Coming to Terms With the Nation

by Mullaney, Thomas; Anderson, Benedict

• ISBN13: 9780520272743
• ISBN10: 0520272749
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-12-27
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

China is a vast nation comprised of hundreds of distinct ethnic communities, each with its own language, history, and culture. Today the government of China recognizes just 56 ethnic nationalities, or minzu,as groups entitled to representation. This controversial new book recounts the history of the most sweeping attempt to sort and categorize the nation's enormous population: the 1954 Ethnic Classification project ( minzu shibie). Thomas S. Mullaney draws on recently declassified material and extensive oral histories to describe how the communist government, in power less than a decade, launched this process in ethnically diverse Yunnan. Mullaney shows how the government drew on Republican-era scholarship for conceptual and methodological inspiration as it developed a strategy for identifying minzuand how non-Party-member Chinese ethnologists produced a "scientific" survey that would become the basis for a policy on nationalities.

Author Biography

Best First Book Award, American Historical Association, Pacific Coast Branch Thomas S. Mullaney is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. xi
List of Tables	p. xiii
Foreword	p. xv
Acknowledgments	p. xxi
Introduction	p. 1
Identity Crisis in Postimperial China	p. 18
Ethnicity as Language	p. 42
Plausible Communities	p. 69
The Consent of the Categorized	p. 92
Counting to Fifty-Six	p. 120
Conclusion: A History of the Future	p. 134
Ethnotaxonomy of Yunnan, 1951, According to the Yunnan Nationalities Affairs Commission	p. 137
Ethnotaxonomy of Yunnan, 1953, According to the Yunnan Nationalities Affairs Commission	p. 139
Minzu Entries, 1953-1954 Census, by Population	p. 142
Classification Squads, Phases One and Two	p. 145
Population Sizes of Groups Researched during Phase One and Phase Two	p. 147
Notes	p. 149
Character Glossary	p. 185
Bibliography	p. 191
Index	p. 217
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