Assessing China - Ethnicity and China up to Mao (and beyond)

Beginning with the pre-1949 and even pre-Mao view, the emperor traditionally tolerated the non-Han residents of his realm. They were officially regarded at different times as ‘less-than-human’ and ‘barbarians’, though. In imperial times they were generally classified simply as northern, southern, eastern and western barbarians with or without a directional prefix (as follows when without):

狄 Di Northern Barbarians literally: dogs who make fire

蠻 Man Southern Barbarians literally: worms who have language

夷 Yi Eastern Barbarians literally: people with bows

戎 Rong Western Barbarians literally: possessing daggers

So essentially they were sub-human with weapons in this long-held conception of the various non-Han elements to be dealt with in China. The 1911 republic moved on to more specifically recognise the Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan, Hui and Han races. The Hui may be the least familiar with the general reader of this blog. They are a group of generally Chinese-speaking and generally Muslims distributed widely within China often in cities. The republic’s official policy was to promote assimilation.

Marxism of course had something to say about ethnicity and Mao developed his ideas even before achieving government. Marx’s view was that attention paid to racial differences was actually “false consciousness”. He would have said that ordinary workers in Siberia and Australia would have more in common with each other than with their bosses. This was his ‘internationalist’ impulse that so annoyed Adolf Hitler. For Marx all the differences that mattered were related to economic roles, relationships and power and therefore class.

Stalin was a prominent Marxist theorist of ethnicity. He was more of a nationalist than either Marx or Lenin. I’ve already noted that Mao was also quite a nationalist so he was bound perhaps to be most influenced by Stalin in dealing with ethnicity. Stalin defined a distinct national and identity group as any group that had:

1) A common and distinct language;

2) A common and distinct homeland;

3) A common and distinct economy; and

4) A common and distinct culture.

He also thought any such group deserved the right to self-determination and Mao as quite a fervent nationalist in his public pronouncements at least was willing to at least pay lip service to this idea. Stalin also paid lip service to it but his personal nationalist paranoia undid the reality of this in the USSR and Eastern Europe (at least). Autonomy as separate peoples within the USSR (and any Communist state) was Stalin’s goal in theory, though.

In the 1950s, the CCP gave attention to how to rule over the variety of ethnicities it did in fact rule over and attempted to identify all the separate Chinese 'races' using Stalin’s above four criteria (with some modifications that suited China – for example the Hui generally spoke no distinct language (they generally spoke local Chinese languages) but the CCP nevertheless wanted to recognise their race as a race so they did – ‘ancestry’ was given equal status to the other four criteria to allow this). Chinese anthropologists and ethnologists looked at nearly 500 theoretical claims to status (actually not all potentially distinct groups chose to submit claims so that gives some idea of the diversity within China). Finally 54 minority nationalities (少数民族 – shaoshu minzu is the singular as well as plural) and a bit later 55 were recognised giving 56 distinct recognised nationalities in China including the Han majority.

At first, Mao was conciliatory but by 1954 real autonomies were ultimately rejected for three reasons:

1) Minority areas (as in the USSR) tended to be in important border regions and therefore strategically vital;

2) Several of the areas also contained important mineral deposits for China as a whole; and

3) Finally, the areas tended to be sparsely populated and therefore ripe for settlement by Han migrants especially as Han areas tended to be quite overcrowded.

Also, especially during the CR, minorities and their practices came to be associated with the backwardness from which China was allegedly attempting to rise. Minority religions and styles of dress were both widely criticised and attempts were made to ‘proletarianise’ the minorities. So unity and equality was a rather far off concept for some time. It was thought and planned (with political ‘development’ campaigns) that economic development would erase ethnicities being as they were believed to be ‘feudal cultural practices’. The CR saw minorities forced to wear Chinese-style clothes, to stop celebrating religious and other traditional festivals, to stop traditional singing and dancing, to use Chinese and to conform (as good proletarians). Their temples and sacred places were destroyed.

Nevertheless the state came to define itself as a united state of many nationalities – the Zhonghua Minzu (the Chinese Nation - 中華民族 in traditional characters). Five province-level entities are now officially autonomous (along with Hong Kong and Macau, made autonomous after more recently being returned from Western control) and some county, district, township and lesser level entities are also designated Autonomous Regions (自治区 - Zizhiqus). The policy has also officially changed from assimilation (tonghua - 同化) to melding (ronghe - 融合).

Nomads were in addition encouraged to settle and become more productive growing grain crops for China rather than herding animals far and wide and minority cadres were especially educated and trained.

Today there are also incentives to claim ethnic status for individuals because of positive discrimination in higher education (for example in the form of quotas). Of the total population of China 8% belong to one of the shaoshu minzus (around 100 million of a total Chinese population of more than 1,000 million) and they are somewhat dominant races historically in at least 50% to 60% of China’s land area. The only two province-level entities with concentrations of more than 50% non-Han ethnicity today are the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (mostly Uyghur) and the Tibetan Autonomous Region (mostly Zang (Tibetan)). The other three official province-level Autonomous Regions (ARs) are the Inner Mongolia, the Guangxi Zhuang and the Ningxia Hui ARs.

Many of the separate ethnicities are mountain folk of various regions. The following table shows the largest eight minority groups in millions (based on China’s 1990 census):

Zhuang (mainly south-western)	15.5
Manchu (north-eastern – mainly in Manchuria)	9.8
Hui (Muslim – mainly north and north-western)	8.6
Miao (Hmong-like mountain people – south-central)	7.4
Uyghur (western)	7.2
Yi (central to western)	6.6
Tujia (fairly central)	5.7
Mongol (northern – mainly in Inner Mongolia)	4.8

We may notice that only one group of these eight (the Uyghur) is known in the West as interested in more autonomy today. Zang is the official name for the main recognised Tibetan ethnicity and the Zang are around the ninth largest minority.

Other smaller groups with interest in changes in (at least) their degree of autonomy but with less of a reputation for violent actions than the Uyghurs include the Tajiks, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz (mostly living in Xinjiang like the Uyghurs and also Muslims).

There are around 8 other minority groups in total with populations of at least a million including Bouyei (or Buyei), Dong, Yao, Korean, Bai, Hani, Li and Dai.

The Tajiks and the Kyrgyz populations are substantially less than one million but along with the Kazakhs they are interested in enhancing at least their Islamic ties with the nearby former USSR central Asian republics that bear their names.

The May Fourth Movement, the Nationalists and the Communists

Nationalist demonstrations in May of 1919 (especially on the fourth), partly at the unfair treatment of China at Versailles and Paris and mainly involving students, were important. Germany had lost the war and so its concession and sphere of influence, rather than being given to China, an ally if a weak one of the Western Allies during the war, were given to Japan.

The movement sought self-rule and opposed the continuation of all foreign rule but especially sought the strong and assertive self-rule clearly not then in evidence from the local republican government that had begun in 1911 following the overthrow of the monarchy.

After the initial protests, the cause was taken up especially by intellectuals and students typically either educated overseas or in the new ‘western-style’ schools and the movement came to be called the May Fourth Movement.

The CCP itself sees its origins as being in this movement. The movement was strongly anti-tradition and anti-Confucian as Chinese tradition and Confucianism were seen as the primary causes of China’s current weakness before its adversaries. It promoted modernisation (and even Westernisation – the West was seen as strong) especially in the forms of science, democracy, nationalism, women’s rights and language reform (a welcomed written form of the vernacular language was replacing the opaque Classical Chinese as a literary vehicle). A publishing revolution accompanied the movement: new newspapers and journals popularised new ideas and many works of various kinds were translated from other languages following on from the protests.

The movement was at least partly inspired by the recent success of the revolutions in Russia – a new period of revolutions seemed called for as it had in earlier periods such as in 1848 and later periods such as in 1968 and the last and first two decades of the 20^th and 21^st centuries respectively but it was not especially coherent. It contained everything from Marxists to liberals and anarchists.

The first notable person to popularise Marxism in China (beginning in 1918 when he completed his translations of the works of Marx) was Li Dazhou (李大釗). The two central May fourth themes, though, were nationalism and the sense of a need for (and the possibility of) bold, progressive and substantial reform.

Sun Yat-sen was emerging as the head of the Guo Min Dang (the Nationalist Party – GMD or sometimes KMT because of the Wade-Giles Romanisation then popular) that was much later the final rival of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 and exiled to Taiwan. Sun sought support from abroad in his battle to unite and strengthen China and interested only the newly formed USSR. He agreed as a condition to work with the then fledgling CCP. With Soviet help he set up the Whampoa Military Academy at Canton (Guangzhou) for GMD and CCP members placing it under the command of Chiang Kai-shek. Zhou En-lai was at the academy. Together these two parties prepared a united push north to the heartland of China to unite the land under the GMD. Both parties sought national unity but it never seemed likely that the CCP would accept the role of junior partner, however, and eventual disunity thus must have seemed inevitable to most members of both parties even then.

The ‘Making’ of ‘Modern China’

So for two thousand odd years the Chinese culture area had been generally more or less united and unbowed. And it had been a flourishing area in most ways. The Middle Kingdom was the usual state of China; it was in the middle of the world and the best state to which all others were formally tributaries. But something strange was coming and that was the science and modernity and equal feelings of superiority – in shorthand, the guns – of European powers. Never mind that gunpowder had been invented in China, it was now to be successfully used to intimidate China, classic Sun Zi methods were employed. There was a bit of opium in there, too.

China had to decide what was going on and also think what was to be done about it. The task fell mainly firstly to the Qing rulers. They ruled from the 17^th to the 20^th Centuries. The last in the line attempted modernisation and many of China’s intellectuals also absorbed European ideas that they sought to use to make China strong. China had nevertheless come under virtually the complete control of a number of European governments including Russia’s and the Japanese government.

Regardless of these city developments, China at the beginning of the 20^th Century was a mostly traditional subsistence-based agrarian society despite containing many large especially coastal cities. Men were obliged to wear the queue as a symbol of subservience to the Manchurian Qing dynasty. The revolt of 1911 and overthrow of the dynasty led to China’s first weak republic. Men everywhere cut off their queues. Before many decades would pass, Mao and Chiang Kai-shek and their armies would be duking it out for the final control of the land.

China remains quite agrarian today but it is following the worldwide modernising trend towards urbanisation. Managing this development has naturally occupied much of the attention of various Chinese governments of the 20^th and 21^st Centuries. The other tension in modern Chinese history has mainly occupied the communist period of the late 20^th Century and into this century and that is the tension between revolutionary Maoist/Trotskyite development and Dengist capitalist development with Chinese features. From around 1976 to 1978, Dengism has been in the ascendancy. I’ll get into more on all of that later.

The first government of 1911 was ineffective and many regional warlords effectively ruled their regions. It was a very violent and complex time. Warlords varied from bloodthirsty tyrants holding large landholdings to Christian generals often at war with each other. Foreign powers supported the ruling warlords in their spheres of influence and foreigners, called ‘foreign devils’ by many Chinese because they were seen as working to keep China weak and divided, lived in the foreign ‘concessions’.

That was China's parlous state as Europe entered into its first major 20th Century civil war; a war that would shake up the world ultimately including China.