Philosophy 602 (Conference Room)
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
Spring 2026 Meeting 2
Joanna Lee, Joanna Lee-Brown, East Asian Languages and Cultures “The Figure of the Chinese Muslim between China and Egypt State Media, 1955-1966”
Abstract: The Bandung era saw the emergence of a rich relationship between China and Egypt, two prominent socialist states committed to building Third World solidarity and global anti-imperialism. Yet, this relationship was complicated by an impending Sino-Soviet split, the tensions between internationalism, pan-Arabism, and nationalism, as well as the relationship between Islam, socialism, and Communism. This paper traces the discursive mobility of the Chinese Muslim as a figure across the representational economy of China’s and Egypt’s state-supported media and its role in negotiating the contradiction between religion and revolution in the context of Third World solidarities. The Chinese Muslim figure is fashioned into a signifier of religious freedom and progressiveness that affirmed the secularism and developmentalist objectives of both nation-states, solidifying their position in the teleological progress towards modernity. However, the Chinese Muslim eventually recedes from the discourse of anti-imperialist Third Worldism, which in its statist formulations moved away from its accommodation of Muslim kinship as an idiom for solidarity. By showing how the Chinese Muslim figure was circulated to articulate different political meanings, this paper investigates how Islam in China becomes an idiom for competing universals, questioning the stability of the “Third World” as a conceptual category.
