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 Until now, most China scholars have dismissed the possibility as remote, and the violent incidents on the margins of China’s great landmass were not consid- ered a serious threat to the monolith. The Uighur, Kazakhs, Tajiks, Mongols, and even the Tibetans are still felt to be insignificant minorities: politically and militarily inept, internationally isolated, and expected to go the way of the Manchu and others who have been thought to be long assimilated intp the Chinese mainstream. Although I am not predicting or advocat- ing the dissolution of China along the lines that Victor Louis predicted, in this paper I argue that recent events among the Uighur in Kashgar are related to the Hakka in Canton and explain why these linkages have generally been ignored by China scholarship. I suggest that we need new ways of thinking about ethnic and regional identity that often leads to local conflict along unexpected lines. What is going on in southem China is linked to the rise of local ethnic nationalisms-the rise of the Cantonese, the assertion of the Hakka, and the galloping economy of the south- ern Fujianese—-to traditional nationalisms on China’s borders as well as global trends that have affected China domestically and intemationally. My research parallels work in contemporary anthropological and ethnographic theory, which rejects notions of homoge- nized cultures and posits the existence of multiple identities and shifting associations. Despite the frequent wishing away of ethnic and nationalist loyalties, we are witnessing the rise of eth- nic nationalisms that define the arenas of conflict across the globe. This flies in the face ofearlier predic- tions by both modemization theorists and even Marxist ideologues that ethnic identities would fade in favor of individual, secularized, economic-based behaviors. “Tribalism,” thought to be a thing of-the past, is now the watchword of the 1990s. Most people are surprised at the viciousness which people, who were long thought to be assimilated, modernized, and secularized, are assaulting and “cleansing” others in the name of primordialized self-identity, self-determination, and ethnic nationalism. What is going on here? National identities, although imagined, are never arbi- trary but arise in particular sociopolitical contexts in relational opposition to specific others. To follow Ben Anderson (1983), it is the feeling of “othemess” one experiences while in exile or, I would add, while being incorporated and dominated into a nation-state that may more than anything lead to a strong sense of eth- nicity. To follow Dorine Kondo (l989:43), the notion of relational identity stresses “multiplicity, contextual- ity, complexity, power, irony, and resistance.” It is the articulation of the multiplicities of these identities, within the context of where they have been expressed, that these identities become salient. Nationalism is not just an idea but also a certain style of representation that is now most often defined by interactions within or resistance to the nation-state. As Hobsbawm argues, “Nationalism is a political pro- gram . . . .Without this programme, realized or not, ‘nationalism’ is a meaningless term,” (Anthropology Today 1992:4). Nationalism is not arbitrary, but nei- ther is there any core content to it. It has no essential essence. It is not shifted and redefined. I began to think much more about the nature of what relational and oppositional identity means (see Glad- ney 1991) after interviewing Turkestani refugees and emigres in Turkey. It convinced me that much of what I had been reading in Foreign Afiairs and other jour- nals about the resurgence of “tribalisms” in Central Asia now that the Soviets have withdrawn was very wrong. I became convinced that these people were profoundly different than they were before their domi- nation by the centralizing states of Soviet and Chinese Central Asia and that their multifaceted identities are anything but tribal. Han Nationalism and the Rise of the Chinese Nation-State As yet, no larger studies of the creation of Han nation- alism have emerged—mainly because it is assumed by sinologists trained in the dominant tradition that “Han” is generally equal to “Chinese”—-a tradition created and maintained by the current regime in power. Studies of Chinese nationalism have generally ignored the issue ofthe creation of the Han majority in favor of the larger question of Chinese identity. Few have questioned how the Han became the 94-percent majority of China. Perhaps, the traditional Confucian 112 Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268
Not linked to a story yet.
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.