Dungan People - Identity

Identity

During the Qing dynasty, the term Zhongyuanren was synonymous with being Chinese, especially referring to Han Chinese and Hui Muslims in Xinjiang or Central Asia.

Because of religious reasons, while Hui people do not consider themselves Han and are not Han Chinese, the Hui consider themselves wider Chinese and also refer to themselves as Zhongyuanren. The Dungan people, descendants of Hui who fled to Central Asia, called themselves Zhongyuanren in addition to the standard labels Lao Huihui and Huizi. Zhongyuanren was used generally by Turkic Muslims to refer to general Chinese people. When Central Asian invaders from Kokand invaded Kashgar, in a letter the kokandi commander criticizes the Kashgari Turkic Muslim Ishaq for allegedly not behaving like a Muslim and wanting to be a Zhongyuanren (Chinese).

Read more about this topic:  Dungan People

Famous quotes containing the word identity:

    No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women.... When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.
    bell hooks (b. c. 1955)

    Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
    It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.
    Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)

    The adolescent does not develop her identity and individuality by moving outside her family. She is not triggered by some magic unconscious dynamic whereby she rejects her family in favour of her peers or of a larger society.... She continues to develop in relation to her parents. Her mother continues to have more influence over her than either her father or her friends.
    Terri Apter (20th century)