Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency conference report, numbered RTT 95-10039 and dated October 1995, presents the proceedings of a conference held 30 September to 1 October 1993. The CIA's Geographic Resources Division sponsored the conference. In it, academic geographers, anthropologists and US Government officials examined ethnic conflict by region, covering Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and South Asia. The report also discusses what these conflicts mean for US policy. It does not deal with UFOs or unidentified aerial phenomena.
“Nevers”25 pages
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. ' 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 110 Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 205 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.