(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
necessity ofenlisting the support of the ethnics on
their borders that led them to recognize minority
nationalities but also the desire to unify the nation
against the outsiders in order to overcome internal dif-
ference. Now that there is no longer an external threat,
it is this intemal difference that will most pull them
apart.
The best analogy here is that of Europe and the
Roman Empire. Lucien Pye (1993) has recently
observed that “China today is what Europe would
have been if the unity of the Roman Empire had lasted
until now and there had not been the separate emer-
gence of the separate entities of England, France, Ger-
many, and the like.” China is a multilingual nation
with large populations that can be divided among the
six major language groups. Linguists such as John De
Francis and Jerry Norman have demonstrated that
there is as much diversity “among the Chinese dialects
as . . . among the Romance languages . . . .To take an
extreme example, there is probably as much differ-
ence between the dialects of Peking and Chaozhou as
there is between Italian and French; the Hainan Min
dialects are as different from the Xian dialect as Span-
ish is from Rumanian,” (Norman 1988). Much like
Latin in the Middle Ages, China’s diverse language
groups all are served with one standard writing sys-
tem, Chinese ideographs that vary in some styles, such
as Cantonese, although the speech communities are
mutually exclusive. What holds these diverse commu-
nities together is oppositional hierarchy. The politics
of difference, until now, have not reached to this level.
Ethnic and Oppositional Identity
It is oppositional hierarchy, the shifting nature of iden-
tity, that now enlivens Chinese cultural nationalism.
This relates to the popular Arab Bedouin proverb:
Me against my brother, my brother and I against our
cousin, our cousin and us against you.
As the great Central Asianist B-artold once said:
“When you ask a Turkestani what his identity is, he
will answer that he is first of all a Muslim, then an
inhabitant of such or such city or village. . . , or, if he
is a nomad, member of such or such tribe.” But as
Nazif Shahrani pointed out, later Muslim travelers
noted that the only reason the Central Asians first told
Bartolcl they were Muslims was because they per-
ceived him as a European Christian and part of the
Czarist colonial project. In similar fashion, Hakka
have always told anthropologists that they are Han
persons, but, among themselves, they and most South-
emers believe they are Tang persons.
By looking at ethnic identity and conflict in relational
terms, one can immediately understand why a person
from a certain lineage in southem China can be
Toisan, Cantonese, Southem, Han, and a Chinese citi-
zen, all at once or selectively, depending on to whom
they are talking—foreigner, non-Han, Northerner,
non-Cantonese, or non-Toisan Cantonese. It is finding
out when and how one assumes these different identi-
ties that is key here, not what any one identity will be
in some essentialized permanent form that exists out-
side of historical contingency.
Sir Edmund Leach (1954) was the first anthropologist
to argue that ethnic identity is formed as the result of
power oppositions; the Kachin in Highland Burma
only acted ethnically when in opposition to the Shans.
Evans-Pritchard’s (1940) classic study of the Nuer
determined the unique expansive-contractive nature of
hierarchical segmentary lineages among nomadic
societies that lack a distinct leader. When the Nuer
were confronted with an outside power, they unified
and organized to a high degree of political complexity
in order to respond to the challenge. When the threat
subsided, they diversified and atomized.
Ethnic identities are often seen to coalesce and crys-
tallize in the face of higher order oppositions. These '
ethnic identities form and reform according to articu-
lated hierarchies of interaction with the particular
oppositional power in question (see diagrams). In
From Empire to Nation, Rupert Emerson (1960) pro-
vides a perceptive definition of the nation as “the larg-
est community, which when the chips are down,
effectively commands men’s loyalty” (cited in Connor
1984). Julian Huxley and A. C. Haddon proposed: “A
‘nation’ has been cynically but not inaptly defined as a
society united by a common error as to its origin and a
common aversion to its neighbors.”
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Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268