Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Old women are quicker than monkeys at climbing
Althoughmytranslation undoubtedlylacksmuchofthecleverness oftheoriginal,which
performs linguistic somersaults in order to end each line with the vowel sound
ai
in the
Chinese word for “odd,”
guai
, the gist of the poem is clear: Yunnan is a land of mountain
peaks shrouded in clouds, whose human inhabitants, for better or worse, have yet to be
tainted by modernity. Their foodways are strange. Their sexual mores are exotic. And their
animistic spiritual beliefs are as untamed as the landscape that surrounds them. Ideas about
minorities in China operate almost at the level of
doxa
: they are taken for granted, unques-
tioned concepts about “the natural order of things” (Bourdieu 2004, 1990). In the Chinese
rendering of the word
culture
,
wenhua
, the second character,
hua
, is transitive: it means “to
become,” “to transform from one state to another,” the implication being that a person with
culture is one who adopts Han customs and becomes literate in Chinese.
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The so-called nationalities question (
minzu wenti
)—how to integrate minorities into the
national culture and economy in order to avoid social discord—has been a subject of polit-
ical concern for centuries. Shortly after the defeat of the Nationalist Army and the es-
tablishment of the PRC, Deng Xiaoping, who three decades later would lead the country
through the liberal economic transformation known as Reform and Opening, addressed a
group of committed Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The nationalities question
figured prominently in his speech: “If we cannot resolve the nationalities problems, we
cannot resolve the national defense problem.… Particularly in regards to the southwest re-
gion, we ought to make the nationalities a high priority” (Deng [1950] 2006:194). Ever the
pragmatist, Deng saw the best solution as one that maintained a tradition of political cadres
drawn from the ranks of local minority people so long as these local leaders remained loyal
and subordinate to the party.
The nationalities question continues to ignite passionate debates in scholarly and policy
circles today. One recent example is an article by the Beijing-based social scientists Hu
Angang and Hu Lianhe (whom scholars playfully refer to as “Er Hu” after the two-stringed
instrument in classical Chinese music) published in the journal
Sociology of Ethnicity
and
titled “Second-Generation Nationalities Policy: Promoting Ethnic Integration and Prosper-
ity” (2011). They argue for an assimilationist approach that would entail dramatically scal-
ing back social programs for minorities, including preferential admission to educational
institutions, and even removing altogether the category of
minzu
from the national identi-
fication card. Citing the social, economic, and security benefits that stem from being a part
of the Chinese nation-state, they argue for national identity to take its transcendent place
above more narrowly defined regional or ethnic affiliations. Their views have raised howls
of protest from various scholars, who see this argument as wildly optimistic, if not down-
right naive.
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