Organizers: Gregory E Guldin, Pacific Lutheran University; Keng-Fong Pang, University
of Washington, Seattle
Chair: Gregory E. Guldin, Pacific Lutheran University
Discussant: Myron Cohen, Columbia University
Recent years have seen an intense focus by scholars outside of China on the non Han minorities of China, adding a much needed corrective to Han centric definitions of Chineseness. Given the renewed emphasis on regionalism in China, however, now is an appropriate time to re-focus on the Han majority, utilizing insights from the study of the Chinese "others", the minorities.
This panel thus seeks to spotlight the concept of "Han ness" by an investigation of its regional and local manifestations. Just as researchers now question the validity of non Han nationality boundaries, should we too now doubt the old intra Han categories? To what degree, for example, do Han local identities actually function as ethnic group equivalents? How fluid are such Han ethnic group boundaries in actual social practice? What do Han ethnicities tell us about Han and Chinese identities?
Each panel paper explores these multiple identities by a focus on Han ethnicities in different areas of southern China, including Guangdong, Taiwan and Hainan. Moving beyond classic but static descriptions of differences between "dialect" or "regional" groups, presenters will question traditional formulations of a hierarchy of Han, regional, and Chinese identities and will explore the utility of the concept of intra Han ethnicity for explaining contemporary social, cultural, and political developments in China.
Keng-Fong Pang, University of Washington, Seattle
Viewed by political centers of China through the centuries as a richly endowed but hot and malaria stricken tropical isle home to non Han natives, Minnan speaking Han Hainan ren, and noted mainland political exiles such as Hai Rui, Hainan Island was proclaimed a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in 1984 and China's newest province in 1988. In the last six years, the metamorphosis of Hainan Island, particularly in the major cities of Haikou and Sanya, from island backwaters into a socially-fascinating, free wheeling and fast developing region of China has been remarkable and yet minimally studied by long term researchers. This change has been largely due to favorable island interpretations of the Chinese government's most special of all SEZ incentives to attract foreign and mainland Chinese investors to power Hainan's economic development. Beginning with a trickle of idealistic Dalu ren mainlanders moving into Hainan in 1984, an estimated 100,000 Dalu ren came to Hainan in 1988, followed by another 300,000 between l991 and 1993. Perceiving the potential for greater "personal freedom" in the island and untold potential for financial and career success, mainlanders who came to Hainan included bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, educators, laborers, and prostitutes. This recent and major influx of Dalu ren into Hainan has clearly contributed to the increasing social tensions which have developed and are still evolving between the old time local Han Hainan ren and the newly-settled Han Dalu ren with their mainland socio cultural ethos.
Departing from the conventional scholarly view that regional speech differences in China are merely dialectical and regional ways of life as merely regional folk differences, this paper argues that the types of social boundaries now emerging between Han Hainan ren and Han Dalu ren in Hainan are no different from what is usually theorized as "ethnic" in China or elsewhere in the world. Utilizing analytical framework and concepts from Anthony Giddens' structuration theory and Bourdieu's notions of symbolic domination, this paper will focus on the recent structuring of ethnic boundaries between Hainan ren and a generalized set of Dalu ren in both historical and personal contexts. The concepts of "intra Han racism" and "intra Han ethnicity" are particularly appropriate in Hainan as some local Hainan ren begin to perceive an emerging mainland dominant economy, government and society which might be best conceived as a form of "internal colonialism". For example, the mainlanders' organization of the International Coconut Festival clearly points to elite mainlanders' attempts to define a new Hainan identity which includes mainlanders like themselves. This new research builds upon my earlier long term minority majority relations research in Hainan.
Joseph Bosco, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Discourse on "Han" ethnicity is more contested in Taiwan than elsewhere in China. The conflicting voices can allow us to better understand the nature and logic of ethnicity in China. In part, this discourse is contested because Taiwanese did not go through the 20th century nationalist experiences of the mainland and, in fact, were subjects of "others"-the Japanese and then the mainlander KMT. Discourse is also different because it is part of the debate on nationalism and independence. In reaction to KMT orthodoxy that insisted on the Chinese ness and "Han" identity of the Taiwanese, an alternative discourse has emerged stressing the ethnic-and even racial-difference of the Taiwanese. This discourse must, however, address the obvious cultural and linguistic commonalities between the two sides of the Taiwan Straits which became obvious with the cross strait exchanges after 1987. This paper presents evidence that while mainland Chinese view Taiwanese tourists and investors as simply Chinese from another province, Taiwanese view themselves as more like foreigners when in China. While the concept of "Han" is very salient in the PRC, it is weaker in Taiwan, where the alternate discourse speaks of "Han chauvinism." At the same time that Taiwanese is often viewed as a regional form of Chinese culture, another discourse views Taiwanese identity as an alternate identity that challenges mainland Chinese ideas of Han unity. The Taiwan case problematizes concepts of Chinese nationalism and identity, and challenges the assumption that ethnic identity in China is a hierarchy of regionalism.
Gregory E. Guldin, Pacific Lutheran University
The post 1980 reform era in China unleashed migration streams which have headed coastward and inundated many a county in Guangdong Province. With an estimated tenth of Guangdong's current population hailing from elsewhere, with putonghua heard with increasing frequency throughout the Pearl River Delta, and with local women being courted by nouveau riche migrants, Guangdong's legendary insulation and intensity of regional identity is being sorely tested
Fieldwork in and around the Pearl River Delta during 1992 and 1993 explored the mutual adaptations that locals and migrants are making to this new multi ethnic environment. A comparison of different locales with differing concentrations of waishengren ("out of province people") reveals two distinct patterns of regional and identity formation: one based on the provincial level and the other on a wider regional grouping. Despite the many brickbats hurled at the ethnicity concept by recent commentators, analysis of Guangdong's dynamic social scene thus reveals the continuing utility of ethnicity to explain intra Han group interactions. Rather than abandon the concept, we should appropriately sinicize it.
Allen Chun, Academia Sinica-Taiwan
This paper proposes to trace the emergence of a "cultural identity" in postwar Hong Kong as a function of certain unconscious designs of the state, its perceptions of changing socio-political circumstances and the effects of both upon the formation of a public consciousness. I argue that it is useful to understand identity as a form of public articulation that is concretely manifested in social discourse and institutional practice which is less an objective account of one's actual origins than a subjective statement of one's "being in the world," to borrow Friedman's phrase. Thus, while it is important to ask how and why people in Hong Kong, especially in the post-1984 era, see themselves as "Chinese" (or not Chinese), the paper is more accurately in the long run concerned with understanding "crises" of identity, that is to say, the conditions that prompt the need to question the "subjectivity" of public consciousness and redefine the nature of its "positionality" within a global system.
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