3 / Ethnology, Linguistics, and Politics
In any political system that involves relations among ethnic groups and/or nations, ideas of nationhood and identity maintain their salience only insofar as they are framed in categories relevant to the lives of the participants. Since ethnic groups and nations exist only insofar as people recognize their existence, their existence must be continually reinforced and restated by acts that communicate the continued salience of the categories. For example, as long as police in American cities differentially stop and question darker-skinned males simply for being in a particular part of town at a particular time of night, as long as census forms ask respondents to check one of several boxes labeled “race,” as long as young men on certain street corners speak with a particular vocabulary and intonation pattern, the categories “black” and “white” will retain salience in American society. Similarly, as long as the personal identification cards of Chinese citizens carry a designation labeled minzu, as long as circle dances are performed in remote township squares on state occasions, as long as the language known to its own speakers as Nuosu ddoma continues to be spoken, and as long as members of certain categories are given preference in high school admissions, citizens of the Liangshan area will continue to be divided into the categories Yi, Han, Zang, and so forth.
Communicative acts such as those described above do not create ethnicity in the causal sense. The thing communicated about must have some importance for the communicative act to have meaning in the first place. But the communicative acts are necessary to sustain (and sometimes create) the facts of culture, kinship, and history that give their meanings such salience. Thus one way in which we can speak of ethnic identity is as a series of languages of communication about group membership and group relationships. In most systems of ethnic relationships, there are two general ways in which languages communicate about ethnicity, and each of these in turn is used in two or three specific types of languages.
The first way in which languages communicate about ethnicity is through the use of one set of symbols rather than another equivalent set, thereby communicating the ethnic aspect of the communicative relationship in which the symbols are used. Two kinds of languages can communicate about ethnicity in this way. The first of these is simply what we conventionally call languages, such as English, Black English, standard Chinese, and Nuosu ddoma. In many situations, merely using a particular idiom conveys a lot of information about the speaker and the listeners: whether I speak English or Chinese or Nuosu ddoma, when, and with whom, communicates things about ethnicity that are not necessarily explicit in the content of the conversation.
Signs other than speech and writing also communicate information about ethnic relations simply by being used. The whole series of cultural behaviors usually known as ethnic markers—which can include food, dress, housing styles, ritual, and many other things—are at this level nothing but signs, often conveying simple information about the ethnicity of the person employing them. People in the United States who wear yarmulkes or celebrate Passover are making a statement to each other and to outsiders about their Jewish ethnicity, for example, in the same way that people in Liangshan who preserve boneless pigs and worship the household deity Zambala are making a statement that they are either Naze or Prmi, but certainly not Nuosu or Han.
The second way that languages express ethnicity is by talking about it, by employing the categories that refer to ethnic groups and relations. In the Chinese case, and in Liangshan in particular, there are at least three different types of idioms that are used to talk about ethnicity. The first of these is the ordinary speech of people as they go about their business and have occasion to speak about themselves and their neighbors in terms of ethnic categories, which exist in all the languages spoken in the area, though the categories used in one language do not map exactly onto the categories used in another. This language often includes self-referential aspects, as people use their ethnic languages (in the above mode where the use of one language rather than another indicates something about ethnicity) to speak about ethnic relations, and even about the use of language, which in a polyglot area is an important aspect of their daily lives.
The second kind of language used to talk about ethnicity is the scholarly one of ethnohistory—the geographic and temporal story of the location and movement of peoples, presuming for the sake of argument that there are such things as peoples, civilizations, cultures. This language has been developed primarily by scholars, but the line between scholarship and local discourse is never clearly drawn. Thus the stories and legends of a local community are data for the scholars’ systematic accounts, even as the systematic accounts, read and discussed in local communities, become incorporated into the local or folk narratives and classifications (Hanson 1989, Haley and Wilcoxon 1997).
The third language is that of the state discourse of ethnic identification, through which authorities in multiethnic states identify every citizen as belonging to one or another ethnic group or category. In the United States, this takes the forms of census categories and affirmative action goals, among others, and in China takes the form of the process of “ethnic identification,” through which the Communist-led government, beginning in the 1950s, attempted to classify all of its citizens into one or another minzu (Lin 1987, Fei 1980). All official communications use this language of ethnic identification.
The manifestations of ethnicity described in this book can thus be seen as a series of communicative acts, performed in the kinds of languages described above. The remainder of this chapter describes how the formal languages of ethnic discourse have been formulated in the period of Communist rule, how the process of ethnic identification established the vocabulary of the official discourse and influenced that of the popular discourse, and how the work of ethnology and linguistics provided the language of ethnohistory to support and reinforce the categories formulated in the process of ethnic identification.
ETHNOLOGY, LINGUISTICS, AND THE LANGUAGES OF ETHNICITY
The Chinese Communists came to power in 1949–50 armed with two ideologies. The first of these was nationalism, through which they were determined to forge a “unified, multinational state” within their borders, including the minority regions around the peripheries. The second was Marxism-Leninism, through which they were determined to lead the inhabitants of that state in China proper forward from their “semifeudal, semicolonial” historical stage, and the inhabitants of the minority regions forward from whatever earlier stages of history they might then be at, into the future of socialism and eventual communism. To accomplish the twin goals dictated by these twin ideologies, the Communists needed the help of social scientists, particularly ethnologists and linguists, and these social scientists thus became closely implicated in the projects of state-building and national development, particularly as they applied in the peripheral areas. It was the ethnological projects that, in a sense, wrote the lexicons and grammars of the ethnohistorical and ethnic identification languages used in China today not only to talk about ethnicity but to attempt to regulate ethnic relations.
Chinese Ethnology before 1949
Precursors to Ethnology in Late Imperial Times. Description and classification of peripheral peoples have a long history in China. The earliest systematic general history, Records of the Historian (Shi ji), written by Sima Qian in the early first century B.C.E., contains chapters dealing with various peoples around the peripheries of the Chinese world, including “Record of the Southwestern Barbarians” (Xinan yi liezhuan). In only slightly later times, works such as Records of Foreign Countries (Huayang guo zhi) from the Jin period and Book of Barbarians (Man shu) from the Tang dynasty are entirely devoted to ethnology in the sense of describing the customs, habits, and ecology of foreign peoples.
By the Ming and Qing dynasties there had evolved two different, but connected, traditions of ethnological reporting about the Southwest. One was the writing of accounts of non-Han peoples in standard documents such as local gazetteers (fang zhi or difang zhi) and in the personal accounts of scholars and literati who administered or visited non-Han areas. The other was the pictorial ethnology of the Miao man tu ce, often called “Miao album” in English, a genre that is a sort of catalogue of minority “peoples” (including other groups in addition to those called Miao), each afforded a two-page spread consisting of a stylized picture and a brief description of physical characteristics, temperament, livelihood, and customs.1
Despite the very different levels of discourse embodied in these two genres, they share a common set of assumptions that still inform Chinese ethnology to a degree. First, they are driven by a classificatory impulse. Groups are named and categorized, and the categorization is anchored both in an assumption of a common history and in a set of characteristics of livelihood, temperament, customs, and so forth. Second, they are concerned with the distance of each group from the cultural ideal of the Han core. In many sources, groups are divided into two basic types. Shu, “cooked” or “ripe,” peoples are those who, in spite of their obvious non-Chinese origin and their inferior customs and different languages, are still participants in the Chinese political order, ruled either directly by the imperial field administration or indirectly by appointed local rulers, and often practice Chinese customs such as ancestor worship, are bilingual in their native languages and Chinese, and sometimes even participate in the classical educational system and the civil-service examinations.2 Sheng, or “raw,” peoples, by contrast, are those still beyond the influence of literization entirely, out of reach of any but the most sporadic and military government, ignorant of Han language and culture. Classification and scaling, the two basic principles of the 1950s ethnological project, are thus present already in literature from the late centuries of the Imperial era.
The Development of a Chinese-Western Hybrid Ethnology. After the fall of the empire in 1911, and especially after the beginning of the so-called May Fourth Era of iconoclasm and absorption of Western ideas beginning in about 1919, a flood of Western -ologies flowed into China, and among them were ethnology and anthropology. In the 1920s and early 1930s, such diverse systems of thought as evolutionism, German Kulturkreislehre, and British structural-functionalism caught the attention of Chinese scholars, first eager to look for scientific reasons why China had developed differently from the West, but soon thereafter thinking about the problems of the relations between China proper and the peripheral regions now included in the Republic’s administrative borders (Chen Yongling 1998). Ethnology and anthropology were taught in universities in various parts of the country, including Peking University and Yenching University in Beiping, Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, and Xiamen University in the city of that name (Guldin 1994: 23–56).
Already in the period before World War II, foreign-educated Chinese ethnologists and their homegrown students had conducted considerable research among minority populations, but this research, paradoxically, grew in quantity and sophistication during the war years. Many intellectuals from the eastern and southern coastal cities moved inland to Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guangxi to escape the Japanese invaders, and a large number of them, along with scholars native to these areas, conducted field research among the minority peoples of the Southwest. Many of China’s most eminent ethnologists, anthropologists, and anthropological linguists—such as Wu Wenzao, Fei Xiaotong, Liang Zhaotao, Lin Yaohua, Ma Xueliang, Yang Chengzhi, Feng Hanyi, Fu Maoji—and a host of others contributed to this effort as well as to the ethnological and ethnolinguistic projects carried out later under the Communists.
The ethnology of these times is, as one might expect, a hybrid. While many of the scholars who wrote on the Southwest (such as Lin Yaohua, in his account of the Nuosu in Liangshan [1961]) were foreign-trained and incorporated the tenets of, for example, structural-functional analysis into their accounts, most of them still retained the classifying and ordering tendencies of their Imperial forebears. If the descriptions were more lifelike and less stereotypical, based on careful and often extended observation, the context was often still that of the descendants of certain peoples mentioned in the ancient texts, now known through science in greater detail but still retaining the character of their early ancestors.3
The kind of classification these scholars engaged in is indicated by the term for “ethnology” in standard Chinese: minzuxue, or “the study of minzu,” a term that had acquired a second sense in addition to the nationalistic one described in chapter 2. That nationalistic sense has been perpetuated—in the term Zhonghua minzu, or “Chinese nation”—not only by cultural nationalists such as Chiang Kai-shek but also by the Communists, who used minzu to translate the Soviet Russian term natsiya (Connor 1984). Zhonghua minzu continues to be used in nationalistic appeals by China’s Communist Party and government almost interchangeably with such terms as long de chuan ren (descendants of the dragon) and Yan Huang zisun (children and grandchildren of the emperors Yan [or Shen Nong] and Huang [or the Yellow Emperor]). In the ideology of China as a “unified country of diverse nationalities,” all nationalities, or minzu in its second sense, are united in the greater Chinese nation, or Zhonghua minzu.
Ethnology, or minzuxue, however, is most concerned with the second sense of the term minzu, which refers to the groups that make up the nation. As mentioned in chapter 2, the term was originally used in this sense by such nationalist writers as Sun Zhongshan to refer to the major historical groups that made up the Chinese empire and were to be included as citizens of the new Chinese Republic and represented by the five stripes of the original Chinese Republican flag. The ethnologists working in the Southwest, however, quickly expanded the use of this term, using it in scholarly and administrative journals of the 1920s through 1940s to refer to the groups classified and described in their works. Minzuxue thus became the study of cultural and social difference, of the defining characteristics of the many and diverse peoples who inhabited China’s border regions.
The Chinese Revolution and Chinese Ethnology
Emerging from this rather bourgeois, foreign-influenced background, Chinese ethnologists and linguists were asked, between 1949 and 1958, and again after 1978, to contribute to the Party-led projects of national unity and socialist development (Chen Yongling 1998: 25–33). From 1958 to 1966, the period of the Great Leap Forward and the subsequent famine and rebuilding, their role was restricted, as was the role of all intellectuals, many of whom were labeled as “rightists” after 1957. From 1966 to 1978, the period of the truly radical policies of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, their role was practically nonexistent, except for a small amount of linguistic work (Guldin 1994: chap. 10). But after 1978 the project of ethnology literally continued where it had left off in the 1950s, to the extent that many articles researched and written in the 1950s, but judiciously tucked into drawers during the radical interlude, were taken out again and published in the 1980s. And despite the de facto turning away from socialism, and thus from much of Marxism-Leninism, as a formula for development after 1979, the project of nationalities unity was still a crucial one to the Communists, and development, though frequently changing its ideal form, had never lost its importance.
The contribution asked of the ethnologists and linguists was thus much the same in the 1980s and 1990s as it had been in the 1950s. In both periods, it began with new versions of the old projects of classification and scaling, structured since the revolution by the Soviet-derived notions of nationality and of the stages of history. From there it proceeded to various derivative tasks, such as recording the histories of the now-fixed entities, standardizing their languages and cultures, and, in the 1980s, reconstructing an economically developing, multiethnic polity out of the ruins of Cultural Revolution radicalism.
Identification: Determining Which Minzu Exist in China. With the advent of Communist Party rule in China, the term minzu in the second, more local sense became equated with the Soviet Russian term natsionalnost’ (Connor 1984), which was defined by that eminent ethnologist Josef Vissarionovich Stalin as a group with four common characteristics: language, territory, economy, and psychological nature manifested in a common culture (Gladney 1991: 66–67). (Around the same time, minzu, so defined, acquired the standard English translation “nationality,” which it retains, to the horror of Western ethnologists, in official and tourist literature on China today.)4 These four criteria of minzu membership were the ostensible basis of the 1950s project of ethnic identification.
The identification project began when local groups were invited to submit applications for the status of minzu. According to later accounts (Fei 1981), over four hundred groups submitted such applications, which were then judged by teams of researchers, supposedly to determine whether they conformed to Stalin’s four criteria. After researchers compiled data on the four hundred applications, the actual number of groups was determined to be somewhere in the fifties, stabilizing at fifty-four minorities5 plus the majority Han in 1962, and having been augmented since then only by the addition of the Jinuo in 1979 (Du 1985).6
Recent retrospective scholarship, however, has shown that there was great variation in the extent to which the identification process actually used Stalin’s criteria in determining group boundaries. In some cases they worked reasonably well. In such areas as Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and East Turkistan or Xinjiang, the conventional Chinese usage of the term minzu for Mongols, Tibetans, or Uygurs probably fits fairly well with an English speaker’s intuitive feel for the idea of nationality, since these peoples lived in compact territories, were reasonably uniform culturally, and all had historical experience of independent statehood. Their inclusion in China (which many people in those areas continue to oppose) rather unambiguously makes the People’s Republic of China a multinational state, as advertised.
In most of the Southwest, however, things are somewhat different, since different minzu, or different cultural and linguistic collectivities, live intermixed in that area, and there have been few historical instances of ethnically based states there, and none in recent centuries. In this kind of a situation, it becomes much more difficult to apply Stalin’s criteria to nationality, and in fact Chinese ethnologists sometimes gave lip-service to his criteria while actually classifying minzu according to other standards. Lin Yaohua (1987) has shown, for example, that researchers in the Southwest discovered early on that the kind of intermixture of ethnic groups found in that area did not conform to the model implied by Stalin’s definition, and that researchers who still had to come up with policy recommendations thus fell back primarily on language as a criterion for identification.7 Jiang Yongxing (1985), writing about Guizhou, has commented that the identification teams relied too heavily on “historical relatedness” of groups and not enough on local people’s own wishes, with the result that many identities in Guizhou are still disputed and many groups are still “yet to be identified” (Cheung 1995a, 1996).
Despite the scientific premises and seeming finality of this project, there is still much dispute in certain areas over whether minzu were identified properly in the original project or the follow-up work that goes on in some places to this day. The uncertainties and disputes almost inevitably come from communities whose members feel their own minzu identity was wrongly determined in the classifying project. These are of two kinds. The most common are groups who feel they have been unjustly lumped with larger groups but ought to have a separate identity of their own. The Baima Zang of northwestern Sichuan are such a group; they have even printed and distributed a collection of historical essays that demonstrate their separateness from the Tibetans whose minzu they were included in, but it is reported that the opposition of the tenth Panchen Lama (who died in 1989) prevented the Zang from being broken up in this way.8 Other examples are the Ge of southeastern Guizhou (Cheung 1995a, 1996) and, at one time at least, many of the Shuitian people described in chapter 13 of this book (see also Harrell 1990). The other type consists of people who claim minority status despite official classification as Han. Certain Hui of southern Fujian, described by Dru Gladney (1991: chap. 6) and Fan Ke (n.d.) are an example of this second type, in this case one that successfully won reclassification in the 1980s.
The existence of continuing controversies over identification points out two important things about the identification project and about ethnic relations generally. First, the project is not a one-way thing, imposed top-down on passive local peoples. From the beginning, consultation with local leaders was an important part of the process, and from the beginning also, many if not most of the agents of the state who implemented ethnic identification and other aspects of the literizing project were themselves members of the minority communities. In other words, the language of ethnic identification is one that can be spoken by people of all ethnic identities and claimed identities. And the participation of people with local, changing interests ensures that even this attempt to determine classifications once and for all will always run up against shifting identities and interests of those being classified. In other words, the vocabulary of this language is not entirely closed or predetermined, though the ethnic identification project tried to make it as closed as possible. Second, classification is a vital issue in the minority regions of China. Not only people’s pride and their understanding of their heritage and their place in the world, but also their access to resources are heavily dependent on it.
Description: Coming to Know the Minzu. Mere identification of minzu, however, is not enough of a contribution from linguists and ethnologists to enable the state to accomplish its goals in minority regions. Because the state project involves not only ruling the peoples within its territory but also economic and cultural development (defined as progress toward socialism and eventually communism, starting from wherever on the ladder of history a particular group might have been at the time of the Communist takeover), peoples must also be described in considerable detail, both in order to determine where they are on the ladder of development and also to provide specific knowledge about them that will be useful in various aspects of rule and promotion of economic and cultural development. To this end, the project of ethnic identification in the 1950s was combined with a massive project of ethnology, and many of the same scholars who contributed to the founding and early development of Chinese ethnology before 1949, along with younger scholars coming of age since the Communist takeover, were enlisted in this effort of data collection about the minorities’ society, history, and language. Through this massive effort, continuing to this day, the scientific language of ethnology and ethnohistory was created and developed as a supplement to the political language of ethnic identification.
In the first heyday of this project, many investigations were conducted and reports written, and in preparation for the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic in 1959, a large-scale effort began in 1957 to publish an encyclopedic series of reports on society and history. These first-generation reports, known colloquially as “white-covered books,” or baipi shu, were compiled in great haste at the time of the Great Leap Forward, only to fall quickly under criticism for their insufficiently Marxist content, demonstrated by the fact that many of the senior scholars involved in their compilation were pre-revolutionary bourgeois ethnologists, some of them officially coming to be labeled rightists in the Anti-Rightist campaign beginning in summer 1957 (Chen Yongling 1998: 33–36). Many reports never saw the light of day, and went underground until the revival of ethnology and ethnology research institutes in the 1980s. During that decade they were then published, together with many results from research newly conducted in the 1980s, in the provincial collections of “reports of social and historical investigations” (shehui lishi diaocha baogao). These reports (over fifty volumes for Yunnan, for example, and ten or more each for Sichuan and Guizhou) consist both of individual reports on various topics and of ordered presentations of what is important to know about a particular minzu at a particular stage of development. For example, Summary Volume of Historical and Social Investigations on the Yi of Liangshan in Sichuan Province (Sichuan sheng Liangshan Yizu shehui lishi diaocha zonghe baogao) treats the following topics concerning the Nuosu of Liangshan, generally placed at the slave society level of development (Sichuan 1985: 5):
Part 1: Social Productive Forces
1. The principal sector of production—agriculture
2. Production activities that serve as subsidiary occupations: herding, fishing, forestry, and others
3. Handicrafts not yet separated from agriculture
4. Exchange of commodities that had not developed into a separate economic sector
5. Production and sale of opium and its effect on the productive forces in Yi Society
Part 2: Castes and Caste Relations
1. Caste structure
2. The means of production controlled by each caste, and its economic situation
3. Caste relations
4. Caste mobility
5. Class (caste) struggle and its form
6. Summary
1. Land tenure relations
2. Land sales and pawning
3. The situation of land management
4. Other situations of rent and tenancy
Part 4: Clan system
1. Clans
2. Enemies
3. Household and marriage
The reports of social and historical investigations, along with various journals that have sprung up in minzu studies in provincial and prefectural institutes, as well as in departments of ethnology and anthropology at various universities and nationalities institutes constitute a rich corpus of ethnographic data spanning five decades (though concentrated very heavily in the 1950s and again in the 1980s and 1990s), but they do not simply present data in an empirical fashion. In accordance with the responsibilities of ethnologists and linguists to the state’s minority projects, these works are concerned not only with identification, classification, and description but also with ordering. Each minzu, envisioned as a group with certain characteristics in common (Stalin’s four criteria), must be regularized, systematized, normalized in Michel Foucault’s sense (1977: 177–84), made to conform to a paradigm of what a minzu is. This standardization or normalization has taken many forms, including the ethnographic collections described above, but others have been particularly the province of scholars: the writing of histories and the preparation of linguistic materials.
Writing Standard Histories. Along with the reports of social and historical investigations, the State Nationalities Commission also published, in the mid- and late 1980s, a series of concise histories of minzu (minzu jianshi), one for each of the fifty-five officially recognized minority ethnic groups, or shaoshu minzu. Along with other historical works published by institutes and university presses, these standard histories set forth orthodox interpretations of the unitary history of each of the fifty-five minorities. Although these histories vary somewhat in content, they mostly conform to a standard format, one that places the history of each minzu into the framework of the history of China as a whole, and into the universal framework of the Marxist-Stalinist stages of evolution in human history. As Ralph Litzinger describes the volume on the Yao,
This history is a simplified, encapsulated version of how the Yao have progressed through history; it charts the obstacles they have encountered in their long and arduous path to realize full social and economic potential, to become a socialist, modern minzu.
[Yaozu jianshi (The concise history of the Yao)] takes the reader on a tour through the long historical stretch of Chinese history, as moments in the history of the Yao are situated in different dynastic regimes and related to social evolutionary stages. (Litzinger 1995: 130)
Works on other minzu are similar in their conception and construction (Harrell 1995b). There are three features to notice in these histories. First, there is no questioning of the idea that these minzu are real units, despite the fact that they were definitively identified for the first time in the 1950s and that some of their boundaries are still actively disputed. Second, the history of each minzu is calibrated to what I have elsewhere described as “history with a capital H, which stands for Han” (Harrell 1995b: 75). There is no doubt left that these minzu are part of the Chinese nation and have been for a very long time. Yet placing them in the context of the stages of human evolution makes it clear that they are a backward or inferior part of that Chinese nation. Third, much of the writing of these histories is done by scholars who are themselves members of the minority minzu in question. As representatives of their own minzu and at the same time participants in this hegemonic state project, they participate in the two-way process of co-optation mentioned above: their story gets told, and it is a glorious one, but it is told as a part of the larger story of the Chinese nation as a whole.
Standardizing Languages. One of the clearest indications of the Chinese state’s ambivalence about its status as a present-day empire or a nation-state is its attitude toward minority languages. Although the Han language is clearly hegemonic, as the only one used in nationwide media and taught in all schools, the government, especially in the 1950s and again in the 1980s, has actively promoted the use of minority languages alongside Han Chinese. It has supported the development of print media in many of the minority languages (particularly those with large numbers of speakers), thus using one of the most prominent policies of nation-state building described by Benedict Anderson (1991), in the service of building a state that is not exactly sure of the sense in which it wants to be a nation.
In order to promote the use of non-Han languages, of course, linguistic scholars had to be enlisted in a linguistic project, much as ethnologists were enlisted in the project of ethnic classification, description, and history writing. If the languages of the minority minzu were to come up to the Han standard, they needed to be described, classified, standardized, written, and taught systematically in the schools. It has been the work of linguists, beginning with those attached to the ethnic identification teams in the 1950s, to accomplish these tasks with the minority languages.
Description, of course, involved a heavy investment in field linguistics, recording a large number of varieties. But merely recording and listing varieties was insufficient; these languages were those of the fifty-five minority minzu, after all, and each minzu needed to have its own language classified and related to those of other minzu. A standard Stammbaum classification was worked out by the 1980s (Guojia Minwei 1981: 585–86) that conveniently correlated, on a nearly one-to-one basis, minzu and their languages.9 In addition, the varieties spoken by each minzu were further broken down into dialects (fangyan), and sometimes subdialects (ci fangyan) and local vernaculars (tuyu) (Bradley 1990, 2001). Only when the varieties spoken by members of a minzu cut across language families could a minzu have two languages; otherwise any variation was termed dialectal.
The linguistic project was not just descriptive and classificatory, however; it had and retains the practical purpose of using the languages in the modern context of nation-building and economic development. This means that standard varieties had to be chosen (for Yi, to take an example, this was a complex task, handled differently in the three provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou [Bradley 2001]), and textbooks written for use in schools (Harrell and Bamo 1998). Those languages that had no written form prior to the Communist takeover had to have scripts invented for them (usually based on the Latin alphabet); those that were written previously often needed standardization if they were to be used in textbooks, newspapers, magazines, and other print media.10
The paradox of this linguistic project, of course, is that the minority languages are officially available only to promote the messages of national unity and development. Diversity is displayed by the use of the numerous vernaculars in a variety of media. But diversity can go only so far; the linguistic project grants voice to the members of minorities only insofar as they sign on to the national project. Nevertheless, it is difficult to grant permission for people to speak, and give them the media to do so, while still keeping them from expressing any messages of conflict or separatism. Especially in the 1990s, divergent voices speaking for local ethnic groups have become more and more common, as related in the case studies in chapters 5 through 13 of this book.
INTEGRATION AND DEVELOPMENT IN MINORITIES WORK
Chinese ethnology is, then, in a sense a creature of and an important agent of the minority policies of the Chinese Communist Party. In order to carry out its programs of development and national integration, the Party needed the help of ethnologists, linguists, historians, and other scholars. They were the great normalizers, building the base of knowledge and vocabulary that allowed the substantive projects of national integration and development to proceed in the minority regions. But the work of the ethnologists was only a small part, though a vital one, of the overall program of development carried out by means of “minorities work,” or minzu gongzuo.
When Mao Zedong launched the great systematic ethnological projects in the 1950s, he called upon the scholars and students participating in those projects to “rescue the backward,” or qiangjiu luohou (Chen Yongling 1998: 31), for knowing who the minorities were, and placing them on the scale of history, were only preliminaries to the real objectives of minorities work. Though its content has shifted along with the Party line over the half-century of Communist rule, minorities work has still maintained its two primary objectives: including the minorities in the project of national integration, and developing the minority regions as part of the development of the country as a whole. The whole industry of creating knowledge of minorities, described above, from ethnological reports to standard histories to language textbooks and translation bureaus, was created in the service of these greater projects of including the minorities and the minority regions in the projects of national integration and development. The policy and practice of minorities work has been treated in great detail in works by June Teufel Dreyer (1976), Colin Mackerras (1994), and Thomas Heberer (1989, 2001) and, in its cultural aspect, by Louisa Schein (1999). The following summary places the present research in context.
Administration of Minority Regions
The earliest “nationalities policies” of the Chinese Communist Party emphasized the Party’s willingness to grant a great deal of autonomy to local governments in minority regions that took its side in the civil war against the Guomindang (Kuomintang, KMT) forces (Gladney 1991: 87–91, Atwood 1995). As soon as the Party actually assumed power, however, its attentions were turned toward integration of all within its territory, and the nature of “autonomy” that actually emerged firmly subordinated governments of minority regions to the central government in Beijing. With the partial exception of Tibet before 1959 (Goldstein 1997), there was no opportunity whatsoever for local authorities to pursue policies at odds with those of the central government as formulated by the Party (Heberer 1989: 41). The designated autonomous areas—most of which were established in the 1950s but which had grown to comprise five provincial-level autonomous regions (zizhi qu) thirty-one autonomous prefectures (zizhi zhou), and 105 autonomous counties (zizhi xian) by 1989 (Heberer 1989: 40)—have in essence been under direct rule from Beijing since their establishment. The degree of relative autonomy that they have been able to exercise has varied greatly, however. During the 1950s and again in the 1980s and 1990s, many of the cadres in the Party and government have been members of minorities;11 there has been wide latitude to use minority languages as primary or supplementary media of instruction in elementary and secondary schools, and since the Autonomy Law of 1984, there has been more local control of budgets than is the case in nonautonomous administrative districts. In the radical periods from 1957 to 1979, on the other hand, and especially during the Cultural Revolution, autonomy was nothing but a word in a title, and not only direct administration by mostly Han cadres, but deliberate attempts to suppress minority culture, religion, and customs were widespread (Gladney 1991: 91–92; Heberer 1989: 25–28; Guo 1996). The efflorescence of varied manifestations of ethnic identity described in the case studies in this book is partially explicable as a reaction to bad memories of oppression and persecution during the Cultural Revolution years.
The Democratic Reforms and the Displacement of Traditional Political and Economic Structures
Creation and staffing of administrative structures, however, are only a small part of development policy for minority regions. In the beginning, once it was determined where minority populations in various regions stood on the scale of human development, the authorities had to face the problem of social transformation. Nearly all the rural communities in China proper were rent sometime during the years between 1947 and 1952 by the Land Reform campaign, whose purpose was to depose former landholding elites and replace them with Communist Party cadres, and to transform the structure of landholding itself from its former “feudal landlord” basis first to individual peasant ownership and then within a few years to the collectives that were the basis of Chinese agriculture until the early 1980s.12
Land reform was also carried out in many minority regions, but only those where it was determined that the social system had already evolved to the stage of the “landlord economy,” which is conceptualized as a later stage of feudalism (see Diamant 1999). In those areas where the society had developed only to the beginning stages of feudalism represented by the manorial economy—such as Tibet, the Sipsong Panna Tai kingdom, and much of the western part of Liangshan, or where social evolution was retarded at even earlier stages, such as “slave society” (most of the Nuosu areas of Liangshan) or even the late stages of “primitive society” (certain groups in southern Yunnan)—land reform was not carried out. Indeed, in many of these areas, native authorities, some of them long recognized by imperial governments as tusi or other native rulers, were allowed to remain in place alongside the new Party-led administration as long as the local land tenure systems were also in place. The separation of areas that underwent land reform, and those that did not, was often very local, with areas in the same township either reformed or temporarily left alone according to prevailing land systems in individual villages.
This delay in social reform lasted until 1956 in most areas of the Southwest; when reform came, it was initially of a different sort from the violent class struggles of the Land Reform campaign. Instead, the previously untouched minority areas underwent a process called Democratic Reform (Minzhu Gaige, or Mingai for short). In this process, rather than inducing local peasants to struggle against and overthrow their indigenous leaders, Party nationalities workers made an attempt to co-opt as many local leaders as possible into the new administration (in some areas, many of them had been co-opted already). Those who cooperated with the Communists were made into vice-heads of three of the four arms of the state—the People’s Government (Renmin Zhengfu), the People’s Congress (Renmin Daibiao Dahui, or Renda for short), or the People’s Consultative Conference (Renmin Zhengzhi Xietiao Weiyuanhui, or Zhengxie for short)—excepting in most cases the leading arm, the Communist Party. Though they were able to wield very little power in these vice- (fu) positions, they retained a measure of prestige as long as they cooperated.
Along with the co-optation of native leaders into local administration came a dismantling of traditional systems of land tenure, including manorial tenancy, serfdom, and slavery, and their replacement by individual freehold tenure, which was itself soon replaced by collectivization, sometimes within only a year or two of the original Democratic Reform. At the beginning of the reform process, it seems to have been a success in many areas, as it was carried out according to the so-called “five don’t” principles: don’t struggle, kill, settle old scores, raise old land claims, or jail people.13 But the process did contain within itself the possibility of a much more polarized struggle, since people were classified, as in Han and other landlord economy areas, according to their relationship with the land in the old economy.
This possibility of conflict came to fruition in many parts of the country in the years 1957–59, as the Party’s general line radicalized with the Anti-Rightist campaign, the establishment of People’s Communes, and the Great Leap Forward. Many former local elites and landowners were dismissed from their largely honorary vice-posts at this time and often were branded as class enemies and struggled against. In many areas, such as the ethnically Tibetan districts of northwestern Sichuan, as well as the areas of Liangshan discussed in this book, some of these leaders, often taking a considerable number of loyal followers with them from among their former tenants or retainers, staged armed revolts and guerilla warfare against the Communist Party administration; these revolts in northwestern Sichuan probably contributed to the geopolitically more significant 1959 uprising in Tibet; in Liangshan, the acute, large-scale phase of the insurrection lasted for one to two years in most areas, though there were holdouts in remote areas well into the 1960s. The final suppression of the insurrections was followed closely by the twenty tumultuous years of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; with the general loosening of nationalities policy in the 1980s, not only were many members of the old elites restored to their positions as vice-heads in the People’s Congress and People’s Consultative Conference, but there has been a cautious effort among many of these people, along with certain minority intellectuals employed in universities and research institutes, to rewrite the history of this period of ethnic conflict, though in doing so they continue to test the limits of tolerance of the propaganda departments that control publication; in general during the 1980s at least, minzu questions were considered much more sensitive than even such questions as the worth of socialism or the adaptability of the Marxist-Leninist model of development, and people had to tread very cautiously.
Economic Development
The tortuous course of economic development in China’s minority regions proceeded in one sense parallel to that in the rest of China. When the Great Leap Forward mobilized huge numbers of people to build dams, roads, and other public works and to “manufacture” steel on former village threshing grounds, it mobilized in the minority districts also. When the Cultural Revolution took grain as the key link and expanded the area of its cultivation to what had been pasture or uncultivated areas, terraces appeared in newly cut forests on inhospitable mountains. And when agriculture decollectivized and there was a push for the development of what was first called a commodity economy and then a market economy in the 1980s and 1990s, minorities also decollectivized and were encouraged to produce for the market.14
The economic development of the minority regions has, however, been different from that in the Han areas, and in three important ways. First, in a situation reminiscent of colonialism or neocolonialism as described by world-systems theorists (Wallerstein 1984), China’s peripheral regions have often been seen by central economic planners as sources of raw materials and markets for finished industrial goods. When I visited Xinjiang in 1994, for example, I watched trains of tankers full of oil proceed east toward China proper, while endless lines of flatcars full of tractors passed them on the parallel tracks going west. This was pointed out to me as a common symbol used by Uygur and other minority peoples in Xinjiang to portray their dependent economic position (see Heberer 2001). Since minorities occupy over 50 percent of the People’s Republic’s surface area, they sit on top of a great proportion of its mineral and forest resources. Minority elites complain, albeit privately, that what is rightly theirs is being exported for the benefit of colonialists in the big cities and in China proper generally.
Second, since the minority regions of China are sparsely populated in comparison to China proper, central planners have at various times seen these areas as convenient outlets for surplus population. This availability of “nearly empty” territory, along with the desire to move more Han into the peripheries for security reasons and the lack of trained personnel among most of the minorities, has meant a great influx of Han settlers, merchants, cadres, teachers, and other government personnel into all minority regions at various times beginning in the 1950s. In Xinjiang, for example, approximately 5.7 million, or 38 percent of the 1990 population of 15 million, was Han; of those 5.7 million Han, 2.2 million were composed of the soldier corps, or bingtuan, the descendants of the armies sent to secure the area in the 1950s, who now dot the whole region with their massive agricultural colonies (Rudelson 1997: 22, 37). In Inner Mongolia, most Han in-migration has consisted of individual families moving at government instigation; they are more scattered, but Han now compose about 80 percent of the 22 million people of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region; Mongols, by contrast, are only about 15 percent (Borchigud n.d.). As a final example, Han migration into Tibet was not encouraged until the late 1980s, but since that time there has been considerable in-migration, which has been one important issue in the repeated civil unrest engaged in by local nationalists in Tibet (Schwartz 1994: 202–6). Almost nowhere are minorities entirely in charge of their own economic development. At the same time, members of minority groups in many areas nevertheless work hard, both as government cadres and as individual agriculturalists and entrepreneurs, to bring development to their own regions.
Third, even as the country has moved in the 1980s and 1990s away from the Marxist-Leninist strategies of development toward the strategy of building a market economy, a large number of minority regions have marketed a commodity available only to them: their ethnicity itself. Ethnic tourism, by both Chinese and foreigners, has come to China in a big way in the last fifteen years, and it is often promoted in minority regions as the way to create income in those areas for development (Oakes 1995, 1998; Cheung 1995a; Schein 1989, 1997, 1999; Swain 1989, 1990). In addition to bringing in revenue, ethnic tourism has been a factor in the revival of ethnicity during the reform era. Some areas, such as the Dali plain, home of the majority of the Bai people, who were quite acculturated to Han ways by the early part of this century, have seen a revival of ethnic things from clothing to religious ceremonies in order to provide an ethnic atmosphere for tourists. In this and other areas, along with the revival of ethnic cultural forms and customs has come private entrepreneurship on the part of minority individuals who manufacture and sell crafts to individual tourists while their communities are paid by tour operators (and indirectly, of course, by the tourists themselves) to display songs, dances, food, and other ethnic elements for the tourists to enjoy (Oakes 1995, 1998; Cheung 1995a; Schein 1999).
Variation in Minorities’ Participation in and Reactions to Development
Economic development, in the form of both infrastructural construction and rising living standards, has been a real feature of life in minority areas of China since 1980. At the same time, minority regions have suffered almost uniformly from the twin plagues of resource extraction and Han migration, meaning that the benefits of development in most areas are less than what they might otherwise be. And as the state continues to promote nationwide development in a way that integrates the minority regions into dependency or interdependency with the geographic core of China proper, different regions react differently. In Tibet and Xinjiang, and to a large extent in Inner Mongolia also, many members of minority groups see development in quite critical terms, especially as it brings more and more Han people and Han culture into the regions. People are glad to have regained a measure of religious and cultural freedom but still wish, frankly, that the Chinese would go away. They tolerate and participate in tourism and even turn it to the advantage of the local separatist cause, since foreigners are likely to side with peoples campaigning for self-determination (Schwartz 1994: 201).
In other regions, such as the Southwest, there is enormous resentment toward Han people in general, over issues of resource extraction, immigration, and the superior, condescending attitudes of Han toward minorities. For example, I rode once in a car with a Yi driver, a Yi scholar and a Meng cadre to visit a Hui township. When we got going, the Meng cadre, a Communist Party member and rather fierce custodian of her unit’s resources, burst out, in the local dialect of Liangshan, “Today’s certainly gonna be fun. No Hans along” (Jintian yiding hui haoshua. Meidei Hanchu). The local leaders of ethnic minority communities, however, have bought in wholeheartedly to their membership in the Chinese nation, and vigorously promote such integrative measures as ethnic tourism, showing the glories of their own culture to Han and foreign visitors; ethnic education to allow members of their own communities to participate in building up their own corners of China; and the ethnicization of the local administration, which allows them to set at least the details of the agenda of development, though they have little control over major extractive industries or immigration into their areas.
This book is about one of those areas where ethnically non-Han people, members of officially designated or self-promoted minority ethnic groups, are trying to make their way within the Chinese nation to a more respected position. Because they are parts of the Chinese nation, they communicate at least partly in the metalanguages of ethnic identification and of ethnology and ethnohistory. But because they also speak in their own languages, verbal and symbolic, and because their identity was differently constituted before and during the collective period, they have different approaches to being ethnic today.
The New Role of Ethnology: A More Open Conversation?
Since the late 1980s there also seems to have been a change in the attitude expressed by Chinese scholars of ethnology and ethnohistory toward the history and society of minority peoples. The old normalizing paradigm, based on the five stages of history supplemented by Lewis Henry Morgan’s nineteenth-century account of cultural evolution, is no longer unquestionable orthodoxy, and class struggle is no longer a prescribed ingredient of ethnohistorical analysis. There is even a possibility of questioning both the premises of the language of ethnic identification: maybe Stalin’s criteria are inapplicable, as suggested in general by Lin (1987) and Jiang (1985), and there may be situations, like that of the Naze described in chapters 11 and 12 of this book, where ethnic identity is so fluid that no conclusive identification can be made (Li Shaoming 1986, Li Xingxing 1994). In addition, the characterization of such modes of production as “slave society” among the Nuosu in Liangshan has also been severely questioned (Ma Erzi 1993).
If we compare a few article titles from the annual journal Liangshan Nationalities Studies (Liangshan minzu yanjiu), established in 1992, with the contents of the general report on Yi society cited above, we immediately see a difference:
“Nurturing the Market Economy Is the Key to Alleviating Poverty in the Poor Yi Districts of Liangshan”
“An Investigation into Commercial Activity by Village Yi Women in the City of Xichang”
“Miscellaneous Thoughts on the Clan Question among the Liangshan Yi”
“Mr. Leng Guangdian [a famous Nuosu leader during the Republican period], Who Encouraged Me to Attend School”
And, in a volume recently edited at the Nationalities University in Beijing, “A Trial Discussion of Remnant Caste Attitudes in Yi Areas of Liangshan” (Lin Yaohua 1993). It is clear that the disciplines of ethnology, ethnohistory, and linguistics, while still dedicated to the state projects of nation-building and development, no longer must do so within a rigid, normalizing paradigm.
In this new atmosphere, collaborative research with foreign scholars is not only tolerated but positively encouraged, even though the scientific paradigms of Chinese and foreign ethnologists are still widely divergent. Where they diverge most sharply, I contend, is in the presence of a self-critical discourse in Western anthropology since the 1970s and the virtual absence of such discourse in Chinese ethnology. There seem to cosmopolitan-trained anthropologists to be great similarities between the kind of colonial normalizing projects aided by European ethnologists during the first part of the twentieth century and the kind of applied anthropology in service of state- and nation-building described earlier in this chapter (Schein 1999, chaps. 4 and 5). But because of the unfree political atmosphere in Communist China, as well as the sincere belief of many ethnologists in the orthodox Marxist model of historical progression and its implications for projects of national development, the basic assumptions behind the state-directed and inspired projects are just now beginning to be questioned, and never publicly or in print. In addition, Chinese nationalism, as described in chapter 2, remains a powerful emotional force for almost everyone who has spent her or his life entirely in China, and even for some people who have traveled outside. To question the basic unity of the Zhonghua minzu is not only politically risky; for many people it is emotionally wrenching. Western scholars, by contrast, question everything, and as a result, collaboration between Western anthropologists and Chinese ethnologists remains uneasy, even with the relative opening of the Chinese field to new ideas.
It is in this kind of a situation that I conducted the three periods of field research and several short visits during which I collected the data for this book. In doing so, I did not simply observe and record the varied and changing bases of ethnic identity in Liangshan: I also participated in a minor way in their creation and formation. My essays on Yi culture and society will soon appear in a Chinese-language edition (Harrell 2000b), as, I suspect, will this book not long afterward. The fact that Nuosu and Han scholars will certainly be reading this book within a few years, and perhaps even Prmi and Naze scholars also, demonstrates perhaps better than anything else the interaction not only of the discourses of ethnohistory, ethnology, and ethnic identification within China, but also their increasing interaction with a global ethnological and critical cultural studies discourse. The process of discursive interaction is treated briefly in chapter 9; Louisa Schein (1999) treats it at far greater length. But here we must first sketch our own version of the discourses of ethnohistory, ethnology, and ethnic identification.
1. See Diamond (1995) and Hostetler (2001) for descriptions and analyses of Miao albums. The modern successor to this genre is perhaps the packets of postcards or trading cards of the fifty-six minzu of China printed in the 1980s; each has a picture on one side and a set of facts (population and area of habitation—analogous to batting average and RBIs?) on the other. I have two different sets of these cards, but the only Miao album I have seen, a rare manuscript, is kept under lock and key at the University of Washington’s East Asia Library. It does not depict primarily Miao but rather peoples of Yunnan, mostly Tibeto-Burman, calling into question the name “Miao albums.”
2. The participation of ethnically non-Han peoples in the civil-service examinations was a feature of local ethnic relations during the Qing period in many places in the Southwest, including the Nuosu village of Manshuiwan, described in detail in chapter 8.
3. I have treated the nature of historiography and ethnology of the Yi peoples in the Republican and Communist periods in “The History of the History of the Yi” (1995b).
4. I have noticed, however, that at least one of the regional minzu xueyuan, most of which translate their own name as “nationalities institute,” has recently changed its name to the “Central China University for Ethnic Groups.” This does not really solve the problem of translation of minzu into English.
5. In this book, I reserve the term “minorities” for those ethnic groups that are officially designated or wish for official designation in the classification system of a modern state. In the People’s Republic of China, “minorities” is a customary and reasonable translation of the official term shaoshu minzu.
6. For an officially sanctioned account of the process, see Fei 1981; for critiques by foreign scholars, see Heberer 1989 and Gladney 1991.
7. Lin explains the inability to classify southwestern groups according to Stalin’s criteria by the fact that the criteria were designed for areas where the transition to capitalism was already initiated, while the peoples of southwest China were still at the feudal, slave, or occasionally even the late primitive stages. In fact, there was a debate in the 1950s as to whether to apply the term minzu to groups in the earlier stages of history according to the Morganian-Marxist paradigm, or whether to use distinctive terms such as buluo (tribe) or buzu (tribal ethnic group). For reasons of political equality, the debate was decided in favor of using minzu for all of the groups (Li Shaoming, lecture at the University of Washington, March 1999).
8. The Panchen’s opposition is a widely circulated rumor that I have never seen in print. However, Zang scholars have begun to attack both the “separatist” ideas of certain Baima scholars and the whole idea of the Pumi as a minzu. See Sichuan Sheng Minzu Yanjiu Suo 1980 and Upton 1998.
9. The only exceptions to this one-to-one correlation were the Yughur, some of whom spoke a Mongolic and some a Turkic language; the Yao, some of whom spoke a Yao, some a Miao, and some a Zhuang-Dong (known in the West as Tai) language; and the Hui and Man, most of whom spoke Han (Guojia Minwei 1981: 586).
10. For fuller descriptions of the process of language recording, classification, and standardization in minority areas, see Harrell 1993 and Dwyer 1998.
11. I have, for example, been able to look at the records of all cadres appointed in Xide County in Liangshan (the site of Mishi, described in chap. 6), whose population is about 85 percent Nuosu and 15 percent Han. In this county, from 1976 until 1987 the position of county Party secretary was occupied by a Nuosu (Yi) for nine years and by a Han for three years. Of the seventeen vice-secretaries to serve during this time, eight were Nuosu, eight Han, and one Zang. Of Party department heads to serve during this time, only ten were Nuosu and twenty were Han; of party secretaries in the government, legislature, army, and other offices, thirteen were Nuosu and six Han. Although this is a higher percentage of Han among party secretaries than would be found in the county population, it does not appear to substantiate the charge that there are no minorities in responsible positions in the Party. It is interesting, however, that even within the Party, more cadres in technical positions (heads of departments) tend to be Han than do cadres in general leadership positions or those who serve as Party secretaries in administrative, legislative, and army units (CCP Xide 1991). Also, it is reported unofficially that since 1991 there has been a de facto policy of not appointing minorities to Party secretary positions at the prefectural level and above.
12. For accounts of the land reform process in Han rural communities, see Hinton 1966; Potter and Potter 1989; Siu 1989; Friedman, Selden, and Pickowicz 1991.
13. Different people remember different lists. Peng Wenbin (personal communication) was told that the “five don’ts” were don’t curse, beat, imprison, kill, or struggle.
14. For a dramatic example of the economics of decollectivization in a very remote pastoral region of Tibet, see Goldstein and Beall 1990.