Mecca between China and India

Abstract

Through the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) and the Nationalist–Communist War (1946–9), several Chinese Islamic pilgrimage delegations set out on their journeys across the Indian Ocean. Mecca was more than a simple endpoint destination. These travels encompassed transits and sojourns in cities in between Nanjing/Shanghai and Mecca, offering the pilgrim-cum-delegates venues of encounters with foreign dignitaries and diaspora populations. This chapter examines the published records and private diaries of members of the Chinese Islamic Goodwill Mission to the Near East (1937–9) who had been aligned with the Republican Nationalist Party, with a focus on their actions and rhetoric in Calcutta, Bombay, Karachi, and Lahore. Claims to anti-imperial Islamic solidarity and routes of the pilgrimage provided accessible channels for the Chinese Muslim delegates to conduct meetings with leaders of both the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress Party, while simultaneously attempting to garner support from Cantonese/Shandong diaspora populations and Turki refugees from the war-stricken Xinjiang Province. The practices and networks of informal diplomacy that consolidated in wartime would outlast the Second Sino-Japanese War itself.