In striking resemblance to the tribute offerings of the ancient Chinese empires, the minorities, sing and perform ritualized prostrations as they offer their greetings to the studio audience, who appear to be largely members of the Ha majority. They appear so, because the studio audience is uniformly (as if in uniforms) dressed in conservative suits with ties, Mao jackets, or other formal attire, which is in marked contrast to the "colorful costumes" of the minority entertainers.
I couldn’t help noticing however that that though the Hui do not possess their own separate language, and are known for eschewing the "songs and dances" by which many minorities are iconographically represented in China , in this program they sing and dance just like the rest of the performers. Instead of detailed lyrics from a traditional New Year's folk song (of which there are none), the Hui sing their traditional Arabic greeting, A'salam Alei Cum, over and over again. The Chinese subtitles translate this formulaic greeting as "Pengyou Nihao" (Friend, hello).
As multinational, China portrays itself as democratic, claiming "autonomous regions, prefectures, counties, and villages" based on the Soviet model, but in name only, since the Chinese constitution does not allow true geopolitical secession-something perhaps the conservative Russian right-wing now wish Stalin would have thought of when he approved a Soviet constitution that allowed for political secession of the (now former) republics. The myth of democratic representation is critical to China's construction of itself as a modem multinational state, distinguishing and distancing itself from the ancient feudal Chinese empires that did not allow for representation.
Given public criticism over China's treatment of Tibet, it is not surprising that Tibetans are often represented as the most willing subjects of Chinese "democratic liberation." In a 1985 issue of the state-sponsored Nationalities Pictorial, a Tibetan is portrayed as happily voting, as if they really did control their own destinies. The caption reads: "Happiness Ballot." In another published painting in the sane issue, several minorities are portrayed on the Great Wall, happily proclaiming in the caption: "I love the Great Wall"-though the Great Wall was primarily built to keep nomadic peoples out. It is also interesting to note that in this figure clearly geared for school children, the figures on the Great Wall, with one exception, are clearly Muslim: the men wear Turkic and Hui (Muslim Chinese) Islamic hats, and the woman is veiled. The oddman out strangely enough is an African. Perhaps he is represented on the wall with the other minorities to represent their ethnic solidarity; more seriously, perhaps it is to emphasize their corporate "primitivity" (i.e., promoting the idea that China's minorities are like "primitive" Africans), which is key to understanding the position of the minorities in the Marxist-Maoist scheme.
The popularity of this discourse is evidenced by a widelly distributed film directed by Suen Wan and Guo Wuji, 1992., Amazing Marriage Customs' (Jingu Hunsu Qiguai, literally "Strange modern and ancient marriage customs"), distributed by the Nanhai Film Company. Filmed entirely in China with government support, the film is a survey of marriage customs throughout China, with a heavy dose of minority practices, especially in Yunnan. What is noteworthy about the film is not the typical exoticization and eroticization of minorities , but the deliberate structuring of the film along stage evolutionary theory. At the beginning of the film, we are shown primeval visions of a neolithic past and the emergence of primitive mankind. The narrator intones:
Following the "matrilineal" section, the film introduces the Uyghur Turkic Muslims of Xinjiang. "Islam," we are told, "respects patriarchy and husband right." And "women are subordinate." The final scene begins with views of the Tiananmen and Forbidden City and, against a background of Han couples dating in the park, the narrator states:
The characteristic of modem marriage is freedom, monogamy, and equality between sexes. The law of marriage stipulates ... No force on either side. Or a third party interfering! Love is most essential in modem marriage. Having love affairs [tan lianai, lit., "speaking about love relations"] is a prelude of marriage. In the countryside of Beijing you may observe this wonderful prelude.
The film then notes that in a "modem large" city it is often difficult to find a mate, and therefore computerized dating is featured as a "modem" solution for finding a mate. The film culminates with a grand mass wedding of 100 couples, dressed in formal Western attire, who were actually married at the Beijing Hotel as a result of successful computerized matchmaking. The narrator concludes: "Monogamy means equality between the sexes. This harmonious union of love, marriage, and sex life notes the result of evolution in history."
The minorities play a very important role in China's official vision of history, nationality, and development. Their "primitivity" contrasts with supposed Han "modernity." Minorities become a marked category, characterized by sensuality, colorfulness, and exotic custom. This contrasts with the "unmarked" nature of Han identity. "Hanness" for the Chinese connotes civility and modernity, and this is perhaps why more "educated" minorities such as the Manchu and Koreans, are never exoticized as sensual or primitive. The Han, though they supposedly comprise 91.2 percent of China's population, are rarely described or studied as Han per se, whereas whole research centers and colleges are devoted to the study and teaching of minorities in China. Anthropologists of Euro-American society have begun to note a similar process in the unmarked majority category of "whiteness." Majorities, according to Virginia Dominguez's revealing study of Louisiana Creole identity, become "White, by definition" (Dominguez White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole.1986). It is only the so-called "ethnics" (a term in the Oxford English Dictionary that comes into the English idiom as denoting "heathen"), who are marked by "culture." Majorities by extension, become denaturalized, homogenized, and essentialized as "same." This is particularly true, it seems, of Asia, where large blocks of Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans are thought to be "homogeneous."
By contrast, as Richard Smith ("Mapping China's World: Cultural Cartography in Late Imperial Times," in Wen-hsin Yeh (ed.), Landscape, Power and Culture in Chinese Society. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, China Research Monograph, 1998,49.) has shown in his work on mapping in China, distinct boundaries were not a feature of Qing Dynasty maps, which showed no obvious borders separating China from, or clearly delineating the individual kingdoms and territories of, mainland Southeast Asia as Russia, India, and Central Asia.
Even those strongly tied with the "center" of the "Middle Kingdom," as Han scholars, writers, and officials, are likely to have visualized its boundaries not as distinct linear borders, but more as horizons of influence and contact. This notion is reflected in such terms for "boundary" as fen-ye, a compound of a character meaning to divide or part, and another character, ye, meaning both "wild" and "open country" and in another common character for boundary, fie, can also denote scope, extent, and realms. Similarly, Khmer and Burmese terms for boundaries existed in the nineteenth century, but like the Siamese terms analyzed by Thongchai Winichakul, these signified "areas, districts or frontiers" (Thongchai Siam Mapped: The History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. University of Hawai'i Press, 1994: 75) and none correlated with the British notion of a "boundary" as a line.
In nationalist movements, maps have served as a highly potent weapon in turning linguistic and religious groupings into new national entities, not least because they give an explicit visual dimension to the idea of a nation. As Michael Herzfeld writes, maps "furnish emergent ethnic solidarities with expressive force and direction" and with what he terms the "carefully guarded spaces of cultural intimacy from which they may later emerge in resplendently militant and public form" (Herzfeld Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. London and New York: Routledge,1997: 13).
From the 1860s to 1890s, maps formed part of China's self-strengthening movement, and study associations, books and journals devoted to geographic and cartographic issues burgeoned in China, as they were in England, France, and other European centers. Not until the late Qing did Chinese cartographers begin to produce their own colorful, modern looking maps (Smith 1998: 91). Japan's victory in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-5 struck the final death-blow to Chinese cartography. From now on, as Smith writes, "Chinese nationalism affected in fundamental ways the rendering of geographical space by cartographers in China" (Smith 1998: 74-75).
Visiting Border Regions
During the Second World War, Kunming the capital of Yunnan near the Border of Burma became the de facto military capital of unoccupied China and a hive of intellectual activity, attracting many scholars and students, sustaining a 60,000-strong refugee community. Yunnan remained the last bastion of anti-Communist forces well into the 1950s. After 1949, autonomous regions and districts were set up in zones where the minorities formed large enough communities, but population transfers in various political guises continued to alter the ethnic complexion of the province.
China's southwesternmost province, Yunnan borders Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam to its west and south, and Tibet, Sichuan, Guizhou, and Guangxi to its north and east. A rough, mountainous land affected by the formation of the Himalayas, its highest point is Meili Snow Mountain, in the northwest, and its lowest is at Hekou, on the Vietnam border.
One way in which the Chinese government has responded to the challenge of countless people moving in and out of China, movements which threaten to destabilize and denaturalize the geographic and political construct of the Chinese state, is by retreating into a symbolic, cultural universe of national constructs over which it still feels it has considerable control.
Yunnan's position on the boundaries of Chinese and Southeast Asian civilizations was reflected in the dual tribute historically paid by local chieftains to the Burmese King and the Chinese emperor. Yunnan's cultural proximity to Southeast Asia, and its geographical remoteness from China's political center rendered it a haven for opponents of government. It remained under Mongol control after the fall of the Yuan dynasty until 1381. Population pressures in central China inspired Ming policy to "Sinify" the area through voluntary and forced Han migration in the seventeenth century.
By the 1990s, Yunnan's population was over two thirds Han, the rest comprising thirty-two of China's fifty-six indigenous ethnic groups. Fifteen of these groups reside along southwest China's 4,060 km border, mingling with fellow ethnics in Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam. The chief such groups are the Yi (Tibeto-Burman) at 4,054,000, also found in Laos and Vietnam; the Hani (Tibeto-Burman), 1,248,000, also found in Burma, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam; the Dai (Tai-Kedai), 1,014,000, also found in Thailand, Burma, Laos, and Vietnam and the Zhuang (Tai-Kedai), 1,003,000. Ethnic groups are concentrated in fairly cohesive enclaves. In Xishuangbanna, for example, the Dai alone comprise 35% of the population.
In 1993, Wu Guangfan, Secretary-General of Yunnan Provincial Government emphasized the salience of regional links and stressed the remoteness of Beijing, stating that "Close neighbors are better than distant relatives" . But where central governments once took pains to rein such feelings in, the 1990s saw a radical reorientation in central directives. Symbolized by Deng Xiaoping's "Southern Tour," involving the top leader's high-profile visit to Guangdong and Shenzhen in 1992, this shift brought official endorsement and encouragement to Yunnan's vision of regional integration. In 1984, the provincial administrations of Chengdu, Chongqing, Guangxi, Guizhou, Sichuan, Tibet, and Yunnan established the "Southwestern Economic Cooperation Zone" (SECZ) to pool economic efforts and resources and to focus central government attention on their needs and ambitions. Despite the obvious economic benefits for Yunnan's inhabitants, this shift in emphasis away from Beijing-centric lines of vision was thought to require a complete rethinking by some senior government figures in Yunnan and its partner provinces in what now became known as the "Big Southwest”. We must "liberate our thinking" and "turn our perspective around" so as to adopt this policy of "regionalization" (quyuhua) which was a prerequisite for Yunnan's economic integration with Southeast Asia.
As described by Governor of Yunnan He Zhiqiang, regionalization has effectively transformed Yunnan from a place on China's "periphery" to a "frontline." China was still "opening up"-but it was opening up in new directions, no longer just to Japan and Europe, but to Southeast Asia and South Asia. In this process of "throwing wide open the southern door and marching towards Asia," Yunnan held a critical role. But in order to exercise that role to full advantage, knowledge was needed: it was time for China to learn about the economies, cultures, societies, and regions on its southern frontier.
After a slow start, the people's commune system was introduced among the Dai Lue of Xishuangbanna in 1966. Vestiges of feudalism were seen as not only being marked in the lifestyles, but ingrained into the organization of space and style of architecture. Eradication of feudalism in this era of high revolution necessitated the destruction, desecration, secularization, or neglect of temples and sacred sites. Han China's mission civilisatrice took a particularly brutal shape during the forced assimilation drives of the Cultural Revolution.
After the central government renounced these policies of violence and adopted a policy of cultural conservation, these policies have been replaced with a different course of modernization. Since the early 1980s, to be modern, or anti-feudal, has required brick and cement construction of party offices, schools and so forth, in place of community centers traditionally organized around temples or in communal salaa, raised wooden shelters which function as points of social organization and rest-houses for monks on pilgrimage throughout Theravada Southeast Asia.
Interestingly, notes anthropologist Jacques Lemoine, these modes of construction were so foreign to Dai that itinerant construction workers from the northern town of Dali were hired. In addition, Buddhist monks were invited from Moung Young in Burma to come and direct religious ceremonies and instruct their boys in monastic life and the Buddhist scriptures. In considering the economic role of the monastery in this process of reconstruction, Lemoine points to its role as an "incentive to produce more, save, and finally make donations to the monastic ceremony" (Lemoine "Ethnicity, Culture and Development among Some Minorities of the People's Republic of China," in Chien Chiao and Nicholas Tapp (eds.), Ethnicity and Ethnic Groups in China, special issue, New Asia Academic Bulletin, 1989,vol. VIII, 1-10: 4-5.).
The Myanmar government has in turn invested considerable money and publicity in the restoration of the Tooth Relic Pagoda. A historic monument to Chinese-Burmese friendship and Buddhist relations, the Pagoda is a regular feature on Chinese delegation visits. In 1995, great fanfare accompanied the official return, from China, of the revered Buddhist tooth relic for installation in the pagoda after its "1500 years in China." Such visits are enshrined in official publications, such as China Myanmar Goodwill Visits of Great Historic Significance, an illustrated, English language pamphlet containing reprints of relevant news articles, photographs, and songs, published in Myanmar in 1997.
It is also interesting that the promotion of the Great Wall as national heritage, and campaigns to preserve and restore the Great Wall precisely coincided with the promulgation of Deng Xiaoping's "open door policy." Although a new development, this promotion of the Great Wall as a national symbol represented a political continuum in its reiteration of a specifically Northern Chinese feature as an all-encompassing motif.
Back in Kunming my guide told me about the Hui in the area, believed to be the descendants of Muslim traders from the Middle East, who arrived in China by land and by sea. Unlike the Turkic Muslims of China's far west, the Hui live scattered throughout the country, from Lhasa to Harbin, Gansu, Qinghai and here in Yunnan.
Traditionally, the Hui do not get along with the Turkic Muslims of the far west and are loyal to China. In the warlord years, Hui armies put down Turkic separatists and carried the Chinese (Taiwanese)Kuomintang banner to the Pamirs. Because of their loyalty, the Hui is represented on the Chinese national flag. The red banner of the People's Republic bears a large yellow star for the Han majority, and four smaller yellow stars for the Manchu, Mongol,Tibetan and Hui. .Although the Hui always have been the diaspora, the immigrant in China, often racialized as the other. Even their name, "Hui" in Chinese can mean "to return," as if they were never at home in China and destined to leave.
According to the official nationality census and literature in China, the Hui people are the second most populous of China's fifty-five recognized minority nationalities, who altogether comprise almost eight percent of the total population. The Hui are the most widespread minority, inhabiting every region, province, city, and over ninety-seven percent of the nation's counties. It is noteworthy that while the Hui may represent a small fragment of the population in most areas (with the exception of Ningxia), they often make up the vast majority of the minority population in Handominated areas. This is also true for most of China's cities where the Hui are the main urban ethnic group. It is conventionally thought that China's Muslim minorities are concentrated in the northwest comer, near Soviet Central Asia. Surprisingly, after Ningxia and Gansu, the third largest population of Hui is found in Henan Province, in central China. Their sixth largest concentration is in Yunnan, and there are over 200,000 of them in Beijing, the nation's capital.
There is also extensive economic and occupational diversity found among the Hui, from cadres to clergy, rice farmers to factory workers, schoolteachers to camel drivers, and poets to politicians. In the north, the majority of Hui are wheat and dry rice agriculturists, while in the south, they are primarily engaged in wet-rice cultivation and aquaculture. Since the collectivization campaigns of the 1950s, most Hui were prevented from engaging in the small private businesses that were their traditional specializations. Hui run successful restaurants throughout China, and across its borders, which I have visited in Thailand, Bishkek, Almaty, Istanbul, and even Los Angeles, where there are six.
Descended from Persian, Arab, Mongolian, and Turkish Muslim merchants, soldiers and officials who settled in China from the 7th to 14th centuries and intermarried with Han women, largely living in isolated communities, the only thing that some but not all had in common was a belief in Islam. Until the 1950s in China, Islam was simply known as the "Hui religion" (Hui jiao)-believers in Islam were Huijiao believers. Until then, any person who was a believer in Islam was a "Hui religion disciple" (Huijiao tu).
Nevertheless, they are recognized by the state as one nationality, the Hui, and they themselves now use that self-designation in conversations with other Hui and non-Hui. Like their unique Islamic architecture and art, Hui combine often, as they say, "Chinese characteristics on the outside, and Islamic ones on the inside," with mosques appearing as tempels.
Another interest of mine was to visit the area near the Tarim Basin where ‘mummies’ of western China fascinated scholars at the time due to their ‘Caucasoid’ features, well-preserved material culture, and putative ‘European’ origins. Thus I moved on to an opposite border near the ‘silk road’, Xinjiang province, see: www.maps-of-china.com
Here merchant and limited agrarian practices, gradually established Khocho or Gaochang, an Uyghur city-state based in Turfan for four centuries (850-1250). The gradual Islamicization of the Uyghur from the 10th to as late as the 17th centuries, while displacing their Buddhist religion, did little to bridge these oases-based loyalties. Justin Rudelson convincingly argued that the "oasis identities" among the contemporary Uyghur often prevail over religious or national identity, dividing them along local and linguistic lines (Rudelson, Oasis Identities: Uyghur Nationalism Along China's Silk Road. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
With the arrival of Islam, the ethnonym "Uyghur" however fades from the historical record. Instead, we find the proliferation of such localisms as "yerlik" (persons of the land), "sart" (caravaneer), "taranchi" (agriculturalists from the Tarim basin transplanted to Yili under the Qianlong Emperor), and other oasis-based localisms.
When I have asked Kazaks in Istanbul and in Germany why they attempted so hard to preserve what they thought to be a "traditional" Kazak identity, they often have told me, "We are descended from the great Kazak nomad leader Genghis Khan (he was Kazak you know, not Mongol), we know our entire genealogy, and it is the first thing every Kazak remembers about themselves, besides being Muslim. Whenever we meet another person who looks Kazak on the street, we don't ask them if they are Kazak, but what Kazak lineage, which Jüz they are from. Then we can see just how closely we are related.
Since the dissolution of the former Soviet Union in 1991, they have had many more opportunities to do so. The Turkish government gave 10,000 scholarships to invite Central Asians to study in Turkey in 1992-93, and 10,000 more in successive years. Many were not prepared for the difficult adjustment that they would have living in Turkey. Not only did they complain about the cramped dorms and less money than they were expected to receive, but also how difficult Turkish was to learn, how horrible the food was (no rice pilaf), and how different the culture was from home.
They did not take to Turkish society as quickly as the politicians in Ankara expected. And many Central Asians eventually returned from ,Turkey disappointed by what they found there, complaining of its secularism, hedonism, and inferior education, which many of them found far beneath their Russian training. At the same time, Turks in Turkey discovered how different they were from their "ancestors" and "distant cousins," leading to increasingly public doubts about Atatürk's dogma regarding the Central Asian origins of the Turks.
The problem is we do not know much about these "sub-Turkic" peoples, since they are regarded by the Turkish state as just "Turks" and not counted as minorities. Though there have been many studies on the official minorities in Turkey, the Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and even the Kurds, there has been almost nothing done on the sub-Turkic identities, since most assumed that once these people came to Turkey, they just blended in, becoming Turk, or what is culturally and politically defined as "White" in the U.S., just as in China, Cantonese, Shanghainese, and Hakka are defined as "Han."
One Swedish scholar, Ingvar Svanberg, noticed the profoundly different acculturation patterns of, Uyghurs and Kazaks in Turkey. Svanberg estimated that there are 60-100,000 of these Inner Asian émigrés, but we really do not know, because they are not counted by a state interested in defining a majority, through quantifying only certain minorities. Despite the popular Turkish proverb: "Türkiyede yet misbir buçuk milliyet var" ("There are 71 and a half nations/ethnoreligious groups in Turkey").
During the Republican period, Uyghur identity was again marked by factionalism along locality, religious and political lines. Forbes, in his detailed analysis of the complex warlord politics of Republican Xinjiang, finds important continuing distinctions Genealogies travel well. Kazak notions of transhumance based on the auyl that trace to the roots of nomadic descent lines also extend far beyond any contemporary configurations of the nation-state. It allows Kazak networks that extend throughout Central Asia, China, Turkey, and Europe. For Kazaks who have in the past been socially restricted from marrying any relative within five generations, the oral genealogical tradition becomes a critically important cognitive map of relational alterity-defining potential spouses, allies, and trading partners. Despite the disappearance of complete nomadic pastoralism in the former Soviet Central Asia, where we rarely find herders traveling as families, nomadic nostalgia can be seen in public monumentalism, museum displays, the revival of "nomadic" popular culture in song and poetry and it even finds its representation on the Kazak and Kyrgyz State seals and flags. On a field of blue, the Kazakstan flag shows the symbol of an eagle soaring past a golden sun, reminiscent of the days when Kazak pastoralists hunted with eagles. Remarkably absent are any references to Soviet or even Islamic influences.
The post-Cold War period has led to a downward movement of opposition: it is no longer a U.S.-Soviet-Chinese trilateral configuration, but a much more particularized, multipolar, and multivalent world, where shifting identities may move quickly up and down or even between scales of relation depending on specific circumstances. Without the Russian and U.S. threat to China's sovereignty, lower-level identities may increasingly come into play, evidenced by increasing "southern nationalisms" among the Cantonese, Fujianese, Hakka, and others empowered by new-found economic wealth.
This project also calls into question the nature of majority national identities in Turkey, the former Soviet Union, and China. Recent studies of the Marxist influence on national identity construction in these regions have often ignored the process by which majority groups get constructed: the Turk, the Russian, and the Han Chinese. The "Turk" in Ottoman history, was the tent-dwelling nomad, and not held up as the admirable essence of Turkish nationhood until the rush from empire to nation associated with Atatürk. A similar transition from empire to nation led the early Chinese nationalists to appropriate a Japanese-derived term for nation (minzoku) and label initially 5 under the nationalists and later 56 groups under the Communists as "nations" (minzu). The notion of the Han as a minzu (nationality) is a quite recent phenomenon, popularized by Sun Yat-sen in relational opposition to Tibetans, Mongols, Manchu, and Hui, in his 5 peoples policy, and more importantly, to the foreign imperialists, all of whom were perceived as "nations" (Gladney 1994a). The category of "Han" as a people was actually left to China by the Mongols, who included all northern peoples as Han (including the Koreans), as distinguished from southerners (nan ren), Central Asians (semu ren), and the Mongols. Now that higher-level post-imperial, and then Cold War, oppositions have subsided, China may find itself moving down the scale into serious sub-Han ethnic and national alterities, particularly with the economic rise of southern nationalisms, historically and linguistically less identified with the Han ethnonym.
It is clear that we must attend to the nature of shifting national identities in these regions, and the jmpact of changing international geopolitics. But geopolitics is not enough, as these processes of identity formation and re-formation cannot be understood without attention to historiography and cultural studies. It is even more apparent that relations between Turkey, Russia, and China will hinge on the shifting identities of the mainly Turkic, mainly Muslim peoples in the region. Identities, as this chapter has sought to show, are not easily united across pan-Turkic or pan-Islamic lines. The styles of national identity among these groups pose fundamental challenges, or transgressions, to the nation-states they find themselves in: Uyghur indigenity rejects Chinese claims to "their" land; Kazak idealization of nomadic transhumance suggests that no nation-state should be allowed to contain them; and Hui hybridity argues against the very notion of the "nation," that the diasporic condition is part of everyone's modem and postmodern predicament, and that there is no pure nation, ethnicity, or race that can claim state power on that alone. Perhaps this belief in hybridity has generally kept the Hui from voicing separatist tendencies.
In China, recognition of official national identities has empowered these groups in their claims against the nation, particularly for the Hui and Uyghur, to a crystallization and ethnogenesis of identities-identities that have now moved above and beyond the bounds of the Chinese nation-state, encouraging other unrecognized groups to push for recognition and political power. And lest one think that these so-called "marginal" unrecognized peoples are irrelevant to Chinese history and society, we must remember that the Taipings had their origins in the southwestern corner of the country, in Guangxi among the Hakka and Yao, splitting and nearly toppling the Qing Empire. The person who helped bring the Qing finally to an end was Dr. Sun Yat-sen, a true member of the modem transnational diaspora, a Cantonese, born and raised in Hawaii, educated in Japan.
