Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Yuanhao Zhao, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

This talk examines China’s recent Belt and Road Initiative (the BRI) and their implications to China’s Muslim community and Muslim-majority countries along the routes of the new Silk Road. China engages the cultural imaginaries of the Silk Road in the official narratives, especially the Arab and Persian merchants and adventurers and their long journey across deserted land to China. The Muslim travelers’ admiration of the Chinese civilization and the Chinese empire’s inclusive attitude towards them made some of them to settle in China and became integrated in the local society. In contrast, China’s Muslim minorities, often portrayed as descendants of these early Muslim travelers on the Silk Road, do not share similar experiences. The inclusive-ness towards Muslims within China’s domestic contexts seems to be highly variegated and selective, which was largely based on these groups’ familiarity with the Han Chinese society. Therefore, groups like Turkic Muslims hence become targeted by the Chinese government for being potentially threatening to national authority. In contrast, for groups including the Hui, while sharing the experience of having limited space to express their faith in Islam with other Muslim minorities, they also seem to be more “favored” by the Chinese government, especially in the context of connecting China to the Muslim world. Thus, Chinese Muslims and their relationship with the Chinese state present a paradox where the Chinese government curates a Muslim-friendly image towards countries in the Middle East and Southeast Asia while its domestic policies towards Muslims present an opposite attitude. China’s “Islamic diplomacy” towards the Muslim world is hence conditioned by such a paradox where transnational solidarity in the global Muslim communities towards Turkic Muslims encounters these countries’ geopolitical relations with China. To illustrate such tensions, this talk uses the case of Hui Muslims and their migration to Southeast Asian countries like Malaysia to show how China’s “Islamic diplomacy” is contested on the ground where the officially recognized representatives of China’s Muslim community negotiate their ethno-religious identity in relation to local communities. In doing so, this talk hopes to offer an alternative narrative to the macro-level discourse of China’s relations with Southeast Asia. Rather than focusing on the grand narratives of infrastructural development and the inflow of foreign investment from China in Southeast Asia, this talk uses experiences of Chinese Muslim diaspora and their connections in China to show how individuals contribute to producing China’s presence in countries and regions along the Silk Road through their own networks in myriad ways.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Yang Yang is a postdoctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. She received her PhD in Human Geography from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research focuses on transnational religious networks and the politics of ethno-religious identity in northwestern China. Her dissertation thus adopts an ethnographic approach to analyzing the impacts of Hui Muslims’ grass-roots connections to non-Chinese Muslim communities in Southeast Asia and the Middle East in the Hui’s everyday lives in Xi’an, China. Her current research examines how the Hui diaspora in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia contributes to grass-roots connections between China and Malaysia, and how Malaysia becomes Hui’s new Muslim role model through serving as their preferred destination for halal tourism and their style references for Muslim fashion. Notably, this project analyses how ethno-religious identities and mobility intersect in the contexts of migration and the recentering of Islamic teachings in both cultural and political contexts on a global scale.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the webinar.