A Gramscian Analysis of the Sinicization of Islam: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s Approach towards the Hui and Uyghur Minorities since 2015

Abstract

The thesis examines China’s relationship with Islam following the adoption of Sinicization as the state’s official policy towards religion in 2015. The analysis of the deterioration in Muslim minorities’ religious rights and freedoms has mostly focused on the Uyghur minority. While challenging the CCP’s narrative around terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism, critical scholarship, has mostly discussed the Sinicization of Islam through a security lens. By expanding the analysis to the Hui Muslim minority, which was not perceived before as threatening as the Uyghur, the thesis examines the CCP’s perception of Islam as an ideological-economic threat. Contrary to the predominant understanding of the Sinicization of Islam as a policy driven by security considerations, the thesis shows how Islam is currently considered threatening to the state’s ideology of Socialist Marxism with Chinese Characteristics, as reinterpreted by Xi Jinping’s Thought. Gramsci’s discussion of cultural hegemony, combining ideological and economic factors, offers the theoretical framework for understanding the Sinicization of Islam as a response to the CCP’s perceived threat to the dominance of the state’s ideology. The thesis shows how the CCP’s perception of a potential for a counter-hegemony in Islam has driven the shift in their treatment of Muslim minorities; how they began to shift from an ethnic to a religious identification of the Hui and Uyghur minorities; and also how the CCP’s economic policies have contributed to Sinicization. China’s international relationship with Islam is finally explored as a further dimension the CCP considers in the process of the Sinicization of Islam. The Sinicization of Islam and Muslim minorities is therefore revealed as a hegemonic project that aims to respond to the CCP’s perceived ideological-economic threat.