DOCSLIB.ORG

Defining Han Identity in Chinese Ethnology and Archaeology

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Defining Han Identity in Chinese Ethnology and Archaeology MAKING THE MAJORITY: DEFINING HAN IDENTITY IN CHINESE ETHNOLOGY AND ARCHAEOLOGY By Clayton D. Brown BA, Utah State University, 1999 MA, Utah State University, 2001 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Ph.D. in History University of Pittsburgh 2008 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Clayton D. Brown It was defended on March 20, 2008 and approved by Evelyn Rawski, Professor, History Department Nicole Constable, Professor, Anthropology Department Richard Smethurst, Professor, History Department Anthony Barbieri-Low, Assistant Professor, History Department Dissertation Director: Evelyn Rawski, Professor, History Department ii Copyright © by Clayton D. Brown 2008 iii MAKING THE MAJORITY: DEFINING HAN IDENTITY IN CHINESE ETHNOLOGY AND ARCHAEOLOGY Clayton D. Brown, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2008 According to the People’s Republic of China, fifty-six ethnic groups combine to form the Chinese nation although the Han, at over ninety percent of the population, constitute China’s overwhelming majority. Their numbers now exceed one billion, the largest ethnic group on earth and twenty percent of the world’s population. My dissertation project, entitled “Making the Majority: Defining Han Identity in Chinese Ethnology and Archaeology,” challenges the putative authenticity of this official category by critically examining its creation and evolution in the modern period. In the early twentieth century anthropology became instrumental in defining the Chinese as a people and composing China’s national narrative, or what Benedict Anderson calls the “biography of the nation.” While archaeologists searched for Chinese racial and cultural origins in the Yellow River valley of the Central Plain, ethnologists studied non-Han minorities in the rugged and remote frontiers. These scholars linked contemporary minorities to ethnonyms from classical texts, thus imposing on them a legacy of barbarism while Han assumed the role of ethnic Chinese, heirs of historic Chinese civilization, and the heart of the modern Chinese nation. Over the course of the past century social changes and political expediency necessitated revisions of the Han narrative, and popular conceptions evolved accordingly. Today the various Chinese political communities of Taiwan, Hong iv Kong, Macao, and the PRC all perceive the Han differently, reflecting their divergent visions of the Chinese nation. On the whole, examining interpretations and representations of Han identity across heuristic and spatial boundaries shows that the concept of Han is in fact fluid, evolving, and ultimately political. This study concludes that Han, like “white” or Caucasian in the US, represents an imagined majority—a social construct that continues to inform the negotiation of Chinese identities. v TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE ……………………………………………………………………………… vii I. INTRODUCTION: HAN AS CHINA’S WHITE …………………………….… 1 II. ARCHAEOLOGY: THE SHANG DYNASTY AS HAN HERITAGE, 1923- 1930 …………………………………………………………………………….. 18 III. ETHNOLOGY: FRONTIER STUDIES AND CHINA’S OTHER, 1926-1945 . 56 IV. LI CHI AND EVOLVING NARRATIVES OF THE CHINESE RACE, 1950- 1977 …………………………………………………………………………….. 91 V. FEI XIAOTONG AND THE CHINESE SNOWBALL: OFFICIAL NARRATIVES OF HAN AND THE CHINESE NATION IN THE PRC AND BEYOND, 1950-2007 ……………………………………………………..….. 123 VI. FRACTURED NARRATIVE: POPULAR CONCEPTIONS OF HAN, 2004- 2008 ………………………………………………………………………….... 155 VII. CONCLUSION: DISAPPEARANCE OF THE HAN ……………………….. 183 BIBLIOGRAPHY ………………………………………………………….…………. 190 vi PREFACE It seems that in challenging Han identity I have taken on the role of the foolish old man from Chinese folklore who, armed only with a shovel, dedicated himself to the Sisyphean task of removing the mountain. Certainly this present work offers little more than a miniscule effort—a metaphorical shovelful—but hopefully one that in conjunction with the efforts of others will accomplish something great. In any case, it is not an individual effort, either for the old man, who succeeded with the help of his progeny, or for me. I am profoundly indebted to a number of individuals and institutions for their assistance with this study. At the University of Pittsburgh I have enjoyed the very good fortune of working with a committee that has both encouraged independent work and creativity while providing inspiration and much needed guidance for the project. My thanks especially to Evelyn Rawski for conceding to take me on as a doctoral student, and to Nicole Constable, Tony Barbieri-Low and Dick Smethurst for investing themselves in a naïve graduate student’s overly ambitious project. I am certain that the diversity of interests and backgrounds among committee members greatly enriched the study. Even so, the final product is my own, including the inevitable errors. I have also been fortunate to work with Hsu Cho-yun, professor emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh and senior fellow of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, who proved to be an important connection with the past. Other senior scholars at the Academia Sinica, including Li Yih-yuan and Wang Fan-sen, as well as staff at the Institute of History and Philology and the Archaeology Section, provided access to relevant archives and other vii rare materials. My thanks also to Huang Ying-kuei and Guo Peiyi at the Institute of Ethnology for affiliation and other assistance. In Beijing, a number of individuals at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, including He Xingliang and Du Rongkun of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology and Chen Xingcan of the Institute of Archaeology, shared their insights and experiences, as did Wang Qingren and Wang Jianmin of the Central University for Nationalities. Additionally I am grateful to Li Guangmo and Zou Heng for their exceptional hospitality and willingness to reminisce. In Guangzhou I appreciated working briefly with the Anthropology Department faculty of Zhongshan University, and particularly Liu Wensuo with whom I have been able to continue collaboration. My thanks also to the Xiamen University Anthropological Research Institute and the Smithsonian Institution archives each for hosting me on short visits. I would be remiss if I failed to acknowledge the many generous sources of research funding, beginning with the University of Pittsburgh Department of History, the University Center for International Studies, and the China Council. The project was also supported by Title VI funding from the Department of Education, the Fulbright program, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Security Education Program, the American Historical Association, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Discrete portions of the dissertation were presented at conferences hosted by Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Concordia Universities as well as at annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association and the American Historical Association, all of which aided me in vastly improving the manuscript. viii Li Yi-tze, currently a doctoral candidate in the Anthropology Department at Pitt, exercised great patience in explicating handwritten archive documents on abstruse academic topics and I hope my attempts at reciprocation did him some service. Finally, I dedicate this dissertation to Ian and Anya, without whom I would have finished in half the time. I have no regrets. Clayton D. Brown Pittsburgh 4/ 21/08 ix INTRODUCTION: HAN AS CHINA’S WHITE According to the People’s Republic of China, fifty-six ethnic groups unite to form the prodigious Chinese nation. Within this diverse mix, however, the Han constitute an overwhelming majority, with 91.96 percent of the population. The number of Han now exceeds one billion, or twenty percent of the world population, making Han the largest ethnic group not only in China but on the face of the earth.1 A diminutive Western analogue is found in the category White or Caucasian. According to the latest figures from the United States Census Bureau, exactly 211,460,626 people fall within the racial category “White,” making this the official US majority at 75.1 percent of the overall national population.2 Both Han and White share the dubious distinction of being the majority within their respective sphere, but ironically they also share an obscurity wholly incongruous with their numbers. While racial and ethnic studies have tended to focus narrowly on minorities, only recently has the monolithic, undefined majority become a viable subject for critical analysis. Critical Race Theory and Critical White Studies Precise demographic statistics like those cited above imply that race and ethnicity are objective and quantifiable, yet social critics have recently drawn attention to what 1 White Papers of the Chinese Government (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 2000), 450. 2 This census was taken in 2000, the same year as the PRC census. See US Census Bureau statistics online at http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/c2kbr01-1.pdf. 1 Benedict Anderson called “the fiction of the census.”3 Michel Foucault has reminded us that our classificatory schemes are neither timeless nor natural; they are, in fact, created.4 Likewise, Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu both discussed how such “practical taxonomies,” in imposing order on the world, offer a means of exercising power.5 By tracing the histories of these established taxonomies, we may discover how and when categories were first created and, most importantly,
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Asian Languages in the Australian Education System
    The Study of Asian Languages in Two Australian States: Considerations for Language-in-Education Policy and Planning Yvette Slaughter Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2007 School of Languages and Linguistics University of Melbourne ABSTRACT This dissertation conducts a comprehensive examination of the study of Asian languages in two Australian states, taking into consideration the broad range of people and variables which impact on the language-in-education ecology. These findings are intended to enhance the development of language-in-education policy, planning and implementation in Australia. In order to incorporate a number of perspectives in the language-in-education ecology, interviews were conducted with a range of stakeholders, school administrators, LOTE (Languages Other Than English) coordinators and LOTE teachers, from all three education systems – government, independent and Catholic (31 individuals), across two states – Victoria and New South Wales. Questionnaires were also completed by 464 senior secondary students who were studying an Asian language. Along with the use of supporting data (for example, government reports and newspaper discourse analysis), the interview and questionnaire data was analysed thematically, as well as through the use of descriptive statistics. This study identifies a number of sociopolitical, structural, funding and attitudinal variables that influence the success of Asian language program implementation. An interesting finding to arise from the student data is the notion of a pan-Asian identity amongst students with an Asian heritage. At a broader level, the analysis identifies different outcomes for the study of Asian languages amongst schools, education and systems as a result of the many factors that are a part of the language-in-education ecology.
    [Show full text]
  • Contemporary China: a Book List
    PRINCETON UNIVERSITY: Woodrow Wilson School, Politics Department, East Asian Studies Program CONTEMPORARY CHINA: A BOOK LIST by Lubna Malik and Lynn White Winter 2007-2008 Edition This list is available on the web at: http://www.princeton.edu/~lynn/chinabib.pdf which can be viewed and printed with an Adobe Acrobat Reader. Variation of font sizes may cause pagination to differ slightly in the web and paper editions. No list of books can be totally up-to-date. Please surf to find further items. Also consult http://www.princeton.edu/~lynn/chinawebs.doc for clicable URLs. This list of items in English has several purposes: --to help advise students' course essays, junior papers, policy workshops, and senior theses about contemporary China; --to supplement the required reading lists of courses on "Chinese Development" and "Chinese Politics," for which students may find books to review in this list; --to provide graduate students with a list that may suggest books for paper topics and may slightly help their study for exams in Chinese politics; a few of the compiler's favorite books are starred on the list, but not much should be made of this because such books may be old or the subjects may not meet present interests; --to supplement a bibliography of all Asian serials in the Princeton Libraries that was compiled long ago by Frances Chen and Maureen Donovan; many of these are now available on the web,e.g., from “J-Stor”; --to suggest to book selectors in the Princeton libraries items that are suitable for acquisition; to provide a computerized list on which researchers can search for keywords of interests; and to provide a resource that many teachers at various other universities have also used.
    [Show full text]
  • Zhou Zuoren's Critique of Violence in Modern China
    World Languages and Cultures Publications World Languages and Cultures 2014 The aS cred and the Cannibalistic: Zhou Zuoren’s Critique of Violence in Modern China Tonglu Li Iowa State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/language_pubs Part of the Chinese Studies Commons The ompc lete bibliographic information for this item can be found at http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/ language_pubs/102. For information on how to cite this item, please visit http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/ howtocite.html. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the World Languages and Cultures at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in World Languages and Cultures Publications by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The aS cred and the Cannibalistic: Zhou Zuoren’s Critique of Violence in Modern China Abstract This article explores the ways in which Zhou Zuoren critiqued violence in modern China as a belief-‐‑driven phenomenon. Differing from Lu Xun and other mainstream intellectuals, Zhou consistently denied the legitimacy of violence as a force for modernizing China. Relying on extensive readings in anthropology, intellectual history, and religious studies, he investigated the fundamental “nexus” between violence and the religious, political, and ideological beliefs. In the Enlightenment’s effort to achieve modernity, cannibalistic Confucianism was to be cleansed from the corpus of Chinese culture as the “barbaric” cultural Other, but Zhou was convinced that such barbaric cannibalism was inherited by the Enlightenment thinkers, and thus made the Enlightenment impossible.
    [Show full text]
  • Originally, the Descendants of Hua Xia Were Not the Descendants of Yan Huang
    E-Leader Brno 2019 Originally, the Descendants of Hua Xia were not the Descendants of Yan Huang Soleilmavis Liu, Activist Peacepink, Yantai, Shandong, China Many Chinese people claimed that they are descendants of Yan Huang, while claiming that they are descendants of Hua Xia. (Yan refers to Yan Di, Huang refers to Huang Di and Xia refers to the Xia Dynasty). Are these true or false? We will find out from Shanhaijing ’s records and modern archaeological discoveries. Abstract Shanhaijing (Classic of Mountains and Seas ) records many ancient groups of people in Neolithic China. The five biggest were: Yan Di, Huang Di, Zhuan Xu, Di Jun and Shao Hao. These were not only the names of groups, but also the names of individuals, who were regarded by many groups as common male ancestors. These groups first lived in the Pamirs Plateau, soon gathered in the north of the Tibetan Plateau and west of the Qinghai Lake and learned from each other advanced sciences and technologies, later spread out to other places of China and built their unique ancient cultures during the Neolithic Age. The Yan Di’s offspring spread out to the west of the Taklamakan Desert;The Huang Di’s offspring spread out to the north of the Chishui River, Tianshan Mountains and further northern and northeastern areas;The Di Jun’s and Shao Hao’s offspring spread out to the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River, where the Di Jun’s offspring lived in the west of the Shao Hao’s territories, which were near the sea or in the Shandong Peninsula.Modern archaeological discoveries have revealed the authenticity of Shanhaijing ’s records.
    [Show full text]
  • The Nature and Linkages of China's Tributary System Under the Ming
    Working Papers of the Global Economic History Network (GEHN) No. 21/06 The Nature and Linkages of China’s Tributary System under the Ming and Qing Dynasties Giovanni Andornino © Giovanni Andornino Department of Economic History London School of Economics March 2006 This paper was originally written and submitted as a dissertation in partial fulfilment of the MSc Global History (LSE), and was a winner of the McKenzie prize (2004-05) awarded for outstanding performance in MSc/MA/MPhil/PhD examinations. For more information about the participants and activities of GEHN, go to http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/economicHistory/GEHN/Default.htm Department of Economic History London School of Economics Houghton Street London, WC2A 2AE Tel: +44 (0) 20 7955 7860 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7955 7730 The Nature And Linkages Of China’s Tributary System Under The Ming And Qing Dynasties Giovanni Andornino Abstract. The current landscape of Global History literature appears dominated by a rather asymmetrical dichotomy between Eurocentric analyses of the cumulative emergence of the West and global history which reduces the significance of this transition by blending it into very long-term perspectives. This ‘synecdoche syndrome’ – whereby a part and the whole are often equated and compared – belies the real nature of human history, which, up to the XIX century at least, was grounded in the presence of a plurality of coexisting world-systems. Each of these systems revolved around a multilayered cultural, economic and political relationship between centre(s) and peripheries. It is through both a synchronic and diachronic comparative study of such systems that the theory of structural systemic transformations may be refined.
    [Show full text]
  • Third Edition 中文听说读写
    Integrated Chinese Level 1 Part 1 Textbook Simplified Characters Third Edition 中文听说读写 THIS IS A SAMPLE COPY FOR PREVIEW AND EVALUATION, AND IS NOT TO BE REPRODUCED OR SOLD. © 2009 Cheng & Tsui Company. All rights reserved. ISBN 978-0-88727-644-6 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-88727-638-5 (paperback) To purchase a copy of this book, please visit www.cheng-tsui.com. To request an exam copy of this book, please write [email protected]. Cheng & Tsui Company www.cheng-tsui.com Tel: 617-988-2400 Fax: 617-426-3669 LESSON 1 Greetings 第一课 问好 Dì yī kè Wèn hǎo SAMPLE LEARNING OBJECTIVES In this lesson, you will learn to use Chinese to • Exchange basic greetings; • Request a person’s last name and full name and provide your own; • Determine whether someone is a teacher or a student; • Ascertain someone’s nationality. RELATE AND GET READY In your own culture/community— 1. How do people greet each other when meeting for the fi rst time? 2. Do people say their given name or family name fi rst? 3. How do acquaintances or close friends address each other? 20 Integrated Chinese • Level 1 Part 1 • Textbook Dialogue I: Exchanging Greetings SAMPLELANGUAGE NOTES 你好！ 你好！(Nǐ hǎo!) is a common form of greeting. 你好！ It can be used to address strangers upon fi rst introduction or between old acquaintances. To 请问，你贵姓？ respond, simply repeat the same greeting. 请问 (qǐng wèn) is a polite formula to be used 1 2 我姓 李。你呢 ？ to get someone’s attention before asking a question or making an inquiry, similar to “excuse me, may I 我姓王。李小姐 ， please ask…” in English.
    [Show full text]
  • Official Colours of Chinese Regimes: a Panchronic Philological Study with Historical Accounts of China
    TRAMES, 2012, 16(66/61), 3, 237–285 OFFICIAL COLOURS OF CHINESE REGIMES: A PANCHRONIC PHILOLOGICAL STUDY WITH HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS OF CHINA Jingyi Gao Institute of the Estonian Language, University of Tartu, and Tallinn University Abstract. The paper reports a panchronic philological study on the official colours of Chinese regimes. The historical accounts of the Chinese regimes are introduced. The official colours are summarised with philological references of archaic texts. Remarkably, it has been suggested that the official colours of the most ancient regimes should be the three primitive colours: (1) white-yellow, (2) black-grue yellow, and (3) red-yellow, instead of the simple colours. There were inconsistent historical records on the official colours of the most ancient regimes because the composite colour categories had been split. It has solved the historical problem with the linguistic theory of composite colour categories. Besides, it is concluded how the official colours were determined: At first, the official colour might be naturally determined according to the substance of the ruling population. There might be three groups of people in the Far East. (1) The developed hunter gatherers with livestock preferred the white-yellow colour of milk. (2) The farmers preferred the red-yellow colour of sun and fire. (3) The herders preferred the black-grue-yellow colour of water bodies. Later, after the Han-Chinese consolidation, the official colour could be politically determined according to the main property of the five elements in Sino-metaphysics. The red colour has been predominate in China for many reasons. Keywords: colour symbolism, official colours, national colours, five elements, philology, Chinese history, Chinese language, etymology, basic colour terms DOI: 10.3176/tr.2012.3.03 1.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction
    Notes Introduction 1. Hobsbawm 1990, 66. 2. Diamond 1998, 322–33. 3. Fairbank 1992, 44–45. 4. Fei Xiaotong 1989, 1–2. 5. Diamond 1998, 323, original emphasis. 6. Crossley 1999; Di Cosmo 1998; Purdue 2005a; Lavely and Wong 1998, 717. 7. Richards 2003, 112–47; Lattimore 1937; Pan Chia-lin and Taeuber 1952. 8. My usage of the term “geo-body” follows Thongchai 1994. 9. B. Anderson 1991, 86. 10. Purdue 2001, 304. 11. Dreyer 2006, 279–80; Fei Xiaotong 1981, 23–25. 12. Jiang Ping 1994, 16. 13. Morris-Suzuki 1998, 4; Duara 2003; Handler 1988, 6–9. 14. Duara 1995; Duara 2003. 15. Turner 1962, 3. 16. Adelman and Aron 1999, 816. 17. M. Anderson 1996, 4, Anderson’s italics. 18. Fitzgerald 1996a: 136. 19. Ibid., 107. 20. Tsu Jing 2005. 21. R. Wong 2006, 95. 22. Chatterjee (1986) was the first to theorize colonial nationalism as a “derivative discourse” of Western Orientalism. 23. Gladney 1994, 92–95; Harrell 1995a; Schein 2000. 24. Fei Xiaotong 1989, 1. 25. Cohen 1991, 114–25; Schwarcz 1986; Tu Wei-ming 1994. 26. Harrison 2000, 240–43, 83–85; Harrison 2001. 27. Harrison 2000, 83–85; Cohen 1991, 126. 186 • Notes 28. Duara 2003, 9–40. 29. See, for example, Lattimore 1940 and 1962; Forbes 1986; Goldstein 1989; Benson 1990; Lipman 1998; Millward 1998; Purdue 2005a; Mitter 2000; Atwood 2002; Tighe 2005; Reardon-Anderson 2005; Giersch 2006; Crossley, Siu, and Sutton 2006; Gladney 1991, 1994, and 1996; Harrell 1995a and 2001; Brown 1996 and 2004; Cheung Siu-woo 1995 and 2003; Schein 2000; Kulp 2000; Bulag 2002 and 2006; Rossabi 2004.
    [Show full text]
  • Drug Trafficking in and out of the Golden Triangle
    Drug trafficking in and out of the Golden Triangle Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy To cite this version: Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy. Drug trafficking in and out of the Golden Triangle. An Atlas of Trafficking in Southeast Asia. The Illegal Trade in Arms, Drugs, People, Counterfeit Goods and Natural Resources in Mainland, IB Tauris, p. 1-32, 2013. hal-01050968 HAL Id: hal-01050968 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01050968 Submitted on 25 Jul 2014 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Atlas of Trafficking in Mainland Southeast Asia Drug trafficking in and out of the Golden Triangle Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy CNRS-Prodig (Maps 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 25, 31) The Golden Triangle is the name given to the area of mainland Southeast Asia where most of the world‟s illicit opium has originated since the early 1950s and until 1990, before Afghanistan‟s opium production surpassed that of Burma. It is located in the highlands of the fan-shaped relief of the Indochinese peninsula, where the international borders of Burma, Laos, and Thailand, run. However, if opium poppy cultivation has taken place in the border region shared by the three countries ever since the mid-nineteenth century, it has largely receded in the 1990s and is now confined to the Kachin and Shan States of northern and northeastern Burma along the borders of China, Laos, and Thailand.
    [Show full text]
  • Controlling Xinjiang: Autonomy on China's “New Frontier”
    Controlling Xinjiang: Autonomy on China’s “New Frontier” I. INTRODUCTION II. BACKGROUND A. Chinese Control of Xinjiang: A Brief Political History 1. Early Interactions with Xinjiang 2. Political Integration in the Qing 3. Increased Unrest on the Frontier 4. Liberation B. CCP’S Policy Towards National Minorities 1. The Winding Road Towards “Autonomy” 2. Early Policy: Unify and Conquer: Dangle the Carrot 3. Welcoming Minorities into the Chinese “Family” 4. Creation of the Autonomous Regions III. ANALYSIS A. An Examination of Relevant Laws 1. Introduction 2. Granting Autonomy: “Give and Take” 3. The Law on Regional National Autonomy 4. Does Xinjiang’s Autonomy Meet International Standards? B. Autonomy: A Salve for China’s “Splittist” Headache C. The Party’s Perspective: Stability and Progress IV. CONCLUSION I. INTRODUCTION Along the ancient Silk Road, beyond the crumbling remnants of the Great Wall’s western terminus and the realm of ethnically Han Chinese1 lies Xinjiang: the vast and desolate northwestern province of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the beginning of Central Asia.2 Strategically located, the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) is a vital component of China’s political and economic stability.3 1 Central Intelligence Agency, World Fact Book, at http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook (last visited Feb. 8, 2002). Han, the state- recognized majority nationality, comprise approximately 91.9% of China’s almost 1.3 billion people. Id. 2 JACK CHEN, THE SINKIANG STORY xx (1977). Xinjiang covers one-sixth of China’s total land area, and at 660,000 square miles, the province is as big as Britain, France, Germany, and Italy combined.
    [Show full text]
  • Yanchang Oilfield
    Chapter 3 China’s First On-Land Oilfield: Yanchang Oilfield 1 Yanchang Oilfield Established, 1905 Yanchang Oilfield is situated in the vast area east of Yan’an in northern Shaanxi Province and west of the Yellow River. Geologically, it belongs to the Ordos Basin, which covers the provinces of Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, Shanxi, and Inner Mongolia. Its topography, with abundant gullies and ravines, is typical of the Loess Plateau. The existence of oil in northern Shaanxi has been well- documented in Chinese historical records since early times. In 1905, the Qing dynasty Governor of Shaanxi Province, Cao Hongxun 曹洪勋, wrote a memorial to the throne, requesting permission to establish the Yanchang Oilfield. Although the Qing court granted his request, it did not give him any funding. He boldly used 81,000 taels (= 2,331.25 kg) of the local government’s silver originally intended for wasteland reclamation to build the oilfield. He appointed Expectant District Magistrate Hong Yin 洪寅 to oversee the operation. After two years of preparation, they hired a Japanese technician, Satō Hisarō 佐藤弥朗, who started drilling at Yan-1 Well, in Qili Village 七里村, on June 5, 1907, using a percussion rig brought from Niigata, Japan. Drilling was completed at 81 m on September 10, and the well had an initial daily out- put of 1 to 1.5 tons, which it maintained for ten years. The crude oil from Yan-1 was processed in small copper pots and produced 12.5 kg of lamp oil per day. It was sent for analysis in Xi’an, and it was found that when burnt, it produced a small amount of white smoke.
    [Show full text]
  • Interactions Between Africans and Local Chinese in Guangzhou, China
    Contemporary Racial Formation in China: Interactions Between Africans and Local Chinese in Guangzhou, China A THESIS Presented to The Faculty of the Department of Anthropology The Colorado College In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of the Bachelor of Arts By Jiumei Gao The Colorado College May/2016 1 Abstract In the 19th century, China encountered the first group of European colonialists and other foreigners. Nationalism, including views on different races, started to form. In the 20th century, ideas of racial categories and how Chinese people belong to the more superior “Yellow race” continued to develop and triggered national pride and rebellion against colonialists. During the Mao-era, nationalism was temporarily replaced with communism, but soon came back after Mao died in 1976. In the 1980s when China opened its market, people of the world, especially of the developing countries, were driven to China for its massive economic opportunities. As a result, Chinese people started to practice ideas of nationalism in their daily interactions with foreigners. This study took an ethnographic approach in order to examine the practice of nationalism in daily life among Chinese residents in Guangzhou, which has the largest African population throughout the country. The study included an explicit review of the historical development of China’s nationalism, along with a one-month ethnographic field research project that utilized interviews with 22 Chinese and 14 Africans in areas with higher concentration of Africans in Guangzhou. The results show that racism against Africans is commonly expressed among the Chinese participants. I found that their rationale of anti-African racism mostly originates from the structure of China’s nationalism that has been building since the 19th century.
    [Show full text]