Thinking About Ethnicity in Early Modern China

THINKING ABOUT ETHNICITY IN EARLY MODERN CHINA Pamela Kyle Crossley* "Ethnicity," whatever one may mean by it, has emerged as a seminal issue in historical, sociological and cultural exchange. It has become a catchphrase whose elasticity is in some ways welcome, in some ways to be regretted. This short essay will discuss the apparent problems in the historical origins of "minority nationalities" concepts in China and of "ethnic groups" concepts in the West, together with the implications for social and cultural history of the present discourse on "ethnicity" in China. Any one of these topics would be worth a book, and the space allotted to each of them here will be insufficient. The central arguments of the essay are, first, that there is an irreconcilable incompatibility between sinological concepts (including "sinicization") and contemporary ethnic studies. Second, the importance of diachronic studies of the concepts of "race," "ethnicity" and "nationality" will be advocated both for the study of China and for the study of the study of China. Priorities for discussion have been formed around the presentation in this issue of three important and innovative studies concerning social phenomena associated with ethnicity in nineteenth-century China, which has put a particular emphasis upon the importance of the concept of "ethnicity" for social and cultural history. The present work, in other words, is simply that of a historian surveying the challenges anthropology and sociology offer our field at present. It is not self-evident that "ethnicity" is an appropriate or exceptionally fruitful concept for the analysis of Chinese late imperial social history.1 I am indebted to Dm Gladney and Sergei Kan, who have kindly looked over the manuscript and attempted to suggest improvements; to the editors of Late Imperial China; and to Barbara Calli for editorial assistance. James Tatum, Robin Yates, William Scott, Gene Garthwaite, Mary Wilson, Marilyn Young and Po-chia Hsia have all provided illuminating discussion of some particulars introduced into this essay. I claim all stubbornly persisting errors of fact or interpretation. The essay was written and revised during a period of support by the Darthmouth College Junior Faculty Fellowship program and the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, for which I am grateful. I am also indebted for institutional support to the history faculties and libraries of Smith College and Yale University. 1 A similar argument (for a different audience) is made very forcefully by Tapper 1988, which was kindly shown to me by Gene Garthwaite after reading a completed text of the present article . Tapper places far greater stress upon the issue of political and anthropological manipulation of ethnic criteria, but his distillation of "discourses" (scholarly, official and popular) is fundamentally consonant with many of the points I am attempting to make here. Late Imperial China 11, No. 1 (June 1990):1-34 T by the Society for Qing Studies 1 2 Pamela Kyle Crossley Though it is not explicitly stated in any of the essays in this issue, the implicit assumption is that ethnicity in one form or another was present in China and was significant. As must always be the case when a large analytic concept is invoked, the first ground of revelation is the intellectual context of the writer, and China's past as an "objective" phenomenon remains at some remove. The present predilection for identifying ethnicity as a phenomenon in China and using it as an analytical tool has evidently grown out of an awareness that the "sinicization" (or "sinification") commonplace received from previous generations of China scholars was conceptually flawed, intellectually inert and impossible to apply to real history .2 Sinicization was not merely a convenient word describing acculturation to Chinese culture or assimilation by it, but was a bundle of assumptions regarding the reasons for and the manifestations of cultural change throughout a very broad expanse of Asia. In itself, the idea of sinicization (hanhua) may someday be a suitable object for study and analysis. Its conceptual flaw lay in its circularity. To be "sinicized" was to become "like the Chinese," who were only those who had been previously sinicized. This is self-evidently counterhistorical in the sense that Chinese culture, the character of which is at issue in "sinicization," has...