A year ago on Round and Square (24 July 2012)—Fieldnotes From History: Provincial Elections (t)
Two years ago on Round and Square (24 July 2011)—Hurtin' Country: Nothing But the Wheel
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| [a] Journey RF |
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VI
East Asia (b)
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| [b] Fifty-six RF |
The Han ethnic group is
by far the majority in today’s China, with over ninety-percent of the
population identified under that category. This has been true for much of
Chinese history, but with somewhat less dominant numbers. Indeed, one reading
of Chinese history in the past 3,000 years shows a profound and sometimes
highly divisive back-and-forth between Han Chinese and what today have come to
be called “minority groups.” The first outright possession of China proper by
non-Han rulers occurred during the Yuan dynasty (1368-1644), when Mongolian
leaders ruled from Beijing. At no point was non-Han occupation more
dramatically shown than in the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), when a Manchu
domination of the imperial machinery penetrated into Han social life to the
point that Han men were forced to wear the “queue” as a sign of submission that
enveloped the vast majority of the Chinese population.
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| [c] Outposts RF |
The more common case in
Chinese history has been for the Han ethnic group to dominate, and to portray
Chinese history as a history of the Han peoples. Courses on “China” throughout
the world have been so heavily influenced by this pattern that it is sometimes
difficult to see that the Han ethnicity, even though it forms an enormous
majority, is still but one cog in the vast interplay of ethnic interchange that
has made up Chinese history and culture for the past three thousand years.
Han is Chinese, but Han
is not “China."
The Han ethnic majority
played a sizable role in China’s history, and the growth of the Chinese state
over the subsequent twenty centuries is a story of ethnic movement to and from
the Yellow River drainage area, where most of China’s early history played out.
It should never be forgotten that, from well before the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220
CE) onward, there is a continuous and never-ending engagement with territories
and peoples of non-Han origin. It is one of the most dramatic themes of Chinese
history, but it is underplayed in Chinese textbooks to such an extent that one
might quite mistakenly assume Chinese history to be a record of the Han
peoples.
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| [d] Shared RF |
This is an error that
this book corrects through many dozens of examples of rich, individual culture,
growth, and decline.
To say that the “other”
fifty-five ethnic groups (there were actually many hundreds) simply played a
supporting role is nonsense. To be sure, they were integrated into a complex
and growing Chinese state, and that has continued in one way or another up to
the present. This integration is often interpreted as a simplistic kind of
assimilation, and textbooks not infrequently speak of the way that outsiders
almost invariably adapted to Chinese (predominantly Han) culture. Far more
rarely do they speak of significant changes that worked in the other
direction—with “outsiders” (from the perspective of the narrative) deeply
influencing Han culture. That this was so is indisputable, but it is often only
tacitly acknowledged in history textbooks in the Chinese-speaking world. In
fact, the cultural and linguistic blending was a constant in Chinese history,
and it can be seen in two broad sets of movements.
The first came with
pressures from the north, as peoples from northeastern and northwestern
territories made incursions into China. Some of these, even as early as the
Zhou period (c.1050-221 BCE), were military incursions that forced Han Chinese
out of their home territories. Others were part of the almost continual
diplomatic give-and take between a centralized Chinese state and northern
territorial groups. Intermarriage and various embassies played an enormous role
in the cultural interactions between peoples.
The second major wave of
interaction resulted from the combined influence of territorial expansion, on
the one hand, and the Yellow River valley being occupied by northerners,
forcing Han peoples ever southward, on the other. This process, which can be
seen even in Confucius’s Analects,
accelerated in earnest in the first millennium of the Common Era.
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| [e] Adaptation RF |
Large ethnic
groups in the southeast were increasingly confronted by the growing commercial
and governmental reach of the central state. Many dozens of ethnic groups in
southwestern China also began a long process of acculturation at about this
time. In short, the history of China is a history of ethnic adaptation and
territorial expansion over 3,000 years in the regions between and beyond the
Yellow and Yangzi Rivers.
Much of that adaptation
came through marriage alliances. The way that such exchange takes
place—generation after generation for over three thousand years of written
records—has everything to do with the history of ethnicity in China. The Han
ethnic group came to dominate, in part, because of strategic intermarrying and
the strength of sheer numbers. Over the course of many centuries, practices of
exogamy (marrying beyond one’s group) combined with patrilineal organization to
give sizable advantages to the Han ethnicity. When Han men married women from
other ethnic groups, the children would belong to the Han man’s family line.
Multiply that process by many thousands of cases and carry it over twenty or
more centuries, and the impact is profound. The Han ethnicity, already strong,
coopted and engaged other ethnic groups in a continual process that has
affected all parties.
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