Race and Nationalities
Résumé
China is officially a multicultural and multiethnic state (duo minzu guojia), including 55 minorities (shaoshu minzu) and the most numerous nationality; the Han (hanzu). From the first full-scale census in the early 1950s to the present day, the question of ethnic minorities has featured high on the PRC political agenda. Minorities come into play as new material for conveying the political ideology of the Party, and setting up a new subject in the PRC propaganda.
The official discourse on minorities and the representation of minorities are particularly interesting to understand how the classification of the Chinese population into a majority Han and numerous minorities has been undertaken to fit to the dominant ideology. Behind very simple images of minorities in propaganda posters, stamps, calendars, or magazines (and even on TV and cinema today), a complex discourse on the search for Chinese national identity in the young PRC takes shape.
The main scope of this paper is to analyse the representation of minorities in official discourse during the “ethnic identification” (minzu shibie) period, from the first campaigns in the 1950s, to 1979 when the last minority had been identified and classified. I will attempt to explain, through representation of minorities, the dominant ideology and the political strategies on a nation-level implied in the ethnic classification. I will argue that the representation of minorities and the treatment of ethnicity question in this period hint a wider strategy that attempts to create a Han national identity and to define a new model of a universal China. Therefore, the study of minorities' representation at the first stage of the classification may highlight the origin of political pattern of “diversity in unity” described in the 1990s by Fei Xiaotong, father of the anthropology and minority studies in China.
The official discourse on minorities and the representation of minorities are particularly interesting to understand how the classification of the Chinese population into a majority Han and numerous minorities has been undertaken to fit to the dominant ideology. Behind very simple images of minorities in propaganda posters, stamps, calendars, or magazines (and even on TV and cinema today), a complex discourse on the search for Chinese national identity in the young PRC takes shape.
The main scope of this paper is to analyse the representation of minorities in official discourse during the “ethnic identification” (minzu shibie) period, from the first campaigns in the 1950s, to 1979 when the last minority had been identified and classified. I will attempt to explain, through representation of minorities, the dominant ideology and the political strategies on a nation-level implied in the ethnic classification. I will argue that the representation of minorities and the treatment of ethnicity question in this period hint a wider strategy that attempts to create a Han national identity and to define a new model of a universal China. Therefore, the study of minorities' representation at the first stage of the classification may highlight the origin of political pattern of “diversity in unity” described in the 1990s by Fei Xiaotong, father of the anthropology and minority studies in China.
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