The defining of the modern Chinese nation-state and non-Han minority nationalities’ identity and position, as well as their relations with the larger, integrated China has been a key issue of twentieth-century China, which, in the words of Timothy Cheek, belongs to one of the significant “ideological moments,” i.e., “rejuvenation.” 1 This current book is a result of historical research, fieldwork, and critical reflection on a series of issues concerning the building of modern Chinese nationalistic discourse, practices of modern Chinese anthropology and historiography, academic debates, representation of southern Chinese minority nationalities, and state–minority relations. It examines the process of “discursive formation” and regards this process as multilayered, incoherent, and diffusive. 2 While I acknowledge the modern Chinese state’s rationale of justifying a multinationality Chinese nation, this study also reveals many discontinuities, ruptures, and gaps in the long process of the ideology’s implementation and adaption. I focus on the intellectual and cultural producers of modern Chinese knowledge of nationalities at various and interrelated levels, and analyze how they produced knowledge while trying to reconcile their Euro-American training with Marxist theories and their Chinese identity. In some cases, I demonstrate the tension between the scholars’ non-Han Chinese identity and the Han-dominated mainstream nationalist discourse.
Since late Qing and early Republican Chinese governments recognized only five nationalities: the Han , Manchu (Man), Mongols (Meng), Muslims(Hui), and Tibetans (Zang) while leaving many non-Han southwestern minority peoples unrecognized and unclassified, this current study focuses on how these peoples, mainly Miao , Zhuang , and Buyi , and Yi were investigated, studied, and officially recognized. Indeed, the mountainous southwest part of China provides “relatively complex and diverse environments” for cross-cultural connections. 3 At the same time, southern non-Han minority groups have been asserting their cultural and political differences and rewriting their history more rigorously in recent years. 4 This complexity also contributed to multifaceted scholarly discourses and debates in the twentieth century.
To approach this process of building modern ethnic knowledge, I divide these producers of the modern knowledge of Chinese nation and nationalities into several worlds: political thinkers, parties and modern states; national-level social scientists, mainly anthropologists, ethnologists, and historians; local scholars, including curators and non-Han minority scholars, and grassroots-level community leaders. It is also important to keep in mind that modern ethnic knowledge in China is largely what Edward Said called “political knowledge,” while it overlaps with what Said called “nonpolitical” “pure knowledge.” 5 The struggle between the state and individual scholars and even among the scholars as I delineate in this study is largely out of the tension between pure and political knowledge. I see the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s attempt to build a modern, unified, and multinationality China as a process of rebuilding political authority and political order, which was a recurring theme of modern China after the disintegration of the traditional imperial-Confucian political order. 6 Political authority was and still is a pertinent issue in China. As Samuel Huntington points out, for the developing and modernizing societies in the post-WWII world, “The primary problem is not liberty but the creation of a legitimate public order,” while Americans, due to their own uniquely favorable conditions in state- building, “never had to worry about creating equality,” and they were “peculiarly blind to the problems of creating authority in modernizing countries.” 7 The People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the 1950s was a poor and backward society recovering from a century of civil and foreign wars, and that “Third World historical context” is the proper one for discussing the Chinese experience. 8 National integration, which was the “ultimate goal” of “all postcolonial developing countries,” was also a main task of modern Chinese state. 9 This “integration” was a political process to redefine “the relationships between a majority people and minority peoples.” As Colin Mackerras defines it, a “political, cultural, social and economic structuring of a larger state which sees the minorities maintaining its own cultures and identities, but influenced by the majority and not seeking sessions in a new state with its own independent government.” 10 Of course, when we talk about the modern Chinese state, we are talking about two modern Chinese polities: the non-Communist Republican China (1912–1949) and the Communist People’s Republic of China (1949–); however, the two governments intersect as they both assumed the modern state’s role as a “distributor of privileges and a differentiator among ethnic groups.” 11
Taking a detached, neutral stance, I argue that the thesis of “civilizing project” should be reconsidered in the context of the modern Chinese state (both the Nationalist and Communist governments)’s agenda of rebuilding political authority and order. accomplishment of internal equality, even if rhetorically, and mobilization, as well as constructing cultural cohesiveness among Chinese citizens regardless of ethnic background and with various strategies. Stevan Harrell defines “civilizing project” as “a kind of interaction between peoples, in which one group, the civilizing center, interacts with other groups (the peripheral peoples) in terms of a particular kind of inequality.” 12 In practice, this power dynamics is subtle. The PRC government celebrates the cultural differences and unique traits of the non-Han groups, as long as these cultural assertions do not challenge its political authority. 13 In addition, the “civilizing project” was hardly a one-way process. Peripheral peoples were not merely passive victims who suffer the “effect” of the intrusive and unequal civilizing project. As Dru Gladney puts it, “Studies of China’s ‘civilizing mission’ (Harrell 1995)…appear to be in danger of doing just that: positing a core Chinese civilization at the very same time as they criticize the civilizing mission among the ‘peripheral’ peoples.” 14 Instead, in many cases, marginalized cultural communities, or at least their elites, seek recognition, protection, and favorable treatment from the state, be it Qing China, Republican China, the PRC, or postcolonial India. 15 Non-Han minorities might also choose to be “Sinicized” once they find doing so serves their interests, and thus it is simply a matter of rational “livelihood choice.” 16 In this book, I demonstrate how the writing of minority nationality history was not only a state cultural project and practice of Marxist historiography, but also became the personal choice of Shui nationality local cultural elite in southern Guizhou . The Chinese Communist state was also effective in using “positive incentives” and “preferential treatment” to reward political loyalty, rather than merely exercising control. 17 While the state was asserting its authority over national politics and culture to mobilize and reinvigorate the people and to reintegrate the nation, the newly formed modern Chinese cultural elites, Han and non-Han alike, who had acquired new systems of knowledge such as anthropology and “scientific” historiography through modern academic disciplines, also claimed their intellectual authority. 18
My research will thus be largely about the complex relationship between the state and modern Chinese knowledge elites in collaborating to build authority, as well as their rivalry over the authority to determine the correct approaches to the minority issue. The primary concern of the book is not particularly “equality” between Han and non-Han or between the center and the periphery. Rather, it is about how each historical agent makes his/her own claim and exercises his/her power in each given situation while defending his/her own authority of interpreting or an autonomous sphere of influence. First, inequality cannot account for the rise of nationalism , for it overlooks the structural “competition for valued resources and opportunities” and the “relative distribution of ethnic groups.” 19 Second, every state intrinsically distributes ethnic privileges unequally. 20 The structure of inequality, which I will discuss in more detail, also points to another situation: the relationship between modern China and the West. When we talk about a “civilizing project” or “civilizing mission,” we first think that it is the West that “has always been in the business of teaching the rest of the world values and culture.” 21 Whether there is true “equality” between trained modern social scientists, who are accompanied by research assistants and “informants,” and the investigated “native” or “indigenous” people can also be called into doubt. Another paradox is the state’s efforts to increase political integration of the multiethnic Chinese nation and its appreciation of cultural diversity, in which “integration is the crux.” 22
The knowledge production mechanisms had three main layers in China. First, the politically discursive level that consists of the Communist Party’s ideology and guiding principles concerning the national and nationality question, and particularly the use of the Chinese trope “family” as a metaphor of the modern Chinese nation. This process of nationality construction can be considered as a process of political persuasion, while “processes are frequently recurring causal chains, sequences, and combinations...