This project examines Chinese secularism and the minzu (ethnicity/nationality) framework. In tracing the genealogy of Chinese secularism through three figures, Kang Youwei, Chen Duxiu, and Mao Zedong, I argued that it is deeply intertwined with generations of indigenous efforts for national independence, in which religion was reified as a state component and consequently produced as a new regime of state surveillance. Chinese secularism aims to make modern, national subjects as well as regulate religious subjects. I also argued that the minzu framework is a modality of secularism that is meant to manage difference, which produces the only minzu majority, the Han as normalized Chinese subjects described in civilizational terms in contrast to all other minzu minorities. In this way, I position the Hui group in Zhengzhou in this context of Chinese secularism and minzu framework and conducted online interviews with seven Hui interlocutors to examine the effects of these state-directed projects. In the conversations with seven Hui individuals, I argued that the Hui’s internal heterogeneity shows the limitation of and the homogenizing powers of the minzu framework, which makes the Huis’ difference salient from the Han and produces the Hui’s marginalization as an effect. In addition, in my interlocutors’ discourses, religion, especially Islam, is characterized as backward, peripheral, and addictive, which have led many young, urban Huis to detach themselves from their supposed religious and ethnic identity and to eliminate their differences from the Han.