(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
Edward Friedman (1993), Emily Honig (1991), and
others have demonstrated a new rising importance of
the politics of ethnic and cultural difference within
China proper. Not only have the “official” minorities
in China begun to more strongly assert their identities,
pressing the government for further recognition,
autonomy, and special privileges, but also different
groups from within the so-called “Han” majority have
begun to rediscover, reinvent, and reassert their ethnic
differences.
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In the south especially, there has been a recent rewrit-
ing of history, illustrated by a newfound interest in the
southern Chu Kingdom as key to southern success.
Edward Friedman reports the establishment of muse-
ums throughout southern China dedicated to the glori-
ous history of the southern Kingdom of Chu, as
manifested in both the Warring States period,
475-221 BC and the Three Kingdoms 220-265 AD.
Many Southemers now see the early Chu as essential
to Chinese culture and as distinct from the less impor-
tant northern dynasties. In a significant departure from
traditional Chinese historiography, southem scholars
are beginning to argue that by the 6th century BC the
bronze cultures of the Chu spread north and influ-
enced the development of Chinese civilization, not the
other way around. This argument supports a reevalua-
tion of the importance of the south to China’s past, as
well as economic and geopolitical future (Friedman
1993). -
Rising consciousness of the southem Chu, or Can-
tonese, is paralleled by reassertions of identity among
the Hakka people,_the southem Fujianese Min or Hok-
kien, the Swatow, and a host of other peoples empow-
ered by economic success and embittered at age-old
restraints placed on them from the north. Many people
are beginning to note the southern leanings and ori-
gins of central party political figures, and it is not
unusual to hear reports that so-and-so is a Hakka and
therefore has acted in a certain way. Leading figures
considered to be Hakka or part Hakka include Deng
Xiaoping, Hu Yaobang, and Ye Jianning—father of
Guangdong’s previous govemor. It is now widely
known that all members of the Chinese Communist
Party’s (CCP) southern bases in the 1920s and 1930s
were Hakka, as were their leaders. Mao successfully
mobilized Hakka hatred against other Southerners and
their landlords. People now often praise Zhou Enlai by
stressing his southern Jiangnan linkages. And even
Jiang Jieshi—Chiang Kai-shek—was praised as a
Southerner who knew how to get money out of the
United States.
Liao Ping-hui (1993), a Taiwanese sociologist, reports
that Taiwan is also experiencing a dramatic reasser-
tion of the gaoshan “aboriginal” peoples to their
indigenous rights and claims. Age-old Taiwanesel
Mainlander ethnic cleavages (Hill Gates 1981) have
given way to a predominance of Taiwanese language
and political figures in everyday life as well as a host
of other groups maneuvering along traditional cultural
and linguistic grounds for political power.
The assertions of the politics of difference within the
majority Han society militate against traditional
assumptions about the “homogeneous” Chinese, the
monoculturalism of China, and the predominance of a
91 -percent Han majority nationality. Local differences
are now becoming recognized as “ethnic,” (Honig
1992), whereas previously most China scholars dis-
missed them as merely “regional.” This semantic
shift, from “regional” to “ethnic” reflects a new
salience placed upon the politics of difference in the
People’s Republic.
Traditional China studies emphasized “China” as one
civilization, one country, and one culture. Rarely was
there serious attention paid to cultural and political
difference in China studies unless it concerned the
“exotic” minority border peoples, almost always
regarded as marginal to power and politics in the Peo-
ple’s Republic. Most studies dealt only with ethnic
differences as related to the 55 official minority
nationalities of China. While two recent collections in
Daedalus and two new edited volumes on Chinese
national identity have begun to address this issue,
most of them approach the issues of cultural identity
from the other direction, that is, asking what binds the
Chinese together—Confucianism, Communism, state-
authoritarianism, familism, or language—rather than
what might be pulling them apart. Conflicts with
China’s long divisiveness over cultural, linguistic, and
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Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268