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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Mullaney, Thomas S. Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
Main Argument:
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Mullaney argues that the Ethnic Classification Project "stands at the center of practically all questions of ethnicity in contemporary China, being itself part of the history of each of the minzu categories to which it gave shape and, in some cases, existence" (4). He differentiates between the histories of differentiation and of categorization, arguing (rightly) that these are not the same thing; one is an organic process of change on the ground, while the other is an epistemological process that may or may not take those changes into account in any meaningful fashion. Mullaney also makes a very interesting argument that he does not take up again, namely that the Ethnic Classification Project was part of the PRC's process of learning how to "see like a state," and that it must be considered within the trajectory of China's overall post-imperial transition. Mullaney retains the translation of minzu as "Ethnic" in the Ethnic Classification Project because his research demonstrates that, rather than being conceptualized by Communist Party bureaucrats, the categories of the Project were the result of the work of ethnologists and linguists.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Mullaney argues that there were three reasons for the PRC to incorporate minzu within its new political structure: one, "the deeply historical problem of maintaining the territorial integrity of a highly diverse empire" (20); two, the need to differentiate the PRC from the Republic, which had advocated a mono-ethnic China comprised of the "Zhonghua minzu"; and three, "the failure of the state’s initial experiment with a highly noninterventionist policy of self-categorization" (21), in which the PRC had attempted to allow minzu members to self-identify, a situation which yielded classificatory chaos that would have had politically destabilizing results if it had been allowed to stand as-was. The Qing had let minzu groups define themselves because it had had no paramount interest in defining them or even in fixing their relations to the state beyond securing tribute and internal security, so had never needed to fix all of the ethnic groups over which it held sway. The Republican revolutionaries were staunchly anti-Manchu, and their elaboration of the notion of Chinese minzu fell into two phases: the northern-centric "Five Peoples" conception of minzu espoused by Sun Yat-Sen, and the "one China" minzu of Chiang Kai-Shek, which were both a part of their attempts to construct China as a modern nation-state. The Communists promised ethnic rights to minzu as part of their anti-Nationalist program, and so had to follow through once in power. After their first attempt at a census revealed that they would have to standardize the minzu categories, the Project in fact constructed a remarkably synthetic system due to the influence of the social scientists it employed--and in fact, had it followed pre-existing models, it is highly likely that there would be more than 56 minzu in China today. Third, in Mullaney's view, the CCP learned that "it was only through categorization that a multitude of people could be recast as a singular, corporate person, and only through category that a variety of conceptions of minzu could be brought into congress with one another, both literally and figuratively" (40). Fourth, this recovers the ambiguity of minzu groupings prior to standardization, and also that the CCP did not acquire full-fledged governmentality when it triumphed over the Nationalists on 1 October 1949. Instead, it had to learn to see like a state.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the beginnings of the Ethnic Classifciation Project, and in particular excavates the weird history of the origins of its taxonomic worldview: now with Soviet colonial practices, but rather those of the British empire in the person of one H.R. Davies. Davies' amateur anthropological taxonomy was based solely on linguistic characteristics as derived from his wandering around Yunnan in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Contra Laura Hostetler, according to Mullaney, Republic ethnologists rejected the idea of continuity between Ming/Qing and their own ethnotaxonomies; those same ethnologists were the ones now employed by the PRC to carry out the Ethnic Classification Project. Davies' much more elegant ethnotaxonomy allowed ethnologists to easily make both synchronic and diachronic readings of Yunnan's ethnological past and present. Davies' model appealed both for what it did as well as for how he did it, playing to ethnologists' sense of themselves as the advocates for minorities. The Ethnic Classification Project thus represents the rough ethnological consensus of specialists more than it does the CCP.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the actual praxis of the ECP, which was conducted by academics under the supervision of CCP officials. There were two broad stipulations handed down: one, that amalgamation was the name of the game, with which the academics had no quarrel, as taxonomic simplification was one of their own longstanding principles. The second stipulation was that minzu must meet Stalin's criteria for ethnic minorities: a common language, a common territory, a common mode of economic production, and a common psychology (= culture), and that they were not precapitalist communities (narod), why by definition could not be full-fledged nationalities (Russian natsia). The innovation of one researcher, Lin Yaohua, was to flip the minzu [ἐθνος] model so that it was a model of minzu jituan [ethnonational blocs], focused not on "factors that distinguished different forms and stages of human organization and emphasize instead the one factor which united them: the potential for full-fledged nationality or ethnicity. it was this potential that, for Lin, served as the common denominator among each of Stalin’s stages, and raised at least the possibility of defining groups in terms of what they could become rather than what they were at present" (83). Li then removed the "jituan" from minzu jituan and made it equivalent to ἐθνος and narod, thus dropping natsia. Thus minzu were made dynamic, plausible communities rather than static existing communities, and thus also, Mullaney argues, "Classification researchers were planning from the outset to base their taxonomic recommendations not strictly on the inherent qualities or characteristics of the communities under examination, but also an assessment of the state’s capacity to interpose itself and bring about the actualization of the proposed minzu categories" (90). Thus the Stalinist model was applied in theory but put into practice more loosely (matching practice in the USSR itself).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the fieldwork process by which the ECP researchers--reliant on the machinery of the Communist state--traversed the Yunnan countryside to gather their data. Crucially, they did not merely passively collect observations or in any meaningful way pretend to objectivity; rather, using techniques more or less directly borrowed from Communist cadre training, they used group interviews, specifically the "investigation meeting" pioneered by Mao, to actively manufacture the consent of the categorized to the new system that they were simultaneously evolving. As part of this strategy, they attempted wherever possible to rile on local elites and prestigious figures, relying on them to influence members of their communities indirectly. As Mullaney pithily puts it, "if researchers helped the state see the peoples of Yunnan categorically, the state would now help researchers (and itself) secure the consent of the categorized" (96). Indeed, since time in the field was so short and the team went to Yunnan knowing more or less what they wanted to find, fieldwork was geared towards creating this consent among members of ostensibly different groups, or at least towards minimizing conflict. Mullaney concludes that "the Classification team’s methodology is best understood as a hybrid of two traditions of social research: the ethnological tradition developed by Chinese academics in the Republican period and Communist methods developed before and just following the founding of the People’s Republic" (119).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the engineering of the fifty-six minzu after the main work of the ECP was finished, arguing that "by simultaneously surfacing and canonizing the officially recognized minzu and sublimating and subordinating the rest, the Chinese state has been remarkably successful in turning the fifty-six-minzu model into common sense" (122).The canonized ethnonyms are found in certain domains, and the unrecognized ethnonyms also have their domains: "the discursive realm of taxonomic synonymy, the 'yet-to-be-classified minzu,' and the emergent discourse of 'newly discovered' groups" (128). With specific respect to the final category, some Chinese ethnologists have begun employing the term "zuqun," since "minzu" is now an official designation and the other term (Taiwanese in origin) allows them to escape the state's official discourse. As Mullaney notes, "the development of such a counterdiscourse once again raises the prospect for a theoretically grounded subversion, as it did in the first half of the twentieth century" (133).
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Mullaney notes that the 56-minzu model has become the anchor for whole realms of discourse in China today, and, interestingly, that "the accuracy of the taxonomic conclusions of the 1954 Classification project has changed over time" as more and more people have come to accept them as natural and given (135). Thus, the ECP was nothing so much as a "history of the future" which, conveniently, was also able to create that future through writing it. Even if or when the ethnotaxonomy of China changes in the future, as it has in the past, the ECP will prove a vital part of that new future by virtue of its history thus far.
Critical assessment: Mullaney is a really smart dude, and therefore it's doubly frustrating that this book is so short. I am reliably informed that he knows a lot more about this topic than he actually says in the book, and even aside from that, he gestures towards some really interesting ideas in his introduction that are never picked up again in the book--indeed, he never pursues most of the interesting implications of his ideas. So, I think he is substantially correct as far as he goes, but this is a short book, and if I were an editor, I would have asked him for the missing 1/3 of the manuscript before I published it.
Further reading: Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Scott, Seeing Like a State; Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China
Main Argument:
These differences in ethnotaxonomy [from the Qing to the Republic to the PRC] cannot be accounted for at the level of the categorized. Rather, what changed over the course of this period were the ethnopolitical worldviews of the different Chinese regimes, the modes and methods of categorization they employed, and the political commitments that guided their respective efforts to reconceptualize China in the postimperial era. There was no single “search for a nation in modern Chinese nationalism”—rather, there were searches, in the plural. (3)Historiographical Engagement: James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State; others
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Mullaney argues that the Ethnic Classification Project "stands at the center of practically all questions of ethnicity in contemporary China, being itself part of the history of each of the minzu categories to which it gave shape and, in some cases, existence" (4). He differentiates between the histories of differentiation and of categorization, arguing (rightly) that these are not the same thing; one is an organic process of change on the ground, while the other is an epistemological process that may or may not take those changes into account in any meaningful fashion. Mullaney also makes a very interesting argument that he does not take up again, namely that the Ethnic Classification Project was part of the PRC's process of learning how to "see like a state," and that it must be considered within the trajectory of China's overall post-imperial transition. Mullaney retains the translation of minzu as "Ethnic" in the Ethnic Classification Project because his research demonstrates that, rather than being conceptualized by Communist Party bureaucrats, the categories of the Project were the result of the work of ethnologists and linguists.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Mullaney argues that there were three reasons for the PRC to incorporate minzu within its new political structure: one, "the deeply historical problem of maintaining the territorial integrity of a highly diverse empire" (20); two, the need to differentiate the PRC from the Republic, which had advocated a mono-ethnic China comprised of the "Zhonghua minzu"; and three, "the failure of the state’s initial experiment with a highly noninterventionist policy of self-categorization" (21), in which the PRC had attempted to allow minzu members to self-identify, a situation which yielded classificatory chaos that would have had politically destabilizing results if it had been allowed to stand as-was. The Qing had let minzu groups define themselves because it had had no paramount interest in defining them or even in fixing their relations to the state beyond securing tribute and internal security, so had never needed to fix all of the ethnic groups over which it held sway. The Republican revolutionaries were staunchly anti-Manchu, and their elaboration of the notion of Chinese minzu fell into two phases: the northern-centric "Five Peoples" conception of minzu espoused by Sun Yat-Sen, and the "one China" minzu of Chiang Kai-Shek, which were both a part of their attempts to construct China as a modern nation-state. The Communists promised ethnic rights to minzu as part of their anti-Nationalist program, and so had to follow through once in power. After their first attempt at a census revealed that they would have to standardize the minzu categories, the Project in fact constructed a remarkably synthetic system due to the influence of the social scientists it employed--and in fact, had it followed pre-existing models, it is highly likely that there would be more than 56 minzu in China today. Third, in Mullaney's view, the CCP learned that "it was only through categorization that a multitude of people could be recast as a singular, corporate person, and only through category that a variety of conceptions of minzu could be brought into congress with one another, both literally and figuratively" (40). Fourth, this recovers the ambiguity of minzu groupings prior to standardization, and also that the CCP did not acquire full-fledged governmentality when it triumphed over the Nationalists on 1 October 1949. Instead, it had to learn to see like a state.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the beginnings of the Ethnic Classifciation Project, and in particular excavates the weird history of the origins of its taxonomic worldview: now with Soviet colonial practices, but rather those of the British empire in the person of one H.R. Davies. Davies' amateur anthropological taxonomy was based solely on linguistic characteristics as derived from his wandering around Yunnan in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Contra Laura Hostetler, according to Mullaney, Republic ethnologists rejected the idea of continuity between Ming/Qing and their own ethnotaxonomies; those same ethnologists were the ones now employed by the PRC to carry out the Ethnic Classification Project. Davies' much more elegant ethnotaxonomy allowed ethnologists to easily make both synchronic and diachronic readings of Yunnan's ethnological past and present. Davies' model appealed both for what it did as well as for how he did it, playing to ethnologists' sense of themselves as the advocates for minorities. The Ethnic Classification Project thus represents the rough ethnological consensus of specialists more than it does the CCP.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the actual praxis of the ECP, which was conducted by academics under the supervision of CCP officials. There were two broad stipulations handed down: one, that amalgamation was the name of the game, with which the academics had no quarrel, as taxonomic simplification was one of their own longstanding principles. The second stipulation was that minzu must meet Stalin's criteria for ethnic minorities: a common language, a common territory, a common mode of economic production, and a common psychology (= culture), and that they were not precapitalist communities (narod), why by definition could not be full-fledged nationalities (Russian natsia). The innovation of one researcher, Lin Yaohua, was to flip the minzu [ἐθνος] model so that it was a model of minzu jituan [ethnonational blocs], focused not on "factors that distinguished different forms and stages of human organization and emphasize instead the one factor which united them: the potential for full-fledged nationality or ethnicity. it was this potential that, for Lin, served as the common denominator among each of Stalin’s stages, and raised at least the possibility of defining groups in terms of what they could become rather than what they were at present" (83). Li then removed the "jituan" from minzu jituan and made it equivalent to ἐθνος and narod, thus dropping natsia. Thus minzu were made dynamic, plausible communities rather than static existing communities, and thus also, Mullaney argues, "Classification researchers were planning from the outset to base their taxonomic recommendations not strictly on the inherent qualities or characteristics of the communities under examination, but also an assessment of the state’s capacity to interpose itself and bring about the actualization of the proposed minzu categories" (90). Thus the Stalinist model was applied in theory but put into practice more loosely (matching practice in the USSR itself).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the fieldwork process by which the ECP researchers--reliant on the machinery of the Communist state--traversed the Yunnan countryside to gather their data. Crucially, they did not merely passively collect observations or in any meaningful way pretend to objectivity; rather, using techniques more or less directly borrowed from Communist cadre training, they used group interviews, specifically the "investigation meeting" pioneered by Mao, to actively manufacture the consent of the categorized to the new system that they were simultaneously evolving. As part of this strategy, they attempted wherever possible to rile on local elites and prestigious figures, relying on them to influence members of their communities indirectly. As Mullaney pithily puts it, "if researchers helped the state see the peoples of Yunnan categorically, the state would now help researchers (and itself) secure the consent of the categorized" (96). Indeed, since time in the field was so short and the team went to Yunnan knowing more or less what they wanted to find, fieldwork was geared towards creating this consent among members of ostensibly different groups, or at least towards minimizing conflict. Mullaney concludes that "the Classification team’s methodology is best understood as a hybrid of two traditions of social research: the ethnological tradition developed by Chinese academics in the Republican period and Communist methods developed before and just following the founding of the People’s Republic" (119).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the engineering of the fifty-six minzu after the main work of the ECP was finished, arguing that "by simultaneously surfacing and canonizing the officially recognized minzu and sublimating and subordinating the rest, the Chinese state has been remarkably successful in turning the fifty-six-minzu model into common sense" (122).The canonized ethnonyms are found in certain domains, and the unrecognized ethnonyms also have their domains: "the discursive realm of taxonomic synonymy, the 'yet-to-be-classified minzu,' and the emergent discourse of 'newly discovered' groups" (128). With specific respect to the final category, some Chinese ethnologists have begun employing the term "zuqun," since "minzu" is now an official designation and the other term (Taiwanese in origin) allows them to escape the state's official discourse. As Mullaney notes, "the development of such a counterdiscourse once again raises the prospect for a theoretically grounded subversion, as it did in the first half of the twentieth century" (133).
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Mullaney notes that the 56-minzu model has become the anchor for whole realms of discourse in China today, and, interestingly, that "the accuracy of the taxonomic conclusions of the 1954 Classification project has changed over time" as more and more people have come to accept them as natural and given (135). Thus, the ECP was nothing so much as a "history of the future" which, conveniently, was also able to create that future through writing it. Even if or when the ethnotaxonomy of China changes in the future, as it has in the past, the ECP will prove a vital part of that new future by virtue of its history thus far.
Critical assessment: Mullaney is a really smart dude, and therefore it's doubly frustrating that this book is so short. I am reliably informed that he knows a lot more about this topic than he actually says in the book, and even aside from that, he gestures towards some really interesting ideas in his introduction that are never picked up again in the book--indeed, he never pursues most of the interesting implications of his ideas. So, I think he is substantially correct as far as he goes, but this is a short book, and if I were an editor, I would have asked him for the missing 1/3 of the manuscript before I published it.
Further reading: Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Scott, Seeing Like a State; Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China