Talk:Dungan
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Their ancestors fled there NOT from persecution but for famine in China in the 19th century Back then, Russian czar gave them land to encourage them to stay. Your definition can not explain why only few Hui people are outside of China. comment by User:129.120.61.116 moved from main article
[edit] Dungan origin
User:Daduzi, I reverted your change of linking 'Chinese' to Han Chinese; now it's back to linking to Chinese people. Dungan people are mostly of Hui origin rather than Han (though it's likely there are some recent Han Muslim converts among them, and maybe even Sinicized non-Han Muslim minorities). Better just to call them as "Chinese" (something like zhonghua minzu) unless we can find specific genetic data. (The Dungan themselves generally describe themselves as being exclusively descended from Hui.) Pls yell to me if you disagree. cab 14:43, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
- The reason I changed it to Han Chinese is because the Hui minority is ethnically Han but are counted as a separate minority on the basis of religion. This is what distinguishes them from other muslim minorities like the Uighurs. I'll agree that my initial wording was bad, though, and should have been more specific. Perhaps change to "Dungan (Chinese: 東干族; pinyin: dōng gān zú; Дунгане) is a term used in territories of the former Soviet Union to refer to a Muslim people of Han Chinese ethnicity."? --Daduzi talk 15:49, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
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- OK, I've gone ahead and changed it. If you don't like it feel free to change it to something else, but try to avoid using Chinese people, as that is a disambiguation page (see WP:DPL). Thanks. --Daduzi talk 17:36, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
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- Hui also have some genetic differences from Han, especially in the paternal line. E.g. [1],[2]. Also a paper on Dungan genetics here at [3]. (Not easy to find because e.g. searching for dungan genetics gets you lots of papers by Irish guys named Dr. Dungan). Sorry not to get back sooner. Maybe change it to Hui? cab 02:01, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
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- Hui share one "cultural" similarity to Han that they do not share with the Turkic and other Muslim groups in XJ: they appear to rely on the lunar calendar. This is by inference from the patterns of age-heaping in the censuses of China, in which Hui, like Han, have a "preference" for birth years that are favorable animal years, while Uighurs and Kazakhs show no such preference. I can provide a published source from a conference on the 1990 Chinese census if any0ne is interested, but it's fairly obscure.--Mack2 16:43, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Redundancy and Confusion between Dungan and Hui: Recommend Consolidation
I am copying this from "my talk" FYI.--Mack2 16:19, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
Dungan
Hey Mack2. Thanks for your edit on Dungan. However, I reverted it, since both those pages were already linked from elsewhere in the article. The See Also section is usually for articles which may be somewhat related to the topic of the article and/or interesting to the reader for further exploration, but didn't need to be linked from within the body of the article itself. Also. Links to versions of the same article in another language appear in the left sidebar when you're viewing the page; they're usually grouped together near the bottom when you're editing it. Cheers. cab 15:53, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
OK, but to be honest the English-language articles are much more confusing than they ought to be, and that's why I deliberately provided the seemingly redundant cross-links. There are now separate articles on Hui and Dungan. But these these are just two names for the same ethnic group. I think these articles ought to be consolidated. It is misleading to say that Dungans are the name used in the (former) Soviet Union to describe a group of Chinese Muslims, for example, since the name "Dungan" is also used by Uighur and other Turkic peoples in both Xinjiang and in Kyrgyzstan and in Russia to refer to the "Hui." On a visit to Xinjiang, I heard a Uighur describe the people as "Dungan," for example.
I'm not skilled enough to do a consolidation, but I feel there needs to be a consolidation both in substance and the cross-links to avoid the wrong implication. Perhaps you can take it on? Thanks.--Mack2 16:14, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
Added: It seems to me that one article on Dungans (Hui), with redirection as needed, would suffice. And then the language, religion, culture can be described basically once, with (if needed) separate sections on Hui (Dungans) in China and Dungans (Hui) in the former Soviet republics.--Mack2 16:37, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
- I have no stong feelings either way on this particular issue as things stand, but I do want to stress that any consolidated article should be named Hui, as that is by some margin the more common English name for the Dungan/Hui. --Daduzi talk 22:55, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
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- I agree with you for at least two reasons. First, Hui is apparently the name that the people give to themselves, and it's consistent with the English-language transiteration of their name. Second, the Hui article is much more developed right now than the Dungan article (the Dungan article in the .RU site is also very preliminary). As I mentioned above, however, I am not the one to do the consolidating, because I don't know my way around enough yet. Perhaps we should propose the consolidation to the principal authors of the Hui article? I'm not sure who that would be. Any ideas how to proceed? I think it would be wise first to wait for more contributors to respond to this idea before it moves too far.--Mack2 00:21, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
I'd oppose consolidation. There's something of a dilemma here. Basically, there's a group of of people in the former Soviet Union speaking a language that's definitely not Chinese, (though it's as related as Urdu is to Hindi), and calling themselves "Hui". Separately, there's a group of people in China speaking a language that definitely *is* Chinese, and calling themselves "Hui". Turks refer to both groups as "Dungan" and their language as "Dungan language". But English and Chinese speakers both make a distinction between "Dungan" speaking in "Dungan language" and "Hui" speaking in Chinese. Also, if a bunch of Hui in Beijing picked up tomorrow and moved to Kazakhstan, Chinese people would still call them Hui, not Dungan. If you referred to them as Dungan, both English and Chinese speakers would get the (incorrect) impression that they were native speakers of Dungan language who grew up there. cab 03:04, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
- I'm trying to think of some parallels. I'm not sure the defining characteristic is the language they are speaking (as opposed to ethnic origins and self-identification or consciousness), and for that matter I'm not sure the Hui in Kyrgyzstan and the Hui in Xinjiang (as one location) are speaking a different language. My hunch is they're speaking slight variants of one language, with variation due to the physical-geographic separation over many generations, not to mention their being influenced by the ethno-linguistic contexts within which they have lived (but we're not talking about different languages or even different dialects -- just the introduction of loan words from languages of regions in which they reside). But what do I know for sure? I think I know that there are no schools teaching "Hui" in either China or anywhere else -- at least I'm pretty sure of this. There weren't any in Xinjiang (XJ) last time I was there 10 years ago, when they were teaching in Mandarin, Uighur, and Kazakh but not Tajik or Hui. So Hui kids must be learning Mandarin and probably only Mandarin as a literary language. There are about 9 million Hui in China, and about 10% of those live in XJ; and there are larger non-Han groups that don't have any schools in their own language, perhaps because they lost it (e.g., Zhuang).
- But I would bet that Hui in XJ and Hui in Kyrgyzstan (where some 50K Hui reside) have common relatives and interests but things would go back some generations. And I would bet that all the Hui in former Soviet Central Asia and Russia came from China. My recollection is that the Hui were always tabulated with the "foreign" nationalities in the Soviet censuses, and tabulated as Dungane and not as Kitaitsy (Chinese). I did just check the Russian 2002 census online (http://www.perepis2002.ru/index.html?id=17), which shows 801 Dungans and 34,577 Chinese (and the Dungans are about 52% urban, while the Chinese are 96% urban). So nobody is confusing these two nationalities in Russia, either. Further, I would guess that since the end of the USSR, there has been increased contact between Hui in China and the former Soviet Union. Certainly there are itinerant traders who are moving with their goods from one bazaar to another in the region, e.g., I've seen Kyrgyz moving with huge bundles of goods on a 24-hr trip between Alma-Aty and Kashgar, all to trade.
- But I would still guess a Hui is a Dungan and a Dungan is a Hui, and that unless you wrote an article with no info about origins and customs, you would find the need write the same thing about the origins of the Hui-Dungans in China and Hui-Dungans in former Soviet Central Asia; but of course their history and experiences are different -- in the same way that, say Kurds in Iraq have a different experience from Kurds in Iran, Azerbaijan, and Turkey but they are still Kurds and they have no homeland.
- But even if you keep these articles separate, and I'm not decided either til more evidence is in, my hunch is that you would want to do a lot more to identify the "origins" of Hui-Dungans in Soviet Central Asia and Russia, so that you'd be able to talk about how their experiences diverged from a more or less common background. For example, there's a lot of "prehistory" about the Hui in this article, the accuracy of which I can't vouch for: http://www.china.org.cn/e-groups/shaoshu/shao-2-hui.htm
- One thing I can see at this stage is that the Dungan article in English and the Dungan article in Russian are basically stubs. Perhaps if someone were to expand those articles substantially with more information about culture, language, history, economics, etc., then the rumpiness of the article on the Hui in the former Soviet Union would be less apparent.--Mack2 03:37, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
ADDED: Here's what the Russian article says. I'll give a quick and dirty translation. Note that they don't differentiate between the Hui in China and the Hui in Central Asia except in their writing systems.
Дунгане — народ, проживающий в Китае, Киргизии, южном Казахстане, Узбекистане. Самоназвание хуэй. Дунгане говорят на диалекте китайского языка. Живущие в странах СНГ используют письменность на основе кириллицы. Исповедуют ислам ханафитского толка, являются потомками мусульман, бежавших из Китая в конце 18 века. (Dungans -- a people living in China, Kirgizia, south Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan. They call themselves Hue. Dungans speak in a dialect of the Chinese language. Those who live in the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (SNG) use a writing system based on the Cyrillic alphabet. They are believers in Islam of the Hanafi school, and are Muslims by descent, having fled China at the end of the 19th Century.)
Дунгане занимаются земледелием, торговлей на рынках. Во всех крупных городах региона популярны кафе дунганской кухни. (Dungans work in agriculture and trading in the bazaars (markets). In all large cities in the region cafes with Dungan cooking are popular.) В киргизском городе Каракол сохранилась деревянная дунганская мечеть начала XX века. (In the Kyrgyz city of Karakol, an ancient Dungan mosque is preserved from the beginning of the 20th century.) В России согласно переписи 2002 года проживает 800 дунган. (According to the 2002 census, 800 Dungans live in Russia.)
