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Hui people
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The Hui people (Xiao'erjing: ???? ??? ) are a Chinese ethnic group, typically distinguished by their practice of Islam. Hui is the abbreviation of the full name Huihui "??". They form one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China. They are concentrated in Northwestern China (Ningxia, Gansu, Shaanxi, Xinjiang), but communities exist across the country. Most Hui are similar in culture to Han Chinese with the exception that they practice Islam, and have some distinctive cultural characteristics as a result.
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Encyclopedia
The Hui people (Xiao'erjing: ???? ??? ) are a Chinese ethnic group, typically distinguished by their practice of Islam. Hui is the abbreviation of the full name Huihui "??". They form one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China. They are concentrated in Northwestern China (Ningxia, Gansu, Shaanxi, Xinjiang), but communities exist across the country. Most Hui are similar in culture to Han Chinese with the exception that they practice Islam, and have some distinctive cultural characteristics as a result. For example, as Muslims, they follow Islamic dietary laws and reject the consumption of pork, the second most common meat consumed in Chinese culture (chicken being the most), and have also given rise to their variation of Chinese cuisine, Chinese Islamic cuisine and Muslim Chinese martial arts. Their mode of dress also differs only in that men wear white caps and women wear headscarves or (occasionally) veils, as is the case in most Islamic cultures.
The definition of Hui after 1949 does not include ethnic groups such as the Uyghur, who live in the Mainland China and practice Islam. The ancestors of some Hui People and all Uyghur people were Uyghurs who built the Uyghur Empire. After the fall of the Uyghur Empire, four groups fled to Gansu, Qinghai and Ningxi and two groups fled to Southern Xinjiang who intermarried with local Tocharian people. Only the Uyghur People retain the Turkic language. Prior to 1949, the definition of Hui referred to Chinese Muslim with Turkic ancestry which later extended to non-Turkic Muslim such as Southern Chinese Muslim who were predominantly Malay and Arabic origins. Included among the Hui in Chinese census statistics (and not officially recognized as a separate ethnic group) are several thousand Utsuls in southern Hainan province, who speak an Austronesian language (Tsat) related to that of the Cham Muslim minority of Vietnam, and who are said to be descended from Chams who migrated to Hainan.
A traditional Chinese term for Islam is ?? (pinyin: Huíjiào, literally "the religion of the Hui"), though the most prevalent is the transliteration ???? (pinyin: Yisilán jiào, literally "Islam religion").
Etymology
It was under the aegis of the Communist Party in the 1930s that the term Hui was defined to indicate only Sinophone Muslims. In 1941, this was clarified by a Communist Party committee comprising ethnic policy researchers in a treatise entitled On the question of Huihui Ethnicity (Huihui minzu wenti). This treatise defined the characteristics of the Hui nationality as follows: the Hui or Huihui constitute an ethnic group associated with, but not defined by, the Islamic religion and they are descended primarily from Muslims who migrated to China during the Mongol-founded Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), as distinct from the Uyghur and other Turkic-speaking ethnic groups in Xinjiang. The Nationalist government had recognised all Muslims as one of "the five peoples"—alongside the Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans and Han Chinese—that constituted the Republic of China. The new Communist interpretation of Chinese Muslim ethnicity marked a clear departure from the ethno-religious policies of the Nationalists, and had emerged as a result of the pragmatic application of Stalinist ethnic theory to the conditions of the Chinese revolution.
Huis anywhere are referred to by Central Asian Turks and Tajiks as Dungans. In its population censuses, the Soviet Union also identified Chinese Muslims as "Dungans" (???????) and recorded them as located mainly in Kyrgyzstan, southern Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. In the Russian census of 2002, a total of 800 Dungans were enumerated. In Thailand Chinese Muslims are referred to as Chin Ho, in Myanmar and Yunnan Province, as Panthay.
History
Origins
The Hui Chinese have diverse origins. Some in the southeast coast are descended from Arab and Persian Muslim traders who settled in China and gradually intermarried and assimilated into the surrounding population keeping only their distinctive religion. A totally different explanation is available for the Mandarin Chinese-speaking Yunnan and Northern Huis, whose ethnogenesis might be a result of the convergence of large number of Mongol, Turkic or other Central Asian settlers in these regions who formed the dominant stratum in the Mongol-founded Yuan Dynasty. However, even Cantonese Muslims, of the southeastern coast, typically resemble northern Asians much more so than their typical Cantonese neighbours.
It was documented that a proportion of these nomad or military ethnic groups were originally Nestorian Christians many of whom later converted to Islam, while under the sinicizing pressures of the Ming and Qing states.
This explains the ethnonym "Hui," in close affinity with that of "Uyghur," albeit Sinicized and contradistinctive from "Uyghur" in usage. The ethnonym "Hui," though for a long time used as an umbrella term (at least since Qing) to designate Muslim Chinese speakers everywhere and Muslims in general (for example, a Qing Chinese might describe a Uyghur as a "Chantou" who practiced the "Hui" religion), was not used in the Southeast as much as "Qingzhen", a term still in common use today, especially for Muslim (Hui) eating establishments and for mosques (qingzhen sì in Mandarin).
Southeastern Muslims also have a much longer tradition of synthesizing Confucian teachings with the Sharia and Qur'anic teachings, and were reported to have been contributing to the Confucian officialdom since the Tang period. Among the Northern Hui, on the other hand, there are strong influences of Central Asian Sufi schools such as Kubrawiyya, Qadiriyya, Naqshbandiyya (Khufiyya and Jahriyya) etc. mostly of the Hanafi Madhhab (whereas among the Southeastern communities the Shafi'i Madhhab is more of the norm). Before the "Ihwani" movement, a Chinese variant of the Salafi movement, Northern Hui Sufis were very fond of synthesizing Taoist teachings and martial arts practices with Sufi philosophy.
In early modern times, villages in Northern Chinese Hui areas still bore labels like "Blue-cap Huihui," "Black-cap Huihui," and "White-cap Huihui," betraying their possible Christian, Judaic and Muslim origins, even though the religious practices among North China Hui by then were by and large Islamic. Hui is also used as a catch-all grouping for Islamic Chinese who are not classified under another ethnic group.
Muslim Revolts
During the mid-nineteenth century, a series of civil wars broke out throughout China by various ethnic-lingual groups against the ruling Manchu-Mongol-Han Bannerman and Han Confucians elites. These include the Taiping Rebellion in Southern China ( whose leaders were Evangelical Christians of ethnic Hakka and Zhuang background), the Muslims Rebellion in Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinghai and Ningxia in Northwestern China and Yuannan, and the Miao people Revolt in Hunan and Guizhou. These revolts were supported by European Powers at the beginning but eventually put down by the Manchu government. The Donggan People were descendants of the Muslim rebels who fled to Russia after the rebellion were suppressed by the joint force of Hunan Army led by Zuo Zhongtang with support from local Hui elites.
5.2 million lives lost
Between AD 1862-1879, loss of population in Shaanxi(Chinese:??) province
(1) The amount of population loss is staggering. In the short time of 17 years, the population of the whole province went from 13,940,000 to 7,720,000, the total loss was as high as 6,220,000, about 44.6% of the original population before the war.
(2) The loss of population during the war was far higher than those losses during famine and disasters. Natural disasters were terrible, man-made disasters(meaning wars) were even worst, in 17 years, the war-caused population loss went up to 5,208,000, was 83.7% of the total loss of population, and the loss of population during natural disasters were only 1,012,000, a mere 16.3% of the total loss of population. End of translation.(The original text is on the talk page)
The massacre of Hui in Shaanxi
(Original text on talk page)
Translation begins:
Throughout the 270 years of Qing dynasty history, the development of Hui people in Shaanxi province had been through a huge up-down process. At the beginning of Qing, the Hui people had about 845,000; it increased to 1,700,000 within 200 years. But because of the Hui Rebellion in Gansu and Shaanxi during the Tongji reign, the total loss of Shaanxi Hui people was as high as 1,550,000, Hui people had only 150,000 left at the end of the war, over 91% of the initial people had vanished.
During the war, the loss of the Han Chinese population was much higher than Hui people(Total loss was 5.2 millions), but relatively speaking, because its population loss was so high(91%), the whole population was nearly wiped out, they were near the edge of extinction. Before the war, many counties had Hui people living quarters; none could be seen at the end of the war...Shaanxi province' composition of ethnic was changed drastically (by the war)....in the 1990 China's fourth National Census, there was only 132,000 Hui people in Shaanxi province. End of translation. Original Chinese text is on the talk page.
Huis outside The People's Republic of China
Hui in Malaysia
There is evidence that Chinese Hui migrated to Peninsular Malaysia in the influx of Chinese labourers during the nineteenth and late twentieth century. Chinese who have the surname Ma are suspected to have Hui ancestry. A number of them settled in the region of Lumut in Peninsular Malaysia. It is speculated that these Muslims assimilated with the local non-Muslim Chinese and now most of them are no longer Muslims. Nonetheless, there are those who still maintain their Islamic faith. A famous Chinese Muslim missionary in Malaysia has the surname of Ma.
If they are married to Muslim Malaysian indigenous persons, their offspring are officially accepted as part of the "Bumiputra" (indigenous people or "sons of the land"). Otherwise, the society might treat them as party of the large Chinese minority group. However as Islam is also an ethnic marker in Malaysia, many Chinese converts in Malaysia tend to adopt and assimilate into the indigenous culture. However, there is a trend since the 1900s for Chinese converts to retain their original pre-Muslim Chinese surname, probably to maintain their cultural identity.
Hui in Thailand
Many Hui people live in the north of Thailand. They are sometimes called Chin Haw or Chin Ho. However, not all Chin Haw have Hui ancestors. Some of them are actually belong to other ethnic groups in Yunnan.
Panthays
Panthays form a group of Chinese Muslims in Burma. Some people refer to Panthays as the oldest group of Chinese Muslims in Burma. However, because of intermixing and cultural diffusion the Panthays are not as distinct a group as there once were.
Dungans
Dungan (; ) is a term used in territories of the former Soviet Union to refer to a Muslim people of Chinese origin. Turkic-speaking peoples in Xinjiang Province in China also refer to members of this ethnic group as Dungans. In the censuses of Russia and the former Soviet Central Asia, the Hui are enumerated separately from Chinese, and are labelled as Dungans. In both China and the former Soviet republics where they reside, however, members of this ethnic group call themselves Hui, not Dungans.
Surnames
These are surnames generally used by the Hui ethnic group:
Prominent Hui
- Bai Chongxi, a general of the Republic of China
- Bai Shouyi, prominent Chinese historian and ethnologist
- Hui Liangyu, a Vice Premier of the People's Republic of China
- Lan Yu was a Ming Dynasty general who ended the Mongol dream to reconquer China.
- Li Zhi, a famous Confucian philosopher in Ming Dynasty, would perhaps be considered a Hui if he lived today because of some his ancestors being Persian Muslims.
- Ma Dexin, Islamic scholar in Yunnan
- Ma Bufang ( ???), was a warlord in China during the Republic of China era, ruling the northwestern province of Qinghai.
- Ma Hualong, one of the leaders of the Muslim Rebellion of 1862-77.
- Shi Zhongxin, mayor of Harbin from 2002 to February 2007, whose ancestors came from Jilin
- Zhang Chengzhi, contemporary author and alleged creator of the term "Red Guards"
- Zheng He, a Semu Muslim, probably the most famous Muslim in Chinese history, would perhaps be considered a Hui if he lived today
Related group names
See also
Further reading
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