In Communist Multiculturalism, Susan McCarthy offers a compelling response to the age-old question of what it means to be Chinese. Relying on interviews with a large cross-section of minority and non-minority people in Yunnan Province as well as exhaustive textual research in English and Chinese, she considers how an idea of Chineseness plays out in Dai, Miao, and Hui minority communities of Southwest China. Her conclusion, that the celebration of minority ethnicity need not undermine, and may in fact reinforce, a sense of national belonging, contributes to a growing list of works emphasizing the need for Western scholars of Chinese minority issues to move beyond tropes of subjugation, assimilation, and resistance (to which it is easy to reduce Han majority/minority relations) and to give minority informants credit for saying what they mean (rather than combing their statements for “hidden transcripts”).
McCarthy’s larger idea, which she explores in chapter 1, is that culture is best understood not as a self-contained whole or even as a diffuse hybrid, but rather as a process of “mutual interpenetration” of groups (27). Likewise, nationhood does not presuppose a collection of people united by a shared cultural framework. This notion of culture and nation frames the rest of the book, in which minority cultural revivals appear as expressions of a variety of ideas ranging from separatism to Chinese nationalism, and members of Dai, Bai, and Hui groups are seen as dynamic players in the construction of both minority identity and national identity.
Chapter 1 also provides a succinct articulation of Chinese “official and academic classificatory schemes” by which minority peoples are understood on scales of exotic/assimilated and docile/restive (13). The Hui fall furthest from the official notion of the “ideal minority” because they are considered both assimilated and restive. The Bai, though assimilated, are docile, and the Dai are most ideal in that they are both exotic and docile. The chart reveals not only a standard attitude towards minorities, in which compliant Otherness is valued, but also a paradox: to be an ideal minority (and thus exotic) is not to be an ideal Chinese (and thus assimilated and modernized).
After placing the Dai, Bai, and Hui in historical perspective (chapter 2), McCarthy moves on to a consideration of each group (chapters 3–5), addressing current revival movements in the light of each group’s history, relation to the state, and self-understanding. Her discussion of the Dai focuses on the tension revealed in chapter 1, by which an individual operating strictly within official discourse cannot be successful as both a minority person and a Chinese citizen. In the case of the Dai, for whom ethnic identity is tied to Buddhism, revival serves to bridge this gap by finding ways to redefine Buddhist practice along “modern” lines. McCarthy offers the example of a newly-opened Buddhist temple that functions as a house of faith as well as a progressive AIDS outreach center.
In contrast to the Dai, Chinese history paints the Bai as an unusually prosperous, cosmopolitan minority group. The Bai sense of identity thus emerges from this idea of cultural “advancement”—though present reality frequently does not confirm it. In this case, revival efforts, such as the opening of bilingual Bai/Chinese schools, are attempts to reclaim an idea of cultural advancement that is defined in reference to Han culture but intended to occur within a distinctively Bai sphere.
As Muslims, the Hui face a different set of issues because their self-definition derives from membership in a group, the Islamic community, that extends beyond the borders of China. Like the Bai, the Hui are considered advanced; however, many Chinese feel that religion is a taint on the Hui’s seemingly modern outlook. Hui religion is problematic for other reasons, too, holding within it the threat of disobedience to the state by linking the Hui to sources of authority beyond China. Revival, much of which centers around the re-emergence of mosques as “schools” for Hui children, is thus an attempt to find common ground between a national ideology (Chineseness) and a religious one (Islam).
I leave the book with much to consider, and also a rather basic question: at what point does an emphasis on complexity—intended, of course, to illuminate interethnic relations—actually obscure the essential power differentials at play? To state the issue in a different way, a pluralistic approach to culture and nationhood certainly enriches the way Western researchers understand Chinese society, but it cannot negate the definitions of culture and nation that are operative in China; and at certain points, McCarthy’s presentation of information seems unnecessarily constrained by her theoretical schematic.
A good example is her interview with the chief of the tourism bureau of Menghai County. During the interview, McCarthy and the bureau chief discuss an ethnic park of sorts, a Dai “village” in which paid minority workers stage minority culture-themed performances for visitors, predominantly domestic tourists. Rather than focus on the value of these parks in bringing minorities closer to the Han (as McCarthy expected him to do), he emphasizes their importance in teaching young minorities about their own culture. He states, “In the past, people did not usually dress up in their traditional nationality clothing. But these young women learn about their minzu (ethnic) costume when they work at the tourist sites, and become used to wearing traditional clothes. When they return home, they bring these habits with them, and many more people in their villages learn from them and also begin to wear their traditional costume” (86). McCarthy concludes that “to this official, culture was both a tool for economic gain and an end in its own right, crucial to self-knowledge and a sense of one’s history and people” (87). What is absent here is a consideration of how that self-knowledge and sense of “one’s people” is being constructed—though clearly it is attainable by wearing the correct outfit—and how it may, in fact, underlie the current trend to celebrate one’s ethnicity through intentional self-alignment with the greater national polity.
Whether readers fully buy into McCarthy’s understanding of minority ethnic revival, her investigation of the dynamics of that revival is instructive, and she effectively articulates a number of persistent themes in discussions of Chinese ethnicity, primarily the conflict between ideals of minority identity and Chinese citizenship. In short, I leave the book with plenty of questions. But those questions are enriched by McCarthy’s thorough research and perceptive analysis.
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[Review length: 1058 words • Review posted on April 13, 2010]