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.

Practical and Theoretical Maoism v Marxism-Leninism

So now that the CCP and Mao have triumphed in my history (for the time being, at least) it's time for a bit more of a Marxism-Leninism/Mao Zedong Thought primer (as the theory and practice had been developed in China up to this point, at any rate).

The Maoism I’m discussing here is the theoretical (but especially practical) Maoism of the Yan’an decade (roughly 1940 to early 1949) that gained the popular support which led to the ouster of the GMD. I’ve already discussed a few differences Mao had had from early in his career with the ideas of Marx but it’s worth putting some flesh on how this was understood (and also how pragmatically Mao put his ideas before the population). He also had issues with the ideas of Lenin and I’ll discuss here (and in later posts) how Mao adapted Marxism/Leninism to specifically Chinese conditions.

The first thing to note is that Marx was a westerner who lived from 1818 to 1883 in the West. His location is important in understanding why he had the ideas he did. The theory relevant here is Marx’s theory of historical materialism, the essence of which is that progress is inevitable in history towards a final state of Communist society. Further to that the progress is driven by changes in modes of production (an economic matter) precipitated by class struggle.

Marx named four progressive stages of history before Communism that he thought all societies progress through before attaining Communism: primitive society, slave society, feudal society and Capitalist or bourgeois society. He also thought each progressive change required an actual revolution to bring it about. In turn, the causes of each revolution for Marx are ‘contradictions’ in the economic organisation inherent in every form of society except Communist society and resultant ‘class struggle’. The contradictions involve forms of exploitation of majority classes by minority classes.

Marx’s special analysis of Capitalism was that a small group, the Capitalists, exploited the majority workers’ class by expropriating the ‘surplus value’ produced by the labour of workers but that this pre-Communist system carried within itself, as usual, the seeds of its own destruction: it brought large numbers of workers (the proletariat) together in cities where they would naturally develop a political class consciousness and begin to organise themselves for revolution.

The oppressed class always revolts in Marx’s schema and societies always progress in this way. This has been regarded as deterministic and based more or less purely on economic circumstances. Economic relations form the ‘base’ of society for Marx. Political and social relationships are the ‘superstructure’ over and determined by this base. So for Marx the required advanced political ‘consciousness’ for revolt to occur against Capitalist society requires the economics to be right. There had to be a modern urban industrial economy in place. It was an ‘if and only if’ proposition. Marx did, however, allow that ‘agency’ (active will) was required in some form in order to bring about the organisation of the workers for the Communist revolution. He, himself, tried and failed to bring about revolutions in the developed world of his own time and admired other attempts.

Lenin lived from 1870 to 1924 again in the West. Again his theory was influenced by where and who he was (and, in his case, by the revolution he was able to bring about). There were about four variations to Marxism that justify the name of a new theory: Marxism/Leninism. Here they are:

1) As in the USSR, a ‘vanguard party’ of the most politically enlightened workers should lead the revolution. Lenin led his version of such a party;

2) The party should seize state power and establish a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. The state itself would ultimately ‘wither away’ as unnecessary but in the meantime it should be strictly controlled by the party, socialist and centralised;

3) The party should be practical about its application of Marxist principles; and

4) Lenin’s theory of economic imperialism (that I’ve already discussed) placed the initial burden on leaders like him in less developed countries than envisioned by Marx (but especially also upon Mao, for example, in colonies with various degrees of imperialist control) but also held forth the promise of international cooperation between the vanguard parties and eventual worldwide revolution brought on initially by independence of the colonies (Mao’s first addition to this part of the theory was to recognise the status of semi-colonies such as China as valid contributors, too). Lenin foresaw that ‘nationalist’ independence coalitions required to force this independence could include, at first, classes other than the proletariat (other nationalist classes) such as peasants (and even the middle class and what he called ‘national capitalists’).

Mao lived from 1893 to 1976 in China. His understanding was perhaps even more dependent upon his location because he spent most of his life in China rarely travelling anywhere else. He was a Chinese patriot and nationalist before he became a Marxist and remained a revolutionary Chinese nationalist. He first became politically active in a big way in the period following the nationalist and revolutionary May Fourth protests of 1919 and while nationalism was formally regarded by Marxism/Leninism as a ‘false consciousness’ it was a consciousness that certainly motivated him (Stalin, too, had become more nationalistic than Lenin in response to his concerns at the international hostility he believed he faced).

Having said all that, the first tenet of Maoism (or Mao Zedong Thought as it is now called in China) is that Marxism/Leninism was a valid guiding principle consistent with his nationalism albeit that it required Sinification (i.e. it had to be adapted to concrete Chinese circumstances). Proponents of the Sinification would argue that both Marx and Lenin advocated pragmatic flexibility in response to conditions on the ground (or indeed ideological development) in various spheres of revolutionary action.

Here’s Mao on Marxism and this issue from his “The Sinification of Marxism” in Schram (ed.) The Political Thought of Mao Tsetung, pp. 172-3:

Concrete Marxism is Marxism that has taken on a national form, that is, Marxism applied to the concrete struggle in the concrete conditions prevailing in China, and not Marxism abstractly used... We must discard our dogmatism and replace it by a new and vital Chinese style and manner, pleasing to the eye and to the ear of the Chinese common people.

The next tenet (relying on the first) was that as China was a semi-feudal semi-colony the ultimate enemies to be dealt with there were feudal landlords and all those who supported the imperialism of the West (especially imperialism within China). In reliance on this in turn (especially since his famous speech of 1927 on how the revolution should be conducted in China) Mao decided that the major revolutionary force in China should be the many poor peasants under the yoke of the landlords and in the thrall of the foreigners and not the tiny proletariat. In his 1927 speech he predicted that the party could either march at the head of the poor peasants, be swept along by their immense and furious force or be left in their wake. The poorest peasants were certainly both by far the largest and the most exploited class in China at the time (and hence also the class with by far the most to gain and the least to lose from violent revolution of the type Mao expected would be required). The proto-Capitalist workers of the cities (exploited though they were) had actually proved relatively reticent about revolution through the 1920s.

Here’s Mao on the peasants from his 1927 “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan” from Selected Works, Vol. I, pp. 23-24:

In a very short time, in China’s central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back. They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves. Every revolutionary party and every revolutionary comrade will be put to the test, to be accepted or rejected as they decide. There are three alternatives. To march at their head and lead them? To trail behind them, gesticulating and criticising? Or to stand in their way and oppose them? Every Chinese is free to choose, but events will force you to make the choice quickly.

Mao was a voluntarist by which I mean he emphasised the role of the agency of advanced elements like party members in creating the requisite revolutionary consciousness for Communism in even the peasants in China’s merely proto-Capitalist stage of development. So this is opposed to the economic determinism of Marx (though he was never completely deterministic). Periodic regular so-called “rectification movements” (beginning with the first in 1942) with the aim of ensuring ideological uniformity are examples of the teaching of peasants by advanced elements that Mao considered possible. Re-education and reform were emphasised then over punishment and purging. They were internal party campaigns for the correction of errors and the education first of the cadres, who would then be in a better position to correctly educate the peasants in right belief.

Mao’s own peasant origins meant that he understood the class better than either Marx or Lenin. Marx thought that they were actually unorganisable. As with Lenin, Mao saw the centralised party as an appropriate vehicle for revolutionary leadership but he introduced the ‘mass line’, as I’ve already mentioned, and was generally critical of undue hierarchy and bureaucracy. Leaders were to live and work among the masses and learn from them and stay in touch with them as well as guide them. More ‘back and forth’ than Lenin had ever allowed in his hierarchical and bureaucratic abstraction of a party system of political control was envisioned (and this didn’t just include ‘back and forth’ between party members and cadres). Peasants knew local conditions best, had good ideas of their own and a continuous and profitable feedback loop between peasant ideas and party policy could be established. Utopia seemed to Mao the only possible eventual outcome.

Here he is on the ‘mass line’ in “Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership” from Selected Works, Vol. 3, p. 119:

In all the practical work of our Party, all correct leadership is necessarily ‘from the masses, to the masses’. This means: take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them, and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action. Then once again concentrate ideas from the masses and once again go to the masses so that the ideas are persevered in and carried through. And so on over and over again in an endless spiral with the ideas becoming more correct, more vital and richer every time. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge.