Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. xiii, 207 pp. (Maps.) US$74.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-19-993629-8.
The Uyghur and Tibetan people have had a notoriously difficult relationship with the state. Even today, most of them continue to reject, sometimes violently, the form of national identity it proposes. By comparison, most of China’s other 53 ethnic minority groups have been much more accommodating. Why? This is a complicated question which Professor Enze Han, a lecturer on the international security of East Asia at SOAS in London, is attempting to answer. By and large, his explanations are convincing.
The essence of his argument is that focusing on domestic factors, e.g., a lack of economic opportunity or limited religious and cultural freedoms, is, of course, crucial to determine whether a group will contest the legitimacy of the state. But this approach only yields an incomplete picture. External factors are equally important, particularly for groups that entertain close links with an organized diaspora. For instance, most Uyghurs will naturally find that the lives of their ethnic kin in Central Asia have much greater meaning than those of any “domestic other.” As Han rightfully points out, “the dynamic of ethnic political mobilization is different for ethnic groups that have extensive external kin relations” (11).
This is a highly sensible premise. But how does it measure up to reality? After briefly describing the historical context in which China’s recent nation-building policies have developed, Han explores this question in five short chapters, each one focussing on a different ethnic group: the Uyghur, Joseonjok (Chinese Korean), Mongol, Dai and Tibetan. Using data he gathered through his own fieldwork between 2006 and 2008, Han shows how domestic and international factors have modulated in different ways the response of each of these groups to state policies.
Han begins with the Uyghurs. For years, this Turkic minority has been living under well-documented cultural, religious and economic restrictions. This largely explains its tense relationship with the state. But that is not all. As Han points out, when the Uyghurs turn their gaze to the near abroad, they see various examples of prosperous Turkic peoples. For example, Han uses the most recent statistics available to show how GDP per head has consistently been lower in Xinjiang than in Kazakhstan, where the largest population of Uyghur expatriates live, or Turkey, which still exerts a significant cultural influence. In recent years, this contrast has been further accentuated by the fact that Xinjiang’s robust economic growth has brought few tangible benefits to the Uyghurs.
By comparison, being part of China has brought much clearer economic gains to the Mongol community: two decades of rapid growth ensured that by 2007, GDP per head in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR), where most ethnic Mongols live, was twice as high as in Mongolia. But not all is rosy in the IMAR and Han’s surveys show that many Mongols believe their struggling culture is actually much better protected across the border. They also recognize that Mongolia is a democracy, albeit an imperfect one, and that it offers greater political freedoms than China. In theory, such sentiments could be exploited to foster a more acute sense of identity within the Mongol populations of China, but there is no widely recognized international organization or charismatic leader in a position to do so. This is in marked contrast with the Uyghurs and Tibetans, both of whom benefit from the support of outside advocates, the World Uyghur Congress and the Dalai Lama, respectively. This lack of outside assistance and encouragement partly explains why the Mongols have not articulated grand strategies of self-determination.
What of the Dai? This minority group, which is found mostly in southern Yunnan and numbers just over a million people, maintains close kinship relations with communities in Burma, Thailand and Laos, none of which have been bastions of political or economic stability in recent years. This has made the Dai realize the relative prosperity they have enjoyed in China and so their gripes have largely focused on local concerns.
The Joseonjok, a population of approximately two million people from China’s northeast, constitute a somewhat special case: a large segment of their external kin, i.e., those who live in South Korea, are vastly more prosperous and enjoy incomparable political freedoms. So why have the Joseonjok not mobilized to contest the state’s legitimacy, like the Uyghurs or the Tibetans? Han points to several factors, most significantly that neither of the two Koreas, nor any outside organization for that matter, has shown interest “in supporting the Joseonjok politically on issues related to group autonomy within the Chinese state” (66). Equally important, the Chinese Korean minority has had a relatively stable relationship with the state: it was an early supporter of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and its members still occupy a disproportionately high number of positions in the Party’s structure. Thus, for those dissatisfied with the status quo, the dominant strategy has been to emigrate en masse to South Korea; according to some estimates 10 percent of all Joseonjok may now be living south of the 38th parallel.
Han ends his study with a chapter on Tibet. Since he was unable to conduct fieldwork in the Tibetan Autonomous Region or in neighbouring provinces with large Tibetan communities, his narrative is largely based on secondary sources. Here, Han has chosen to give less importance to economic factors due to his assumption that “the omnipresent status of Buddhism in Tibetan society also means that “earthly” obsessions with material wealth and comforts are perhaps not as important as in the other societies discussed in the book.” This feels a little bit gratuitous and somewhat self-serving, but Han nonetheless convincingly shows how the ebb and flow of external support has closely conditioned the relationship of the Tibetan community with the Chinese state.
If one must point to a weakness in Han’s study, it is probably that his samples are often small. His work on the Dai, for example, focused on a single community, that of Xishuangbanna in southern Yunnan, while his surveys in the IMAR and the Joseonjok areas targeted relatively small numbers of individuals whose opinions may not be representative of the communities as a whole. To be fair, conducting fieldwork in China, particularly on a highly sensitive issue such as the contentious relationship between ethnic minorities and the state, is often challenging. Despite this shortcoming, this book constitutes a useful addition to our understanding of the relationship between the Chinese state and its ethnic minorities.
Martin Laflamme
Embassy of Canada, Beijing, China
(Views presented are solely those of the reviewer)