Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Maris Boyd Gillette is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Haverford College.

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Between Mecca and Beijing

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List o f Illustrations..........................................................xiCHAPTER ONE Modernization and Consumption......................................1CHAPTER TWO Housing, Education, and Race.......................................22CHAPTER THREE Mosques, Qur'anic Education, and Arabization.....................68CHAPTER FOUR Traditional Food and Race.........................................114CHAPTER FIVE Factory Food, Modernization, and Race.............................145CHAPTER SIX Alcohol and "Building a Civilized Society".........................167CHAPTER SEVEN Wedding Gowns and Modernization..................................192CHAPTER EIGHT Consumption and Modernization....................................221Appendix........................................................................237Character List..................................................................241Notes...........................................................................245Bibliography....................................................................253Index...........................................................................269

Chapter One

On a hot day in June 1996, I sat with Xue and Yan at a large table near the wide-open storefront of their family's restaurant. It was midafternoon, and the temperature had soared well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Barley Market Street was nearly deserted, and there were few signs of activity in the neighboring restaurants and food stalls. Since the restaurant was nearly empty, most of the half-dozen employees were taking their afternoon naps, and we were free to talk. It was a familiar pattern for the three of us, reminiscent of many afternoons we had spent together during the eighteen months I had lived in Xi'an, the largest city in northwest China, in 1994 and 1995 (see Map 1).

That day we were talking about fashion. Of the three of us, Xue was the one with the most expertise; when I first met her she had been working at one of the city's largest and most popular department stores. Xue's interest in fashion was reflected in her clothing. She tended to dress up more than most of the Chinese Muslims who lived in her neighborhood. That afternoon, rather than wearing the flowered, rayon pajama set of matching long-sleeved shirt and trousers that was typical summer garb in the Muslim district, Xue wore a dressy teal blouse with lace and pearl decorations over her loose trousers. She commented that skirts, particularly short skirts, had recently become popular in Xi'an. More and more young women were wearing miniskirts-but not in her neighborhood. Thinking about this, Xue explained, "We Hui people are more feudal" (Women Huimin bijiao fengjian). Her sister Yan listened in tacit agreement.

This was not the first time that I had heard Xue describe herself and the other residents of the Muslim district as "feudal." At the time I did not question her choice of words. During fieldwork in Xi'an, my experience was that people frequently spoke in terms of what and who was "feudal" or "traditional" (chuantong) and what was "modern" (xiandaihua), what was "backward" (luohou) and what was "progressive" (xianjin), what was "parochial" (tu) and what was "cultured" (you wenhua) or "civilized" (wenming). Ordinary Chinese used these words to describe people's dress styles; the food they ate; the houses, neighborhoods, and cities they lived in; and their occupations. They also described different social groups in this way. Many times I heard Xue and her neighbors characterize themselves as "feudal," or claim that other Chinese thought that the Hui people were "feudal."

Later I wondered what it meant that Xue called herself "feudal," and what wearing miniskirts had to do with being less "feudal," or, as the residents of this Chinese Muslim neighborhood were more likely to say, more "modern." Xue's comments indicated that she made a connection between consumption practices, such as wearing miniskirts, and a process that she and other locals referred to as "modernization" (xiandaihua). The terms that Xue and her Muslim neighbors used to describe their own and others' consumption choices (as well as other aspects of social life) had connotations that transcended their local setting. The ideas that these words conveyed were part of an ongoing Chinese dialogue about development and the conditions under which "modernization" or material and spiritual "progress" could occur.

Over the course of the twentieth century, successive Chinese governments had affixed the concepts, of which "feudal" is one example, through which "modernization" was understood. This discourse had emerged under the influence of Western theories of social evolution and the linkages between race, culture, and nation. During the mid-1990s, the developmental ideas expressed by words such as "feudal" affected how people like Xue understood themselves as individuals and as members of groups and influenced how they interpreted their experiences and how they behaved. In this book, I argue that the residents of the oldest and largest Muslim district in Xi'an used consumption to manipulate ideas about social development and position themselves more favorably within a state-sponsored evolutionary ideology. Through their consumption practices, Xue and her neighbors appropriated "modernization" for themselves, and in the process they challenged the state's official role as purveyor of and guide to "modernization."

"Feudal" and Other Ideas

"Feudal" is the common English translation of the Chinese term fengjian, a word that comes from the Chinese classic the Zuo Chuan (Li 1971:78). Originally, fengjian described a decentralized system of political organization in ancient China. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese intellectuals and officials resuscitated fengjian as a model for reforming the imperial government and limiting its powers (Duara 1995:153). Their efforts were stimulated by the Qing dynasty's inability to maintain sovereignty and control over its imperial territory and internal affairs. After China lost the Opium Wars and ceded the island of Hong Kong to Britain in 1842, the imperial government was forced repeatedly to acquiesce to the territorial and commercial demands of several Western nations and Japan. These concessions made an enormous impact on Chinese elites because they demonstrated China's weakness and vulnerability to foreign nations. Reform of the Chinese political system along the lines of a federated or fengjian state was one strategy that some scholar-officials devised to restore China to what most Chinese considered to be her proper international preeminence (Duara 1995:153-7)

Less than twenty years later, however, the use of fengjian as a positive political model had disappeared. By 1910, "feudal" had become the cause of China's crisis rather than the solution to her international defeats. Fengjian's shift in meaning coincided with the rising popularity of socialist ideas among the many Chinese intellectuals who had studied abroad, particularly those who had studied in Japan (Li 1971; Duara 1995:201). At this time, fengjian, intimately associated with the Chinese past and the classical Chinese canon, became the term used to translate the Marxist concept of "feudal." Marx viewed feudalism as a backward form of economic organization associated with medieval Europe and the precursor to capitalism (see Marx [1858] 1989; [1848] 1988). Following Marxist usage, fengjian moved from being a progressive political alternative designed to make China a modern state to become the antithesis of progress and a mark of stagnation. A negative understanding of "feudal" as a failure to develop and as the characteristic feature of Chinese tradition persisted in China up through the 1990s (see Cohen 1994a; Link 1992:155, 193, 200, 286). The political success of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is in part responsible for this perspective, though the attack on Chinese tradition began well before the CCP took power (see Cohen 1994a; Schwarcz 1995; Spence 1981).

Marx's model of social development (historical materialism) was a sequence of evolutionary stages. Like most nineteenth-century developmental theorists, including Lewis Henry Morgan and Herbert Spencer, Marx contended that societies progressed, when they did progress, through a series of developmental stages from primitive to modern social orders. Many late nineteenth-century social thinkers posited that human societies evolved along a unilinear developmental trajectory until they reached the culminating point: the "modern," urbanized, industrial nation-state. Western Europe and the United States exemplified the outcome of evolutionary progress. The result of these ideas was a new, teleological reading of human history as a universal progression from barbarism to civilization.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, theories of social evolution in both Marxist and non-Marxist forms provided Chinese elites with a framework for interpreting their country's political and military inadequacies. This was because social evolution could be used both to interpret the particular past of a particular society and as a universal model for ranking contemporaneously existing societies. Each society was measured for its level of civilization, with stages of advancement primarily determined by technology. Fengjian or "feudal" was one of many new words that were used to express this radical new model that could characterize the reasons for China's defeats and humiliation. Like "feudal," other developmental concepts were also created by appropriating words from ancient Chinese classics. These included "machine," "progress," "economy," "class," "revolution," "democracy," and "production." Other social evolutionary ideas required neologisms, most of which Chinese intellectuals borrowed from modern Japanese; these included such terms as "modernization," "science," "industry," "nation," "race," "culture," and "tradition."' All were necessary to locate China within a hierarchically ordered model of social development and to understand how "traditional Chinese culture" had affected "modernization."

"Race," "Culture," and "Nation"

"Race," "culture," and "nation" were three of the primary subjects of social evolution. In the social evolutionist framework, "race" does not refer to skin color or depend primarily on physiology, though many groups that were characterized as races were said to share physical traits. Race refers to a group that putatively possesses a shared descent or genealogy that is made manifest in a supposedly unique culture or "genius." According to much late nineteenth-century thinking, the proper destiny for such a collective unit was nationhood. This idea has continued to influence twentieth-century politics throughout the world (see, e.g., Hart 1999; Bringa 1995; Brubaker 1996). Racial identity was thus the political rationale for the nation-state, and it was often asserted that the nation's development depended on the quality of the race upon which it was founded (see Diktter 1992:97-125; Duara 1995:17-50). A familiar Western term that may help clarify this relationship is the German idea of das Volk, the German "people" or "race" that justified the Anschluss, the movement to unify all Germans into one nation-state. The founding of the German Reich in 1870 and the unification of East and West Germany after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989 were both predicated on the idea of the German "people" (see Brubaker 1996:2, 112-4). The Chinese term that I am rendering as "race," minzu, was borrowed from Japanese at the turn of the twentieth century and is most likely a translation of das Volk (Lipman I997:xx). Minzu means both "nation" and "race." It is often translated as "nationality" in late twentieth-century English writing.

In the 1860s, the concept of "survival of the fittest"-a synonym for natural selection-emerged as a characterization of international politics (Diktter 1992:99). In the political struggle for survival, the states that possessed the most "modern" traits were destined to succeed, whereas those that had not developed such characteristics would decline and fail. China, frequently referred to as "the sick man of Asia," was an example of a maladapted state. The crucial determinant of a nation's successful evolution was the civilizability of its race. Races that were technologically inferior or "primitive" at the time when these theories became popular (which coincided with a period of Western colonial expansion) would not develop into modern nation-states, at least not of their own accord. Those states, namely the Western European nations, the United States, and (slightly later) Japan, whose "superior" racial populations had enabled them to modernize, embarked on a "civilizing mission" to assist those societies that had not reached such heights (see Macauley [1835] 1971 for a British example of this rhetoric; see Robertson 1995 for examples from Japan). Thus, theories of social evolution legitimated Western and Japanese imperialism.

Because the fate of the nation was predicated upon race, the question for Chinese elites faced with China's political and military weakness was the civilizing potential of the Chinese "race." The "genius" of the Chinese people, their culture and tradition, was evidence for the Chinese race's capacity to develop. As my discussion of fengjian may suggest, intellectuals took different stances on the value of Chinese culture. Some elites, convinced of its superiority, advocated the adoption of Western science and technology while maintaining Chinese tradition. The belief that Chinese society was the highest manifestation of civilization had a long history in China, although this notion had been undermined by the late nineteenth-century foreign incursions (Elvin 1994: 44; see also Duara 1995:56-61, Harrell 1995b:18-20, Schwartz 1994:246-7). For this type of elite, the central problem was, in the 1917 words of the scholar-official Hu Shi, "How can we best assimilate modern civilization in a manner as to make it congenial and congruous and continuous with the civilization of our own making?" (cited in Schwartz 1994:73; compare Chatterjee 1993:16-34).

Other Chinese intellectuals, however, perceived modernization and Chineseness as fundamentally at odds (see Cohen 1994a; Schwartz 1995; Watson 1995). Many members of the Chinese intelligentsia during the early twentieth century disparaged and rejected Chinese tradition, blaming Chinese culture for China's supposed stagnation at a "feudal" stage of development. Their "ferociously iconoclastic antitraditionalism" was powerfully articulated during the May Fourth Movement of 1919 and expressed repeatedly throughout the twentieth century by the Nationalist and Communist governments of China, Chinese elites, and urbanites (Cohen 1994a; see also Link 1992; Schwartz 1995; Watson 1991b; Watson 1995). The solution that many elites proposed was to reform Chinese culture along "modern" lines: the members of the Chinese race should prove their capacity for nationhood by demonstrating that they were "civilized" according to the standards of Western culture (see Fitzgerald 1996). These intellectuals and officials faulted Chinese culture but did not accept that the Chinese had a racial impediment to modernization. The Chinese government (rather than foreign imperialists) would teach the Chinese "race(s)" to become civilized and modern (Anagnost 1997a; see also Dikotter 1992).

One preoccupation of the intelligentsia and the successive governments between the 1890s and the 1990s was how many races there were in China. The state needed to affix the number of races in China in order to evaluate their levels of social development. Although both the Nationalist and Communist governments believed that all China's races required official guidance to progress, the amount, nature, and duration of governmental assistance would vary depending on where a particular race ranked on the developmental trajectory. The evolutionary stages of the peoples of China in turn affected where and how the national process of modernization would be implemented. They also showed which "race" was most qualified to lead the others to develop.

Racial discourse and racism had been present in China since at least the thirteenth century (Lipman 1997:35-7; see also Duara 1995:51-82; Crossley 1987), coexisting with the notion that anyone who behaved in a culturally Chinese fashion was or could become Chinese (see Harrell 1996a, 1995b; Cohen 1994a; Watson 1991b). During the twentieth century, officials and intellectuals combined indigenous Chinese racism with Western ideas about social evolution to determine the nation's racial makeup. The long-standing faith in the supremacy of Chinese culture and Chinese folk notions about non-Chinese "barbarians" were manifest in what groups counted as "races" and how their level of development was assessed. Not surprisingly, the race that the CCP identified as the most civilized and modern was the Han race, that group of Chinese citizens who the party took to epitomize traditional Chinese culture.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Between Mecca and Beijingby MARIS BOYD GILLETTE Copyright © 2000 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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