Between Mecca and Beijing: Modernization and Consumption among Urban Chinese Muslims (review)

Eighteen months of fieldwork among the inhabitants of Xi'an's historic Hui Muslim Quarter in Shaanxi in 1994 and 1995, and numerous subsequent visits, laid the foundation for this careful and engaging ethnographic study of identity and modernity. It is Maris Boyd Gillette's thesis that urban Hui Muslims are using consumption "to manipulate ideas about social developments and position themselves more favourably within a state-sponsored evolutionary ideology" (p. 3). Consumption is seen here, literally and metaphorically, as a buying into the Chinese state's unilinear developmentalist ideology with its hierarchical ranking of Han civilization and non-Han "nationality cultures." But—and this is an important point in the book—selective consumption among Hui Muslims and alternative sources of validation, whether derived from Islamic precepts or from identification with the material progress of Arab-Muslim countries, may also subvert such a model, attaching modernity instead to reassertions of Hui Muslim purity and halal (qingzhen), linking religious with secular (and superior) standards of social morality, sanitation, and hygiene. Gillette agrees with much of the scholarship on consumption, which claims that consumer-oriented societies, as are developing also in the case of China, may be seen to grant people increased opportunities for self-expression and agency. However, she also points to, and illustrates, important differences. The Chinese state intervenes and constrains in those cases where problematic religious consumer "goods" (such as a Hui-initiated antialcohol movement and a Hui preference for Arabic-style architecture, religious-school curricula, and the like) are perceived as encroaching on the government's monopoly over the definition, direction, and ultimate objectives of progress.

The first chapter provides an overall history of "Hui" and "Muslim" identity up to contemporary times, of the fluctuating relationship of Muslims with imperial administrations, and of their changing status in a hierarchy of statuses, ranked by closeness to, or distance from, a paradigmatic standard of superior civilization set by Han Chinese culture. Drawing on a rich scholarship on nationhood and ethnicity, Gillette situates central, and contested, constructs of "race," "ethnicity," and "minority" in Chinese historical political discourse, a discourse out of which evolved fifty-six designated "ethnic minorities," among them ten minorities that constitute the Muslim population. The dynamic and shifting relationship of Hui Muslims (with whom this study is concerned—and here the title of the book might be slightly misleading!) with the Center is explored through the Center-steered paradigm of "modernization" and "modernity." Modernization is shown to carry multiple meanings: post-1949 government economic and industrial policies for national strength and international standing to underpin socialist civilization, or a process in which participation is a metaphorical marker of individual and group ranking, of the quest for equal standing. The latter aspiration has been greatly facilitated through the growing investment in consumer goods under Deng Xiaoping's administration and through the encouragement of a culture of consumption, which has co-opted, to a varying degree, all Chinese subjects. And this rise in consumption and consumer culture has thus provided the "civilizing" process, or, conversely, the remaining stagnant or "feudal" sections of Chinese society, with an array of material symbols. Consumer goods have thus "served as powerful and personally relevant indices of modernization" (p. 16).

Subsequent chapters feature some of the most contested status symbols of successfully attained modernity—housing and education, religious architecture and pedagogy, food and beverages, and weddings and wedding paraphernalia—to explore the dialectic between official notions of progress and modernity and counter-notions derived from an Islamic system of meaning. The Hui Muslim culture of Xi'an City's Hui Quarter may be ranked as inferior by the Center, but, so this study suggests, it also poses challenges that at times are perceived as a threat to state monopoly over the definitions of a superior civilization.

A particularly poignant illustration of state-minority relations as involving complex negotiations, bargaining, and tactical withdrawals is provided by the...