Fudan-UC Center Young Scholar's Conference on. “Governance in China” University of California, San Diego; May 14-15, 2015 People’s Republic of Virtue: Explaining the Chinese Communist Party’s Fear of God with a Case Study of Hui Muslims in the Public Sphere by Alex Stewart, Ph.D. Department of Anthropology University of California, San Diego Abstract The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sometimes appear to be an anachronistic oligarchy that has traded collectivism for free markets and maintains a fragile grip on power through raw autocratic force thinly veiled in outdated socialist rhetoric. However, examination of the party’s discourse of religion and morality and its relationship with the Hui ethnic minority, reveals a nuanced attempt to preserve and reinvent the traditional public sphere of exclusive and centralized moral representation to act as a counterweight to rival, transnational moral discourses of neoliberalism, religion, and universal human rights. The traditional role of the state to ensure and protect virtue among the people has remained such a salient concept in China that party members continues to justify state policies within this framework despite the absence of any cohesive central ideology. Data from ethnographic research among the Hui Muslim community of Xining, Qinghai Province show how religious communities tacitly challenge the party’s exclusive claim to moral authority by promoting alternate moral systems tied to transnational communities beyond party control. Chinese government actions that seem inscrutable, insecure, and even inhumane to some outsiders can in part be traced to a notion of sovereignty that restricts full participatory citizenship to elite cadres tasked with performing a harmonious and virtuous public sphere. In this discursive system, party members serve as exemplar for and protect the nation from an urban populace corrupted by neoliberalism, a rural population perpetually in need of civilizing, and religious believers susceptible to manipulation by foreigners and charlatans. Introduction Despite the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s history of criticizing and even reinventing Chinese culture, it still maintains its traditional role as guardian and exemplar of a Han-centric and rationalist public virtue in a way that produces tension with minority ethnic groups that embrace independent and cohesive moral systems like Islam. Many internal ethnic tensions, especially separatist movements such as those in Tibet and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, clearly have ethnic, economic, and linguistic components, but this article will attempt to isolate the ideological challenge minority religions pose by focusing on the Hui people, whose descent from Muslim migrants has helped to define them as an ethnic group, but who only differ from Han Chinese in customs related to Islam. Party propaganda portrays Chinese subjects in