Few in the People's Republic of China (PRC) question the legitimacy of identifying the Chinese-speaking Muslims as the Huizu ethnic minority. This status has been enshrined in the policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since it started to formulate its nationality discourse in the 1930s. The officially produced scholarship on Huizu history, culture, sociology and so on hardly ever omits the Huizu paradigm, and scholars in China discuss the Sino-Muslims outside it only with difficulty. The minzu definitions produced in the PRC have proved to be so alluring that even foreign scholars have employed them as handy tools to describe the ethno-cultural landscape of the country, though most of them have noted their Procrustean rigidity. The ethnic status of the Huizu is particularly problematic, however, even from the orthodox Marxist–Leninist point of view, as they do not meet the so-called Stalinist criteria of defining a nationality (minzu).

Yet the CCP was not the first political force in Chinese history to find the Muslim question hard to approach. The omnipresence of Muslims in the Chinese culture area has created difficulties of perception and policy for most regimes since the Ming dynasty. Before the advent of the PRC's minzu paradigm many scholars, both Chinese and foreign, found the Sinophone Muslims perplexing and ambiguous. Chinese Muslims have been a vexing cognitive problem especially for Euro-Americans, since they tested the boundaries of understanding of both China and Islam, often treated in their ‘pure’ forms in the Orientalist tradition. The central question was whether the Muslims inhabiting the Chinese culture area were a foreign element, both culturally and racially; a culturally distinct yet racially local population; or a special form of ethno-religious community, formed through the assimilation of outside ethnic elements into Chinese people. Many modern foreign observers have tended to favour the last option: seeing the Sino-Muslims as a somewhat transitional phase between being fully non-Chinese and fully Chinese, exhibiting traits of both local genes and foreign admixtures. Writing in 1936, the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin judged the Chinese-speaking Muslims, called Dungans in Xinjiang, to be ‘Chinese who have embraced Islam and are probably also separated from the Chinese by certain racial differences’.