Asia: Local Studies/Global Themes, 18. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. xxiv, 232 pp. (Tables, figures, maps.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-27274-3.
In China, ethnicity structures citizens’ lives, yet tells us nearly nothing about them. On the one hand, the Chinese state rigidly defines the ethnic identities contained within its borders, and citizens are classified according to a list of 56 official ethnicities. On the other, these labels say little about the people they describe; members of a single group may speak different languages, engage in different cultural practices, and otherwise share little in common. Thanks to Louisa Schein, Stevan Harrell and others, we know a great deal about the subjects these categories have produced. We know substantially less, however, about the classification process that created these groups in the first place. Coming to Terms with the Nation represents an ambitious and fascinating attempt to fill this gap. Drawing on archives and interviews with the ethnologists who conducted the classification, Thomas Mullaney provides a rich description of the 1954 Ethnic Classification Project (minzu shibie) in Yunnan Province. Mullaney challenges common understandings of the classification process as rushed and arbitrary, instead locating the minzu shibie within such diverse intellectual traditions as British imperial ethnology, Republican-era social science, and Maoist field research.
Long before the Communist victory in 1949, a central concern of the CCP leadership was integrating diverse ethnic and linguistic groups into the unified Chinese nation it hoped to build. The political solution to this problem lay in creating “minority autonomous regions,” which would (in theory if not in practice) give minority areas limited self-government rights within a unified Chinese state. But this solution presumed that basic facts about the ethnic groups residing within China’s borders—who these groups were and where they lived—were already known. In reality, CCP leaders knew little about the diverse groups they hoped to integrate into the “new China.”
As Mullaney documents, the CCP’s earliest systematic attempt to acquire this knowledge—the 1953–1954 national census—only made this problem more intractable. To the surprise of state authorities, an open-ended question asking census-takers to specify their ethnicity produced a “chaotic body of data” consisting of over 400 distinct identities (34). Several groups had only one member. Granting this vast number of groups the political representation that the constitution promised to ethnic minorities would have been an impossible task for a fledgling government. By determining which of the hundreds of self-reported ethnicities fit the definition of an ethnic group, the Ethnic Classification Project sought simultaneously to establish the “true” list of Chinese nationalities and to simplify the task of incorporating these groups into the polity.
Chapter 1 confirms what scholars have long assumed to be true: that the Ethnic Classification Project recognized only a small fraction of the ethnic labels that Yunnan’s residents applied to themselves. The book’s bolder claims—and ultimately its greatest contributions—appear in the detailed discussion of the ethnic classification process itself. The conventional wisdom holds that researchers attempted, under extreme time pressure, to redefine a large and diverse set of ethnic groups into a smaller set of accepted categories. These decisions were largely the product of expedience; their only principled justification came from a desire to fit China’s ethnic makeup into the Stalinist model of nationality. Mullaney’s narrative complicates this picture considerably. While Stalin’s conception of natsia was nominally an important component of the classification—it provided the official standard against which groups were to be judged before they could be classified as official ethnic groups—the social scientists who led the classification effort actively reinterpreted this standard in a manner that was at once principled and self-serving.
Chinese ethnologists hoped to make their discipline indispensible to the new Communist leadership, as they had tried and failed to do under Nationalist rule. Doing so required classification researchers to reinterpret Stalin’s typology to include the notion of “ethnic potential,” since few groups possessed the qualities that would justify classifying them as nationalities according to an orthodox interpretation of Stalin’s definition. By turning the Ethnic Classification Project into a search for “precapitalist nationalities,” which their own expert knowledge could identify, classification researchers made their linguistic taxonomy of ethnic groups central to the classification process without challenging the authority of the Communist officials who oversaw it. That the ethnic groups the state ultimately recognized largely reflected the ethnolinguistic taxonomy these scholars had developed years earlier demonstrates their success.
Their reliance on a linguistic definition of ethnicity meant that these social scientists were more indebted to British colonial practice than they were to Soviet theories of nationality. The linguistic taxonomy that researchers used to classify groups according to their “ethnic potential” was already widely accepted as the basis for ethnic classification by Republican-era ethnologists, many of whom remained central to the discipline after the Communist victory. These scholars’ schemas were themselves deeply indebted to the work of H.R. Davies, a British military officer who travelled through Yunnan beginning in 1893 and created a linguistic taxonomy of the ethnic groups he encountered there.
Mullaney’s focus on the colonial roots of China’s ethnic categories poses a bold and convincing challenge to those who see China’s ethnicity policies as a faithful application of a Soviet formula. But as chapter 4 shows, the Communist influence on the ethnic classification process was pronounced. This influence lay less in ideology than in method. As classification researchers and local Communist officials traveled through Yunnan, they used a research method that was part information gathering, part persuasion. Using the group investigation meetings that Mao had pioneered in his research among the Hunan peasantry, the classification teams conducted a “mode of field research … in which the boundary between information and transformation was porous by design” (99). By doing so, they hoped to persuade communities who had long seen themselves as distinct to accept the new ethnic identities that were being thrust upon them by the state.
At the time of the classification, researchers framed these identities only in terms of their “ethnic potential”; the task of bringing these groups into being would be left to the state. As Mullaney’s final chapter documents, sixty years of state-led efforts to reinforce the taxonomy that the classification created—revisionist histories of the 56 recognized ethnic groups, widely available sets of 56 ethnic dolls, and the like—have created a closed set of ethnic categories and forced the many identities that were not recognized by the classification to largely disappear. Although this result is familiar to many students of China, the process by which these categories were generated is not. While Mullaney’s excellent book teaches us a great deal about the genesis of multiethnic China, it also reveals a more general lesson about, in James Scott’s words, “seeing like a state”: before it can rule its subjects, the state must first define them.
Sara A. Newland
Harvard University, Cambridge, USA
pp. 136-138