Empire

It has been almost a month since I last posted. However, this post is not really about the things that have happened since the last post, but rather a dump of the revelations I had over winter break that I have been far too lazy to actually put into writing.

It occured to me as I was walking along a dirt road between fields of sugar cane in southern Yunnan province that I had been thinking about China using the wrong framework. I spent much of my vacation, when I was not just sitting in Chengdu "recovering" from my ankle injury (i.e. drinking coffee with other foreigners and playing pingpong with the hostel staff), traveling through some of the poorest most minority-dense regions of China. Actually, that is potentially misleading for a variety of reasons, so perhaps I had better write it as: traveling through some very poor and minority-dense regions. In any case, I was traveling through places where Hui, Tibetans, Hani, Dai and Bai people occasionally outnumbered the Han that make up the vast majority of the Chinese population. And I was trying to understand the dynamics that were at play between these groups.

The critical error that I had been making in terms of thinking about this interactions was considering them under the minority paradigm. I was thinking about the parallel problems of integrating a minority group into the mainstream, modernizing and enriching poor comunities, while simulatneously maintaining among them a distict and viable sense of culture. This is, in fact, a sampling of the problems facing the Chinese government and Chinese society vis a vis its minority groups. However, considering these groups as minorities in the same sense that Blacks, Hispanics and South and East Asians are minorities is confusing, and understandably so.

China is not really a single nation in the sense that the US or France is a nation. This is particularly evident when considering its minorities. Whereas the US and most European powers are (largely) past their periods of imperialism, China is still best considered as an empire, not as a single nation. While the US has killed (both intentially and by accident) the vast majority of the native population of its landmass, China has not. Because of this, where the American minorities are (with the significant exception of most Blacks) immigrant groups, the Chinese minorities are conquered peoples. This distinction helps to explain many of the most glaring macroscopic differences between ethnic politics in America and in China.

As an American, I am very unaccustomed to thinking about minorities as anything other than immigrants. The fact is that in most of Europe, like in America, minorities tend to be in cities where they typically occupy positions in the unskilled working class (short-order cooks, factory workers) in the case of one immigrant segment or in the professional class (engineers, doctors) in the case of another. There is often another major group of immigrants serving as migrant agricultural laborers. These three types of immigrants make up the majority of non-black minorities in America and of all minorities in most of Europe.

In China, as in Latin America, some of Eastern Europe and presumably many other parts of the world, the immigrants are not workers looking for good jobs, but rather conquerors and carpetbaggers taking over the leadership of the region. In most of Western China, the cities are dominated by Han, but the countryside is almost entirely local minorities. The Chinese came, in some cases recently, in some cases hundreds of years ago, and imposed their order by military and economic force. The divide between the Chinese way of life and the local one is therefore even more substantial than I had expected it to be. Until quite recently, the conquerors made little serious effort to impose their culture on the locals, just as long as the locals bought their goods and didn't revolt. The result is that Tibetans in Gansu, despite hundreds of years of Chinese rule, generally don't speak any Chinese. They remain, for the most part, the same sort of destitute yak-herders that they have been for hundreds of years.

This distinction makes it enormously difficult to think of a reasonable way to deal with the Chinese West. Cultural integration is always a mixed bag, but at least when Americans expect immigrants to integrate (on which issue my feelings are conflicted), they give a level of agency to the migrants, at least allowing them to opt out by not moving to the US. In the case of conquest minorities, they are given no choice in the matter, they are part of the Chinese empire by dint of military force. And cultural integration is simple compared to difficulties in the economic and political spheres.

And what is the Chinese justification for their occupation of Tibet, Xinjiang, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia and Qinghai, substantial portions of Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi and smaller parts of Hunan, Hubei, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Gansu, Guangdong, Hainan and Sichuan? All these are places where racial and cultural minorities predominate. Despite the fact that the vast majority of Chinese people are Han, the vast majority of Chinese places are not. Mostly this occupation is considered to justify itself. The Northwest has been part of the Chinese empire for hundreds of years, and China is still able to control it militarily, so despite the fact that many of its inhabitants do not consider themselves Chinese and generally not considered Chinese by others, they are part of China. Likewise with Tibet, Qinghai, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. Ask Chinese people if these Central Asians are Chinese and they will usually say yes. But not in the same way that Han are Chinese.

In fact, the name of China in Chinese is 中华人民共和国 (zhong hua ren min gong he guo). Let's break that down character by character. 中 (zhong) means middle; one of the traditional names of China and the still-common short form is 中国 (zhong guo): "middle country" or "middle kingdom." Skip to 共和国 (gong he guo) for a minute. This translates to "socialist republic." It is the 华人民 (hua ren min) that is a little more problematic. 华 (hua) is another, older name for China from a time when, I am assured by my Chinese teacher, the territorial extent of the empire was in fact greater than it is currently. However, 华 (hua) also carries the connotation of Chinese culture. 华人 (hua ren) is a term that is used to refer to culturally Chinese people, both in China and abroad (in Singapore or the US for example). This can be easily construed as meaning Han Chinese culture. In fact if you ask most Chinese people about Chinese culture, they make no mention of anything remotely Tibetan or Mongolian or Uiguir. So 华人民 (hua ren min) means culturally Chinese people, in other words Han and the minorities so far integrated that they are basically indistinguishable from Han. In full, word by word, 中华人民共和国 is 中 "middle" 华 "culturally Chinese" 人民 "people" (with both socialist and non-socialist implications) 共和国 "republic." The Central Socialist Republic of Chinese People. It's no wonder that minorities get shorted politically.

So in their justification for the rulership over the greater territorial extent of China, the Party and most Chinese people point to the fact that those places have historically been part of China (i.e. the Chinese Empire dating back to a time when it was actually called that). The real reason is because they are able to control it militarily. This is the same reason why India was once part of the British Empire and Algeria was once part of the French Empire. The problem is, the Chinese want it both ways. Their justifcation for considering Taiwan part of the PRC, well it is culturally Chinese and was historically part of the Chinese Empire. Pay no mind to the fact that Vietnam was once part of the Chinese Empire (well, actually China kinda wants Vietnam too, every year they push the border further into Vietnam) or the fact that there are other culturally Chinese places (Singapore) that are not part of China. Or the fact that Taiwan was a relatively recent addition to China. We want Taiwan because it's culturally Chinese and who cares that we don't actually controll it, but who cares that Tibet is not culturally Chinese because we do control it.

It is easy to look at it as a nation because that is how the cultural core operates and because that's what they want you to think and because it's contiguous. In fact, China and Russia are the only real land empire remaining. Russia and the US killed most of their native populations (in the American West and the Russian East, who incidentally were genetically quite close to eachother) and most of the bigger minorities split off from Russia. Maybe Brazil or Mexico or Indonesia places like that are also home to many conquest minorities, but these are strange because they were created as countries by the external conquest of a now-defunct imperial power. And because these are the only real exceptions, most people tend to think of modern empires as per the British/Dutch/Spanish/Portuguese/German/Belgian model of a power on one continent and colonies on others. But in China the colonies are part of contiguous extent, which makes it harder to distinguish where the cultural home ends and the carpetbagging begins. This is scarily like Central and Eastern Europe prior to the World Wars.

I'm kinda going off in weird directions now, so it's time to finish this. I have more to say about cultureal imperialism and carpetbaggers, but for now it is enough to say that China is still an empire and should be considered as such, thinking of it as a nation in the normal sense is confusing at best.