Report from the field: Not quite han: The ethnic minorities of China's southwest

Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars

Volumn 29, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 67-77

  Unger, Jonathan ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0347304722     PISSN: 00074810     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (35)

1. Although Hsu treats the community as quintessentially Chinese, he notes that "In West Town both sexes dress like other Chinese and all women past thirty have bound feet, but everybody speaks Min Chia as the mother tongue. In addition, most men and fewer women speak the Yunnanese dialect with a local accent." (Under the Ancestor's Shadow [New York: Anchor Books, 1967], p. 18). The Bai people of today used to refer to themselves and their language simply as the Min Chia (minjia), a Chinese term meaning "commoner" or "civilian" (perhaps initially used by the Bai in counter-distinction to Chinese military colonies, where hanyu was spoken). That is, the Min Chia thought of themselves not as a separate people but as a local variety of civilian Chinese. An interesting book on the Min Chia/Bai is C. P. Fitzgerald, The Tower of Five Glories: A Study of the Min Chia of Ta Li, Yunnan (London: Cresset Press, 1941). Two recent articles on this subject are Colin Mackerras, "Aspects of Bai Culture: Change and Continuity in a Yunnan Nationality," Modern China 14, no. 1 (January 1988): 51-84; and David Y.H. Wu, "Culture Change and Ethnic Identity among Minorities in China," in Ethnicity and Ethnic Groups in China, Chien Chiao and Nicholas Tapp, eds. (Hong Kong: New Asia College, 1989), pp. 15-18 especially.
2. Although Hsu treats the community as quintessentially Chinese, he notes that "In West Town both sexes dress like other Chinese and all women past thirty have bound feet, but everybody speaks Min Chia as the mother tongue. In addition, most men and fewer women speak the Yunnanese dialect with a local accent." (Under the Ancestor's Shadow [New York: Anchor Books, 1967], p. 18). The Bai people of today used to refer to themselves and their language simply as the Min Chia (minjia), a Chinese term meaning "commoner" or "civilian" (perhaps initially used by the Bai in counter-distinction to Chinese military colonies, where hanyu was spoken). That is, the Min Chia thought of themselves not as a separate people but as a local variety of civilian Chinese. An interesting book on the Min Chia/Bai is C. P. Fitzgerald, The Tower of Five Glories: A Study of the Min Chia of Ta Li, Yunnan (London: Cresset Press, 1941). Two recent articles on this subject are Colin Mackerras, "Aspects of Bai Culture: Change and Continuity in a Yunnan Nationality," Modern China 14, no. 1 (January 1988): 51-84; and David Y.H. Wu, "Culture Change and Ethnic Identity among Minorities in China," in Ethnicity and Ethnic Groups in China, Chien Chiao and Nicholas Tapp, eds. (Hong Kong: New Asia College, 1989), pp. 15-18 especially.
3. Although Hsu treats the community as quintessentially Chinese, he notes that "In West Town both sexes dress like other Chinese and all women past thirty have bound feet, but everybody speaks Min Chia as the mother tongue. In addition, most men and fewer women speak the Yunnanese dialect with a local accent." (Under the Ancestor's Shadow [New York: Anchor Books, 1967], p. 18). The Bai people of today used to refer to themselves and their language simply as the Min Chia (minjia), a Chinese term meaning "commoner" or "civilian" (perhaps initially used by the Bai in counter-distinction to Chinese military colonies, where hanyu was spoken). That is, the Min Chia thought of themselves not as a separate people but as a local variety of civilian Chinese. An interesting book on the Min Chia/Bai is C. P. Fitzgerald, The Tower of Five Glories: A Study of the Min Chia of Ta Li, Yunnan (London: Cresset Press, 1941). Two recent articles on this subject are Colin Mackerras, "Aspects of Bai Culture: Change and Continuity in a Yunnan Nationality," Modern China 14, no. 1 (January 1988): 51-84; and David Y.H. Wu, "Culture Change and Ethnic Identity among Minorities in China," in Ethnicity and Ethnic Groups in China, Chien Chiao and Nicholas Tapp, eds. (Hong Kong: New Asia College, 1989), pp. 15-18 especially.
4. Although Hsu treats the community as quintessentially Chinese, he notes that "In West Town both sexes dress like other Chinese and all women past thirty have bound feet, but everybody speaks Min Chia as the mother tongue. In addition, most men and fewer women speak the Yunnanese dialect with a local accent." (Under the Ancestor's Shadow [New York: Anchor Books, 1967], p. 18). The Bai people of today used to refer to themselves and their language simply as the Min Chia (minjia), a Chinese term meaning "commoner" or "civilian" (perhaps initially used by the Bai in counter-distinction to Chinese military colonies, where hanyu was spoken). That is, the Min Chia thought of themselves not as a separate people but as a local variety of civilian Chinese. An interesting book on the Min Chia/Bai is C. P. Fitzgerald, The Tower of Five Glories: A Study of the Min Chia of Ta Li, Yunnan (London: Cresset Press, 1941). Two recent articles on this subject are Colin Mackerras, "Aspects of Bai Culture: Change and Continuity in a Yunnan Nationality," Modern China 14, no. 1 (January 1988): 51-84; and David Y.H. Wu, "Culture Change and Ethnic Identity among Minorities in China," in Ethnicity and Ethnic Groups in China, Chien Chiao and Nicholas Tapp, eds. (Hong Kong: New Asia College, 1989), pp. 15-18 especially.
5. On the historical process of Han immigration and the consequences for China's indigenous populations, see C. P. Fitzgerald, The Southern Expansion of the Chinese People (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1972), chapter 4. Fitzgerald writes that in previous historical eras the peoples who occupied Yunnan's mountain areas, "the 'raw' or 'uncivilized' in Chinese terms, were largely left to themselves. Very little conscious and planned effort was made to bring them under Chinese influence, so long as they kept the peace....Chinese policy, on the other hand, lethargic although it seemed to be, was based on the nviction that time would bring all the peoples of Yunnan within the full pale of Chinese civilization; a century this way or that did not matter" (pp. 74-75). The ascension of the Communist Party altered official perceptions and accelerated this process dramatically.
6. Minzuxue yu xiandaihua (Ethnic Studies and Modernization), no. 2 (1985): 11.
7. 1993 Hainan sheng tongji nianjian (1993 Hainan Provincial Statistical Yearbook).
8. This "commercial" conquest of land is apparent, for example, in the life stories related in Hsiao-t'ung Fei and Chih-I Chang, Earthbound China: A Study of Rural Economy in Yunnan (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948).
9. In Hainan, the region in China with the largest concentration of state farms, I was able to conduct interviews at four rubber plantations. While the most northern of these state farms contains practically no Li at all, each farm that lies farther south contains progressively higher numbers. At the most southern of the four plantations, situated in territory that was inhabited almost entirely by Li until the 1950s, a bit more than half of the farm's 23,000 residents are Li. Many of them rub shoulders daily with Han co-workers and supervisors. They tend to occupy the lower manual labor positions, and according to the statistics that I gathered, Han families in these four state farms enjoy incomes 43 percent higher than those of the Li households.
10. A good summary of this period appears in A. Tom Grunfeld, "In Search of Equality: Relations between China's Ethnic Minorities and the Majority Han," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 17, no. 1 (1985): 64-65.
11. A good discussion of the Dai is contained in Shih-chung Hsieh, "On the Dynamics of Tai/Dai-Lue Ethnicity," in Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers, Stevan Harrell, ed. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), pp. 301-28. The Dai of the Dehong region of Yunnan Province, which does not face toward Thailand, have become far more acculturated in the direction of the local Han.
12. In a different respect, the Lisu, Jingpo, and Wa peoples who practice a slash-and-burn agriculture in the dense mountain country along China's frontier with Burma have also been in a position to use their access to the border to resist assimilation. "Whenever the situation in China worsened," a resident of the border area told me, "they'd shift over to Burma; and when it became peaceful in China again, they'd shift back. They remain outside the system."
13. . The Han usually, but not always, occupy the richer lowlands. In the mountains of north-east Yunnan, where Han immigrants poured through in waves over the centuries, few minority communities remain in place. High eroded mountain territory as poor as any occupied by Miao or Yao elsewhere in the southwest is home here to desperately impoverished Han. One such village of miserably poor mountain Han is described in Jonathan Unger and Jean Xiong, "Life in the Chinese Hinterlands under the Rural Economic Reforms," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 22, no. 2 (1990): 9-10.
14. . The Chinese government, going against the grain of its official pinyin spelling system, transliterates Buyi as Bouyei for some unknown reason.
15. He appears to be bending the truth here, in that some of the Buyi of Pingtang County still follow a different marriage pattern from the Han. Rural Buyi brides today often return home to their parents' house three days after the wedding and remain there, with visits to their husbands, until the birth of their first child. This custom is on the wane, however, and has already all but disappeared among the Buyi of neighboring Dushan County, where I also spent a number of day s going into villages.
16. In the early 1980s, the Bai recorded a literacy rate of 59 percent, compared to a Yunnanese Han rate of 55 percent (Minzuxue yu xiandaihua, no. 4 [1986]: 32-33.) These statistics include Yunnan's urban population, which is overwhelmingly Han, so it can be presumed that the rural Han population had a rather lower rate of literacy than 55 percent.
17. The Hui population of Yunnan had a literacy rate of 58 percent in the early 1980s (ibid). Interestingly, the rate of literacy of Hui women was identical to that of Yunnanese Han women. The Naxi are the only other minority people in Yunnan besides the Bai and Hui with a higher literacy rate than the Han.
18. A good discussion of this ethnic-minority soft-porn industry is contained in Dru C. Gladney, "Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Majority/Minority Identities," The Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (1994): 101-106. Also see Louisa Schein, "Gender and Internal Orientalism in China," Modern China 23, no. 1 (1997): 77-78.
19. A good discussion of this ethnic-minority soft-porn industry is contained in Dru C. Gladney, "Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Majority/Minority Identities," The Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (1994): 101-106. Also see Louisa Schein, "Gender and Internal Orientalism in China," Modern China 23, no. 1 (1997): 77-78.
20. Morgan proposed his theories in a book entitled Ancient Society (1878), and Engels endorsed his views at length in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1883).
21. Morgan proposed his theories in a book entitled Ancient Society (1878), and Engels endorsed his views at length in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1883).
22. A good recent discussion of the labeling process, especially as it applied to the Moslem Hui, is Dru C. Gladney, "Salman Rushdie in China: Religion, Ethnicity, and State Definition in the People's Republic," in Asian Visions of Authority, Charles F. Keyes, Laurel Kendall, and Helen Hardacre, eds. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), pp. 255-78.
23. Norma Diamond, "Defining the Miao: Ming, Qing, and Contemporary Views," and Ralph A. Litzinger, "Making Histories: Contending Conceptions of the Yao Past," in Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers, ed. Stevan Harrell, pp. 92-116; 117-139.
24. Alain Peyraube, "Is Cantonese Really Chinese?," China Perspectives, no. 5 (1996): 54.
25. It appears that through a process similar to what has been occurring in the southwest but far earlier in Chinese history, the Cantonese population of Guangdong Province is a product of penetration and absorption: biologically partly descendant from Han immigrants from the north and partly descended from indigenous Yao and Vietnamese and Zhuang peoples who did not flee but rather adopted Han ways, intermarried with Han pioneers, and invented Han-style lineage records.
26. Anthropologist Stevan Harrell has written several excellent papers on the Yi and the artificial common identity with which they have been labeled. See Stevan Harrell, "The History of the History of the Yi," in Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers, Stevan Harrell, ed., pp. 63-91; "Ethnicity, Local Interests, and the State: Yi Communities in Southwest China," Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. 3 (1990): 515-518; and "Ethnicity and Kin Terms among Two Kinds of Yi," in Ethnicity and Ethnic Change in China, Chien Chao and Nicholas Tapp, eds., pp. 179-98. Harrell notes, in a letter to me, that "Yi intellectuals really do see themselves as Yi, even though for many peasants it doesn't matter - an artificial identity, yes, but not less real than an artificial lake." studies by anthropologists of the Naxi/Mosuo and their self-identity and labeling are Charles F. McKhann, "The Naxi and the Nationalities Question," in Harrell, ed., Cultural Encounters, pp. 39-62; and Emily Chao, "Hegemony, Agency, and Re-presenting the Past," in Melissa J. Brown, ed., Negotiating Ethnicities in China and Taiwan (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, China Research Monograph no. 46, 1996), pp. 208-239.
27. Anthropologist Stevan Harrell has written several excellent papers on the Yi and the artificial common identity with which they have been labeled. See Stevan Harrell, "The History of the History of the Yi," in Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers, Stevan Harrell, ed., pp. 63-91; "Ethnicity, Local Interests, and the State: Yi Communities in Southwest China," Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. 3 (1990): 515-518; and "Ethnicity and Kin Terms among Two Kinds of Yi," in Ethnicity and Ethnic Change in China, Chien Chao and Nicholas Tapp, eds., pp. 179-98. Harrell notes, in a letter to me, that "Yi intellectuals really do see themselves as Yi, even though for many peasants it doesn't matter - an artificial identity, yes, but not less real than an artificial lake." studies by anthropologists of the Naxi/Mosuo and their self-identity and labeling are Charles F. McKhann, "The Naxi and the Nationalities Question," in Harrell, ed., Cultural Encounters, pp. 39-62; and Emily Chao, "Hegemony, Agency, and Re-presenting the Past," in Melissa J. Brown, ed., Negotiating Ethnicities in China and Taiwan (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, China Research Monograph no. 46, 1996), pp. 208-239.
28. Anthropologist Stevan Harrell has written several excellent papers on the Yi and the artificial common identity with which they have been labeled. See Stevan Harrell, "The History of the History of the Yi," in Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers, Stevan Harrell, ed., pp. 63-91; "Ethnicity, Local Interests, and the State: Yi Communities in Southwest China," Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. 3 (1990): 515-518; and "Ethnicity and Kin Terms among Two Kinds of Yi," in Ethnicity and Ethnic Change in China, Chien Chao and Nicholas Tapp, eds., pp. 179-98. Harrell notes, in a letter to me, that "Yi intellectuals really do see themselves as Yi, even though for many peasants it doesn't matter - an artificial identity, yes, but not less real than an artificial lake." studies by anthropologists of the Naxi/Mosuo and their self-identity and labeling are Charles F. McKhann, "The Naxi and the Nationalities Question," in Harrell, ed., Cultural Encounters, pp. 39-62; and Emily Chao, "Hegemony, Agency, and Re-presenting the Past," in Melissa J. Brown, ed., Negotiating Ethnicities in China and Taiwan (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, China Research Monograph no. 46, 1996), pp. 208-239.
29. Anthropologist Stevan Harrell has written several excellent papers on the Yi and the artificial common identity with which they have been labeled. See Stevan Harrell, "The History of the History of the Yi," in Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers, Stevan Harrell, ed., pp. 63-91; "Ethnicity, Local Interests, and the State: Yi Communities in Southwest China," Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. 3 (1990): 515-518; and "Ethnicity and Kin Terms among Two Kinds of Yi," in Ethnicity and Ethnic Change in China, Chien Chao and Nicholas Tapp, eds., pp. 179-98. Harrell notes, in a letter to me, that "Yi intellectuals really do see themselves as Yi, even though for many peasants it doesn't matter - an artificial identity, yes, but not less real than an artificial lake." studies by anthropologists of the Naxi/Mosuo and their self-identity and labeling are Charles F. McKhann, "The Naxi and the Nationalities Question," in Harrell, ed., Cultural Encounters, pp. 39-62; and Emily Chao, "Hegemony, Agency, and Re-presenting the Past," in Melissa J. Brown, ed., Negotiating Ethnicities in China and Taiwan (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, China Research Monograph no. 46, 1996), pp. 208-239.
30. Anthropologist Stevan Harrell has written several excellent papers on the Yi and the artificial common identity with which they have been labeled. See Stevan Harrell, "The History of the History of the Yi," in Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers, Stevan Harrell, ed., pp. 63-91; "Ethnicity, Local Interests, and the State: Yi Communities in Southwest China," Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. 3 (1990): 515-518; and "Ethnicity and Kin Terms among Two Kinds of Yi," in Ethnicity and Ethnic Change in China, Chien Chao and Nicholas Tapp, eds., pp. 179-98. Harrell notes, in a letter to me, that "Yi intellectuals really do see themselves as Yi, even though for many peasants it doesn't matter - an artificial identity, yes, but not less real than an artificial lake." studies by anthropologists of the Naxi/Mosuo and their self-identity and labeling are Charles F. McKhann, "The Naxi and the Nationalities Question," in Harrell, ed., Cultural Encounters, pp. 39-62; and Emily Chao, "Hegemony, Agency, and Re-presenting the Past," in Melissa J. Brown, ed., Negotiating Ethnicities in China and Taiwan (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, China Research Monograph no. 46, 1996), pp. 208-239.
31. A distinction in gender comes into play here. The men, who almost invariably dress in the same attire as the Han and who can normally speak some hanyu, stand at the cutting edge of the shift toward acculturation. The women not only continue to wear distinctive ethnic attire, but they also are less often educated than the men and thus more often entirely dependent on the indigenous language. During this period of transition the women seem to occupy a position that represents to the peoples themselves the symbolic pull of tradition and of ethnicity.
32. The numbers of children that ethnic minorities are permitted to have seems to depend upon how anxious a provincial government is to keep population growth under control. In Yunnan Province, the minority ties that I visited are only allowed to have two children without suffering a fine, the same number of children as are allowed to rural Han families in Yunnan. In Hainan Province, in contrast, the indigenous Li are normally allowed one more child than the Han; a Li farmer is allowed three children, one more than a Han farmer, a Li state-farm worker or city dweller is allowed two children, again one more than his or her Han workmate. (In practice, the poorest Li farmers in the villages I visited tend to have 4-5 children. They are too impoverished to be vulnerable to fines or other sanctions.)
33. For a table showing the minority-population figures from the two censuses, see Beijing Review, 24 December 1990, p. 30.
34. Emily Chao, "Hegemony, Agency, and Re-presenting the Past: The Invention of Dongba Culture among the Naxi of Southwest China," in Negotiating Ethnicities in China and Taiwan, Melissa J. Brown, ed., pp. 216, 217, 235.
35. Schein writes, for example, "It must be stressed that Miao elites not only facilitated Han consumption of their culture as embodied by their women, but also engaged in a kind of ritualized objectification in which they themselves partook of reified representations of their own 'traditions'. This was especially common among those who had left the countryside and, living among the majority, separated in space from their home villages, had begun to cultivate a kind of romantic nostalgia for essentialized versions of their forgotten culture. The chief symbol of this still-recoverable past was the richly adorned Miao girl, usually in song." ("Gender and Internal Orientalism in China," p. 86).