1995-10-01a- CIA Conference Report: THE CHALLENGE OF ETHNIC CONFLICT TO NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ORDER IN THE 1990S GEOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES 01-Oct-95

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