Enraged North, Omitted South: Early Twentieth Century Chinese Islamophobic Discourses, Varying Muslim Reactions, and Global Media Capitalism

Chan TK (2023)

Publication Language: English

Publication Type: Conference contribution, Conference Contribution

Publication year: 2023

Event location: University of Vienna AT

Abstract

As a vital medium of nineteenth-century Chinese exclusivist national discourses, print periodicals were developed with massive support from the Chinese diaspora in majority-Muslim Southeast Asia. To satisfy readers’ curiosity and promote national geopolitical agendas in the 1920s-30s, Chinese periodicals covered cultural others like Muslims through rigid national categories and orientalist gaze engendered by imitating Western media capitalism and knowledge regime. These global enmeshments repeatedly circulated pejorative discourses about Muslims within and outside China, with a master narrative of Muslims being ‘descendants of pigs’. As a result, Chinese Muslims reacted with various strategies while mediatizing their responses in their periodicals. However, the intensity of Muslim reactions differed towards pejoratives addressing their coreligionists within or outside China’s border. This article focuses on two Chinese media Islamophobic incidents in 1931-1932 regarding Muslims in Southeast Asia and Northwestern China. The different receptions demonstrate the asymmetry within national discursive practices regarding Islamophobic discourses materialized by global connectedness. By taking periodical studies’ perspective and corpus-assisted discourse analysis, this article considers the agencies of Muslim and non-Muslim Chinese periodicals in circulating and steering (counter)discriminative discourses and actions of historical actors. Not only did periodicals serve as a medium containing some narratives about Muslims, but the material dimensions of periodicals – like publishing institutions and print products – provided tools and objects for historical agents to redirect their affects. Hence, Muslims could channel their grievances physically upon the publishers and negotiate how Islam should be talked about in the Chinese public sphere, eventually drawing the Chinese state into the negotiation.

Authors with CRIS profile

Tsz Kit Chan Chair for Sinology with a focus on the Intellectual and Cultural History of China (Alexander von Humboldt-Professor)

How to cite

APA:

Chan, T.K. (2023). Enraged North, Omitted South: Early Twentieth Century Chinese Islamophobic Discourses, Varying Muslim Reactions, and Global Media Capitalism. In Proceedings of the The 29th International Congress of DAVO in Cooperation with the „Turkologentag 2023 – Fourth European Convention on Turkic, Ottoman and Turkish Studies“. University of Vienna, AT.

MLA:

Chan, Tsz Kit. "Enraged North, Omitted South: Early Twentieth Century Chinese Islamophobic Discourses, Varying Muslim Reactions, and Global Media Capitalism." Proceedings of the The 29th International Congress of DAVO in Cooperation with the „Turkologentag 2023 – Fourth European Convention on Turkic, Ottoman and Turkish Studies“, University of Vienna 2023.

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