Organizer: Leo K. Shin, Princeton University
Chair and Discussant: James Z. Lee, California Institute of Technology
While critics of the "sinicization" model have long challenged the persuasiveness of Chinese culture and the presumed dominance of the Chinese state over frontier and neighboring regions, scholarship in the past decade has begun to challenge the very nature and boundary of Chineseness. Despite the growing acceptance of the historicity and contingency of identity (racial, ethnic, cultural, national, etc.), it remains a critical task to apply this perspective to the study of ethnic identification and expansion in pre modern China.
The proposed papers seek to examine the role of ethnic identification in the political, cultural, and economic expansion in late imperial China. Drawing on specific examples from different parts of the southern frontier, where ethnic boundaries were especially intricately woven, the papers demonstrate how under different historical contexts, ethnic identification was manipulated by the Han and non Han peoples to achieve their various objectives.
In the first paper of the panel, Laura Hostetler finds in her study of the Miao albums that ethnographic representation was closely linked to state expansion on the southwest frontier in the Ch'ing period. Studies of the Miao albums, many of them produced by officials, reveal as much about the "southern barbarians" as about the authors and the world they inhabited.
The external representation of non Han peoples, Leo Shin argues in the second paper, served a potent purpose. His study of the military conflicts between the Han and non Han peoples in Kwangsi during the Ming period reveals that as part of its effort to maintain control of the southern frontier, the state allowed and encouraged the construction of ethnic boundaries among the non Han peoples.
Ethnic identity is as much a product of self identification as of external representation. Anne Csete in the final paper examines the 1766 confrontation between the native Li and the "Guest People" in Hainan Island and discusses the intersecting processes of assimilation/acculturation and ethnic identification in this southern frontier of Ch'ing China.
The three papers proposed here depart from earlier studies of China's southward expansion by focusing on the relationships between ethnic identification and various forms of expansion. The issues raised in these papers allow further comparisons with China's expansion in other regions as well as with frontier development in other pre modern societies.
Laura Hostetler, University of Pennsylvania
Linking the projects of territorial expansion and ethnographic representation is now a standard feature in studies of both Western colonialism and the rise of European American social science. Yet this same critical perspective is much less commonly applied to arguably similar cultural/political contexts outside Western spheres of dominance, such as China's Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and its phenomenal territorial expansion during the eighteenth century.
This paper will address a single ethnographic genre, known as the Miao album, that arose during the eighteenth century in southwest China in the context of imperial expansion and the institution of the regular system of Chinese administration in that region. The Albums represent not only the Miao ethnic group, but all of the miaoman or "southern barbarians" found in a given region. Consisting of both color illustrations and text, they contain descriptions of dress, customs, religious rituals, courtship practices, means of livelihood, and other ethnographic content.
Based on a body of over seventy such albums, I will explore the content and characteristics of the Miao album genre. A close reading of prefaces accompanying several albums allows for identification of a number of authors, all of whom were government officials assigned to posts in the southwest. Some prefaces also include a statement of purpose behind the making or commissioning of a given album. By exploring the albums themselves and the stated and implicit reasons for their manufacture, I trace the development of the genre over time and attempt to elucidate one way in which ethnography and expansion were interrelated in southwest China during the Qing dynasty.
Leo K. Shin, Princeton University
While the critical understanding that ethnic boundaries are products of collective imagination has informed much of the recent literature on ethnicity in modern China, the expansion of the state in late imperial China has remained a story of assimilation or cultural persistence, in which the Han and non Han peoples in the frontier are seen as self evident autonomous units interacting with one another.
This paper examines how ethnic boundaries were created and perpetuated by the Han as officials, cultivators, merchants, soldiers, etc., increasingly interacted with the natives of Kwangsi on the southwestern frontier in the Ming period. It focuses on the dialectic relationships between the frequent armed conflicts in the region, in which the clash of interests was most apparent, and this process of ethnic boundary construction in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The proliferation of ethnic labels in the Ming period, as demonstrated in several genres of Ming sources, is analyzed as part of an effort by the state to construct a hierarchy of non-Han peoples by which to structure its control in the region.
This paper argues that while the Ming state continued to cling to the ideal pursuit of civilizing the frontier, the expanded interactions between the Han and non Han peoples resulted in neither the direct assimilation nor the simple persistence of non Han cultures. Rather, they facilitated the "tribalization" of the frontier, the construction of ethnic boundaries between the Han and non Han peoples.
Anne Csete, State University of New York at Buffalo
In the first six decades of the eighteenth century, Han merchant cultivators migrated from coastal Guangdong to share the villages and hillsides of Qiongzhou Prefecture (Hainan Island) with the native Li. Neither helped nor hindered by the Qing state, this gradual migration represented the primary force of Han expansion into Li highland areas. The two groups developed closely interwoven social and economic ties: the newcomers built shops, found a variety of profitable economic niches for themselves, and intermarried with Li women. The High Qing period of peaceful coexistence was shattered in 1766, when some Li carried out a large scale anti "Guest People" campaign, beginning a long period of renewed Li unrest that lasted to the end of the dynasty.
Ethnic identity is elastic yet intractable, constructed yet based on differences that have their own historical momentum. Recent studies of the efforts of Qing rulers to construct and legislate Manchu identity show the limits of management or creation of ethnic identity by the state, especially of reactive efforts to reverse processes of assimilation among groups in close and long contact. At the same time, ethnic identity is highly amenable to manipulation, and can be intensified by local groups with a variety of economic and political agendas. In the Hainan case, Li leaders being crowded out of old economic roles by the Guest People appealed to Li ethnic identity to recruit warriors.
Local gazetteers, a study of the Li People written in 1756 by a district magistrate, confessions of the captured Li attackers, and memorials related to the 1766 confrontation show the economic tensions that were the short term cause of this massacre by Li of their Guest neighbors. These texts also provide the basis for a discussion of the nature of Qing governance in one southern frontier prefecture, and the function of ethnicity in local economic and political systems. This paper focuses on the role(s) of the Qing state in the recurring Li Han conflicts that punctuated Hainan's history, and the apparently contradictory processes of Li Han two way assimilation/acculturation on the one hand and distinct ethnic identity on the other.
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