View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ScholarBank@NUS BECOMING ZHONGGUO, BECOMING HAN: TRACING AND RE-CONCEPTUALIZING ETHNICITY IN ANCIENT NORTH CHINA, 770 BC - AD 581 YANG SHAO-YUN BA (HONS), NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE 2007 i Acknowledgments I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Associate Professor Huang Jianli, who was my supervisor throughout the two years of the Masters programme. From the start, Professor Huang committed himself to helping me realize my dreams of an academic career specializing in Fragmentation-period history, and his advice, while often tough and blunt in its delivery, has always been true to that commitment and proven to be both timely and correct. In September 2005, Professor Huang encouraged me to attempt a dissertation topic I was truly interested in, rather than settle for the ‘safe’ option I had chosen earlier; this advice led me into twenty very fruitful months of research on questions of ethnicity in ancient Chinese history, at first focusing on the Age of Fragmentation but later broadening to include Eastern Zhou, Han, and Wei-Jin. That research, in turn, enabled me to produce an application that successfully secured a fellowship to pursue a PhD in the United States. At the end of May this year, Professor Huang again stepped in to convince me that the broadening scope of my research now necessitated a drastic restructuring of the dissertation. A huge amount of detailed analysis on Northern Dynasties history would have to be discarded from the draft if the conceptual discussions of ethnicity in earlier periods - which I increasingly found to be vital to my main argument - were to have any place in the main text. The process of amputating entire chapters was certainly painful, but its result has been a much more coherent and purposeful dissertation than I would otherwise have written. For all the above reasons, I am thankful to Professor Huang and honoured to call him my teacher. ii Victor Ban read two very different drafts of this dissertation, and suggested many important changes and refinements. Victor, who in April completed his own MA at Harvard with a dissertation on Northern Wei food culture, is a brilliant student and a dependable friend whom I would be delighted to have as a colleague someday. I would like to thank him for his invaluable input; any remaining errors in the dissertation are, of course, my own responsibility entirely. Sincere thanks go also to my classmate Ng Eng Ping for offering me information on the 1950s minzu-buzu debate in the PRC, and for many enlightening and entertaining conversations about famous Chinese historians. My wife Estelle and my parents have given me so much love, understanding, patience, and support during the writing of this dissertation that the credit for its completion is more theirs than mine. And, as always, I give my greatest thanks and praise to God from whom all blessings flow. iii Contents Summary iv Abbreviations used in footnotes vi 1 - Introduction 1 Context and scope Literature review: The sinification/sinicization framework The anthropological framework The Chinese Marxist framework of minzu ronghe Research questions 2 - The Eastern Zhou Worldview: Zhongguo, Tianxia, and the Barbarians 22 Zhongguo/Zhuxia as the centre of the ‘civilized world’ Yi/Rong/Man/Di: The mysterious ‘barbarians’ Huaxia as the ethnic identity of Zhongguo people? 3 – Changes in Han and Wei-Jin Discourses on Ethnicity and Ethnic Difference 38 Li (‘ethics’) and de (‘virtue’): The universalist Confucian measure of ethnicity Hua: The ethnic identity of the literati Hu: A label for foreigners from the north and west Zulei (‘race’) and xin (‘heart’): The proto-racist Confucian measure of ethnicity 4 - Northern Wei and the Supra-ethnicization of the Hua/Yi Dichotomy 61 Fourth-century ‘barbarian’ regimes in Zhongguo Adoption of classical Eastern Zhou and Five Phases discourses Adoption of the labels Hua and Hu Adoption of Gongyang/Guliang and Zuoshi discourses 5 - The Xianbi Construction of ‘Han’ Ethnic Identity 79 A new hypothesis on the origins of Han as an ethnonym When is a Xianbi a Han but not a Han’er? The myth of ‘Xianbified Han’ and ‘sinified Xianbi’ Conclusion: Deconstructing Hanhuà 100 Bibliography 105 Appendix: Glossary of names, terms, and phrases from the ‘Chinese’ (Zhongguo/Han/Hua) language 127 iv Summary My dissertation explores the nature of ethnic identity in the core region of north China during a period of 1,351 years from the beginning of Eastern Zhou (770- 256 BC) to the end of the Northern Dynasties (AD 399-581), these being periods commonly perceived as starting in a state of ethnic diversity and conflict, and ending with a population that was close to homogeneous in sharing a ‘Huaxia’, ‘Hua’, or ‘Han’ ethnic identity. The dissertation's key research question is whether the conventional analytical framework of progressive ethnic assimilation of minority/'barbarian' peoples by a distinct ‘Huaxia’/‘Hua’/‘Han’ ethnic group is supported by a thorough examination of the evidence. My argument, developed through a critical study of the construction, evolution, and manipulation of ethnonyms in ancient north China, is that the ethnic assimilation framework is untenable in its present form. Today, over one billion Chinese citizens know themselves ethnically as ‘Han’, and millions of descendants of migrant Chinese worldwide know themselves ethnically as ‘Hua’, together forming an ethnic group regarded as the largest in the world. Historians, both Chinese and non-Chinese, routinely assert that the prototype for this ethnic group was a ‘Huaxia’ people whose ethnic identity took shape no later than Eastern Zhou. But, contrary to mainstream Chinese scholarly opinion since the 1940s, there is no record at all of ‘Huaxia’ being used as an ethnonym rather than a toponym at any time between 770 BC and AD 581. While there is inconclusive evidence from a single ancient text, Zuoshi Chunqiu, that ‘Hua’ may have been an ethnic identity in sixth-century BC Eastern Zhou, this identity apparently faded from ethnic discourse at some time thereafter and was only revived in the third century AD, due largely to the growing influence of Zuoshi Chunqiu among the elite. Meanwhile, ‘Han’ was a political, not an ethnic, affiliation that fell out of use in north China after v the end of the Eastern Han empire (AD 25-220), and was only reintroduced as an ethnonym by the Xianbi people of the Mongolian steppe in the fourth or fifth century. The Xianbi relabelled the ‘Hua’ ethnic group as ‘Han’, and further adapted ‘Hua’ from an ethnonym to a supra-ethnic identity based on geography and culture, enabling themselves to hold a dual identity as both ethnically Xianbi and supra-ethnically Hua. They thereby overcame the Hua/Yi dichotomy of contemporary Confucian ethnic discourse (a discourse rooted in Zuoshi Chunqiu), in which ‘barbarians’ (Yi) were inherently inferior and unworthy to rule over the ‘Hua’, and in fact appropriated this dichotomy for use in their own relations with peoples and regimes outside their north Chinese empire. Thus between 399 and 581 there was a ‘Han’ ethnic group in north China for the first time in history, but there is no credible evidence that other peoples were giving up their own ethnonyms in favour of ‘Han’ - even if they were adopting ‘Hua’ as a supra-ethnic identity, or adopting cultural elements previously unique to the ethnic group they knew as ‘Han’. vi Abbreviations used in footnotes BQS Li Baiyao 李百药, Beiqi Shu 《北齐书》 (Zhonghua Shuju edition) BS Li Yanshou 李延寿, Beishi 《北史》 (Zhonghua Shuju edition) GY Gongyang commentary to Chunqiu《春秋公羊传》 (authorship uncertain) HHS Fan Ye 范晔, Houhan Shu 《后汉书》(Zhonghua Shuju edition) HS Ban Gu 班固, Hanshu 《汉书》 (Zhonghua Shuju edition) JS Fang Xuanling 房玄龄, Jinshu 《晋书》 (Zhonghua Shuju edition) JTS Liu Xu 刘昫, Jiu Tangshu 《旧唐书》 (Zhonghua Shuju edition) LQ Yang Xuanzhi 杨衒之, Luoyang Qielanji 《洛阳伽蓝记》 LS Yao Silian 姚思廉, Liangshu 《梁书》 (Zhonghua Shuju edition) NQS Xiao Zixian 萧子显, Nanqi Shu 《南齐书》 (Zhonghua Shuju edition) SGZ Chen Shou 陈寿, Sanguo Zhi 《三国志》 (Zhonghua Shuju edition) SJ Sima Qian 司马迁, Shiji 《史记》 (Zhonghua Shuju edition) SLG Cui Hong 崔鸿 (ed. Tang Qiu 汤球), Shiliuguo Chunqiu Jibu 《十六 国春秋缉补》 (Jinan: Qilu, 2000) SS Shen Yue 沈约, Songshu 《宋书》 (Zhonghua Shuju edition) SuiS Wei Zheng 魏征, Suishu《隋书》 (Zhonghua Shuju edition) TPYL Li Fang 李昉 (ed.), Taiping Yulan 《太平御览》 WS Wei Shou 魏收, Weishu 《魏书》(Zhonghua Shuju edition) XTS Ouyang Xiu 欧阳修, Xin Tangshu 《新唐书》 (Zhonghua Shuju edition) ZhouS Linghu Defen 令狐德棻, Zhoushu 《周书》 (Zhonghua Shuju edition) vii ZS Zuoshi Chunqiu 《左氏春秋》/ Zuozhuan 《左传》 (authorship uncertain) ZZTJ Sima Guang 司马光, Zizhi Tongjian 《资治通鉴》 1 Chapter 1 Introduction For all of the ethnic strife that occurred during the period of division after the Han dynasty, this was paradoxically also the period when many of the ethnic groups that figured so prominently in ancient Chinese history disappeared, and became absorbed in the great unity of the “Han Chinese.”… [I]ntermarriage gradually blurred the lines of ethnic distinction. Children of the once unmistakably alien northern elite became indistinguishable from ethnic Chinese – in fact, became Chinese; and the once multi-ethnic populations of both north and south China successfully re-imagined themselves together as fellow Chinese. The Chinese t’ien-hsia [Tianxia] absorbed intruders from the periphery of what was still very much a closed system, and made one out of many. With some adjustment, China retained both its centrality in the East Asian ecumene and its distinctly Chinese identity.1 Thus did the US historian Charles Holcombe summarize the history of a period I call China’s Age of Fragmentation (316-589)2 , but his words could easily have been translated directly from any general history text published in China within the last twenty years, so typical are they of conventional wisdom in the field.