The Traveling Minzu

Based on Uyghur business migrants' everyday experiences, this book investigates how individuals embody and deploy minzu, one of the fundamental concepts in Chinese political and socio-economic discourses after 1949 in China and how this concept travels to Australia with the migrants. By exploring Uyghurs at the Tarim restaurant in èUrèumchi, Uyghur migrants in other major cities in China, and finally the immigrants in multicultural Australia, the author explains how they perceive the concept of minzu and how such concept and an identity has been reformed and reshaped in specific social and economic contexts. She argues that these Uyghur migrants' minzu concept has closely intertwined with citizenship, which not only entails a set of legally defined rights and obligations but also the sense of equality and respect. The book provides a new way of reflecting on who are the Chinese" and what form the "Chineseness" in a transnational context. Following the minzu concept in China and Australia, this book shows how cultural intimacy and critical multiculturalism can provide better socio-cultural space for various Muslim migrant communities. This book will be appealing to social and cultural anthropologists and university students who are interested in China and Inner Asia, ethnicity and transnational migration between China and the South Pacific"--