One hundred years since the fall of the Qing dynasty, which redefined the Inner Asian borderlands as integral parts of the Chinese nation, the Communist Party still struggles to resolve China’s ‘ethnic question’.
In February 2013, Tibet passed the gruesome milestone of the 100th self-immolation. The count continues to rise. In April, violence broke out again in Xinjiang: a clash between Uyghur neighbourhood committee workers and suspected ‘mobsters’ left 21 dead. And in usually calm Inner Mongolia, Mongols now regularly hit the streets in protest against commercially-driven land seizures and forced relocation.
The top levels of government have responded on the one hand by calling for a faster rate of investment in borderland economies to raise them to parity with the interior and, on the other, to attack forms of economic and religious life they deem to be obstructing China’s trajectory of modernisation.
The growing desperation of minority protests suggests that there is a palpable sense that only a brief window for action remains before China’s development priorities swamp local aspirations.
Despite the confident veneer of Politburo pronouncements, ongoing problems in minority regions have prompted deep questioning of the direction of China’s nationalities policy. In early 2012, Tsinghua University scholars Hu Angang and Hu Lianhe provided a focus for the debate by calling for a ‘Second Generation Nationalities Policy’.
The two Hus voiced the concerns of many Han Chinese today; that autonomous administrative structures and constitutional privileges for ethnic minorities amount to a system of reverse discrimination against the Han majority. They argued that it was time to replace these structures and privileges with a consistent set of rights and obligations for all citizens, irrespective of ethnicity.
But popular discontent with China’s affirmative action is widespread and support for revising, or abolishing, the system of ethnic autonomy seems likely to grow.
The proposals are radical. Yet they do not necessarily entail a major break with Chinese Marxist–Leninist tradition.
The gradual withering away of national boundaries is part of the predicted path to socialist utopia; the workers have no country, as Marx put it. The current rigid system of ethnic categories prevents any possibility of such ‘national’ or ethnic blending, and could therefore be deemed non-Marxist. The Maoist canon postponed the obliteration of national or ethnic identity to a distant point on the socialist horizon; for some, that time has arrived.
The People’s Republic has always been reluctant to frame the ethnic question in terms other than a historical legacy. The revolution, officially represented as the combined struggle of all 55 of China’s officially designated ethnic minorities together with the Han majority, is credited with having resolved the ‘nationalities question’. Concessions to China’s ethnic minorities, such as the system of ethnic autonomy, were presented in a more positive light as policies aimed at developing the nation’s backward regions and their (usually non-Han) inhabitants.
Viewed in this way, national autonomy in Xinjiang or Tibet has a use-by date; when the necessary cultural and economic advancement has been achieved. In other words, when the minorities are sufficiently civilised, autonomy will have achieved its goal and can be abolished.
Such is the dilemma faced by China’s ‘second-generation’ theorists. With trust between Han and non-Han a rare commodity, dissolving structures of national autonomy in the name of greater social mobility and cultural cross-fertilisation is almost certainly to be perceived as a threat to already endangered minority languages and cultures, as well as the last remaining spheres of non-Han authority in minority regions.
Critical minority voices are muted in scholarly journals and official forums, but find an outlet on personal websites. The Mongolian Altanbolag has written on his blog that the call for a ‘second-generation nationality policy’ means one of two things: either that China will allow freedom of speech for all viewpoints on its nationality policy; or, more likely in his view, that a selective airing of views critical of current policy will lay the groundwork for a racist and exterminationist turn in China’s ethnic policy.
His piece is alarmist, perhaps, but indicative of the suspicion that will greet any major shift in China’s ethnic policy. For this reason, while endorsing the goal of unifying the Zhonghua minzu (Chinese nation), many officials have sounded a warning against ‘forcing’ the integration process.
As Huang Zhu – a veteran researcher in the United Front Department and State Ethnic Affairs Commission – has pointed out, the last time that criticisms of the system of autonomous regions and constitutional concessions for ethnic minorities were aired was during a period the Party would prefer to forget — the Cultural Revolution.
Dr David Brophy is a lecturer in history at the University of Sydney and an associate of the Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW) at the Australian National University’s College of Asia and the Pacific.
This is an edited extract from the new book China Story Yearbook 2013 ‘Civilising China’, to be launched by CIW this Thursday.
Download the book at http://www.thechinastory.org/yearbooks/yearbook-2013/
