(Estimated Pub Date) the Challenge of Ethnic Conflict to National and International Order in the 1990S: Geographic Perspectives- October 1995

Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268
Ethnicity Theory and Ethnic Conflict
in China: The New Politics of
Difference
Dru Gladney
Research Fellow,
Program for Cultural Studies
East-West Center
The Chinese people have shown the greatest loyalty to
family and clan with the result that in China there
have been familyism and clanism but no real national-
ism. Foreign observers say that the Chinese are like a
sheet of loose sand . . . .The unity of the Chinese peo-
ple has stopped short at the clan and has not extended
to the nation . . .
Sun Yat-sen, Three Peopleis Principles (I 924:2,5)
Shenzhen is Hang Kongized, Guangdong is Shenzhen-
ized, and the whole country is Guangdongized.
Popular saying in southern China
Introduction: The Disuniting of China
In his recent statement to the United Nations, the Rus-
sian Foreign Minister Andrey V. Kozyrev declared
that the threat of ethnic violence today is “no less seri-
ous than the threat of nuclear war was yesterday.”
Although most people would agree that this is cer-
tainly true for the troubled regions of the former
Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle
East, and much of the Americas, few would acknowl-
edge that China is also faced with such a threat. While
the former Soviet Union, in particular, is seen to be
riddled with ethnic and nationalist strife, China is still
regarded as a relatively peaceful monolith that is dom-
inated by a militaristic centralized power structure
intent on maintaining its control at all costs. This
paper will not dispute that received wisdom. Rather, it
will seek to demonstrate why we continue to see
China in this way and to attempt to illustrate some of
the potential faultlines in the system, should it ever
begin to come apart at the seams. The real subject, it
seems to me, when we examine China in this regard,
is “which seams.”
With the rise of a unipolar world led by the United
States, the question of China’s domestic integrity
becomes paramount (Garver 1992). However, geopo-
litical strategists and scholars may be tempted to aban-
don their interest in the minorities of China-—key
players in the border disputes between the two former
neighboring adversaries—who were often only of
interest as potential irritants to Sino-Soviet relations.
China now shares a much reduced border with Russia
and is instead faced with several new nations with
much less political clout. This may lead scholars to
disregard the ethnics within and without China as no
longer of strategic or political interest.
What are the pressures within China for ethnic con-
flict, and why have they changed with the demise of
the USSR? l-low do we begin to conceive of China as
something more than a monocultural society with a
6,000-year written history‘? Do the politics of differ-
ence make a difference for the average Chinese citi-
zen? This paper will seek to address these questions as
I outline what I see to be some of the ethnic “contours
of power” (Yang 1989) within Chinese society.
Although Sovietologists could never have predicted
the rapid events that dismantled the USSR at the
beginning of this decade, and I do not envision the
immediate dissolution of China, attention to the preex-
isting faultlines within these superpowers might yield
significant insight into the political maps that charac-
terize their present and possible futures. (See figure 8.)
Ethnic Faultlines
The Rise of Southern Nationalisms
There is a new feeling in China, reflected by the
popular saying: “Northerners love (ai) the nation;
Southemers sell (mai) the nation.” Accompanying
the dramatic economic explosion in southem China,
Southemers and others have begun to assert their
cultural and political differences. Recent studies by
108
Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268