Kazakhstan’s Dungans, a group of Chinese-speaking Muslims about 56,000 strong, predominantly live in a cluster of compact settlements in the Zhambyl oblast in the southeast of the country (Agenstvo po statistike 2012).They also form one of the largest minority groups in the Chuy and Issyk Köl oblast of neighboring Kyrgyzstan. Yet, while Dungans in the Central Asian republic (and in China, where they are subsumed under the ethnic category of Huizu)4 are widely considered to be a more or less coherent ethnic group, those originating from the Shaanxi and Gansu provinces of China speak different dialects of
4 See the extensive work by Dru Gladney (1991, 1996, 2004) for thorough ethnographic research on the Huizu in China.
Mandarin5 and often inhabit distinct settlements (Jimenez Tovar 2013).
In Kyrgyzstan, those claiming their origins in Gansu province dominate among the 60,000 Dungans and form the intellectual elite.6
Fig. 5.1 Shortobe and the Dungan-populated villages in South Eastern Kazakhstan. Map © Henryk Alff (2014), CC BY 4.0
The 20,000 Dungan inhabitants of Shortobe, as well as those forming the overwhelming majority of the populous nearby villages of Masanchi, Bular Batyr, and Aukhatty, are almost exclusively descendants of refugees hailing from the Chinese province of Shaanxi. During the late 1870s, they left Qing China under the guidance of Muhammad Ayub Biyanhu, one of the military leaders of the Hui Revolts (Vansvanova 2000). Having escaped annihilation in the Qing Empire, the Dungan refugee groups were settled by Tsarist authorities a few kilometers north of the garrison of Tokmak (Shushanlo 1967), now a regional centre
5 In Dungan studies, as well as by the Dungans themselves, their language, however, is regarded not as a form of Chinese, but as a language proper, see for example Svetlana Rimsky-Korsakoff Dyer, ‘Soviet Dungan Nationalism: A Few Comments on Their Origin and Language’, Monumenta Serica, 33 (1978): 363–78.
6 The chair of Dungan Studies (dunganovedenie in Russian) at the Kyrgyz Academy of Sciences is the only scholarly institution in the former Soviet Union dedicated to the study of the Dungan language, history, and culture. It is also responsible for the editing of Dungan school textbooks, which are based on the Gansu dialect of the Dungan language.
across the border in Kyrgyzstan with a sizable Dungan community.
Along the fertile valley of the Chu River, the Dungan refugees cultivated former pasture land and established irrigated farms, making use of their advanced agricultural skills and the seeds they brought from China.7 On the basis of Dungan-dominated settlements, collective agricultural production units were formed in the early Soviet period. Some of them, like the collective farm ‘Kommunisticheskiy’ in Shortobe, were renowned for their high productivity in growing corn, potatoes, and garden vegetables throughout the Soviet period.
The dismantling of the Soviet Union and subsequent independence of the republics of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan as sovereign states in 1991 brought about fundamental changes to Shortobe’s Dungan population. On the one hand, loss of state subsidies and the gradual solidifying of the Kazakhstan-Kyrgyzstan border in the early 1990s meant that collective farming and the distribution of their products, which was the main source of employment and subsistence for the majority of the population, was heading towards disintegration.
On the other hand, Shortobe’s Dungans were among the first rural dwellers in Kazakhstan to gain from the relaxation of travel and foreign trade regulations across the newly opened Sino-Soviet border. Drawing on their ethno-linguistic (and religious) affiliation with Huizu and Han Chinese, Dungan community leaders from Shortobe started to form close interpersonal relations with partners across mainland China (Laruelle and Peyrouse 2012:123) and even as far as Malaysia. Unlike adjacent, mostly Kazakh-populated villages, Shortobe continues to expand and thrive thanks to intensive high-yield agriculture, catering for the markets and for Dungan restaurants in the major cities of Kazakhstan. Trans-Eurasian trade and transport, linking manufacturing centres in China’s seaboard, Xinjiang, with the post-Soviet states, is the community’s second source of income.
Furthermore, dozens of Dungan students now study at the universities or are employed in Xi’an and Lanzhou and in the manufacturing centres of coastal China.
7 See Kamol Abdullaev’s discussion in Chapter One about Tajik refugees in Afghanistan for an example of the ‘flow of agricultural innovation’ in the early Soviet period.
The end of the Soviet Union, however, has also brought about a religious revival and an exchange of ideas about Islam among the Dungan population of Shortobe. Over the past two decades, eighteen mosques were constructed there and in the neighboring Dungan-populated villages, with at least one in what is locally called the
‘Chinese style’, referring to the curved gable construction of the roof.
Shortobe’s Dungans consider themselves pious Muslims and usually follow their religious obligations more strictly than their Kazakh co-villagers. In interviews Dungans often described themselves as following the strict rules of Islam, in contrast to their neighbors. Thus, one of my interlocutors in Shortobe joked that Kazakhs consider themselves Muslims only three times in their entire life: when they are born, when they marry, and when they die. For Dungans, on the contrary, Islam is fundamental to their lives and religious duties are to be discharged on an everyday basis.8 Dungans in Shortobe regularly engage in the prescribed five-times daily prayer; travel for hajj at least once (but often twice);9 and abstain from alcohol and tobacco, substances that have been banned from sale in local shops by the community’s elders.
Islam plays an important role in Dungans’ self-identification and has certainly contributed to the expansion of Hui-Dungan business relations, as a strict self-definition as pious Muslims among both Dungan and Hui has generated mutual trust based on a shared belief in their mutual honesty.10 However, this is accompanied by a general tightening of state control, particularly in China, but also in Kazakhstan, over what some government leaders perceive as religious extremism and the establishment of suspicious religious networks.
However, given the sensitivity of this topic, the religious aspects have not been studied in great detail in the present study.
8 Interview, 20 May 2014, Shortobe.
9 Hundreds of Dungans from Kazakhstan leave for hajj every year on charter flights, taking up a considerable proportion of the government quota for these journeys.
10 Cross-border Muslim solidarity among Dungan groups plays out, for example, in the organization of hajj tours. During an interview on 4 April 2012, a female director of a Bishkek-based Dungan travel agency explained how she arranged journeys predominantly for Dungans from Xinjiang, making use of the comparatively relaxed religious policies in Kyrgyzstan and bypassing the limited annual state quota for hajj travel in China.