The Naqshbandiyya in Late Imperial and Early Republican China

12. for Research on China, University of Leeds, U.K.). I should add that I have since become very interested in what I might call the "sexual politics of banditry." It is assertable, though barely researchable, that banditry represented the salve of selfrespect for men whose inability to pay bride price or to buy land made them less than whole men. Banditry, in other words, restored one's lost masculinity. This would explain the posturing, the sharp dressing, the blustering attitude and the brave talk of the bandits we meet in the memoirs of their captives. Though the topic still awaits fuller consideration, it does seem to offer at least the rudiments of a direction for feminist research on China (in the sense of research that locates its main criteria in the social effects of sexual differentiation). Another aspect of banditry touched upon but not fully developed in the thesis is the related one regarding the gang as a substitute family -- again, I hope to pay more consideration to· this in the future. In short, my study of banditry approached the issue not only from the point of view of the system, in which they are reduced to the role of "scourge", "cancer" and so on; or even from that of the revolutionary or "progressive scholar," by whom the bandit is paid due regard but only in the interests of pinning down the gang's "pre-revolutionary" nature or of bringing it into the service of a pre-defined revolutionary perspective. While dealing fully with these aspects (primarily in chapters six-- bandits and politics-- and seven-- bandits and revolution), I tried also to tell, as far as it can be told, the bandits' own story: why he (most bandits were men, for various reasons) became a bandit; what he expected to get out of it; what were his overriding daily concerns and activities; what he thought of his fellow-bandits ; the special language and symbols he used for communicating.with them; and so on (primarily in chapters three -- who became a bandit? -- and four -- internal aspects of bandit gangs). Although I am not in full-time China research any more, I am attempting to bring the thesis up to date with contemporary mat~rials, and hope to complete this work by the summer of 1981. In the meantime, I am grateful to Professor Barry Keenan for this opportunity to present an outline of my findings. I look forward to exchanges of ideas with others interested in the study of banditry. * * THE NAQSHBANDIYYA ]! LATE IMPERIAL ~ EARLY REPUBLICAN CHINA S.A.M. Adshead, University of Canterbury, New Zealand The aim of this paper is to analyze the power structure of the Moslem community in Kansu between 1895 and 1949. I have called it "The Naqshbandiyya in Late Imperial and Early Republican China" to emphasize my indebtedness for starting point and basic ideas to Joseph Fletcher at Harvard. Fletcher has shown that the leading institution of the Moslem communities in the Chinese northwest, both Chinese and Turkish speaking, was the Naqshbandi tarikat or Sufi order, in particular its revivalist nee-orthodox branch, the Jahriyya, what the Chinese called the hsin-chiao or new sect, which had been introduced to China from the pilgrimage centers of the haj in the second half of the eighteenth century to become the hard core of the great Tungan rebellion of 1862 to 1873. We know too that the hsin-chiao survived the rebellion, that the court rejected Tao Tsung-t'ang's proposal to proscribe it. The question I am concerned with is what happened to this clerical infrastructure betwe£n the late empi_re and the people 's republic. The subject is a large one, and I have so far only scratched the surface of it, using, on the one had, the shih-lu, very abundant for the rebellion of 1895 and the revolution of 1911, and, on the other, Protestant missionary reports, mainly from that 13. admirable journal The Moslem World. Three tentative conclusions have suggested themselves to me, which may be of interest'to other people working in this field with better sources and equipment than mine. First, there is evidence that the Naqshbandiyya, in...