網路對同治年間回民起義的「另類解讀」
Sometime
in March 2019 the Baike Baidu page about the Great Northwestern Muslim Rebellion (陕甘回民起义), c.1862–1874, vanished. The topic has never been a comfortable
one in China, but even for the heavy-handed architects of China’s Great
Firewall, this was a blunt intervention into history. For a facile comparison,
this is a little as if Wikipedia had abruptly deleted their introduction to the
American Civil War.
The Great
Northwestern Muslim Rebellion was complex, messy and extremely violent. It began with a series of local feuds that mostly were not about religion
but which escalated when Qing officials took the side of Han disputants against
the Muslims and garrisons across the two provinces
mutinied, producing a domino effect. Rumour, banditry and socioeconomic
distress did the rest: by the end of the rebellion, the populations of Shaanxi
and Gansu had fallen by half, with millions dead or having fled to make new
lives elsewhere.
Despite
being described as a rebellion, there is limited evidence that
any of the various leaders intended to overthrow the Qing rulers. The rebellion was in truth a patchwork of different, highly local conflicts, where in each case the Hui participants
came to be viewed as the rebels.
The
rebellion is a grim moment in Chinese history that left scars both physical and
psychological. Bloody massacres were carried out by
Muslim as well as non-Muslim forces, leaving a legacy of deep mistrust between
former neighbours. Hui Muslims who fled from Shaanxi were not
permitted to return after the rebellion and were resettled onto poor lands in
Ningxia and Gansu.
Although
the Qing commanders stopped short of ever quite condemning Islam unilaterally,
attempts were made after the rebellion to reform and educate Muslims. However,
many of the authors of the histories written in the immediate wake of the
calamity were not so careful in their distinctions: they tallied up the Qing
dead and produced catalogues of Muslim violence. The ‘Supplementary
Gazetteer to Didao Prefecture’ (狄道州續志), a late Qing gazetteer that forms part of this postbellum literary
reckoning, went so far as to resurrect the use of the dog radical for the
character ‘Hui’.
How
then to deal with such a divisive history? Published last week, the Chinese
government’s new white paper, ‘Historical Matters Concerning
Xinjiang’ concludes with a stern reminder that writing correct
history is essential for the health and development of the nation.
The
approach to history in China is never neutral. Historians writing in the 1950s
and 60s in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) concluded that the Great
Northwestern Muslim Rebellion was ‘righteous’. It was
part of the struggle of the Chinese masses for freedom from imperial
oppression, and the communal violence was a result of Qing policies of divide
and rule that eroded the natural unity of the Han and the Hui.
The
topic remained a sensitive one, however: righteousness was too flimsy a
concept, perhaps, in the wake of so many dead, even a century later.
Resentments lived on in the memories of Hui eking out a living in the bad
lands, and the mouths of mothers who shushed their children by telling them the
Muslims were coming. High-school curricula glossed over the events, if they
mentioned them at all.
Perhaps
the aim was to let sleeping dogs lie. To a certain extent, it worked. Indeed, many in China today have never heard of the rebellion and know little
either of the Hui or Islam. That very absence, however, has played
into the hands of contemporary Chinese Islamophobes (穆黑), active on Weibo.
With
few competing interpretations available, a very vocal minority has sought to portray
the Great Northwestern Muslim Rebellion as a forgotten terror, a time when the
Hui took up arms in a jihad designed to exterminate the Han. In their writings,
the history of the rebellion is employed to indigenise wider international
discourses of post-9/11 Islamophobia, swirled into a toxic mix wherein
nineteenth-century Gansu Sufis rub shoulders with ISIS gunmen.
Accounts
of the rebellion act as a dog-whistle to their readers, a spur to remind them
of the perceived dangers of a Muslim minority and a call to action against
‘creeping Islamification’ (清真泛化). The
articles gain their power precisely by claiming that this is a history that has
been deliberately hidden from the Han masses, presumably either by the agency
of shadowy Muslim powers or the government in its promotion of a flawed
narrative of ethnic harmony.
The
most sophisticated project in this vein that I have encountered to date, which
proclaims itself as dedicated to ‘rescuing’ the history of the Shaan-Gan
rebellions, is not just producing writing about the rebellions but is also
crowd-funding the re-publication of selected histories from the postbellum
period. Comparatively small in reach and recently less active, this
organisation’s Weibo page has nonetheless been viewed some 13 million times to
date.
As the
above might suggest, this strand of Islamophobia walks a fine line
in terms of Chinese censorship. It offers implicit support for China’s ongoing
‘anti-terrorism’ campaigns, which have resulted in the detention of
approximately one million Uyghurs in ‘re-education camps’ since around March
2017, as well as the effective banning of all Islamic religious activity in the
Xinjiang Autonomous Region. The Hui have also faced increased scrutiny of their
religious affairs and are under pressure to ‘deepen the Sinicisation’ of Islam
in China.
However,
such writings also suggest a critique of past government policy and, often, an
unabashed Han nationalism that goes against the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP)
rhetoric regarding China’s multi-ethnic nature. The more virulently
Islamophobic articles published about the Great Northwestern Muslim Rebellion
are periodically scrubbed from the Chinese web, and their authors dance a
long-form game of tag with the censors. Nevertheless, in the wake of the deletion
of the Baike Baidu article, it is still far easier to find such articles online
than any alternative account of the rebellion.
The drive
to rediscover and highlight the Great Northwestern Muslim Rebellion stems from
a very contemporary form of Islamophobia. It is
effective precisely because the rebellion left such deep rifts and because
there has never been a full and frank reckoning of what the rebellion actually
signified. Almost every mention of the rebellion, under its various names, are
currently being deleted from the Chinese internet: as of 24 July 2019, searches
on Baidu return just a handful of results.
Gone,
but not forgotten.
Hannah Theaker is a Junior
Research Fellow in Oriental Studies at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She is
currently working on a monograph exploring social, religious and political
transformation in Shaanxi and Gansu following the Great Northwestern Muslim
Rebellion.
沒有留言:
張貼留言