China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II

Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks

by Kelly A. Hammond

In this transnational history of World War II, Kelly A. Hammond places Sino-Muslims at the center of imperial Japan’s challenges to Chinese nation-building efforts. Revealing the little-known story of Japan’s interest in Islam during its occupation of North China, Hammond shows how imperial Japanese aimed to defeat the Chinese Nationalists in winning the hearts and minds of Sino-Muslims, a vital minority population. Offering programs that presented themselves as protectors of Islam, the Japanese aimed to provide Muslims with a viable alternative—and, at the same time, to create new Muslim consumer markets that would, the Japanese hoped, act to subvert the existing global capitalist world order and destabilize the Soviets.

This history can be told only by reinstating agency to Muslims in China who became active participants in the brokering and political jockeying between the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese Empire. Hammond argues that the competition for their loyalty was central to the creation of the ethnoreligious identity of Muslims living on the Chinese mainland. Their wartime experience ultimately helped shape the formation of Sino-Muslims’ religious identities within global Islamic networks, as well as their incorporation into the Chinese state, where the conditions of that incorporation remain unstable and contested to this day.

Genres: China, Japan, Islam, History, Nonfiction, World War II

320 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2020

Reviews

[Zee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book does good justice to a niche and sidelined topic in transnational history covering events and approaches between governments and religious groups that are particularly interesting given their templates were (and continue to be) borrowed. The author’s research contextualizes it well and frequently readjusts false or misleading notions that the reader may have and that historical academia at large has certainly tended to have, willfully or not.

Also frequent is the academic tendency to be overly repetitive with contextual reframing and such, which probably took up a collective dozen or more pages with superfluous sentences throughout the book, but this takes nothing away from its competent treatment of a fascinating but forgotten dynamic of international relations and its ongoing implications.

[Jason S · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book, even though it strayed from thesis often. Argues with some strong evidence that Japan used Chinese Muslims as a way to build larger Asian empires. An interesting chapter on the diplomacy of the tea trade and some interesting parallels in the conclusion to how the PRC used foreign policy in the Suez crisis to win domestic favor from internal Muslims. An interesting reimagining of the boundaries of World War II

[Jaylani Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book to read when it comes to Muslim community and World War II. I didn't know Japan did like this. I only thought that Italy and Germany were the only ones doing that when they did this to the Muslim subjects of the British, French and Dutch empires.