THE GREAT HAN: Race, Nationalism, and Tradition in China Today. By Kevin Carrico. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2017. xiv, 264 pp. (B&W photos.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-29550-6.
THE HAN: China’s Diverse Majority. By Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015. 200 pp. US$50.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-295-99467-3.
While drafting this joint book review on a China Southern Airlines flight from Beijing to Amsterdam, I decided to skim through a complimentary copy of the inflight magazine Nihao. One of the articles entitled “Touring Around Kyoto in Hanfu” in the August 2018 issue immediately caught my attention, not least because I had just finished reading The Great Han: Race, Nationalism, and Tradition in China Today, Kevin Carrico’s book on the subject of the hanfu clothing movement in contemporary China. The author of the Nihao article described her decision to wear the “traditional clothes of the Han Chinese people” in the Japanese ancient capital of Kyoto “as a brave attempt to cosplay.” The author went on to share that “many curious Japanese girls even approached me and asked me where I rented the dress as they would also like to try it themselves” and other foreigners “asked to take a picture with me and remarked on how beautiful it was!” As innocent as the act of wearing a traditional costume in public as a gesture of self-expression may appear at first glance, this personal decision of dressing up didn’t seem innocuous after reading Carrico’s ethnography. The Great Han uncovers uncomfortable truths around the origins, beliefs, and aims of the Han clothing movement. Through the careful interrogation of daily practices, personal histories, imaginaries, dilemmas, and desires of the movement’s participants, the book shows the continuous appeal and seductive power of ethnic identity labels. The latent pleasure of being recognized as part of the civilizing Han culture and its long history, in which the author of the Nihao article relishes, is what connects her to the subjects of Carrico’s and Joniak-Lüthi’s studies.
In The Han: China’s Diverse Majority, Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi asks broader questions about what it means to be Han Chinese to those assigned with this identity as categorized by the state. Drawing on collaborative semi-structured interviews in Shanghai and Beijing, and ethnographic research in Sichuan and Xinjiang, the author examines how her respondents navigate the official Han identity in relation to other forms of identification. Following the notion of nation as narration, hers is a topographic study of identities, narratives, and discourses around the practices of Han identification, ascription, categorization, and differentiation. Joniak-Lüthi argues that Han identity is best understood as a simultaneous process of storytelling and imagination as well as a series of moments and continuous narratives (43). She finds that the scales of identity, including place-based, occupation-based, and kinship-based affiliations, co-exist in a horizontal relationship, yet contribute to the hierarchical ordering of the Han population. For example, the articulation of Han identity in relation to the attachment to a home place appears to be more tangible than the abstracted Han category itself. This articulation of Han identity in combination with a particular home-place identity provokes discriminations in the marriage, job, and housing markets (12).
In the opening chapter Joniak-Lüthi shows how the Han category has been constructed in historical texts and contends that being identified as a Han is significant to her interviewees since it binds them in a “historically evolved, given identity … through common ancestors” (14). Chapter 2 charts contemporary markers of Han-ness and presents fifteen common narratives that reveal the power dynamics in the tripartite relations between the Han, ethnic minorities, and the Chinese state. Here it becomes clear that the home-place connection is more significant for the Han identity narrations than the bifurcated relationship between the Han majority and ethnic minorities. She points to a central tension in the construction of Han identity that her interviews revealed, namely the challenge to make “Han-ness meaningful” when it “lacks unique characteristics.” (47) In chapter 3 Joniak-Lüthi shows how Han identity comes to life through interrelated narratives, including the importance of home-place identity, national, and state identity, and finds that the significance of Han identity intertwines with other collective and individualized identities. In particular, home-place attachments appear to be more meaningful and familiar to the respondents than the elusive label of Han (89). Chapter 4 discusses how the act of labeling and stereotyping is bound up with negotiations of social hierarchies and power relations. The Han use the tropes of social stereotypes to draw boundaries within the group across multiple scales of spatial distinctions. Throughout the book, the Han emerge as a composite of intertwined, mutually inclusive, overlapping, and relational identities that are simultaneously united and fragmented. The contradiction, highlighted by Joniak-Lüthi, between the apparent invisibility of the Han lamented by many of her interlocutors, and visibility of the Han’s central role in all spheres of life and the Chinese state’s quest to maintain territorial unity and ethnic unity, connects her work closely to Kevin Carrico’s analysis of the hanfu movement.
Carrico’s The Great Han tells the story of what on the surface seems like an incontinent group of hobbyists who like to spend time together dressing up in ancient Han clothing (hanfu). They have an ambivalent relationship with the party-state, and are barely given public spotlight, yet the ideas that they express are well established though remain restrained. What distinguishes the hanfu enthusiasts is their desire to change Chinese society according to the ideal past of the majority Han people that they imagine and hold dear. Carrico situates his analysis in a psychoanalytical approach to nationalism that treats an imaginary national community as an object of desire that emerges from the gaps between ideals and reality (33). In Carrico’s analysis the mismatch between the illusory imagination of the great Chinese nation’s past and individuals’ “uncertain experience” of the present is what gives rise to the hanfu movement’s central idea.
The origins of the hanfu movement date back to 2001 when some Han Chinese felt that their group was being excluded from the dominant representations of Chinese culture and tradition at the Shanghai APEC ministerial meeting. They took their frustrations online where, as a result, the Han Network (Hanwang) emerged and developed into fertile ground for conjuring alternative realities and identities (61). In chapter 1 Carrico carefully shows how the Hanwang network members emulated the ethnic logic and language of the Chinese nation-state. They borrowed “representational motifs” from the state-defined minorities to reinvent the Han as more tangible and asserted, and to reclaim its “unshaken central place in the Chinese nation as a majority group.” However, the network’s true disappointments lay with the character and direction of China’s course of development, which they found difficult to relate to and benefit from. The appeal of a particular Han ethnic narrative and representative trope became a way to fulfill the desire of a coherent, stable, and intelligible identity (42). What is less clear in Carrico’s examination of the movement’s roots is how the transition from online community to face-to-face social network took place and where and how the network members found material resources to realize their ideas of an alternative community.
Chapter 2 shifts the analysis of the structural dimensions of Han identity to the level of individual members’ motivations to join the movement. It details the stories of four Han clothing movement participants struggling to adapt to China’s transformations. Their feelings of a lack of control in their own lives and disappointment when they did not meet societal expectations combined with their lack of confidence in a future without clear direction for self-fulfillment are some of the motivating factors for joining the movement. Their way to escape feelings of being left behind has transformed into the need to become part of an alternative collectivity that fantasizes about a nation of traditional Confucian rituals and Han clothing, untainted by foreign influences. The clothing, rituals, and photography have become the medium and a form of social capital through which participants attempt to bridge the gaps between their imagined and lived experiences. In chapter 4 Carrico shows how the movement’s rituals help participants release their anxieties at critical moments in present-day life by particular re-enactments of the imagined past as a model for the ideal present and future (114). Meticulous photographic records of the movement’s rituals and gatherings further aids to stabilize and objectify the fantasy of the Han clothing movement ideal that can be reproduced and visualized continuously over time.
Chapter 5 interrogates a series of conspiracy theories about the Manchu plots against the Han in state propaganda, family planning campaigns, and cultural practices regurgitated by the Han clothing movement members. Carrico shows how these discursive practices complement group activities aimed at further deepening the lines of division between the Han and the Manchu.
The gendered politics of the Han clothing movement is the subject of chapter 6, which details how the culture and nation as imagined by the group produce a “regressive vision of gender relations” that appeal particularly to the Han men. Objectified as “resources” for national renewal (167), the Han women take the roles of obedient, feminine, pure, reserved members of the nation who have to be isolated and protected from harmful foreign influences. Given the central place of gender in how the movement’s members imagine their alternative collectivity, this chapter could have appeared earlier in the book alongside the discussion of the structural dimensions of Chinese nationalist ideology and practices. It would have helped to highlight the gendered politics of nationalism and gender’s central role in grasping the hanfu movement’s logic and function.
In conclusion, Carrico links the developments of the Han clothing movement to broader trends in Chinese society, including the growing popularity of Confucian education and the post-earthquake reconstruction efforts in Sichuan. This discussion strikes a chord with Joniak-Lüthi’s emphasis on the role of the national school curriculum in cultivating common beliefs about the Han among the general population. It is in the context of these broader trends connecting personal experiences and structural issues that I return to my accidental reading of the article about hanfu cosplay in Kyoto. These two timely and carefully crafted books show the forces that link the hanfu movement to a complex web of discourses, relations, and sentiments taking central stage in Chinese society. Carrico notes that “the final goal of Han Clothing activities … is to produce an imaginarily charmed society in which everyone wears Han Clothing” (106) and Joniak-Lüthi observes that advocates attempt to increase the “visibility” of Han-ness (88). The author of the Nihao article actively contributes to achieving this goal of enlivening an imagined Han history and tradition through not only the act of dressing-up as an “ancient Han girl,” but also by writing about it to an international audience traveling to and from China. To appreciate the complex interplay of personal desires and frustrations with the politics of identity, one has to turn to these fascinating accounts of Han identity articulations that the scholars and students of contemporary China will find illuminating.
Elena Barabantseva
University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom