Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China by Merle Goldman

Author:Merle Goldman [Goldman, Merle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Australia & New Zealand, Asia, China, Political Science, Civics & Citizenship, Constitutions, World, Asian
ISBN: 9780674037762
Google: YF-ftHbw59sC
Publisher: Harvard UP
Published: 2002-06-30T16:34:03.703874+00:00

Xishuangbanna, Dali, and Lijiang23

Civilizing projects are presented as emancipating; they purport to transform people into individual citizens for the sake of their participation in modern state operations. However, minorities must first recognize their minority status in order to regard citizenship projects with a positive attitude. Minority identities and civilizing projects are thus two sides of the same coin: neither can persist without the other. The notion of minority suggests a cognitive distinction between the autonomous subject and a mobilized other. Civilizing projects reproduce the distinction between the advanced and the primitive who, once enrolled in the projects, will have no perspective to problematize their minority identities. Citizenship projects thus essentialize minority identities to the extent that people with these identities willingly engage in self-civilizing exercises. In the process, Han civilization avoids self-examination, which may go a long way to explain the failure of civilizing projects. Yunnan provides a clue.

Yunnan is the most complicated administrative jurisdiction in China in terms of ethnicity. Intermarriage among ethnic groups is common. An outsider finds it difficult to discern the differences among ethnic identities. These differences may be manifested in language, religion, and customs, as well as in clothing style, yet none of these distinctions applies universally. Moreover, such traits are not necessarily correlated with the strength of identity. For example, de spite their stylish clothing and distinctive language, Bai in the Dali area are relatively weak in terms of ethnic consciousness.24 Most people in Yunnan know their ethnic allegiance. Those who come from hybrid families can choose their identity. The artificiality and arbitrariness of ethnic identification bother very few. With various nationalities living together, inferiority stereotyping has little audience and ethnic conflicts are rare.25 However, one encounters more stereotyping the farther away from the cities one goes. The Han officials' superiority mentality is strongest at the lowest levels.

In an autonomous ethnic district, only cadres of the majority ethnic status can serve as heads, yet the deputies are typically Han. Many of these Han cadres are borrowed from large cities. For a number of years, they go on leave from their work unit, which may be a university, a people's congress, or an administration outside of Yunnan. Wholeheartedly in support of civilizing projects, Han cadres portray their subjects in lethargic, barbarian, closed, timid, and foolish images." Reflected in policy, these images encourage all kinds of bans-for example, there are bans on fire cultivating, hunting, landgrabbing, road-grabbing, woodcutting, and unauthorized construction.27 In contrast, the large-scale, and much more serious, deforestation and land grabs carried out by collective national farms and the People's Liberation Army in the same region are by definition not included in the scope of civilizing projects.l" Hunting continues, not so much to feed minority villages in the remote mountains as to sustain Han tourists passing through the base of the mountains.

Minorities who succeed in the cities are those who assimilate themselves better to Han culture. Their "success" signifies to Han officials in charge of mountainous areas that minorities in their jurisdiction, by contrast, are inferior people.

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