She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan: State Violence and Resistance, 1949–2024, and reported the following:
Page 99 sets the stage by comparing the oral history testimonies of a Muslim villager with the official accounts of the conflicts that developed between the Shadian Muslim militia and the Maoist revolutionary People’s Militia. Unlike the narratives of the Maoist work teams that blame the Muslim villagers as a “chaos-making mob,” the oral testimony indicates that the Muslim villagers established their own militia because they felt threatened by the aggression of the weaponized Maoist revolutionary militia, from whom the villagers attempted to seize guns. The antagonism between the two groups intensified, and members of both sides engaged in armed conflict. The page concludes by stressing that the official narratives “offer little information about how a series of conflicts between the Shadian Muslim militia and the People’s Militia unfolded, leading to the Party Center’s direct intervention and the eventual negotiations between Muslim representatives and top CCP leaders in Beijing.”Learn more about Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan at the Cornell University Press website.
The Page 99 Test works surprisingly well because it introduces a crucial point that the book makes to readers. That is, besides official documents, Muslim villagers’ written materials and oral testimonies are vital sources that allow us to more comprehensively understand the religious motives and agency of individuals who resisted Maoist work teams and the PLA in the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, the voices of the Muslim villagers are integral to the book as a whole.
The page begins with the term “religious traitor[s],” who are nowhere to be mentioned in the official documents. Nonetheless, the Muslim villagers’ oral testimonies revealed that these “religious traitors”, identified as local CCP Muslim leaders, cooperated with Maoist work teams to ban Islamic practice, close mosques, and blaspheme Islam. In other words, the Maoist work teams cultivated a patron-client relationship between Maoist revolutionaries and local CCP Muslim cadres, through which the secular state power was able to infiltrate into the religious communities, further escalating the tensions between the atheist revolutionary state, Muslim collaborators, and the ordinary Muslim villagers. Without oral history interviews, such important local dynamics would have been neglected as we interpret how conflict between the Muslim villagers and the party-state originated, developed, and escalated to the point of antagonism.
As the first study investigating how and why conflicts between the Chinese Communist Party authorities and southern Yunnan Muslims, beginning in the early 1950s, culminated in the 1975 massacre, this book suggests a new methodological approach to understanding the development of conflicts between state power and religious communities in borderland regions by emphasizing the importance of connecting elite politics and statecraft to local dynamics and experiences.
--Marshal Zeringue
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