From Round to Square (and back)

For The Emperor's Teacher, scroll down (↓) to "Topics." It's the management book that will rock the world (and break the vase, as you will see). Click or paste the following link for a recent profile of the project: http://magazine.beloit.edu/?story_id=240813&issue_id=240610

A new post appears every day at 12:05* (CDT). There's more, though. Take a look at the right-hand side of the page for over four years of material (2,000 posts and growing) from Seinfeld and country music to every single day of the Chinese lunar calendar...translated. Look here ↓ and explore a little. It will take you all the way down the page...from round to square (and back again).
*Occasionally I will leave a long post up for thirty-six hours, and post a shorter entry at noon the next day.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Asian Ethnicities (10)—Dynamics of Ethnicity (f)

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series Asian Ethnicities
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
[a] Journey RF
In the next dozen entries, I will be posting an initial draft of a book introduction on Asian ethnic groups. It is meant for the blog, and does not represent anything like what will eventually be published. I do so especially because this represents a compilation of my thoughts after a full year of intensive teaching and research on Asian ethnicity. The introduction to this series shows some of my thoughts from last year—before I taught my advanced seminar by the same title as this series. This is something of a culmination of the process, even though I will be now moving in many new directions in the teaching and study of Asian ethnic groups.

Click below for other items in this essay:
Dynamics 1          Dynamics 2          Dynamics 3          Dynamics 4          Dynamics 5 
Dynamics 6          Dynamics 7          Dynamics 8          Dynamics 9          Dynamics 10
VI
East Asia (b)
[b] Fifty-six RF
Han Ethnicity (China)

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.
[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.
[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.
[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.

Click below for other items in this essay:
Dynamics 1          Dynamics 2          Dynamics 3          Dynamics 4          Dynamics 5 
Dynamics 6          Dynamics 7          Dynamics 8          Dynamics 9          Dynamics 10

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