Shenzhen’s Muslim community—now estimated at over 150 000—has flourished in lockstep with a city that has morphed, in barely four decades, from a coastal fishing village to a tech-driven metropolis. In the late 1980s, the first known Muslim residents were few enough to be counted on one hand; today their numbers rival, and may even surpass, those of neighbouring Guangzhou, home to one of China’s oldest mosques. This compressed urban history makes Shenzhen an ideal lens through which to examine how religious life, migration and modernity co-evolve.

This doctoral project will theorise two interconnected logics that appear to shape Muslim life in this hyper-secular metropolis. The first is that of instant-locality refers to how believers rapidly assemble prayer spaces, WeChat groups and Muslim entrepreneurial networks to create a sense of place before formal institutions appear. Second is that of strategic visibility describes the shifting balance between low-profile religious practice and selective public display as Muslims navigate evolving state regulation and neighbourhood sensibilities. Guided by the central question how do Muslims carve out religious, social and spatial belonging in a city with no Islamic memory?, the study approaches the topic from four angles: identity performance among migrant believers; the politics of conversion and its challenge to Hui-centred classifications; the transmission and transformation of Muslim values across gender and generations; and the tactics Muslims use to claim space and legitimacy in Shenzhen.

The project will aim to conduct 18 months of multi-sited ethnography, including 30–50 in-depth interviews, participant observation in mosques, Muslim business networks and digital platforms, and triangulation with policy and media texts. By foregrounding the everyday experiences of Chinese Muslim migrants in an emerging urban context, the study contributes to contemporary anthropological debates on Islam and migration. It also engages with Chinese urban history by tracing new religious and spatial practices in post-reform cities, offering new insight into how identity, mobility, and belonging are negotiated in twenty-first-century China.