Chinese Minorities at home and abroad

Michael Dillon

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351846035
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The classification of ethnic identities ( minzu ) remains controversial in China. Categories established in the 1950s are still used by the state to administer minority areas, despite the existence of a complicated web of subjective identities which potentially undermines efforts to use these categories effectively.

This book offers a new, and sometimes unusual, perspective on ethnic relations in China, and on the interactions between China and other cultures. Two major themes run through the book: the classification of ethnic minorities in China by the state, and the implications of this practice; and the way in which China and the Chinese are seen by outsiders as well as insiders. The contributors, whose research is all based on fieldwork with the relevant communities, are from a wide range of backgrounds and are currently based in China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, and Germany. The subjects of their research are the politics of minority classification in the People's Republic of China; questions of identity in Xinjiang; Kazakhstani perceptions of China and the Chinese; Chinese Muslims in Malaysia; and the growing Chinese diaspora in Africa. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Representation of ethnic minorities in socialist China

Ke Fan

Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China

ABSTRACT
This study examines the fact of representation of ethnicity in the People’s Republic of China. The present ethnic configuration, centred on a re-categorization of the population, came to be accepted by ordinary people in Chinese society as the result of the multiple projects in association with state-making and nation-building. This paper delineates how the projects in question came about, especially the one focused on the investigation of ethnic minority social history. It examines the way in which narrating and representing ethnic minorities officially took place and how the representation of ethnic minorities functions in the construction of the Chinese nation. It argues that representation for ethnicities focused on how to locate each of them at a certain stage of social development, conceptualizing the Chinese nation in a framework of brotherhood in order to include those excluded by the mainstream throughout history.

Introduction

This paper examines the representation of ethnicity in the People’s Republic of China (hereinafter PRC). How has this representation come about, in what ways has the representation supplied the engineering of the search for national solidarity in which the party-state has engaged ever since, and how and why have some forms of this representation changed in recent decades? Before going further, the term representation should be defined. Representation in this article is not what is usually thought of, that is as an institutionally based categorization of the population in contemporary China. Instead, it refers to one that is produced to provide service to politics out of this categorization. It is all about how peoples of ethnic minorities are culturally or socially presented or represented through manipulation by the party-state. Representation, in this sense is more likely to be as Stuart Hall defined it. According to Hall, representation could be all forms of languages. According to Hall, ‘languages work through representation’, that is ‘not because they are all written or spoken (they are not), but because they are all use some element to stand for or represent what we want to say, to express or to communicate a thought, concept, idea or feeling’(2003, 4). For Hall, there are all kinds of language, such as spoken, written, music, and even fashion. However, unlike Hall, in this study, representation is not about what people in question want to say but what the party-state attempts to say as spokesperson for the people who are represented.

In a socialist state, a body of systematic knowledge about ethnic minorities is produced under the state’s guidance. All things regarding ethnic minorities are strictly written, composed, made, and produced in the same framework or by the same elements, eventually expressing what the state wants to say. This is the reason this article treats it as representation and its production as top-down: the state initiated this process. In recent decades, ethnic minority people have more often than not actively produced representations for themselves, in which cultural elements are particularly addressed. Changes in this way could be considered to be bottom-up. Nonetheless, this is not what concerns this article.

Scholars have carried out significant research on the question of how ethnic minorities are culturally represented in China. It has been argued that, in addition to backwardness in social and economic developments, they are frequently romantically portrayed as talented in dancing and singing (nengge shanwu); some of them are also depicted as having some degree of free sexual life before or even after marriage (Harrell 1995; Gladney 1994; Tapp 2002; Yu 2000). They were more often than not feminized in the cultural representations that mainstream society has produced even long before the initial ethnic classification (Gladney 1994; Tapp 2002; Yu 2000).

The formation of imagination as such should be attributed to a long time discourse that has been diffused through the modern education system, media, films, and other cultural productions. This discourse has served the state so has to be congruent with the state’s political agenda. As a consequence, the state eventually represents ethnic minorities’ heritage, ‘socializes them into a national identity, structures their education opportunities and links their schooling to economic development’ (Postiglione 1999; Zhao and Postiglione 2010). Accordingly, ethnic representation from 1949 onward has varied in response to the changing content of national identity anxiety (Chen 2008). Therefore, what the observer obtains from the representation in question is less about ethnic minorities per se and more about ‘the presence of certain state ideological messages’ (Yu 2000).

There seems no objection to the view that representation about ethnic minorities after the establishment of the People’s Republic has been constructed in a direction that the state determines. This does not deny the fact that the representation in question has varied with changing circumstances. Accordingly, whether it is in museums (Fiskesjö 2015; Varutti 2011; Vickers 2007), theme parks (Anagnost 1997; Gladney 1994; Tapp 2002), the media, schools (Anagnost 1997; Postiglione 1999; Zhao and Postiglione 2010), or in other cultural productions (Anagnost 1997; Chen 2008; Harrell 1995; Yu 2000), what has been presented is consistent with what the state has needed at certain period of time.

There have been many descriptions of ethnic minorities throughout Chinese history. These descriptions have produced some stereotypes about ethnic minorities, which, in turn, have also appeared in the representation in question. But descriptions in the past are different from the representations that we see today for at least three reasons: First, even though the state today uses the same designations for a number of the ethnic minorities, these past references to various ethnic groups were not rationally and systematically determined as ‘bound seriality’ (Anderson 1998, 29; also see Chatterjee 2004, 5–6). In recent years, however, some of messages from the remote past have been ‘rediscovered’ for commercial reasons (see Fan 2015, 23–31; Fiskesjö 2015). Second, the diffusion of these classifiers before the formation of the PRC was very limited. Third, the names of the ethnic groups in the past were not systematically produced under state supervision as they were in modern times.

Almost all studies mentioned above have focused on how ethnic minorities are presented in terms of cultural matters. However, they have barely examined the process of how cultural representation of ethnic minorities as a political task took shape in the 1950s. This study attempts to fill that gap.

Comparing ethnic representations produced before and after the establishment of PRC reveals how the state demarcated boundaries for ethnic minorities. My point is that the present ethnic configuration centreing on a re-categorization of the population came to be accepted by ordinary people as a result of a long process in which multiple projects in association with state-making and nation-building, respectively, took place. Having taken an approach of historical anthropology, as a qualitative study this analysis first describes how the projects in question came about, especially the investigation of ethnic minority social history. Next, it examines ways in which narrating and representing ethnic minorities officially took place and how the representation in question functions in the construction of the Chinese nation (zhonghua minzu).

The projects and the ‘scientific knowledge’ production about ethnic minorities

Ethnic identification was the most important work the Chinese party-state engaged in during the decades since 1953. From the very beginning, it was a component part of state-making engineering that aimed to establish People’s Congress system (Fan 2012). This campaign, which was officially announced as complete in 1987, resulted in the identification of 55 minority nationalities (shaoshu minzu). This classification project fitted the state’s modernity campaign well. Thus, the party-state attempted to fully control the areas where ethnic minorities had lived throughout history and where there were frontiers with other states. In addition, the project was an activity showing that the Chinese Communist Party (hereinafter the CCP) had kept its promises made to ethnic minorities when these minorities aided the revolutionary struggle. Only after establishing how many ethnic minorities lived in China could the party-state carry out its preferential policy toward national minorities and pursue its policy of allowing ethnic representation in the institutions of power (see Fan 2012), for instance, every separate minority nationality would have rights of having their representatives sit in People’s Representative Congresses and of having positions in governmental apparatuses as well. More importantly, a separate minority nationality could establish its autonomous ethnic regions, ranking from county to provincial levels, if their population size was more than 22 per cent of a total population of the region. Having helped to establish political representation for ethnic minority, this project led to the other project coming about. It, in turn, initiated the production of representation of ethnic minorities that is the focus of this article.

The investigation into the social history of minority nationalities was trigged in 1956. It aimed to collect data among ethnic minorities in order to search for ways to legitimize the categorization of ethnic minorities, which was still ongoing under the ethnic identification project. The new project also helped identify minority nationalities since the data allowed policy makers to incorporate some ethnic groups into separate minority nationalities according to their historical connections and cultural similarities (see Huang and Shi 2005, 125). The other important purpose of this social history project was to ‘save (qiangjiu) social, historical, and cultural heritages’ (Chen 1999; Ma 1999).

This investigation collected a wealth of materials from ethnic minorities nationwide. From 1956 to 1958, some twenty minority nationalities, including Mongols, Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Zhuang, among many others, were investigated. Starting from 1958, the investigation teams were increased from eight to sixteen. They undertook investigations in sixteen provinces and ethnic autonomous districts. As a result more than 314 items regarding the history and social conditions of different ethnic minorities were produced; more than 100 items of archives and other documents collected; and, more than 10 documentary films made. Drawing on these materials, fifty-seven items of different kinds, ranging from concise histories to historiographies of most separate minority nationalities, were published. Accordingly, the state announced to the public, after ‘completion’ of the social history project in late 1964, that, ‘for the first time, the government had got [sic] to know the basic situations of minority nationalities in terms of their origins, economic and sociopolitical structures, ideologies, customs and habits, and religious beliefs and practices’ (Huang and Shi 2005, 162). Not only did this project serve the project of ethnic identification in terms of regrouping ethnic minorities but it also resulted in a body of systemic knowledge regarding what ethnic minorities produced. The social history project, therefore, also functioned as a means of categorizing the population.

The social history investigation and its works disembedded the social relations of ethnic minorities from their local context; the spatial and temporal existence of ethnic minorities has been greatly reorganized (to paraphrase the discussion of modernity by Giddens (1990, 21)). Even though the cultural representations that powered this reorganization essentially served a Real-Politik, it did nevertheless impel people to ponder their own subjectivity and group memberships. Therefore, the production of rational knowledge (Giddens 1990), or the ‘scientification’ of knowledge (Elias 1998, 217–245) was not only a task for state officials and scholars but also a process joined in by the peoples subjected to the state’s social policy in their cultural inventions and performances.

What concerns this study is to what extent or in what ways has the state, through those campaigns and projects, provided a blueprint that has brought about the production of ethnic representation. Drawing upon certain kinds of the evolutionary imagination, this blueprint was schematized. The investigation in question thus brought a completely different narrative about the ethnic minorities of China. This narrative was, however, according to the leadership of the party-state, also a contribution to so-called ‘scientific’ knowledge about human beings. I am not questioning the reliability of the facts this narrative might have provided but questioning how those facts were generalized.

Representing national minorities

The year 1959 was important in the history of the PRC. With the ‘Great Leap Forward’ (dayuejin) in the sector of economic construction, the central government led the country into the completion of the system of a centrally planned economy. As long as the market was no longer a central concern in economic operation, the government needed only to employ political propaganda and slogans to create zeal for advancing the economy. One could only understand this operation in terms of governmentality, that is, the goal of making the governed believe their will could be realized under the governance, paraphrasing from Foucault (2000, 201–222). It is therefore not difficult to understand why China should have had a slogan such as ‘Catch up economically with Britain in fifteen years’ in its economic construction.

This combination of economic construction and ideological movement was implemented by the state to enhance its legitimacy during an era when its authority was not yet really established. What happened in 1959 was an example of action the state undertook in order to fix its authority and legitimacy in the heart of its citizens. The year of 1959 symbolizes that the new state had completed its first ten-year term, which was considered long enough to assess its achievements. The Chinese take these ten-year anniversaries quite seriously. Every decade the Chinese call for an especially large celebration (daqing) for the National Days. The decade is thus significant in Chinese politics, especially in terms of sea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Majorities and minorities in China: an introduction
• 1. Representation of ethnic minorities in socialist China
• 2. More Islamic, no less Chinese: explorations into overseas Chinese Muslim identities in Malaysia
• 3. Kazakh perspective on China, the Chinese, and Chinese migration
• 4. The discourse of racialization of labour and Chinese enterprises in Africa
• 5. Socioeconomic attainment, cultural tastes, and ethnic identity: class subjectivities among Uyghurs in Ürümchi
• 6. Blurring boundaries and negotiating subjectivities – the Uyghurized Han of southern Xinjiang, China
• Index