The question of Islam and the Muslim citizen in Republican China: Insights from the Turkish model

Abstract This article analyses multiple visions and perspectives offered by Chinese-speaking Muslim intellectuals during the Republican era (1912–1949) concerning their status as a Muslim community by looking into their debates on the modernization and secularization of the Turkish Republic under the Kemalist regime. The transformation of the multi-ethnic and religious Qing empire into a Republican Chinese nation-state presented new challenges to the ruling elite, intellectuals, and minority communities. This article explores how Chinese Muslims navigated the complex intellectual landscape as alternative visions and ideologies concerning nation-building, ethnic autonomy, religion, and modernity emerged in China. The article focuses on how Han Chinese intellectuals, the Kuomintang (KMT) elite, and Chinese Muslims selectively interpreted Turkish modernization in different ways to promote their socio-political cause. It analyses the overlaps and the complex, nuanced differences between Chinese Muslim interpretations of Turkey as a success story of the awakened modern Muslim and the KMT ruling elites’ view of Turkey in the 1930s as a model of developmental authoritarianism, highlighting Turkey’s success in establishing a homogenous nation-state that superseded religion with a sanctified state ideology. The article thus demonstrates how Chinese Muslim intellectuals responded to the KMT state’s increasingly authoritarian rule in the 1930s during the Japanese invasion and the subsequent era of the Civil War when the Chinese Communist Party emerged as a powerful alternative to KMT rule and ideology.