Since the opening of the Peoples' Republic of China to research on its Muslim nationalities in the 1980s, a large body of research on Muslim ethnic identities and histories has been completed. Both ethnic nationalism and state-sponsored regional classifications have been implicated as key mechanisms to explain the geographical distribution and forms of contemporary Muslim settlement across China. No studies, however, have mapped in detail and evaluated the impacts of China's recent political and economic reforms on historical Muslim settlement patterns and how they have changed due to the unprecedented rise in mobility, standards of living, and rural to urban land conversions. Understanding the effects of these processes on historic and contemporary Muslim urban neighborhoods and rural enclaves is vital to advancing scholarship on the geography of Islam in China today, as well as to better predict future dynamics in the face of changing political, economic, and environmental conditions. This study will involve a China-wide survey of mosque locations, and integrated field research at case study sites around Beijing on the North China Plain and in three sites in Shaanxi and Gansu in Northwest China. The research will address five main research questions: (1) What is the relationship between Islamic sites and historic areas of urban and rural Muslim settlement? (2) How do these sites interrelate with the historical development of forms of Islamic teachings, and Sufi groups with hereditary leadership? (3) How do contemporary Muslim settlement patterns identified from mapping China 2000 census data at the township-scale compare with historic areas? (4) In what ways are Muslims affected by demographic and economic factors and political-economic institutions under China's current reform system? (5) Have historic Muslim neighborhoods and rural enclaves been transformed by city expansion into new distinct Muslim areas, or have Muslims assimilated into the new neighborhoods, or moved out to form new ethnic areas? To answer these questions the investigator will build a China-wide geographic information system (GIS) of historic Muslim settlement based on the locations and historic religious attribute data of all known Islamic sites. Also, a township-level GIS will be constructed of the case study areas incorporating 2000 demographic and 2004 economic census data and evaluated in relation to 2008-2009 fieldwork findings. In depth interviews with local government officials, religious leaders, workers, farmers, and public intellectuals will help develop neighborhood and village-scale profiles of migration, population policy, access to credit, store ownership, and property rights.
A team with diverse expertise in Islam, demography, urban planning, agriculture, GIS, and the historical geography of China has been assembled. Collaborators in this research are from the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Peking University, the History Department at Fort Lewis College, and the Islamic Studies Association of Xi'an in Shaanxi province. Education activities are also integrated with the research project. Undergraduates will complete field work in China along with the investigator. Thus, an important outcome of the project will be the interdisciplinary training of undergraduate students in mapping and analyzing China census data in tandem with field surveys of selected areas.
