Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe Henan famine of 1942 occurred during the middle of the Sino-Japanese war, in a province that was divided between Japanese, Nationalist and Communist political control. Partly due to this wartime context, existing accounts of the famine rely almost exclusively on eyewitness reports. This paper presents a range of statistical sources on the famine, including weather records, contemporary economic surveys and population censuses. These statistical sources allow similarities to be drawn between the Henan famine and other famines that occurred during the Second World War, such as in Bengal, when the combination of bad weather, war-induced disruptions to food markets, and the relegation of famine relief to the war effort, brought great hardship to civilians living near the war front.

In the wake of the Wuchang uprising, the first major town in the Northwest to fall to the revolutionaries was Lingzhou, in Ningxia prefecture, Gansu. The reign of the 'Han Restoration Army of Lingzhou' lasted for several weeks, when it was crushed by a predominantly Muslim, loyalist militia force. Several sources on the Lingzhou uprising describe the execution of three Muslim 'traitors' who were aligned with the revolutionaries. This article explores the cause that these 'traitors' betrayed in the eyes of their Muslim executioners. For at least one of the authors of these sources, the worst possible act of betrayal was to turn away from the true shaykh of the age. To understand the significance of this type of betrayal, the article turns back to the Muslim rebellion of the Tongzhi reign (1862–1874) and its aftermath. The main parties to the violence that occurred in Lingzhou in 1911 formulated their actions in response to local events of the recent past, and these local perspectives open up a wide range of interpretations of the significance of the Xinhai revolution.

AbstractChina's leading Muslim writer, Zhang Chengzhi, published in 1991 an historical novel about a Sufi Islamic community, entitled The History of the Soul. The novel covers the two hundred years leading up to 1919, the year of the May Fourth Movement that is conventionally considered as the beginning of modern Chinese history. During this period, the Sufi community that is the subject of Zhang's novels, called the Jahriyya, was involved in a series of violent clashes with the Qing imperial state. The author weaves through his historical narrative of a Chinese spiritual community the story of his own spiritual crisis, which he underwent in the 1980s and finally overcame through his encounter with the Jahriyya.