The Rise and Fall of China's World Muslim City: Halal Culture, Mosques, and Sufi Shrines in Ningxia (Part 1)
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Why Did the World Muslim City Disappear? Spatial Restructuring Under the Sinicization of Religion
The World Muslim City (WMC) was a major development project in Ningxia once built to boost the economy and China-Arab diplomatic ties. Following Xi Jinping's "Sinicization of religion" policy, the project was forced to undergo rectifications and shutdowns after 2018 because it was seen as carrying "non-Chinese" elements. This marked a major shift in China's ethnic policies away from multiculturalism and toward assimilation.
Background: What is the Sinicization of Religion?
The "Sinicization of religion" is a policy direction rolled out in recent years by the People's Republic of China. It demands that all religions align their doctrines, rituals, architecture, and organizations with traditional Chinese culture, core socialist values, and the Party-state narrative. It strips away religious symbols officially deemed "un-Chinese" to tighten the Party's total control over the religious sector.
Abstract
A nation-state is as much a project of narratives and ideas as it is of space and territory. In the People's Republic of China, Xi Jinping’s calls to "revive" traditional Chinese culture, "sinicize religion," and "achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" reflect a broader effort to reshape national narratives and tighten Communist Party control. This article explores the impact of Xi’s revisionist nationalism on China's 55 ethnic minority groups, focusing particularly on the Hui Muslims, one of the ten Muslim minority groups. The paper traces this through the rise and fall of the "World Muslim City" (WMC)—a development project in western China that once mobilized Hui identity and traditions for economic and diplomatic ends. The construction of the WMC was made possible by a multicultural state narrative and a fragmented authoritarian political system that long encouraged local policy flexibilities and deviations. The shutdown of the project highlights the growing anti-Muslim and anti-religious bias in PRC policies, with the "Sinicization of religion" campaign acting as the direct cause of the WMC's demise. Its demise also underscores the regime's current drive to tighten Party control over government, business, and personnel at all levels. Furthermore, the fate of the WMC reveals the spatial dimensions of religious sinicization and China's past and present cultural governance. Borrowing from theorist Henri Lefebvre, the sinicization of religion encompasses a series of "spatial practices" that impose Xi-style "representations of space" onto the "representational spaces" of everyday life, stretching from mosques and commercial areas all the way to theme parks and luxury resorts.
A nation-state is both a narrative and conceptual project, as well as a spatial and territorial one. Potential builders of nation-states leverage narratives and collective identity categories to legitimize their rule over diverse peoples and territories. Through crafted myths, histories, and laws, regimes question and shape their citizens to secure obedience (Althusser, 2001 [1970]). When shifting environments weaken the coherence of the national story, these projects become vulnerable to revision. In the People's Republic of China, the Communist Party abandoned revolutionary socialism in the post-Mao era, forcing it to reconstruct its reason for being—a process that continues today. The diversification brought by economic reforms raised new questions regarding the ethnic and cultural standards of Chinese citizenship. Xi Jinping’s call to "rejuvenate" the nation by "revitalizing" its "fine traditional culture" aims to address these issues in explicit terms (Yang, 2017).
This article looks at the impact of Xi's revisionist project on China's 55 ethnic minorities, especially the Hui Muslims. The Hui are generally considered the most heavily Han-integrated and Chinese-speaking group among the PRC's ten Muslim minorities. The article explores this by analyzing the World Muslim City, a development project in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region that once mobilized Hui identity and culture (pronounced hway) for economic and diplomatic purposes. Launched in 2009, the World Muslim City (hereafter WMC) enjoyed years of backing from top officials in Beijing and Ningxia. In its rhetoric and ambitions, the WMC echoed central government initiatives to develop China's impoverished west and build closer ties with the Muslim world. These initiatives created discursive and strategic spaces for the WMC's Muslim-centric agenda. The project also gained legitimacy through what I have termed in previous research "communist multiculturalism"—an authoritative narrative defining China as a "multi-ethnic, multi-group nation-state" where "diversity is celebrated" and "so-called 'ethnic issues' have been resolved" (McCarthy, 2009: 4). Supporters of the WMC pitched a complementary narrative portraying Ningxia and its large Hui population as central protagonists in China's growth story, indispensable to the country's diplomatic and economic future. Today, the WMC is practically gone. Its major sub-projects have either been shut down or left in limbo.
The demise of the WMC highlights the growing anti-Muslim and anti-religious trends in PRC policies and discourse. Over the past decade, communist multiculturalism has been replaced by the pursuit of "ethnic integration" (minzu ronghe) (Glaesserman, 2023). Calls for a more assimilationist minority policy predated Xi's tenure and intensified after violent ethnic clashes in Tibet and East Turkestan in the late 2000s (Leibold, 2012). Under Xi, however, the shift toward ethnic integration has gone hand in hand with a reinterpretation of Chinese history. Unlike other post-Mao leaders, Xi is heavily invested in reshaping the narrative of Chinese history, including the history of the CCP, which has been rewritten to place Xi alongside Mao Zedong and Deng小平 in the "official constellation of era-defining leaders" (Buckley, 2021). He denounces "historical nihilism"—historical interpretations that focus on the Party's mistakes and run counter to the officially approved narrative. Xi's revisionist nationalism is also reflected in the "Sinicization of religion" campaign, the direct cause of the WMC's demise. Sinicization has affected all five state-approved religions, including Daoism, the only one of the five native to China. Yet it has specifically targeted Muslims and Islam.
Sinicization is a spatial project: symbolic spaces and spatial symbols are the mediums for its nationalist message. Among other measures, it demands the stripping of overt "un-Chinese" elements from religious and some secular architecture, the eradication of religious symbols from the public sphere, and the incorporation of Party-centric imagery and rituals into activities at religious sites. This campaign reveals how discourse and space converge in the (re)building of a nation-state. In China, space—the built environment and its mapped zones—has long served as a tool for broadcasting regime-approved norms and narratives. In the post-Mao era, the Party's control over space and its meaning waned as urban planning and property allocation powers were decentralized and partially privatized. Today, space once again takes center stage in the Party's efforts to define national identity and propagate "core socialist values" (Miao, 2020; Stokols, 2023). A revived China has been materialized in a mix of sand, gravel, and cement.
The impact of Sinicization extends beyond ethnic minorities and religion, curbing regional development strategies, provincial diplomacy, and private capital. The closure of the WMC not only highlights the regime's shifting ethno-religious priorities but also mirrors the push to expand Party control over government, business, and personnel at all levels (Heilmann, 2016; Koss, 2021; Wang and Mou, 2021). Previous accounts of the WMC tended to portray it as a project of the Party-state (He, 2013; Ptáčková, 2020; Malzer, 2020a; Sun, 2022); however, this article emphasizes the role of private and sub-provincial Party-state actors in advancing the initiative—as well as bringing about its demise. Several WMC sub-projects violated land-use laws, and local authorities sometimes resisted efforts to enforce those laws. In this way, the WMC exposes "fragmented authoritarianism," a system that for decades encouraged local policy flexibilities while frustrating Beijing's efforts to ensure local loyalty to its directives (Lieberthal and Oksenberg, 1988; Mertha, 2009). As Nian Lai Cao wrote regarding early campaigns against Christian symbols in Zhejiang province, understanding events in Ningxia requires "taking into account the national context of systematic and comprehensive rectifications of local governance by the central government" (2017: 35). The demise of the WMC can be read as an episode in Xi's quest to consolidate the Party-state.
In the following sections, I first outline the WMC and place it within the context of Ningxia's developmental ambitions before the launch of the Sinicization campaign. Next, I examine the goals and methods of Sinicization and the reactions of Hui Muslims. Along the way, I draw on insights from Henri Lefebvre and other theorists of the built environment to analyze how space and ideological narratives intersect in Sinicization and past Chinese nation-building efforts. I then dive into the case of the WMC, shedding light on the narratives used to promote it, its problematic trajectory, and its ultimate fate. The final section returns to Xi's revisionist state project and its ethno-religious impacts. My arguments and findings are based on qualitative, interpretive analysis of Chinese government documents, published interviews, news reports, press releases, videos, photos, satellite imagery, websites, social media posts, court cases, and academic publications. These materials reveal that Sinicization is a set of "spatial practices" through which Xi-style "representations of space" are imposed upon the "representational spaces" of everyday life, ranging from mosques and communities all the way to theme parks and luxury resorts (Lefebvre, 1991: 38–40).
The World Muslim City and Ningxia's Development Agenda
In March 2018, workers in Yinchuan, capital of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, began dismantling the domed roof of a large pavilion in the downtown business district. The pavilion sat at the heart of the China-Arab Axis, a grand avenue built to celebrate trade and diplomatic ties between China and the Arab world. After tearing down the bulbous top of the structure, workers spent the following weeks building a replacement: a recessed octagonal double-layer roof curving downward from a center point before rising at the eaves. They also straightened the pavilion's support columns to eliminate the pointed arches between them. A few hundred meters to the east, arched metal pergolas were replaced with pitched-roof versions in the traditional "xuanshan" style. Nearby, a crescent moon sculpture was swapped for a giant jade bi—a doughnut-shaped jade disk tied to ancient Chinese burial rituals (see Figure 1). Thousands of such jade disks have been unearthed from burial sites dating back to the Neolithic period at the dawn of Chinese civilization (Sun, 1993). When asked why these structures were "rectified" just years after installation, city officials explained that "transforming the original Arab-style landscape into one reflecting Chinese cultural elements" would foster a more "festive, peaceful, united, and harmonious atmosphere" (Sing Tao, 2018).
Comparison of the China-Arab Axis architecture before and after rectification. Left photo by HT Kou Shi Xin Fei, April 2017, Huitu. Right photo by Zheng Jue, December 2018, Huitu.
These modifications to the China-Arab Axis—subsequently renamed "Unity Road"—signaled the pause of the WMC, a $3.6 billion development project of which the Axis was just one component. Promoted by state and private actors in Ningxia, the WMC was part of a broader effort to capitalize on China's growing ties with the Muslim world. Through clever framing, Hui "entrepreneurs of the national past" (Zhang, 2021) pitched the development plan as a way to transform a backward province into a "strategic pivot" for the Silk Road Economic Belt and a "bridgehead" for China-Arab cooperation (Ma, Bai, and Peng, 2014). The WMC illustrates the long-standing latitude granted to provinces and localities to bend rules and mobilize all available resources to spur growth within broad policy parameters set by Beijing. In Ningxia, for years that meant mobilizing Hui Muslim identity and traditions.
Ningxia (pronounced ning-hsia) is a provincial "autonomous region for ethnic minorities" located near the geographical center of the People's Republic of China. Its geography resembles South Dakota, and like South Dakota, parts of Ningxia are wasteland—arid, sun-baked, and barely arable (see Figure 2). In terms of size, Ningxia is mainland China's smallest province, and its population of seven million is small by PRC standards. By comparison, neighboring Shaanxi province boasts nearly forty million people. Just over a third of Ningxia's population is Hui. Being designated an autonomous minority region offers Ningxia's Hui residents some limited benefits, though this falls far short of true autonomy.
Map of China highlighting Ningxia. Source: TUBS, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Despite its central position on the map, Ningxia is unquestionably marginalized. It is viewed as a gateway to China's northwest, a region known for drought and underdevelopment. Like the rest of the northwest, Ningxia is poor. The climate is to blame: a 1970s UN report described the Xihaigu region in southern Ningxia as "uninhabitable," even though hundreds of thousands of people lived there (Ai, Fang, and Xie, 2020). Over the past four decades, the government has relocated more than a million Xihaigu residents to new settlements with better water supplies and economic opportunities. Due to its isolation and sparse population, Ningxia proved advantageous to the Chinese Communist Party during its revolutionary struggles in the 1930s and 1940s. Parts of Ningxia overlap with what Joseph Esherick (2022) calls the CCP's "accidental holy land"—the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region, where the Party retreated at the end of the Long March and thoroughly overhauled its revolutionary methods.
From the start, the WMC was touted as a way to alleviate Ningxia's backwardness and isolation. Proponents from government, business, and non-profit sectors claimed it would "strengthen cultural exchange and economic cooperation between Ningxia, China, and Muslim countries" and elevate the autonomous region's standing in "China's opening up to the west" (People's Government of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, 2013: 26–27). In this way, the WMC aligned with early 21st-century national development initiatives, notably the "Go Out" strategy aimed at internationalizing China's economy; the "Go West" campaign of massive infrastructure projects across China's interior and west; and the Belt and Road Initiative. Ningxia's own "Go Out" strategy called for "building a frontier open to the Muslim world," partly by encouraging governments and businesses from Muslim countries to "come in" and invest in the region (People's Government of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, 2011: 32–34, 75–79). Yinchuan's urban overhaul, spurred by the "Go West" campaign, reflected these goals (Malzer, 2020b). In 2011, Yinchuan officials approved plans to build a new Central Business District (CBD) in the rural outskirts about 8 kilometers north of the old city center. As envisioned, the Yuehaiwan CBD would feature sleek skyscrapers and artistic public spaces where residents and visitors could kick back and enjoy the city's cutting-edge skyline. The China-Arab Axis and several other WMC ventures were designed to be key elements of the district and among the first CBD projects completed. Like other Yuehaiwan buildings, these were built on converted rural land; the China-Arab Axis slices straight through an area that was still a village in 2010.
The WMC was not a single city, but a multi-site venture with sub-projects scattered across Yinchuan and Yongning County just south of the urban core. In fact, there were two iterations of the WMC, for reasons I will discuss later in the article. The initial version, referred to here as WMC 1.0, launched in 2009 with 13 sub-projects and a price tag of 800 million RMB ($117 million). WMC 2.0 launched in 2012, promising 23 sub-projects and a budget of 23 billion RMB, roughly $3.6 billion. A formal groundbreaking ceremony was held in July 2009, attended by a throng of Ningxia officials along with dignitaries from Bahrain, Turkey, Oman, and Kuwait (Bai, 2009). The presence of these dignitaries highlighted the WMC's early reliance on foreign Muslim backing. Funding for parts of the 13 original sub-projects came from donors and investors in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and other Muslim nations. Kuwait, in particular, was a major capital source. Funds for educational and charitable sub-projects came from the Kuwaiti Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs, its Zakat House, and the Asian Muslim Committee of the Kuwait-based International Islamic Charitable Organization. The Yongning County government provided land for the charitable and educational sub-projects free of charge (Zhao, 2015).
As this list of funding sources suggests, the WMC in its initial incarnation sought to combine profit-seeking with charitable benevolence. The 13 original sub-projects emphasized culture, education, and charity alongside retail and leisure. They included plans for a "World Muslim Folk Culture Street," a pedestrian strip of retail shops and exhibition halls showcasing arts, architecture, and crafts from dozens of Muslim-majority countries; a "One Thousand and One Nights" theme park; a "Muslim Folk Village" to house Hui villagers displaced by urban renewal; a vocational school specializing in Arabic language instruction; and new facilities for the Ningxia Muslim Orphanage. There were also plans for a World Islamic History Museum featuring a mosque on its second floor (Zhou and Luo, 2010). With a few exceptions, these sub-projects were slated for 3,000 mu of land in Yongning County (Liu, Wang, and Tang, 2011: 101). Stylized renderings of the completed WMC 1.0 depicted a tree-lined enclave surrounded on three sides by artificial lakes, featuring shops, museums, parks, residences, academies, and an orphanage—with a towering mosque at the very heart of the enclave.
With its eclectic mix of ventures, the WMC promised to "create a friendly cooperative platform for trade and cultural exchange between... Chinese Muslims and Muslims from other countries and regions around the world" (Tan, 2010). Showcasing Islamic identity and tradition was integral to this goal, with sub-projects drawing on various aesthetic themes and styles. No single version of Islam or Islamic aesthetics dominated; expressions ranged from the (pseudo-)traditional and overtly literal (e.g., faux minarets adorning shopping malls) to the modern and abstract. Some structures tried to convey overt religious significance. For instance, the exterior facades of the (never-built) Quran Mosque and the World Islamic History Museum were supposed to be shaped into "four open Qurans," with 114 decorative windows on their domed roofs symbolizing the 114 chapters of the Quran. The entire structure would be supported by five pillars, an architectural nod to the Five Pillars of Islam.
The Ningxia International Convention Center, serving as the permanent venue for the China-Arab Expo, embodied a more abstract approach to Islamic aesthetics (see Figure 3). Located at the western end of the China-Arab Axis in the Yuehaiwan CBD, the center opened in 2015, featuring geometric designs typical of Islamic art alongside Chinese-flavored elements like dragon motifs and a heavy splash of red. The exterior of the center was wrapped in an asymmetrical, gauze-like steel mesh designed to evoke "the hats and veils of the Hui people" and the checkered keffiyeh worn across the Arab world (Ningxia International Convention Center, 2015). The China-Arab Axis likewise combined Chinese and Islamic elements, though in a more literal way. Stretching over 2 kilometers long and 90 meters wide, the avenue runs east-west through the middle of the Yuehaiwan CBD. Between the roads on its northern and southern edges lie pedestrian walkways and plazas dotted with fountains, sculpture gardens, and decorative pavilions. Sections of the China-Arab Axis showcased Chinese culture with oversized replicas of porcelain vases and bronze dings—ritual vessels that served in ancient China as "prominent symbols of state authority and divine power" (Childs-Johnson, 2012: 164). Other sections displayed various Muslim cultural forms and items: Mughal domes, Moroccan arches, and a giant oil lamp straight out of Disney's Aladdin, to name a few.
Ningxia International Convention Center, Yinchuan, September 2017. Xinhua/Alamy.
In its borrowing of aesthetics and themes, the WMC followed in the footsteps of a standalone venture, the China Hui Culture Park, a Muslim-themed park also located in Yongning County. The original WMC site was practically across the street from the theme park in the same township. Launched in 2002 in the Hui village of Najahu, the park gained attention for its striking Islamic architecture (see Figure 4). Structures inside the park evoked global Muslim landmarks like the Taj Mahal. Other exhibits highlighted the undeniable Chineness of the Hui, which Kyle Haddad-Fonda (2016) observed served as proof that "the Hui have always been integrated into Chinese society." For years, the theme park was practically a mandatory stop for foreign Muslim delegations visiting Ningxia. A stop at the park was usually paired with a visit to the historic Najahu Mosque, a brick-and-wood structure famous for its brightly colored tile roofs and upturned eaves (see Figure 5). In 2009, China's State Council designated the China Hui Culture Park a "National Model Unit for Ethnic Unity and Progress" (Yin, 2015).
Golden-domed ceremonial hall, Hui Culture Park, Yongning. Photo by Takeafancytoraining, December 2019, Huitu.
Main gate of the Najahu Mosque. Photo by Wu Daosheng, 2015, Wikimedia Commons. Accessed February 14, 2024, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:.jpg.
The Sinicization of Space and Ideological Practice
In the first half of the 2010s, Ningxia’s Muslim-centric development strategy seemed to be paying off for the autonomous region. During this period, thousands of dignitaries and investors from Muslim nations visited Ningxia to attend trade forums and do business. Ningxia’s global ambitions got a major boost in 2012 when the State Council approved the creation of the Ningxia Inland Open Economy Experimental Zone and the Yinchuan Comprehensive Bonded Zone, offering tax breaks for foreign trade and export-oriented industries. The Ningxia Halal Food International Trade Certification Center opened in Wuzhong in 2014, part of an effort to ramp up the region's food exports to the Muslim world. In 2013 and 2015, Yinchuan hosted the first and second China-Arab States Expos, each drawing over 7,000 attendees. The 2015 expo saw the signing of 163 cooperation projects between Chinese and foreign enterprises, valued at over $25 billion (Li & Zhu, 2016).
Given these trends, the demise of the World Muslim City a few years later seems puzzling. Yet when placed in the context of the Sinicization campaign announced in 2016, it starts to make sense. Sinicization—*zhongguo hua* in Chinese—is a nationwide policy primarily targeting religion, though it also impacts other endeavors from architecture to social work. As Xi Jinping explained, the policy aims to "blend religious doctrines with Chinese culture... [and] contribute to realizing the Chinese Dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" (Xinhua, 2016). To this end, Xi has exhorted party-state officials and religious leaders to "adhere to the direction of Sinicizing religion in our country and actively guide religion to adapt to socialist society" (quoted in Madsen, 2021: 1). Religious groups have been asked to incorporate party-centric rituals and symbols, including images of Xi, into their liturgical practices and places of worship. In theory, "basic beliefs, core doctrines, and liturgical systems" can be kept as long as they "adapt to socialist society, comply with Chinese cultural spirit, and accord with the progress of the times" (Central Committee of the CCP, 2018). The goal of Sinicization is not to wipe out religion, but to ensure it is subordinated to its *summum bonum*, the Chinese Communist Party.
Without a doubt, though, Sinicization aims to suppress various trends and practices. The campaign specifically targets outwardly "foreign" religious markers that had become increasingly visible in public spaces across the PRC in recent decades. For Islam, these include "signs of 'Saudiization' and 'Arabization' in architecture, attire, religious rituals, scriptural interpretation, and the use of Arabic in Islamic venues," which party leaders insist "must be resolutely curbed and actively and correctly guided" (Central Committee of the CCP, 2018). Expressions of personal piety have come under fire, with Muslims facing harassment for wearing headscarves, growing beards, and fasting during Ramadan. In this way, the Sinicization of Islam is intertwined with "de-Halalization" (*qu qingzhenhua*), an Islamophobic, social media-driven effort to slash halal-branded practices and pressure Muslim citizens to act in a properly "Chinese" fashion (Eley, 2016b; Yusupov, 2021).
In Ningxia and elsewhere, the most visible impact of Sinicization has been architectural. Local governments across the country have forcefully removed domes, minarets, and Arabic script from the facades of mosques, schools, and businesses (Stroup, 2019; Yusupov, 2023). Cadres in planning, construction, and religious affairs departments have been tasked with "strictly supervising" the construction and renovation of Muslim religious sites to ensure they "highlight Chinese style" (Central Committee of the CCP, 2018). One challenge facing officials and believers alike is the lack of clarity over what terms like "Chinese style" and "Chinese cultural spirit" actually refer to. This ambiguity is less a bug than a feature; much like the zero-COVID policy, it can intensify local officials' tendencies to go to extremes in enforcing policies, lest they appear insufficiently firm on the target. Weishan Huang (2021) argues that this lack of clarity shows Sinicization is less about tradition than it is about "traditionalism." Drawing on Edward Shils's distinction between the two, Huang explains that while tradition is malleable and open to interpretation, "traditionalism" turns cultural heritage into something "sacred, and therefore unalterable and exclusive" (ibid.: 65). Fidelity to actual Chinese traditions is largely beside the point. Instead, Huang argues, Sinicization is a "political campaign to designate Chinese traditions as a modern nationalist identity." In the words of the Central Committee of the CCP (2018), the campaign aims to "guide" believers to "establish a correct view of the motherland, ethnicity, religion, history, and culture, and enhance their identification with... the Chinese nation, Chinese culture, and the Chinese Communist Party."
So far, Sinicization has been nowhere near as brutal as the state terror inflicted on Uyghurs in East Turkistan, which seems aimed at eradicating Uyghur identity and culture (Roberts, 2020; Zenz, 2019). Sinicization implies that for Chinese Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, Daoists, and (some) Muslims who follow its rules, there is a possibility of being included in the political community. Many mosques and churches remain open even after their roofs have been retrofitted. Even so, the campaign remains painful for believers whose places of worship have been vandalized or destroyed by a state that previously approved their construction. For many Hui people, Sinicization is seen as a betrayal by a regime that had long encouraged them to forge ties with the global ummah.
Some Hui people have openly resisted the campaign. In August 2018, hundreds of Hui residents in Ningxia protested for weeks against plans to demolish the Weizhou Grand Mosque, which had been completed only two years prior (Stroup, 2019). Their protests were partially successful: the mosque still stands, though in 2019 its domes were removed and replaced with round, recessed roofs. In Yunnan province in Southwest China, protests erupted in May 2003 [sic] in Najahu village in response to plans to alter its main mosque. Tensions also heated up when word got out about plans to Sinicize the Grand Mosque in Shadian, a massive domed building that has long been a source of tourism revenue and local pride. Due to the "tense" nature of relations between Shadian Hui and the state—described by Ruslan Yusupov (2023)—retrofits to the mosque were delayed for years. The community was the site of the 1975 Shadian Incident, a Cultural Revolution-era military assault that left over 1,400 Hui villagers dead. In 1979, the party-state officially apologized for the "incident" and initiated reparations involving the rebuilding of the Shadian Mosque and support for its Islamic religious life (Yusupov, 2021; 2023).
Space, Ideology, and State Power
The architectural obsession of Sinicization demonstrates that under Xi Jinping, building a "correct view of the motherland" requires a proper sorting of religious and secular spaces. In China and elsewhere, the built environment has long served as a medium for communicating political ideals and narratives. Amos Rapoport argued that the communicative capacity of space is the result of the human tendency to "impose meaning on the world by using cognitive taxonomies, categories, and schemata," and that "built form, like other aspects of material culture, is the physical expression of these schemata and domains" (1982: 15). Denise Lawrence and Setha Low note that places, spaces, and the structures they contain are symbols in their own right because they "condense powerful meanings" and "constitute key elements in the communication systems used to express social relations" (1990: 466). Chinese thinkers have long recognized the importance of an ordered spatial environment for conveying and instilling norms and values. As Confucius put it, "If the mat was not straight, he would not sit" (Analects 10:7) (2021).
The idea that space "expresses social relations" is a core insight of Henri Lefebvre’s *The Production of Space* (1991). In that work, Lefebvre proposed that social space is best understood as a dialectical triad of three "moments": "spatial practice," the conceptual "representations of space," and lived "representational spaces" (ibid.: 38–40). The first, "spatial practice," refers to top-down, authoritative efforts to demarcate and create space, such as urban planning, cartography, surveying, and enclosure. Such practices are influenced by similarly authoritative normative concepts of how space ought to be organized and what purposes it should serve (i.e., "representations"). Authoritative spatial practices and representations place constraints on, but are also shaped by, the lived world and the "representational spaces" of everyday activities carried out within it—labor, consumption, socialization, worship, and so on. Lefebvre’s formulation allows us to understand a range of efforts as spatial practices, including the de-Halalization campaign mentioned above. Although de-Halalization primarily targets Muslim bodies and behavior, it remains spatial in its focus and impact. In disciplining the dress, demeanor, and consumption habits of Chinese Muslims, de-Halalization imposes Han-centric Chineseness as a "representation" onto Muslims’ "representational spaces" and the secular pursuits carried out within them. After all, what good is a Sinicized built environment if the bodies and items filling those spaces continue to mark "foreign" Muslim identity and belief?
For Lefebvre, space is neither neutral nor inert, but rather "fraught with" ideology (ibid.: 41). At the same time, ideology relies on space. Lefebvre asks: "What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes, a space which it uses as the vocabulary and the connections, a space which it codifies? What would remain of a religious ideology—for example, Judaeo-Christianity—if it were not based on places and their names: churches, confessionals, altars, sanctuaries, tabernacles?... An ideology only achieves consistency by intervening in social space and its production, and thereby acquiring a body. Ideology itself may be said to consist primarily of discourse about social space" (ibid.: 44). Lefebvre further argues that the articulation of "discourse about social space" involves the exercise of power. For the modern state, space "has become... a political tool of paramount importance. The state uses space in such a way as to ensure its control of places, its strict hierarchy, overall homogeneity, and partial segregation" (1979: 288).
The spatial dimension of state power is obvious in our thinking about sovereignty, which today is synonymous with control over territory (i.e., state space). Beyond that, regimes deploy spatial strategies to extract obedience from their subjects. Political space is configured to make its inhabitants visible, and thus governable (Foucault, 1979; Scott, 1999). In other instances, spatial configurations render invisible those whose existence complicates the regime's preferred narratives (Wacquant, 2000). Alternatively, spatial practices seek to sacralize or naturalize political authority, both to enhance state power and to mask its contingent origins—as Pierre Bourdieu put it, "making us forget [the state's] origin in a long series of acts of institutionalization (in the active sense)" and thereby endowing it with "all the appearance of the natural" (1994: 4). While some measures aim to coerce and control, others seek to infuse space with political meaning and craft the built environment to express and reinforce those meanings. Such practices can be categorized as "spatial cultural governance": the use of symbolic space and spatialized symbols to advance state-preferred narratives, norms, and values (McCarthy, 2022; Oakes, 2019; Perry, 2013). Yet even coercive spatial practices can be expressive. In East Turkistan, camps and checkpoints restricting Muslim minorities also communicate the regime's terrifying power.
In China, the establishment and exercise of state power have long relied on symbolic spatial strategies. Dating back to the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), the emperor’s sacrificial tours, erection of steles, and personal inspections were means of imbuing remote territories with the signs and aura of imperial authority (Chang 2007; Sanft 2008). While these strategies served practical political and military goals, they also fostered what Mara Loveman (2005) calls the "primary accumulation of symbolic power"; that is, state builders acquired the power to "dominate social life" through efforts that "present the products of historical struggle and human creation as natural, inevitable, and therefore nonpolitical" (ibid.: 1654–55). These strategies were driven not only by military and territorial considerations, but by moral and ideological ones as well. Patricia Thornton emphasizes that China's state-building has long been a "profoundly normative and normalizing process that seeks not only to impose a specific moral order enabling the state to claim its preeminence, but also to make the state's presence at the center of this overarching vision seem both natural and necessary" (2007: 4). Thornton argues that the success of these projects hinges on the "state's boundary-setting capacity: the regime's ability to construct itself as an autonomous moral agent, at once apart from and embedded within the imagined political community."
The power of space to shape political identity and behavior was recognized early on by the Chinese Communist Party. Mao Zedong’s 1927 "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan" praised Hunan peasants for seizing or destroying temples, ancestral halls, and other spaces of gentry power that embodied "the whole feudal-patriarchal system and ideology" (the "Fourteen Great Accomplishments"). In their place, communist revolutionaries established poor peasant associations, production cooperatives, and other havens of peasant power. To secure the resources needed to launch a revolution, these spaces and the activities born from them habituated ordinary people to the concepts and practices of Maoism, such as class struggle and the mass line. After the founding of the PRC in 1949, many of the new regime's most ambitious (and notorious) policies were explicitly spatial in their methodology, including land reform, the establishment of the urban work unit (*danwei*), and the people's communes. As Chang-tai Hung notes, the CCP's spatial practices generated both grand spectacles and everyday routines, with monumental architectural projects serving as "powerful manifestations of the party expressing its grand vision in grand architecture" (2011: 258). To paraphrase Lefebvre, the party deployed "spatial practices" that fused socialist "representations of space" with the lived "representational spaces" of everyday experience. The goal was nothing less than the ideological remaking of the Chinese people.
Following the Maoist era, the central government's control over public space waned with reforms that decentralized planning powers to localities and birthed a real estate market. As a result, apart from a commitment to growth, the regime lost some of its capacity to shape the built environment in ways that reflected its ideological commitments. Spatial cultural mobilization was preserved, though in a highly decentralized form through attempts to develop local economies. This mobilization often tended to foster rather than restrict plural cultural identities and traditions, especially in ethnic minority regions that viewed the commercialization of ethnic heritage as a pathway to economic growth.
A fundamental tension exists between mobilization and control in the PRC's spatial cultural governance, particularly when religion is involved. Given the regime's overt atheism and what Nanlai Cao calls the "secular imaginary of spatial modernity" (2017: 36), promoting religion poses problems. Given this tension, it is unsurprising that the economic mobilization of minority religion frequently generated alternative cultural forms and ethno-religious kitsch. As Donald Sutton and Xiaofei Kang argue, the regime prioritized "interethnic harmony" over "accurate and complete restoration of religious sites" or other "objects of identification that might divide or weaken patriotic loyalty to the state" (2010: 115). The strategy has been to "harness the market forces of [religion], but stay at the physical surface—reducing religion to folklore" (ibid.: 122). Under Xi Jinping, however, even the physical surface can become a problem, as the retrofitting of the China-Arab axis clearly illustrates.
Mobilizing Hui Identity as Soft Power Politics
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Original Source: https://www.cambridge.org/core ... 93833
Why Did the World Muslim City Disappear? Spatial Restructuring Under the Sinicization of Religion
The World Muslim City (WMC) was a major development project in Ningxia once built to boost the economy and China-Arab diplomatic ties. Following Xi Jinping's "Sinicization of religion" policy, the project was forced to undergo rectifications and shutdowns after 2018 because it was seen as carrying "non-Chinese" elements. This marked a major shift in China's ethnic policies away from multiculturalism and toward assimilation.
Background: What is the Sinicization of Religion?
The "Sinicization of religion" is a policy direction rolled out in recent years by the People's Republic of China. It demands that all religions align their doctrines, rituals, architecture, and organizations with traditional Chinese culture, core socialist values, and the Party-state narrative. It strips away religious symbols officially deemed "un-Chinese" to tighten the Party's total control over the religious sector.
Abstract
A nation-state is as much a project of narratives and ideas as it is of space and territory. In the People's Republic of China, Xi Jinping’s calls to "revive" traditional Chinese culture, "sinicize religion," and "achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" reflect a broader effort to reshape national narratives and tighten Communist Party control. This article explores the impact of Xi’s revisionist nationalism on China's 55 ethnic minority groups, focusing particularly on the Hui Muslims, one of the ten Muslim minority groups. The paper traces this through the rise and fall of the "World Muslim City" (WMC)—a development project in western China that once mobilized Hui identity and traditions for economic and diplomatic ends. The construction of the WMC was made possible by a multicultural state narrative and a fragmented authoritarian political system that long encouraged local policy flexibilities and deviations. The shutdown of the project highlights the growing anti-Muslim and anti-religious bias in PRC policies, with the "Sinicization of religion" campaign acting as the direct cause of the WMC's demise. Its demise also underscores the regime's current drive to tighten Party control over government, business, and personnel at all levels. Furthermore, the fate of the WMC reveals the spatial dimensions of religious sinicization and China's past and present cultural governance. Borrowing from theorist Henri Lefebvre, the sinicization of religion encompasses a series of "spatial practices" that impose Xi-style "representations of space" onto the "representational spaces" of everyday life, stretching from mosques and commercial areas all the way to theme parks and luxury resorts.
A nation-state is both a narrative and conceptual project, as well as a spatial and territorial one. Potential builders of nation-states leverage narratives and collective identity categories to legitimize their rule over diverse peoples and territories. Through crafted myths, histories, and laws, regimes question and shape their citizens to secure obedience (Althusser, 2001 [1970]). When shifting environments weaken the coherence of the national story, these projects become vulnerable to revision. In the People's Republic of China, the Communist Party abandoned revolutionary socialism in the post-Mao era, forcing it to reconstruct its reason for being—a process that continues today. The diversification brought by economic reforms raised new questions regarding the ethnic and cultural standards of Chinese citizenship. Xi Jinping’s call to "rejuvenate" the nation by "revitalizing" its "fine traditional culture" aims to address these issues in explicit terms (Yang, 2017).
This article looks at the impact of Xi's revisionist project on China's 55 ethnic minorities, especially the Hui Muslims. The Hui are generally considered the most heavily Han-integrated and Chinese-speaking group among the PRC's ten Muslim minorities. The article explores this by analyzing the World Muslim City, a development project in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region that once mobilized Hui identity and culture (pronounced hway) for economic and diplomatic purposes. Launched in 2009, the World Muslim City (hereafter WMC) enjoyed years of backing from top officials in Beijing and Ningxia. In its rhetoric and ambitions, the WMC echoed central government initiatives to develop China's impoverished west and build closer ties with the Muslim world. These initiatives created discursive and strategic spaces for the WMC's Muslim-centric agenda. The project also gained legitimacy through what I have termed in previous research "communist multiculturalism"—an authoritative narrative defining China as a "multi-ethnic, multi-group nation-state" where "diversity is celebrated" and "so-called 'ethnic issues' have been resolved" (McCarthy, 2009: 4). Supporters of the WMC pitched a complementary narrative portraying Ningxia and its large Hui population as central protagonists in China's growth story, indispensable to the country's diplomatic and economic future. Today, the WMC is practically gone. Its major sub-projects have either been shut down or left in limbo.
The demise of the WMC highlights the growing anti-Muslim and anti-religious trends in PRC policies and discourse. Over the past decade, communist multiculturalism has been replaced by the pursuit of "ethnic integration" (minzu ronghe) (Glaesserman, 2023). Calls for a more assimilationist minority policy predated Xi's tenure and intensified after violent ethnic clashes in Tibet and East Turkestan in the late 2000s (Leibold, 2012). Under Xi, however, the shift toward ethnic integration has gone hand in hand with a reinterpretation of Chinese history. Unlike other post-Mao leaders, Xi is heavily invested in reshaping the narrative of Chinese history, including the history of the CCP, which has been rewritten to place Xi alongside Mao Zedong and Deng小平 in the "official constellation of era-defining leaders" (Buckley, 2021). He denounces "historical nihilism"—historical interpretations that focus on the Party's mistakes and run counter to the officially approved narrative. Xi's revisionist nationalism is also reflected in the "Sinicization of religion" campaign, the direct cause of the WMC's demise. Sinicization has affected all five state-approved religions, including Daoism, the only one of the five native to China. Yet it has specifically targeted Muslims and Islam.
Sinicization is a spatial project: symbolic spaces and spatial symbols are the mediums for its nationalist message. Among other measures, it demands the stripping of overt "un-Chinese" elements from religious and some secular architecture, the eradication of religious symbols from the public sphere, and the incorporation of Party-centric imagery and rituals into activities at religious sites. This campaign reveals how discourse and space converge in the (re)building of a nation-state. In China, space—the built environment and its mapped zones—has long served as a tool for broadcasting regime-approved norms and narratives. In the post-Mao era, the Party's control over space and its meaning waned as urban planning and property allocation powers were decentralized and partially privatized. Today, space once again takes center stage in the Party's efforts to define national identity and propagate "core socialist values" (Miao, 2020; Stokols, 2023). A revived China has been materialized in a mix of sand, gravel, and cement.
The impact of Sinicization extends beyond ethnic minorities and religion, curbing regional development strategies, provincial diplomacy, and private capital. The closure of the WMC not only highlights the regime's shifting ethno-religious priorities but also mirrors the push to expand Party control over government, business, and personnel at all levels (Heilmann, 2016; Koss, 2021; Wang and Mou, 2021). Previous accounts of the WMC tended to portray it as a project of the Party-state (He, 2013; Ptáčková, 2020; Malzer, 2020a; Sun, 2022); however, this article emphasizes the role of private and sub-provincial Party-state actors in advancing the initiative—as well as bringing about its demise. Several WMC sub-projects violated land-use laws, and local authorities sometimes resisted efforts to enforce those laws. In this way, the WMC exposes "fragmented authoritarianism," a system that for decades encouraged local policy flexibilities while frustrating Beijing's efforts to ensure local loyalty to its directives (Lieberthal and Oksenberg, 1988; Mertha, 2009). As Nian Lai Cao wrote regarding early campaigns against Christian symbols in Zhejiang province, understanding events in Ningxia requires "taking into account the national context of systematic and comprehensive rectifications of local governance by the central government" (2017: 35). The demise of the WMC can be read as an episode in Xi's quest to consolidate the Party-state.
In the following sections, I first outline the WMC and place it within the context of Ningxia's developmental ambitions before the launch of the Sinicization campaign. Next, I examine the goals and methods of Sinicization and the reactions of Hui Muslims. Along the way, I draw on insights from Henri Lefebvre and other theorists of the built environment to analyze how space and ideological narratives intersect in Sinicization and past Chinese nation-building efforts. I then dive into the case of the WMC, shedding light on the narratives used to promote it, its problematic trajectory, and its ultimate fate. The final section returns to Xi's revisionist state project and its ethno-religious impacts. My arguments and findings are based on qualitative, interpretive analysis of Chinese government documents, published interviews, news reports, press releases, videos, photos, satellite imagery, websites, social media posts, court cases, and academic publications. These materials reveal that Sinicization is a set of "spatial practices" through which Xi-style "representations of space" are imposed upon the "representational spaces" of everyday life, ranging from mosques and communities all the way to theme parks and luxury resorts (Lefebvre, 1991: 38–40).
The World Muslim City and Ningxia's Development Agenda
In March 2018, workers in Yinchuan, capital of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, began dismantling the domed roof of a large pavilion in the downtown business district. The pavilion sat at the heart of the China-Arab Axis, a grand avenue built to celebrate trade and diplomatic ties between China and the Arab world. After tearing down the bulbous top of the structure, workers spent the following weeks building a replacement: a recessed octagonal double-layer roof curving downward from a center point before rising at the eaves. They also straightened the pavilion's support columns to eliminate the pointed arches between them. A few hundred meters to the east, arched metal pergolas were replaced with pitched-roof versions in the traditional "xuanshan" style. Nearby, a crescent moon sculpture was swapped for a giant jade bi—a doughnut-shaped jade disk tied to ancient Chinese burial rituals (see Figure 1). Thousands of such jade disks have been unearthed from burial sites dating back to the Neolithic period at the dawn of Chinese civilization (Sun, 1993). When asked why these structures were "rectified" just years after installation, city officials explained that "transforming the original Arab-style landscape into one reflecting Chinese cultural elements" would foster a more "festive, peaceful, united, and harmonious atmosphere" (Sing Tao, 2018).
Comparison of the China-Arab Axis architecture before and after rectification. Left photo by HT Kou Shi Xin Fei, April 2017, Huitu. Right photo by Zheng Jue, December 2018, Huitu.
These modifications to the China-Arab Axis—subsequently renamed "Unity Road"—signaled the pause of the WMC, a $3.6 billion development project of which the Axis was just one component. Promoted by state and private actors in Ningxia, the WMC was part of a broader effort to capitalize on China's growing ties with the Muslim world. Through clever framing, Hui "entrepreneurs of the national past" (Zhang, 2021) pitched the development plan as a way to transform a backward province into a "strategic pivot" for the Silk Road Economic Belt and a "bridgehead" for China-Arab cooperation (Ma, Bai, and Peng, 2014). The WMC illustrates the long-standing latitude granted to provinces and localities to bend rules and mobilize all available resources to spur growth within broad policy parameters set by Beijing. In Ningxia, for years that meant mobilizing Hui Muslim identity and traditions.
Ningxia (pronounced ning-hsia) is a provincial "autonomous region for ethnic minorities" located near the geographical center of the People's Republic of China. Its geography resembles South Dakota, and like South Dakota, parts of Ningxia are wasteland—arid, sun-baked, and barely arable (see Figure 2). In terms of size, Ningxia is mainland China's smallest province, and its population of seven million is small by PRC standards. By comparison, neighboring Shaanxi province boasts nearly forty million people. Just over a third of Ningxia's population is Hui. Being designated an autonomous minority region offers Ningxia's Hui residents some limited benefits, though this falls far short of true autonomy.
Map of China highlighting Ningxia. Source: TUBS, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Despite its central position on the map, Ningxia is unquestionably marginalized. It is viewed as a gateway to China's northwest, a region known for drought and underdevelopment. Like the rest of the northwest, Ningxia is poor. The climate is to blame: a 1970s UN report described the Xihaigu region in southern Ningxia as "uninhabitable," even though hundreds of thousands of people lived there (Ai, Fang, and Xie, 2020). Over the past four decades, the government has relocated more than a million Xihaigu residents to new settlements with better water supplies and economic opportunities. Due to its isolation and sparse population, Ningxia proved advantageous to the Chinese Communist Party during its revolutionary struggles in the 1930s and 1940s. Parts of Ningxia overlap with what Joseph Esherick (2022) calls the CCP's "accidental holy land"—the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region, where the Party retreated at the end of the Long March and thoroughly overhauled its revolutionary methods.
From the start, the WMC was touted as a way to alleviate Ningxia's backwardness and isolation. Proponents from government, business, and non-profit sectors claimed it would "strengthen cultural exchange and economic cooperation between Ningxia, China, and Muslim countries" and elevate the autonomous region's standing in "China's opening up to the west" (People's Government of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, 2013: 26–27). In this way, the WMC aligned with early 21st-century national development initiatives, notably the "Go Out" strategy aimed at internationalizing China's economy; the "Go West" campaign of massive infrastructure projects across China's interior and west; and the Belt and Road Initiative. Ningxia's own "Go Out" strategy called for "building a frontier open to the Muslim world," partly by encouraging governments and businesses from Muslim countries to "come in" and invest in the region (People's Government of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, 2011: 32–34, 75–79). Yinchuan's urban overhaul, spurred by the "Go West" campaign, reflected these goals (Malzer, 2020b). In 2011, Yinchuan officials approved plans to build a new Central Business District (CBD) in the rural outskirts about 8 kilometers north of the old city center. As envisioned, the Yuehaiwan CBD would feature sleek skyscrapers and artistic public spaces where residents and visitors could kick back and enjoy the city's cutting-edge skyline. The China-Arab Axis and several other WMC ventures were designed to be key elements of the district and among the first CBD projects completed. Like other Yuehaiwan buildings, these were built on converted rural land; the China-Arab Axis slices straight through an area that was still a village in 2010.
The WMC was not a single city, but a multi-site venture with sub-projects scattered across Yinchuan and Yongning County just south of the urban core. In fact, there were two iterations of the WMC, for reasons I will discuss later in the article. The initial version, referred to here as WMC 1.0, launched in 2009 with 13 sub-projects and a price tag of 800 million RMB ($117 million). WMC 2.0 launched in 2012, promising 23 sub-projects and a budget of 23 billion RMB, roughly $3.6 billion. A formal groundbreaking ceremony was held in July 2009, attended by a throng of Ningxia officials along with dignitaries from Bahrain, Turkey, Oman, and Kuwait (Bai, 2009). The presence of these dignitaries highlighted the WMC's early reliance on foreign Muslim backing. Funding for parts of the 13 original sub-projects came from donors and investors in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and other Muslim nations. Kuwait, in particular, was a major capital source. Funds for educational and charitable sub-projects came from the Kuwaiti Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs, its Zakat House, and the Asian Muslim Committee of the Kuwait-based International Islamic Charitable Organization. The Yongning County government provided land for the charitable and educational sub-projects free of charge (Zhao, 2015).
As this list of funding sources suggests, the WMC in its initial incarnation sought to combine profit-seeking with charitable benevolence. The 13 original sub-projects emphasized culture, education, and charity alongside retail and leisure. They included plans for a "World Muslim Folk Culture Street," a pedestrian strip of retail shops and exhibition halls showcasing arts, architecture, and crafts from dozens of Muslim-majority countries; a "One Thousand and One Nights" theme park; a "Muslim Folk Village" to house Hui villagers displaced by urban renewal; a vocational school specializing in Arabic language instruction; and new facilities for the Ningxia Muslim Orphanage. There were also plans for a World Islamic History Museum featuring a mosque on its second floor (Zhou and Luo, 2010). With a few exceptions, these sub-projects were slated for 3,000 mu of land in Yongning County (Liu, Wang, and Tang, 2011: 101). Stylized renderings of the completed WMC 1.0 depicted a tree-lined enclave surrounded on three sides by artificial lakes, featuring shops, museums, parks, residences, academies, and an orphanage—with a towering mosque at the very heart of the enclave.
With its eclectic mix of ventures, the WMC promised to "create a friendly cooperative platform for trade and cultural exchange between... Chinese Muslims and Muslims from other countries and regions around the world" (Tan, 2010). Showcasing Islamic identity and tradition was integral to this goal, with sub-projects drawing on various aesthetic themes and styles. No single version of Islam or Islamic aesthetics dominated; expressions ranged from the (pseudo-)traditional and overtly literal (e.g., faux minarets adorning shopping malls) to the modern and abstract. Some structures tried to convey overt religious significance. For instance, the exterior facades of the (never-built) Quran Mosque and the World Islamic History Museum were supposed to be shaped into "four open Qurans," with 114 decorative windows on their domed roofs symbolizing the 114 chapters of the Quran. The entire structure would be supported by five pillars, an architectural nod to the Five Pillars of Islam.
The Ningxia International Convention Center, serving as the permanent venue for the China-Arab Expo, embodied a more abstract approach to Islamic aesthetics (see Figure 3). Located at the western end of the China-Arab Axis in the Yuehaiwan CBD, the center opened in 2015, featuring geometric designs typical of Islamic art alongside Chinese-flavored elements like dragon motifs and a heavy splash of red. The exterior of the center was wrapped in an asymmetrical, gauze-like steel mesh designed to evoke "the hats and veils of the Hui people" and the checkered keffiyeh worn across the Arab world (Ningxia International Convention Center, 2015). The China-Arab Axis likewise combined Chinese and Islamic elements, though in a more literal way. Stretching over 2 kilometers long and 90 meters wide, the avenue runs east-west through the middle of the Yuehaiwan CBD. Between the roads on its northern and southern edges lie pedestrian walkways and plazas dotted with fountains, sculpture gardens, and decorative pavilions. Sections of the China-Arab Axis showcased Chinese culture with oversized replicas of porcelain vases and bronze dings—ritual vessels that served in ancient China as "prominent symbols of state authority and divine power" (Childs-Johnson, 2012: 164). Other sections displayed various Muslim cultural forms and items: Mughal domes, Moroccan arches, and a giant oil lamp straight out of Disney's Aladdin, to name a few.
Ningxia International Convention Center, Yinchuan, September 2017. Xinhua/Alamy.
In its borrowing of aesthetics and themes, the WMC followed in the footsteps of a standalone venture, the China Hui Culture Park, a Muslim-themed park also located in Yongning County. The original WMC site was practically across the street from the theme park in the same township. Launched in 2002 in the Hui village of Najahu, the park gained attention for its striking Islamic architecture (see Figure 4). Structures inside the park evoked global Muslim landmarks like the Taj Mahal. Other exhibits highlighted the undeniable Chineness of the Hui, which Kyle Haddad-Fonda (2016) observed served as proof that "the Hui have always been integrated into Chinese society." For years, the theme park was practically a mandatory stop for foreign Muslim delegations visiting Ningxia. A stop at the park was usually paired with a visit to the historic Najahu Mosque, a brick-and-wood structure famous for its brightly colored tile roofs and upturned eaves (see Figure 5). In 2009, China's State Council designated the China Hui Culture Park a "National Model Unit for Ethnic Unity and Progress" (Yin, 2015).
Golden-domed ceremonial hall, Hui Culture Park, Yongning. Photo by Takeafancytoraining, December 2019, Huitu.
Main gate of the Najahu Mosque. Photo by Wu Daosheng, 2015, Wikimedia Commons. Accessed February 14, 2024, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:.jpg.
The Sinicization of Space and Ideological Practice
In the first half of the 2010s, Ningxia’s Muslim-centric development strategy seemed to be paying off for the autonomous region. During this period, thousands of dignitaries and investors from Muslim nations visited Ningxia to attend trade forums and do business. Ningxia’s global ambitions got a major boost in 2012 when the State Council approved the creation of the Ningxia Inland Open Economy Experimental Zone and the Yinchuan Comprehensive Bonded Zone, offering tax breaks for foreign trade and export-oriented industries. The Ningxia Halal Food International Trade Certification Center opened in Wuzhong in 2014, part of an effort to ramp up the region's food exports to the Muslim world. In 2013 and 2015, Yinchuan hosted the first and second China-Arab States Expos, each drawing over 7,000 attendees. The 2015 expo saw the signing of 163 cooperation projects between Chinese and foreign enterprises, valued at over $25 billion (Li & Zhu, 2016).
Given these trends, the demise of the World Muslim City a few years later seems puzzling. Yet when placed in the context of the Sinicization campaign announced in 2016, it starts to make sense. Sinicization—*zhongguo hua* in Chinese—is a nationwide policy primarily targeting religion, though it also impacts other endeavors from architecture to social work. As Xi Jinping explained, the policy aims to "blend religious doctrines with Chinese culture... [and] contribute to realizing the Chinese Dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" (Xinhua, 2016). To this end, Xi has exhorted party-state officials and religious leaders to "adhere to the direction of Sinicizing religion in our country and actively guide religion to adapt to socialist society" (quoted in Madsen, 2021: 1). Religious groups have been asked to incorporate party-centric rituals and symbols, including images of Xi, into their liturgical practices and places of worship. In theory, "basic beliefs, core doctrines, and liturgical systems" can be kept as long as they "adapt to socialist society, comply with Chinese cultural spirit, and accord with the progress of the times" (Central Committee of the CCP, 2018). The goal of Sinicization is not to wipe out religion, but to ensure it is subordinated to its *summum bonum*, the Chinese Communist Party.
Without a doubt, though, Sinicization aims to suppress various trends and practices. The campaign specifically targets outwardly "foreign" religious markers that had become increasingly visible in public spaces across the PRC in recent decades. For Islam, these include "signs of 'Saudiization' and 'Arabization' in architecture, attire, religious rituals, scriptural interpretation, and the use of Arabic in Islamic venues," which party leaders insist "must be resolutely curbed and actively and correctly guided" (Central Committee of the CCP, 2018). Expressions of personal piety have come under fire, with Muslims facing harassment for wearing headscarves, growing beards, and fasting during Ramadan. In this way, the Sinicization of Islam is intertwined with "de-Halalization" (*qu qingzhenhua*), an Islamophobic, social media-driven effort to slash halal-branded practices and pressure Muslim citizens to act in a properly "Chinese" fashion (Eley, 2016b; Yusupov, 2021).
In Ningxia and elsewhere, the most visible impact of Sinicization has been architectural. Local governments across the country have forcefully removed domes, minarets, and Arabic script from the facades of mosques, schools, and businesses (Stroup, 2019; Yusupov, 2023). Cadres in planning, construction, and religious affairs departments have been tasked with "strictly supervising" the construction and renovation of Muslim religious sites to ensure they "highlight Chinese style" (Central Committee of the CCP, 2018). One challenge facing officials and believers alike is the lack of clarity over what terms like "Chinese style" and "Chinese cultural spirit" actually refer to. This ambiguity is less a bug than a feature; much like the zero-COVID policy, it can intensify local officials' tendencies to go to extremes in enforcing policies, lest they appear insufficiently firm on the target. Weishan Huang (2021) argues that this lack of clarity shows Sinicization is less about tradition than it is about "traditionalism." Drawing on Edward Shils's distinction between the two, Huang explains that while tradition is malleable and open to interpretation, "traditionalism" turns cultural heritage into something "sacred, and therefore unalterable and exclusive" (ibid.: 65). Fidelity to actual Chinese traditions is largely beside the point. Instead, Huang argues, Sinicization is a "political campaign to designate Chinese traditions as a modern nationalist identity." In the words of the Central Committee of the CCP (2018), the campaign aims to "guide" believers to "establish a correct view of the motherland, ethnicity, religion, history, and culture, and enhance their identification with... the Chinese nation, Chinese culture, and the Chinese Communist Party."
So far, Sinicization has been nowhere near as brutal as the state terror inflicted on Uyghurs in East Turkistan, which seems aimed at eradicating Uyghur identity and culture (Roberts, 2020; Zenz, 2019). Sinicization implies that for Chinese Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, Daoists, and (some) Muslims who follow its rules, there is a possibility of being included in the political community. Many mosques and churches remain open even after their roofs have been retrofitted. Even so, the campaign remains painful for believers whose places of worship have been vandalized or destroyed by a state that previously approved their construction. For many Hui people, Sinicization is seen as a betrayal by a regime that had long encouraged them to forge ties with the global ummah.
Some Hui people have openly resisted the campaign. In August 2018, hundreds of Hui residents in Ningxia protested for weeks against plans to demolish the Weizhou Grand Mosque, which had been completed only two years prior (Stroup, 2019). Their protests were partially successful: the mosque still stands, though in 2019 its domes were removed and replaced with round, recessed roofs. In Yunnan province in Southwest China, protests erupted in May 2003 [sic] in Najahu village in response to plans to alter its main mosque. Tensions also heated up when word got out about plans to Sinicize the Grand Mosque in Shadian, a massive domed building that has long been a source of tourism revenue and local pride. Due to the "tense" nature of relations between Shadian Hui and the state—described by Ruslan Yusupov (2023)—retrofits to the mosque were delayed for years. The community was the site of the 1975 Shadian Incident, a Cultural Revolution-era military assault that left over 1,400 Hui villagers dead. In 1979, the party-state officially apologized for the "incident" and initiated reparations involving the rebuilding of the Shadian Mosque and support for its Islamic religious life (Yusupov, 2021; 2023).
Space, Ideology, and State Power
The architectural obsession of Sinicization demonstrates that under Xi Jinping, building a "correct view of the motherland" requires a proper sorting of religious and secular spaces. In China and elsewhere, the built environment has long served as a medium for communicating political ideals and narratives. Amos Rapoport argued that the communicative capacity of space is the result of the human tendency to "impose meaning on the world by using cognitive taxonomies, categories, and schemata," and that "built form, like other aspects of material culture, is the physical expression of these schemata and domains" (1982: 15). Denise Lawrence and Setha Low note that places, spaces, and the structures they contain are symbols in their own right because they "condense powerful meanings" and "constitute key elements in the communication systems used to express social relations" (1990: 466). Chinese thinkers have long recognized the importance of an ordered spatial environment for conveying and instilling norms and values. As Confucius put it, "If the mat was not straight, he would not sit" (Analects 10:7) (2021).
The idea that space "expresses social relations" is a core insight of Henri Lefebvre’s *The Production of Space* (1991). In that work, Lefebvre proposed that social space is best understood as a dialectical triad of three "moments": "spatial practice," the conceptual "representations of space," and lived "representational spaces" (ibid.: 38–40). The first, "spatial practice," refers to top-down, authoritative efforts to demarcate and create space, such as urban planning, cartography, surveying, and enclosure. Such practices are influenced by similarly authoritative normative concepts of how space ought to be organized and what purposes it should serve (i.e., "representations"). Authoritative spatial practices and representations place constraints on, but are also shaped by, the lived world and the "representational spaces" of everyday activities carried out within it—labor, consumption, socialization, worship, and so on. Lefebvre’s formulation allows us to understand a range of efforts as spatial practices, including the de-Halalization campaign mentioned above. Although de-Halalization primarily targets Muslim bodies and behavior, it remains spatial in its focus and impact. In disciplining the dress, demeanor, and consumption habits of Chinese Muslims, de-Halalization imposes Han-centric Chineseness as a "representation" onto Muslims’ "representational spaces" and the secular pursuits carried out within them. After all, what good is a Sinicized built environment if the bodies and items filling those spaces continue to mark "foreign" Muslim identity and belief?
For Lefebvre, space is neither neutral nor inert, but rather "fraught with" ideology (ibid.: 41). At the same time, ideology relies on space. Lefebvre asks: "What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes, a space which it uses as the vocabulary and the connections, a space which it codifies? What would remain of a religious ideology—for example, Judaeo-Christianity—if it were not based on places and their names: churches, confessionals, altars, sanctuaries, tabernacles?... An ideology only achieves consistency by intervening in social space and its production, and thereby acquiring a body. Ideology itself may be said to consist primarily of discourse about social space" (ibid.: 44). Lefebvre further argues that the articulation of "discourse about social space" involves the exercise of power. For the modern state, space "has become... a political tool of paramount importance. The state uses space in such a way as to ensure its control of places, its strict hierarchy, overall homogeneity, and partial segregation" (1979: 288).
The spatial dimension of state power is obvious in our thinking about sovereignty, which today is synonymous with control over territory (i.e., state space). Beyond that, regimes deploy spatial strategies to extract obedience from their subjects. Political space is configured to make its inhabitants visible, and thus governable (Foucault, 1979; Scott, 1999). In other instances, spatial configurations render invisible those whose existence complicates the regime's preferred narratives (Wacquant, 2000). Alternatively, spatial practices seek to sacralize or naturalize political authority, both to enhance state power and to mask its contingent origins—as Pierre Bourdieu put it, "making us forget [the state's] origin in a long series of acts of institutionalization (in the active sense)" and thereby endowing it with "all the appearance of the natural" (1994: 4). While some measures aim to coerce and control, others seek to infuse space with political meaning and craft the built environment to express and reinforce those meanings. Such practices can be categorized as "spatial cultural governance": the use of symbolic space and spatialized symbols to advance state-preferred narratives, norms, and values (McCarthy, 2022; Oakes, 2019; Perry, 2013). Yet even coercive spatial practices can be expressive. In East Turkistan, camps and checkpoints restricting Muslim minorities also communicate the regime's terrifying power.
In China, the establishment and exercise of state power have long relied on symbolic spatial strategies. Dating back to the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), the emperor’s sacrificial tours, erection of steles, and personal inspections were means of imbuing remote territories with the signs and aura of imperial authority (Chang 2007; Sanft 2008). While these strategies served practical political and military goals, they also fostered what Mara Loveman (2005) calls the "primary accumulation of symbolic power"; that is, state builders acquired the power to "dominate social life" through efforts that "present the products of historical struggle and human creation as natural, inevitable, and therefore nonpolitical" (ibid.: 1654–55). These strategies were driven not only by military and territorial considerations, but by moral and ideological ones as well. Patricia Thornton emphasizes that China's state-building has long been a "profoundly normative and normalizing process that seeks not only to impose a specific moral order enabling the state to claim its preeminence, but also to make the state's presence at the center of this overarching vision seem both natural and necessary" (2007: 4). Thornton argues that the success of these projects hinges on the "state's boundary-setting capacity: the regime's ability to construct itself as an autonomous moral agent, at once apart from and embedded within the imagined political community."
The power of space to shape political identity and behavior was recognized early on by the Chinese Communist Party. Mao Zedong’s 1927 "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan" praised Hunan peasants for seizing or destroying temples, ancestral halls, and other spaces of gentry power that embodied "the whole feudal-patriarchal system and ideology" (the "Fourteen Great Accomplishments"). In their place, communist revolutionaries established poor peasant associations, production cooperatives, and other havens of peasant power. To secure the resources needed to launch a revolution, these spaces and the activities born from them habituated ordinary people to the concepts and practices of Maoism, such as class struggle and the mass line. After the founding of the PRC in 1949, many of the new regime's most ambitious (and notorious) policies were explicitly spatial in their methodology, including land reform, the establishment of the urban work unit (*danwei*), and the people's communes. As Chang-tai Hung notes, the CCP's spatial practices generated both grand spectacles and everyday routines, with monumental architectural projects serving as "powerful manifestations of the party expressing its grand vision in grand architecture" (2011: 258). To paraphrase Lefebvre, the party deployed "spatial practices" that fused socialist "representations of space" with the lived "representational spaces" of everyday experience. The goal was nothing less than the ideological remaking of the Chinese people.
Following the Maoist era, the central government's control over public space waned with reforms that decentralized planning powers to localities and birthed a real estate market. As a result, apart from a commitment to growth, the regime lost some of its capacity to shape the built environment in ways that reflected its ideological commitments. Spatial cultural mobilization was preserved, though in a highly decentralized form through attempts to develop local economies. This mobilization often tended to foster rather than restrict plural cultural identities and traditions, especially in ethnic minority regions that viewed the commercialization of ethnic heritage as a pathway to economic growth.
A fundamental tension exists between mobilization and control in the PRC's spatial cultural governance, particularly when religion is involved. Given the regime's overt atheism and what Nanlai Cao calls the "secular imaginary of spatial modernity" (2017: 36), promoting religion poses problems. Given this tension, it is unsurprising that the economic mobilization of minority religion frequently generated alternative cultural forms and ethno-religious kitsch. As Donald Sutton and Xiaofei Kang argue, the regime prioritized "interethnic harmony" over "accurate and complete restoration of religious sites" or other "objects of identification that might divide or weaken patriotic loyalty to the state" (2010: 115). The strategy has been to "harness the market forces of [religion], but stay at the physical surface—reducing religion to folklore" (ibid.: 122). Under Xi Jinping, however, even the physical surface can become a problem, as the retrofitting of the China-Arab axis clearly illustrates.
Mobilizing Hui Identity as Soft Power Politics
