Guest People

Hakka Identity in China and Abroad

Nicole Constable, Nicole Constable

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780295805450
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295805450

The essays in this volume analyze and compare what it means to be Hakka in a variety of sociocultural, political, geographical, and historical contexts including Malaysia, Hong Kong, Calcutta, Taiwan, and contemporary China.

1/ The Hakka or “Guest People”

Dialect as a Sociocultural Variable in Southeast China

MYRON L. COHEN

This essay is concerned with developing the proposition that the linguistic diversity of Southeast China was a variable influencing the social organization of the region. That differences in language were used to differentiate social groupings will be demonstrated through a study of the interaction of Hakka-speakers in Guangdong and adjoining areas of Guangxi with speakers of Cantonese.

An anthropologist may point to several features of Southeast China which marked off that region from the remaining territory occupied by the Han Chinese. In so doing, he may choose to maintain a synchronic perspective, but yet insist upon a flexible baseline so as to enable a sufficient documentation of any points developed. This approach has been adopted by the one work attempting an anthropological analysis of Southeast China as a whole. Maurice Freedman’s Lineage Organization in Southeastern China is based upon material some of which is “avowedly sociological,” but of which “a great part . . . derives from a very heterogeneous collection of books and articles,” involving “jumps in space and time” (1958:vi). Drawing upon nineteenth-century and pre-Communist twentieth-century data, Freedman presents a model for the social organization of Guangdong and Fujian. The present essay takes Freedman’s monograph as a starting point, and seeks to add another dimension to the image of southeastern Chinese society which has already been presented.

Freedman (1958:2–9) was interested in establishing for Southeast China the significance of the localized and stratified patrilineage in the ordering of interpersonal relations and the constituting of social groupings. The localized lineage certainly was one of the elements of the Han Chinese sociocultural repertory that saw a great development in the Southeast, and a manifestation of this was the common occurrence of villages inhabited by members of one lineage only.

In regards to regional differentiation, Southeast China possesses yet another distinctive feature. This is the very great number of mutually unintelligible tongues to be found in the area. Guanhua (Mandarin), says R. A. D. Forrest:

has largely replaced the original local dialects all over China north of the Yangtze River. But the provinces of the South and Southeast, from Kiangsu [Jiangsu] to Kwangtung [Guangdong], have maintained intact their local forms of Chinese, sometimes called the “dialects” par excellence. (1948:10)

Apart from the Wu dialects, spoken in the vicinity of the mouth of the Yangtze, Forrest distinguishes “three main groups of dialects: Cantonese, Hakka, and the Fukien [Fujian] dialects” (1951:673). Hakka and Cantonese are primarily confined to Guangdong, although there are extensions of both into Guangxi. Of the Fujianese group, the Shantou (Swatow) and Chaozhou dialects are also spoken in Guangdong, in the extreme North (ibid.:673–74).

We may thus note the interesting fact that Fujian and Guangdong, the very two provinces where “the coincidence of agnatic and local community . . . appears to have been most pronounced” (Freedman 1958:1), was also a region displaying considerable linguistic heterogeneity. But the presence of several dialects in an area of considerable size in itself does not indicate that interaction between different linguistic populations was significant in terms of group formation and constitution, i.e., in terms of social organization. Additional bits of information, however, bring out the point that the linguistic diversity of Fujian and Guangdong was carried down to the local level, and that many of the inhabitants of the two provinces may have found themselves frequently dealing with people speaking dialects other than their own. Forrest finds that the Fujian “dialects,” though “sharply defined against the two great dialects of Kwangtung [Guangdong],” nevertheless do “differ between themselves.” In addition to the Xiamen (Amoy), Shantou, Chaozhou, Jianyang, and Jianning dialects of the Fujianese group, there are others, including the dialect of Fuzhou City, which is ‘said not to be understood further than some forty miles from Fuchow [Fuzhou] itself” (Forrest 1951:675–76). And when Forrest tells us that in Guangdong “there is no clear boundary between Cantonese and Hakka, as the two peoples tend to occupy separate villages in the same areas” (1951:674), a linguistic fact takes on sociological significance.

The scanty Western-language material relevant to a study of the interaction between the different linguistic populations of Southeast China has, for a variety of historical reasons, almost exclusively dealt with the settlement of the Hakka among the Cantonese, and the subsequent conflicts that developed between the speakers of these two dialects. Indeed, it was the proportions which these conflicts reached during the mid-nineteenth century that initially stimulated Westerners to note and publish facts on the Hakka and Cantonese, their differences, and their disputes. Undoubtedly, a careful examination of Chinese-language material will yield much data on the significance of linguistic differences in the social configuration of Fujian, and in those parts of northern Guangdong where the interaction was among speakers of different Fujianese dialects or between them and Hakka and Cantonese. But the utilization of Chinese sources dealing with local conditions in all of Guangdong and Fujian would require a research effort beyond that demanded in an essay of this sort. The Western material relating to Hakka-Cantonese interaction has within it information sufficient to suggest the major outlines of a more restricted study. I have therefore utilized data drawn from Chinese sources only to amplify points which otherwise would be inadequately covered, and to provide a historical introduction. While this essay is thus a case study of the interaction between two linguistic populations only, it should be noted that Hakkaspeakers were intermixed with Cantonese over wide areas of Guangdong (as well as adjacent parts of Guangxi). A significant part of Southeast China is thereby involved. The full areal extent of Hakka-Cantonese interpenetration will emerge in the following section.

It would be best to conclude these introductory statements with a brief summary of those parts of Freedman’s work that relate to the present essay.

Freedman (1958) considers that southeastern Chinese society in the main was given its configuration by the interplay of two modes of organizing relationships. Individuals would be members of landed and stratified patrilineages where there would be access to corporate resources, and where the lineage would operate as a unit for either the defense or the expansion of its corporate holdings and perhaps also the private holdings of lineage members. Given the high degree of localization and nucleation, often resulting in the lineage being congruent with the village, political and economic differentiation would take place within the context of organized communities of agnates, and the advantages offered by membership in a corporate group would be unequally distributed. This indeed was a reflection of the fact that the kin-based lineage was immersed in a larger society, one with strong socioeconomic class differentiation.

All of China was characterized by a gentry-peasantry dichotomy, in which the possession of wealth, mainly or ultimately in the form of land, would enable one to prepare himself or his children for eligibility in the state bureaucracy. And between those eligible for participation and the local representatives of state power there was a mutual bond involving membership in the same socioeconomic class. This bond was manifested in the monopoly which the gentry of any region would possess over access to the local representatives of the state. In regard to the southeastern Chinese lineage, class differentiation thus had a functional value, for it meant that there would be individuals who could represent the corporation in dealings with the state. But the gentry also represented the state in dealing with the lineage, and this, plus the position of the gentry as landlords and as manipulators of corporate wealth, led to a continuing tension between the gentry and the peasantry. Antistate activity took the form of participation in secret societies, the membership of which crossed lineage lines. This indicated both the inability of the lineage to fully defend its corporate interests against the state and the limitations of kinship bonds in an economically differentiated society.

It can be seen from the above that the model Freedman presents for Southeast China involves a balancing of the principle of group affiliation through agnatic kinship against that of group affiliation through participation in statewide class alignments. In this essay I will strive to validate the assertion that associated with the linguistic heterogeneity of Southeast China was the fact that dialect was a third structural variable, a third means of group affiliation.

I

Evidence relating to Hakka-Cantonese conflicts should be viewed in conjunction with the historical record of the Hakka migration to Southeast China from the North and with certain historical developments which were concurrent with it. In this way it will be seen that there were many specific factors involved in the process by which antagonistic linguistic populations emerged in Guangdong and Guangxi.

The most comprehensive discussion of the sequence of Hakka migration is contained in the works of Luo Xianglin (1933; 1950). Both Luo and other writers on the subject (Campbell 1912; Eitel 1873–74; Hsieh 1929; Piton 1873–74) rely heavily upon data drawn from the lineage genealogies of groups currently recognizable as Hakka-speakers. The use of such data presents two problems of interpretation: (1) whether such sources are uniformly reliable for the entire period with which they deal; and (2) at what point do these sources relate to the Hakka as a linguistically differentiated population?

Hsien-chin Hu (1948:12; cf. Freedman 1958:7; Chinese and Japanese Repository 1865:282) has indicated that not until the Song dynasty (960–1279) did the lineage begin to assume its present form; not until then did the keeping of genealogies as we know them today commence. The unreliability of pre-Song family records has also been attested to by writers of the Hakka. Luo Xianglin’s (1933:41) plea that genealogies must be used for research on Hakka migrations even prior to the Song “movement to revise the genealogies” is based upon their importance as practically the only source of earlier data, but involves an acknowledgment of their deficiencies. Hsieh T’ing-yu (1929:211) and Charles Piton (1873–74:225) are disturbed by the similar descriptions of origins and migrations which are to be found in the pre-Song portions of both Hakka and Cantonese lineage records. These similarities may in part be accounted for by the fact that the intensified absorption of non-Han groups in Southeast China, following the removal of the Song dynasty to the south of the Yangtze (Wiens 1954:183), occurred during the very period in which there was a general reconstruction of genealogies. The genealogical records produced by newly arriving Chinese might have served as models for the older inhabitants of the region.

As to the original home of the Hakka, there is only the genealogical evidence as a guide, and this indicates that previous to the Eastern Jin (317–420) the ancestors of the Hakka were primarily to be found in Henan (Luo Xianglin 1933:63).

Luo interprets the present distribution of the Hakka as the result of five successive “migratory movements” southward. The first of these began in 317 C.E. in conjunction with the southward flight of the Jin, and extended as far as central Jiangxi (1933:43, 45). Towards the end of Tang (618–907), the campaigns of Huang Chao gave stimulus to a second migration (ibid.:50). Henan was again affected, from which province there were movements to Jiangxi and southern Fujian, while some of those previously settled in northern and central Jiangxi also entered southern Fujian as well as immediately adjoining parts of Guangdong (ibid.:46). Huang Chao was not active in north-central Jiangxi so that the earliest immigrants there remained unmolested (ibid.:46). It is for this region that George Campbell reports that “the t’u t’an [tutan, “local speech”] which we readily identify with the Hakka at first becomes less intelligible than the Mandarin, as we go northward, so we are at a loss how to classify the people” (1912:474). The contrast between this northwestern sector of linguistic gradation and the sharp dialect differentiation which elsewhere marks off the Hakka from their neighbors leads us to suspect that during the migrations at the end of Tang, Hakka was not yet strongly differentiated from the speech of contiguous Chinese. The ancestors of the Hakka at this point were in the forefront of Chinese overland migration, for Xu Songxi has shown that the groups being encountered, and at least to an extent absorbed, by the Hakka in southern Fujian were non-Han (1946:162).

Certainly the genealogical records do attest to the continuity between the late-Tang settlement of southern Fujian and the present Hakka population in that area and in Guangdong. There is even a high degree of specificity: a great many, if not the majority, of Guangdong Hakka appear to trace their ancestry directly to the Fujianese village of Shibi (Shakpiak) in Ninghua County (Nenfa), Tingzhou fu (prefecture) (Campbell 1912:474; Hsieh 1929:216; Luo Xianglin 1933:55–57; Piton 1873–74:222). The material relating to Shibi would seem to indicate a high degree of nucleated settlement involving speakers of the Hakka dialect. This concentration and relative isolation of Hakka-speakers in southwestern Fujian and the concurrent absorption of neighboring non-Han groups extended from the close of the Tang through the Southern Song (1127-1279), and lasted perhaps as long as four hundred years (Hsieh 1929:211; cf. Oehler 1922:351).

Although the main impact of Hakka migration was to be felt later, the Hakka “incubation period” in southwestern Fujian already had begun to show signs of ending during the Southern Song. Tingzhou, in the center of the Hakka district, was described as follows in a memorandum of 1171 recorded in the Fujian tongzhi (Fujian provincial gazetteer): “Ting-chou [Tingzhou] has the most bandit troubles in Fukien [Fujian]. In a period often years, we have been forced to take arms thrice. . . . Many people are out of employment and become bandits” (quoted in Hsieh 1929:212).

Across the border, in that region of northern Guangdong today comprising Meixian and its vicinity, the situation was quite different. There the countryside was comparatively underpopulated, but the inhabitants seemed to have title to all the cultivable lands. Meizhou, the destination of many of the immigrants from southwestern Fujian, was described by the Southern Song scholar Wang Xiangzhi in his Yudi jisheng (The wonders of the world). In Meizhou, Wang writes: “The land is neglected and the people are lazy; farmers are few and the cultivators are all sojourners from Tingzhou and Ganzhou [in southern Jiangxi]; therefore no one suffers from a lack of fields” (quoted in Luo Xianglin 1933:57).

These earlier inhabitants of northern Guangdong were soon displaced or absorbed by a growing stream of Hakka from Fujian. During the changeover from Song to Yuan rule Hakka began to enter Guangdong in great numbers, deriving from the adjoining xian¹ of Ninghua, Changting, and Shanghang, with the majority of persons still departing from Shibi (Luo Xianglin 1933:54). Concurrent with the filling up of the entire northern and eastern part of Guangdong with Hakka-speakers was a steady decrease in the population of Ninghua xian (county). The Ninghua xianzhi (Ninghua County gazetteer) records a drop in the xian’s population from 35,000 “families” in 1253, during the Southern Song, to 12,588 “families” in 1391, at the beginning of the Ming (1368–1644), and to 5,279 “families” at its close (Hsieh 1929:219). These figures, even though their accuracy may be questionable, suggest that while the fierce fighting attendant to the Mongol occupation of the region in 1277 (Luo Xianglin 1933:50–51) might initially have contributed to the depletion of the population, the presence of emptier lands to the south continued the process.

The census figures also suggest that there was not a steady process of population outflow in conjunction with population growth. What we see, rather, is the result of a prior imbalance: overpopulation within a restricted area and underpopulation elsewhere, presuming equivalent ecological carrying capacity. In addition to the isolating factors posed by mountainous terrain, we may assume that a relatively predictable if diminishing food supply might for a time offset any pioneering tendencies within an area of high population density. In addition, the possibility that the inhabitants of a comparatively underpopulated region might hold and have the means of asserting prior rights to some or all potentially usable lands would to an extent limit the quantity and quality of land available to newcomers. But if the population of a given locale would begin to exceed the carrying capacity of the land, a surplus population would be created, and forced to seek new means of subsistence. The new means might take the form of banditry, or would be sought through emigration. In the latter case pioneers would not only be searching for lands for themselves, but might transmit information back to the home region. (George Campbell notes that from the establishment of a school in Meizhou by a Ninghua scholar during the Southern Song, “both places were kn...