[lg policy] A brief ethnic history of China

[Harold Schiffman]

A brief ethnic history of China

Posted by Max Fisher on October 29, 2012 at 6:45 am


Han Chinese performers wear traditional clothing from some of China’s
ethnic minorities for a performance during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
(Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)

China is unique among the world’s most populous nations in that it
considers itself ethnically near-homogenous, Martin Jacques writes in
an essay at the BBC News Magazine. “[M]ore than nine out of 10 Chinese
people think of themselves as belonging to just one race, the Han,” he
says. But it wasn’t always so. As Jacques explains, the history of
ethnicity in China is far more complicated than this suggests, with
lessons for both how that makes China unique and what it means for the
country today.

The history of China, he suggests, is in some ways a story about
ethnicity.     How did China evolve? It is essentially the story of
the Han and the way in which over a period of two millennia they came
to absorb the great majority of other ethnic groups.

    Before the victory of the Qin dynasty in 221 BC, China was divided
into many different states. The process of its subsequent unification
was the creation of an empire. But whereas all the other great empires
of the world have long since broken up, China remains united. Why? In
one word — the Han. The Han identity has served as the glue which has
kept a geographically and demographically vast country together.
Without that shared identity, China would long ago have fallen apart.

Jacques argues that this ancient history of Han unification informs
some of China’s greatest strengths and weaknesses up through today:

    If the strength of the Han identity is that it has held China
together, its weakness, I would argue, has been its relative lack of
respect for difference, an underlying assumption that the non-Han
should become like the Han — indeed eventually be absorbed into the
Han. This attitude is not difficult to understand, it is how the Han
became almost, but not quite, synonymous with being Chinese, or, to
put it another way, how China was created.

Jacques explores these implications for China’s remarkable stability
and success, its relations with the West and its still-troubled hold
over non-Han peoples such as Tibetans. As with any history that views
something very complicated through a single lens, there are
shortcomings to this ethnic history. But it does offer some
fascinating insights into how China sees itself, its place in the
world, and the rest of the globe’s inhabitants.

For a view of China’s diversity, check out these amazing “family
portrait” photos of 56 of China’s largest ethnic groups.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/10/29/a-brief-ethnic-history-of-china/

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