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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...