The Chinese Self and Tibetan Other

I have been trying to understand Tibet. Specifically, the Tibetan struggle for self-determination. There’s the national question within China and the story China tells herself. Then, there’s the world stage and the narratives spun by the media, woven according to the ideological bias of its audience.

I will write more about the story being looped in the left wing press.

Today, I want to think about the story China tells herself. The story begins with the Han identity, a historical construction that dates (like most things) to the early twentieth century as the nation shifted from empire to state. The notion of Han existed for many centuries – the Han dynasty ruled the Wei river valley in central China from 206 BC to 220 AD – but was not considered an ethnic identity until shortly after the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

The nation, proposed Prasenjit Duara in Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (1995), can be understood as “a provisional relationship, a historical configuration in which the national ‘self’ is defined in relation to the Other”. Two subjects were created in the nation, including the Self who was defined in terms of who was excluded from national membership. The Self contained several different others, people objectified as being essentially different from the aims of the national community. Han nationalism can be understood using Duara’s definition of nationalism as a relational identity between the Self who was included in the national community, and the exclusion of others. The Han were constructed as an indigenous and homogenous identity that was essential to being “Chinese”.

The nascent nation-state sent out teams of anthropologists and scientists to comb the countryside and far-flung provinces of China, noting physical attributes and cultural practices. Social Darwinism and Stalinism was in vogue with Chinese social scientists, then. They crafted a theory of a racialized teleology where the Han represented the advanced and modern end of an evolutionary spectrum. Minority others were thought of as “living fossils” of savagery and barbarism that were stages that the Han passed through in order to reach the their position of civilization. This was supported by empirical data that minority practices of matriarchy, communal living and property holding, and extramarital relations were examples of “primitive communism”.

Fei Xiaotong, a Chinese anthropologist, discussed the process of “ethnic identification” based on the Marxist-Stalinist criteria for a race in Toward a Peoples’ Anthropology (1981). A race needed to share a common language, geographic locality, economy, and psychological make-up or culture according to Joseph Stalin. The State Commission for Ethnic Affairs deliberated on the racial categorization of a group, and relied on Stalin’s criteria because it represented “a universal truth…proved through a long period of actual investigation” and used “in the work of nationality research and nationality identification…with success”.

In Plurality and Unity in the Configuration of the Chinese Nationality (1988), Fei traced the rise of Han people from a multiplicity of ethnic origins and their unilineal descent to contemporary society. The Han nationality, wrote Fei, “became a nucleus of concentration” and minorities were “eventually all assimilated into the Han”. Minorities “are inferior to the Han in the level of culture and technology indispensable for the development of modern industry”.

Tibetans and 54 other ethnic minorities have been racialized as the Other in a sociohistorical process that strengthened Han nationalism, the Chinese Self. Tibetans were classified using Stalinist-Marxist criteria of identifying races, and placed at the bottom rung of the evolutionary ladder of progress and modernity. Statecraft constructed a homogenous state with a unified population in order to break with the feudal and superstitious past of darkness and ignorance, and enter the new order of Truth and Reason.

The distinction between Han Self and Tibetan Other continues today, enforced by the PRC policy of internal colonization in Tibet and evident in the recent Tibetan uprisings. Howard French reported:

“The relationship between Han and Tibetan is irreconcilable,” said Yuan Qinghai, a Lhasa taxi driver [of Han ethnicity], in an interview. “We don’t have a good impression of [Tibetans], as they are lazy and they hate us, for, as they say, taking away what belongs to them. In their mind showering once or twice in their life is sacred, but to Han it is filthy and unacceptable.

“We [Han] believe in working hard and making money to support one’s family, but [Tibetans] might think we’re greedy and have no faith.”

Even among long-term residents in Lhasa, Han Chinese said they had no Tibetan friends and confessed that they tended to avoid interaction with Tibetans as much as possible. “There’s been this hatred for a long time,” said Tang Xuejun, a Han resident of Lhasa for the last 10 years. “Sometimes you would even wonder how we had avoided open confrontation for so many years. This is a hatred that cannot be solved by arresting a few people.” Tibetans, meanwhile, complain that they have been relegated to second-class citizenship, that their culture is being destroyed through forced assimilation, that their religious freedoms have been trampled upon.

Photos from protest outside of Chinese consulate in NYC on March 18, 2008.