(iPoster) State Capacity and Hui-Han Relations in Qing China

• In Event: Poster Session: Politics and History

Abstract

Why do ethnic and religious cleavages generate cooperation in some settings but violent conflict in others? This paper addresses this question by examining variation in intergroup relations between the Hui (Chinese-speaking Muslims) and the Han majority in Qing China. Despite shared language, long-term co-residence, and deep economic interdependence, Hui–Han relations varied sharply across regions. In some localities, particularly commercially integrated areas such as Jiangnan, Hui and Han coexisted with limited conflict, participated in shared markets, and interacted routinely in everyday social life. In contrast, frontier regions, especially in the northwest and southwest, experienced recurrent communal violence, including large-scale rebellions in the nineteenth century. Cultural or theological explanations alone cannot account for this divergence, as religious difference and Islamic doctrine remained relatively constant across space.

We argue that local state capacity conditions how religious identity structures intergroup relations. When state capacity is strong, the state provides credible enforcement of contracts, dispute resolution, and public order. In such contexts, religious institutions do not need to substitute for governance. Instead, Islamic norms emphasizing honesty, contractual fidelity, and reputational integrity complement state and market institutions, allowing religious identity to function as a source of cross-group trust and facilitating economic cooperation and social integration. When state capacity is weak, however, formal institutions fail to provide security, justice, or economic predictability. Islamic communal institutions then evolve into substitutes for governance, providing welfare, enforcement, and dispute resolution within the Muslim community. While these institutions generate dense intra-group trust, they also harden group boundaries, restrict cross-group interaction, and increase the likelihood of ethnicized conflict. In short, state capacity does not alter religious identity itself, but reshapes the institutional role that religion plays in structuring intergroup relations.

We test this argument using county-level variation in Yunnan province during the Qing dynasty, a frontier region with a large Hui population and substantial heterogeneity in governance and intergroup relations. The empirical strategy exploits Gaitu Guiliu—a major administrative reform implemented primarily during the Yongzheng reign (1723–1735)—as an exogenous shock to local state capacity. Gaitu Guiliu abolished hereditary native chieftains and incorporated frontier regions into the regular Qing bureaucracy, introducing magistrates, formal courts, standardized taxation, and military oversight. Because counties were incorporated at different times for reasons driven by central state-building objectives rather than local Hui–Han relations, the reform generates quasi-experimental variation in exposure to effective state capacity.

We construct a county–year dataset combining digitized Qing imperial records (Qing shilu) and county gazetteers (xianzhi) to measure Hui–Han violent conflict, Muslim engagement with state legal institutions, market integration, and multiple dimensions of local state presence, including administrative, military, fiscal, and famine-relief capacity. Using a difference-in-differences and event-study design, we trace the dynamic effects of incorporation into the Qing administrative system. There are three expected findings. (1) Gaitu Guiliu produces sustained increases in effective local state capacity, reflected in greater administrative presence, military enforcement, fiscal extraction, and famine-relief capacity. (2) Increased state capacity is associated with improved Hui–Han intergroup relations, including significant declines in ethnicized collective violence and greater Muslim engagement with state legal institutions. (3) The observed improvements in intergroup relations are consistent with a shift in the function of Islamic communal institutions---from substitutes for governance toward complementary social infrastructure.

These findings demonstrate that variation in Hui–Han relations was not driven by religious difference per se, but by institutional context. More broadly, the paper contributes to debates on ethnic conflict, religion and governance, and state-building by showing how strong states can transform religious identity from a boundary of exclusion into a basis for intergroup cooperation.

Authors

• Naiyu Jiang, Stanford University

• Yinghui Zhou, Columbia University