ETHNIC GROUPS IN CHINA: A HISTORY AND COMPARISON

By Helen Cai

The idea of race, while hotly debated and contested in the United States, carries enormously different connotations in the People’s Republic of China. This paper seeks to provide a brief background to the existence of informal Chinese racial groups, as well as the formal groups established as a result of the 1953 national census. Through an examination of historical background to concepts of race in ancient China, as well as methods used by the PRC in establishing the current 56 ethnic groups in China, the paper identifies and discusses the imperfect relationship between racial groups and genetic similarity among the dominant Han group. A comparative analysis of race in America and race in China ensues, concluding that while the two nations differ in their evaluation on the political and social dimensions of race, both nations’ perceptions of race are invariably linked to factors such as length of settlement, common history, political motivation for the introduction of racial groups, and linguistic similarity.

In ethical and medical arenas today, the idea of race in society is ceaselessly contested, defended, deconstructed, and redefined. In America, the term race and all its implications carry a sharp, two-edged sword: race is seen both as a pawn of oppression and as a means of recognizing human differences in an increasingly scientific world. The American understanding of race is mired in historical inequalities with present socio-political consequences and individualized for each person. It is self-prescribed, which simultaneously complicates the applicability of race in pharmacogenetics and frees the individual in terms of self-expression. No matter in which country the race-debate is waged, the discussion is fierce. However, what must be noted is that race means different things in different countries.

This paper takes to the exploration of group identities within nations in which the focus is on the interaction and history of majority groups with minority groups, regardless of whether the majority group considers itself a race or an ethnicity. Both the terms of ethnicity and race are popularly confused within the American paradigm of identity, and this paper does not attempt to provide an exhaustive definition. Instead, it studies how group dynamics have come to exist within the bounds of a country’s chronology.

An exploration of race and identity in another great nation, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), reveals how beliefs about nationality, ethnicity, and identity are molded both through centuries of coexistence and comparatively sudden centralized policy. Factors such as historical belief, physiological difference, government policy, and geographic population distribution all affect the way a national identity is conceived. Currently, nation which compose one-fifth of the total world population houses 56 ethnic groups that the government officially recognizes. Of those, 91.5% are in the majority Han group. The other 55 groups are considered ethnic minorities. The groups were brought together in the landmass known as the PRC by thousands of years of tribal conquests but were only recently codified into clearly delineated groups when the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949.

Han Chinese: A History

In understanding how the Han ethnic group became the world’s largest ethnicity, ancient Chinese history and folklore must be examined. The Han historian Sima Qian (司馬遷: 145BC – 82BC) attributed the Han name to the legendary Yellow Emperor (Huangdi黄帝), who was thought to have battled against his brother, the Flame Warrior (Yandi炎帝), for the right to rule the people from 2698-2597 BC. After his victory, the Yellow Emperor reigned in a region named Han Zhong, and subsequently his subjects adopted the initial part of his name for their own and became the Han people as his nation flourished and expanded geographically. Originally, the descendants of the Yellow Emperor lived around the Yellow River, China’s second longest after the Yangtze, which runs a circuitous course from the Pacific Ocean into China’s northern half.

Centuries after the rule of the Yellow Emperor, the first Chinese dynasty mentioned in Chinese records emerged under the direction of the Xia. It was quickly overpowered by the Shang dynasty, which was eventually absorbed by the Zhou dynasty. During the Zhou, Han culture was spread outward through conquests, and also pulled further into the south of China. Ruling for four hundred years (206BC – 220AD), the Han dynasty solidified its grasp Chinese history by ruling for four hundred years (206BC – 220AD). It expanded the borders of imperial China to the Hexi Corridor in Gansu, the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang, modern north Vietnam, North Korea, and Southern Mongolia. With each conquest, the emperors would begin a series of reforms of Sinicization, which entailed the linguistic and cultural adaptations necessary for the conquered people to assimilate into Han Chinese life. The language taught was Hanyu: Han language, and its writing system, Hanzi, Han characters.

Subsequent to this Sinicization were periods dominated by the non-Han dynasties. Through careful preservation of the status quo, minority groups from the fringes of ancient China (the Mongols in the thirteenth century, the Manchus in the seventeenth) came to rule the Han majority. By carefully absorbing the Han culture and not abolishing previously-existing institutions of identification, the outside-rulers preserved much of the Han status quo and in turn received a calmer transition. Regardless of dynasty, the people under Chinese rule have historically clung to the Han Chinese identity. Chinese scholars in premodern times attributed this gravitation towards the Han group as evidence of the Han group’s cultural and technological superiority. After all, inventions by the Han include gun powder, seismological detectors, canal locks, paper currency, cartography, pendulums, the compass, the civil service examination and much more. However, recent studies, such as that of David Wu, have found this claim to be “at best, a myth”:

"The Chinese people and the Chinese culture have been constantly amalgamating, restructuring, reinventing, and reinterpreting themselves; the seemingly static Chinese culture has been in a continuous process of assigning important new meanings about being Chinese." (Wu 162)

Instead of being the irresistible superior culture once imagined, the new populations seemed to join into the culture due to pragmatic reasons: for access to goods and a chance at social mobility.

Formal Shifts in Chinese Identification (Influence of the West)

In the three hundred years rule of the Manchus under the Qing dynasty, a great amount of changes in identity occurred at a startling pace. The Qing era experienced a huge population growth that made resources scarce. In response, family ties required strengthening in order to “control market towns [due to] the gradual erosion of social order and organizational disorders caused by demography pressures” (Dikotter 14). As such, families increased their reliance on the cult of patrilineal descent, and more credibility and unity arose out of individual jiazu (family tribes). Simultaneous to the lay awareness of family lineages was the stricter classification of ‘race’ in the court. Manchu leaders, aware and growing fearful of total assimilation into Han culture, started drawing distinct boundaries around the four major ‘races’ in the courts: “Han, Manchu, Mongol, or Tibetan” (Crossley).

The earliest consolidated effort to study Chinese race from within came in 1898 during the Hundred Days of Reform. After over two hundred fifty years of Manchu rule under the Qing Dynasty, a faction of reform-minded civil examination candidates demanded for overwhelming national changes in governance. Kang Youwei, one of the candidates who feared further exploitation under Western imperialistic powers, approached the Emperor Guangxu with 40 edicts that would modernize the Chinese imperial rule. One of the edicts called for an examination on the effects of race in China. Historian Frank Dikotter writes:
"It was the product of a fusion between different indigenous strains of knowledge and foreign discursive repertoires, with the principal object of political attention being the species. The scientific category of ‘race’ and the administrative category of ‘population’ were heralded as objects worthy of systematic investigation." (Dikotter 12)

Although all the edicts ultimately were revoked by the Dowager Empress Cixi following her coup d’état, the reasons behind the reforms were clear: China was becoming more and more influenced by Western ideas. Chinese people thought in terms of race, calling themselves the Yellow Race, after the royal color of the Yellow Emperor, and ceaselessly comparing themselves with the White Race in attempt to escape the fate of the conquered Black and Red Races (Dikotter 13).

The Formal Formation of the Minzu: 1954

Concrete steps towards constructing a national identity followed immediately behind the birth of the People’s Republic of China. The new Communist government (CCP) possessed an inchoate recognition of the ethnic groups within China, and certainly did not expect to receive over 400 responses to the fill-in question for race the 1953 census (Aird). The large number of professed races may have arisen as a result of government-promised benefits to minority groups: a seat for every ethnicity on the National People’s Congress, promised limited autonomy for ethnic minorities, and national recognition of identity (Mackerras). Regardless the motivation for the 400 groups, the CCP now had to determine once and for all how many of the claimed ethnicities it could grant formal recognition.

On May 15, 1954, the government dispatched the Yunnan Ethnic Classification Team to taxonomically determine the number of ethnicities in Yunnan province, which singly had yielded 260 of the 400 different responses. The team worked with a tight 6-months deadline, and heavily relied on pre-existing linguistic research to delineate ethnicities. The Yunnan researchers believed that there was a strong correlation between language and ethnicity. Linguistics was considered to be a reliable means of approximating linearity, because it “lent itself readily to the formulation of reductive, hierarchical phylogenies” and “enabled the taxonomist to establish the existence of a common ancestry between seemingly disparate groups without relying on the subjective claims thereof” (Mullaney 12). Factors such as dress, culture, and geographic distribution were also taken into account. The Yunnan team, along with several other groups around the country, provided reports that gave the Party the 56 ethnic groups in place today.

Government Benefits to Minorities

Current national benefits afforded to minorities are many. Minority members are excluded from the One-Child policy implemented in the 1970s, and are allowed to have more than one child. Minority children have access to several large state-operated scholarships, and are given a certain advantage on their college-entrance exam scores. In government posts, affirmative action for minorities is a well-established practice. Most importantly, some minority groups with religious and political differences are granted ethnic autonomous areas (Xinjiang, Tibet, etc.) (Sautman). In recent years, parents of newborns were able to choose to use either the father or the mother’s ethnicity for the newborn’s hukou (household registry), which has since resulted in an increase of reported minority births due to the desire to claim minority benefits (Wang 88).

Economic Inequalities Between the Han Majority & the Minorities

Despite these apparent advantages, however, the de facto reality of minority life is harsh. Even with the execution of affirmative action, minorities lag behind the Han majority in employment, education, and quality of life. A large part of this discrepancy can be attributed to the unequal playing field. Many minority groups exist outside of large urban areas, and tend to suffer from inferior educational institutions, which, in China’s competitive, high-education seeking job field, damages the vocational pursuits of minority children. The preservation of minority languages in ethnic schools is a mixed blessing: cultural heritage is passed down, but limits the amount of education on Hanyu, which is critical in most capacities. The typically rural nature of minority group concentrations also limits the kinds of employment available.

Social Inequalities Between the Han Majority & the Minorities

Historically a nation of conquest and assimilation, China today is still highly polarized on the issue of ethnicity. Affirmative action programs have reaffirmed sentiments of Han superiority and Han largesse among the majority, and it is evident from cultural stereotypes that the nation is still a long way from complete ethnic equality. Misunderstandings and folktales about people of different ethnicities are still commonly tucked into pockets of the country. “To this day, for instance, the Cantonese describe the Tanka, a population group of boat-dwellers in South China, as people with six toes on each foot: they are claimed to be of non-Han descent. The small toenails of the Mongols are said by the Han to be cloven, while minorities in Hainan have long been alleged to have a tail” (Dikotter 93).

Two major views contend about the nature of the current majority-minority balance.  Dr. Gladney at UChicago holds the more cynical view of the dynamic and frames it in terms of oppression: “Minority is to the majority as female is to male, as ‘Third’ World is to ‘First,’ and as subjectivized is to objectified identity”. Dr. Wu of MIT expresses a more long-range and hopeful view of Chinese ethnicities and believes the lack of permanence and definition of the Chinese identity leaves much room for reconciliation: “since most Chinese have believed that the Han people were the race of China, one that had absorbed people of all languages, customs, and racial and ethnic origins; the meaning of being Chinese in the sense of ethnicity, culture, citizenship, or residence were almost never addressed” (Wu 162). Whichever is the more accurate description, the strong identity of the Han majority, with its thousands of years of history, is here to stay, and the minority must adapt itself to that understanding.

Genetic Analysis of Ethnic Group Variation

What is interesting about the Chinese concept of ethnicity is that it is simultaneously lineage-based and incredibly reliant on cultural and linguistic factors. In present society, the Han majority seems to be united in its cultural heritage, but a genetic analysis provides interesting results about the unity of the group. In 1997, Cavalli-Sforza, Ruofu Du, and Chunjie Xiao published a paper describing the genetic distances between Chinese populations. The three used gene frequencies based on 38 loci to calculate the genetic distances between Han subpopulations and ethnic minority groups, with the hypothesis that genetic differences can be explained by natural geographic barriers. In China’s case, the natural barrier used was the Yangtze River, which scissors China into two halves: a northern and a southern region. The team discovered that: "... the mean genetic distance between northern Han subpopulations and northern ethnic minorities (244.7) is close to that among the northern ethnic minority (289.9), the genetic distance between southern Han subpopulations and southern ethnic minorities (304.1) is also similar to that among the southern minorities (250.0), but the mean genetic distance between southern and northern Han subpopulations (517.0) and that between southern and northern ethnic minorities (598. 9) are much greater, nearly double." (Cavali-Sforza et al. 617)

The team drew the conclusion that in both north and south China, the Han regularly intermixed with local ethnic populations, which subsequently caused their genetic structures to converge in likeness. These genetic distances also indicate that the Han subpopulations on either side of the Yangtze have more in common with their neighboring ethnic populations than their Yellow brothers across the river. However, despite such an interesting study, genetics will have little impact on social group identification and Han majority identity. As Manning Nash observes in his 1962 paper, “Race and the Ideology of Race”, society may ignore or incorporate scientific information about race and identity as it pleases.

Comparisons Between Ethnic Identity in China & Racial Identity in America

A parallel assessment of the roots of national, ethnic, and racial identity between the history-rich Chinese and the newly-amalgamated American underlines acute differences and also striking similarities. Main differences include the sudden coalescing of people groups in America versus the gradual assimilation in the East. In China, where physiological variation between the groups are nuanced, China has found the need to involve the government in defining groups. In America, where physical features are more prominent, race is self-identified. In both countries, group identity is couched in majority terms. Both identities of people groups are largely resistant to scientific challenges to their permanence. These characteristics say much about the adaptability of group identity, and its ability to transcend country borders.

The origins of the Chinese and Americans are vastly incomparable. While the Chinese were forced to live under different ruling ‘races’ due to the dynastic cycle, Americans were almost uniformly dominated by people of European descent. Although the Han people were ultimately in possession of most of China’s imperial dynasties, sporadic punctures in the tapestry of Han rule steadied and familiarized the populace with different rulers. This history of multiethnic governance may have attributed to early Han and ethnic admixture, whereas white supremacy in the United States propagated centuries of anti-miscegenation laws.

Americans were faced with a stark palette of peoples immediately distinguishable from one another, while the Chinese were differentiated more by nuanced characteristics like language and customs. Of those peoples, China is more uniform, with a 92% Han majority; America is more diverse with a 73% white majority.  Colonists, slaves, and immigrants shared no common history, whereas the history of the Yellow Emperor extended several centuries back in the Chinese consciousness. Black, white, and Indian Americans were instantaneously forced to adopt a social hierarchy, whereas China’s social hierarchy was based on civil service tests.

Identification of ethnicity and race are also determined differently: Chinese ethnicity is determined by lineage from parents and approved through the government, and American race is self-reported and self-identified. The two governments also hold drastically different views on the usefulness and purpose of group distinctions. In China, the motivation behind creating the 1954 ethnic groups was both political and social. China wanted to encourage ethnic diversity as a political aspiration and symbol and to target disadvantaged areas with more aid. America requires the reporting of race mostly for socio-economic information and to right historic wrongs. Unsurprisingly, both governments tried to allocate benefits accordingly: China is able to offer many exceptions and aid to its minority and proudly displays its support of minorities, whereas America is more subdued in its allocation of minority resources.

Some aspects of group identity are universal. Given a history of oral and cultural tradition, group identifications are unlikely to be buffeted by scientific discoveries that run counter to widely-held perception. As the Cavalli-Sforza report indicated, group identity can easily superceed or absorb true lineage  In both China and the United States, scientists did try to either fortify or negate the existence of race and ethnicity. Dikotter’s critique of Chinese scientists who blundered through race analyses could be equally applied to comtemporary racial scientists in America:  "A variety of cultural intermediaries – social reformers, professional writers, medical researchers, university professors – scientized these folk notions of common stock and legitimized racial discourse through appeals to the authority of science" (Dikotter 19.) The failure of the ‘scientific’ findings to sway common perception of race or ethnicity owes much to the crux of group identity history that operated very well without scientific assertion or refutation. The tendency for a dominant group to overshadow or succeed over a minority group is also apparent both in China and in America. Although affirmative action operates in both countries, institutionalized inequalities (in home locations, in educational opportunities, in unconscious stereotypes) are still running rampant.

In conclusion, attributes like length of settlement, composition of peoples, common history of groups, political motivation behind race and ethnicity identification, and linguistic similarity play a big role in group identity formation. Group dynamics formed in different nations will inevitably be divergent and unique, since each people have a unique history and unique experience living in a region. China’s case demonstrates that ethnicity can sometimes be used a political tool to right inequalities and unify a diverse nation. Chinese ethnicities are used to distinguish between peoples that have coexisted in the same area for thousands of years, and simultaneously seek to rectify current injustices.

Works Cited

Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., Chunjie Xiao, and Roufu Du. “Genetic Distances between Chinese Populations Based on 38 Loci.” Science in China 40.6 (1997): 613-21. Print.

Crossley, Pamela. ‘The Qianlong retrospect on the Chinese-martial (hanjun) banners’. Late
Imperial China, no. 1 (June 1989), pp. 63-107

Dikötter, Frank. The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 1997. Print.

Gladney, Dru. “Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Majority/ Minority Identities.” Journal of Asian Studies 53.1 (1994): 92-123. Print.

Hannum, Emily, and Yu Xue. “Ethnic Stratification in Northwest China: Occupational Differences between Han Chinese and National Minorities in Xinjiang.” Demography 35.5 (1998): 323-33. Print.

Mullaney, T. S. “Ethnic Classification Writ Large: The 1954 Yunnan Province Ethnic Classification Project and Its Foundations in Republican-Era Taxonomic Thought.” China Information 18.2 (2004): 207-41. Print.

Wang, Fei-Ling. “Organizing Through Division and Exclusion: China’s Hukou System - Fei-Ling Wang.” Stanford University Press, 2005. Web. <http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=7081>.

Wu, David YH. “The Construction of Chinese and Non-Chinese Identities.” Daedalus 120.2 (1991): 159-79. Print.

About the Author

Haoxiaohan Helen Cai is a public policy major at Duke University pursuing minors in history and political science. She served as the Duke East Asia Nexus president in 2013, and was a co-founder and director of the Duke UNC-China Leadership Summit.

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