Abstract
Early twentieth-century China, as with other post-imperial states, faced the challenge of creating a nation encompassing different social groups and cultures. How to identify ethnic groups living in the borderlands and generate nationwide social cohesion became a fundamental question that concerned multiple intellectual communities. This article traces the formation of two approaches to ethnicity—ethnology and sociology—at that time. These two approaches, configuring “ethnic differences” in dissimilar ways, were received differently by the public. In the end, the ethnological approach prevailed and the sociological approach was marginalized. This outcome exemplifies a possible hierarchy of knowledge, but also involves the politics of knowledge. This article shows that the disparate visions of “ethnic others” were produced by intellectuals differently positioned within the social context of post-imperial China. The positionalities of these disciplines explain much of their intellectual alignment.
This article traces the formation of two approaches to ethnicity promoted by two academic disciplines—ethnology and sociology—in early twentieth-century China. Ethnographic knowledge proliferated in the new nation of China when the old imperial ideology became obsolete. These two approaches, configuring “ethnic differences” in dissimilar ways, were received differently by the public. The ethnological approach was well-received and, in the end, prevailed; the sociological approach was marginalized. This difference exemplifies both a possible hierarchy of knowledge as well as the operation of the politics of knowledge. This article sheds light on these aspects by focusing on the transplantation of these two disciplines. It shows that the disparate visions of “ethnic others” were not abstract constructions but were produced by intellectuals differently positioned within the social context of post-imperial China. The positionalities of these disciplines explain their intellectual alignments.
Exploring how “ethnic others” were defined is a key in this article. In elucidating the relevance of “others” for nation building, I draw insights from Edward Said (1991) and the colonial studies he influenced. Said articulates the social embeddedness of orientalist imaginings in colonial enterprises. Propagated by Western humanistic scholars, orientalism fixed the “otherness” of the colonized and reinforced Westerners’ perceptions of superiority (Cohn, 1987). It added great symbolic power to colonialism (Loveman, 2005), and lubricated colonial administration as it adjusted colonial rule toward a finely tuned “native policy” (Steinmetz, 2007).
The China cases I examine do not fit the colonial encounter. They do, however, show that defining others was important for an empire in transition to a modern nation-state. China was historically a multiethnic empire with a strong state tradition. The last empire, the Qing (1644–1911), a conquest empire founded by the Manchus, included the vast territories inhabited by Han Chinese and numerous minorities, including Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, Uighurs, and others. Like earlier Chinese dynasties, the ruling concept for the Qing Empire was “heaven” 天下 rather than “state” 国. “Heaven” was the world, whereas “state” indicated a local political unit, a part of the world empire (Levenson, 1968). In the imperial ideology of “heaven,” “ethnic others” colored the imperial landscape and testified to the strength of imperial civilization. The downfall of imperial universalism in the early twentieth century thus presented a serious problem: whether and how to include ethnic others in a redefined, narrower national subjectivity. Ethnologists and sociologists offered two alternative ways to deal with this problem. 1
Two contrasting visions of ethnic others emerged at the time that were concurrent with the formation of these new disciplines. Neither vision was orientalist, strictly speaking. However, the orientalist model offers a useful template for configuring their particularities and their contests. Ethnologists envisioned the nation, whose parameters were determined by the state, as encompassing a variety of ethnic groups. And they believed that dealing with ethnocultural differences was crucial to building a unified nation. Ethnologists were keen to explore these differences, by identifying their splits, diffusion, and merges in history. I call their approach “internal orientalization” because they explored differences, not exactly to distinguish the “others,” but to corroborate their belonging to the overarching national entity. 2 In contrast, sociologists downplayed the nation-state unit and viewed societies, from the bottom up, as open spaces. They saw ethnic distinctions rising from varying modes of rational adaptations to a changing environment. Not assuming an ontological group-based view of cultural differences, sociologists adopted an approach I call “deorientalization,” because they fundamentally objected to solidifying others. Neither did they assume that ethnicities should be merged into a single nation.
These two visions emerged in the aftermath of the collapse of the Qing Empire. They did not supplement each other, but instead were bound in a power relationship. Both in academic and public debates, ethnologists exerted far greater influence than sociologists in the first half of the twentieth century. It was predominantly ethnologists who shaped the intellectual concept of “ethnic differences,” whereas sociologists were marginal to mainstream discourses. To explain why, I will start with an illustration of the historical context, followed by an exploration of the basic ideas and organization of these two disciplines, and conclude with a comparison of their positionalities.
From Traditional Scholarship to Two Distinct Modern Disciplines
Both ethnology and sociology studied minzu 民族, meaning both ethnicity and nation. 3 Both fields produced ethnographic knowledge of non-Han people inhabiting China’s “minority” regions. They benefited from the ethnographic knowledge produced by traditional scholars, yet they focused on “ethnic differences,” which were only vaguely expressed by the latter.
Neither ethnology nor sociology belonged to the indigenous system of knowledge associated with Confucian scholars in China before the twentieth century. The old generation of scholars active from the Qianlong 乾隆 (1736–1795) and Jiaqing 嘉庆 (1796–1820) eras through the late Qing were scholar-officials, erudite in the Confucian classics and active in the government. They were fascinated with ethnographic knowledge, even though they did not categorize cultural differences between the core and outlying peripheral zones as ethnic differences. Their primary interest was to inform state bureaucrats of the less well-known geography and population of the newly integrated frontier regions. They provided a wide range of information on the geography, history, administration, social organization, mores, customs, rituals, and languages of frontier people; their knowledge was systematically geared to practical needs. Most of their studies were situated in the literary tradition of Chinese scholarship. Official historical sources, especially those of the conquering dynasties, such as the Liao 辽 (907–1125), Jin 金 (1115–1234), and Yuan 元 (1271–1368), were scrupulously examined and, where possible, checked against empirical observations (Guo, 2007).
The imperial government also sponsored compilations of ethnographical knowledge for administrative purposes. As Laura Hostetler (2001) points out in her analysis of the so-called Miao albums—”colorfully illustrated manuscripts”—a special genre of ethnographic knowledge was employed for administrative purposes, offering rich information on physical appearances (especially dress and hairstyle), customs, residential places, and administrative jurisdictions of the local people (Hosteler, 2001: 5). The classification of ethnic groups, as Hostetler (2001: 174) argues, was not based upon any fixed criteria (such as language), but was recorded, sometimes even redundantly, to convey a sense of “order” and “comprehensiveness.”
Despite their varied backgrounds, ranging from military officers, diplomats, garrison commanders, and official historians residing in the capital, to the literati of the Jiangnan area (Guo, 2007: 135), traditional ethnographers gathered especially rich material about the history and geography of frontiers, strategically important places for the Qing Empire. In addition to their practical concerns about defending and governing the frontier, these works were also concerned with the mission of “civilizing” the frontier, or the promotion of cultural universalism (i.e., an acculturation to Confucianism) among native peoples. 4 They were imbued with an imperial ideology that promoted a Confucian universalism that transcended ethnic and local differences. In this lineage of writing, less attention was paid to mapping discrete units of ethnicity than exploring the various groups as they were being integrated and assimilated into the dominant imperial culture.
Traditional scholars did not articulate ethnicity—defined by Rogers Brubaker (2002: 164) as “discrete, sharply differentiated, internally homogenous and externally bounded groups”—as a unit of analysis. It was only when modern disciplines such as ethnology and sociology emerged in China in the 1920s that it became a proper unit of analysis. The idea of a deeply constituted cultural disparity among social groups was critically debated in ethnology and sociology but was not particularly relevant to the traditional Chinese mind-set. Traditional scholars tended to envision empire as a centripetal force that drew in and absorbed local cultural differences. The idea of ethnic difference in fact threatened to sabotage the old political notion of empire. Ethnology and sociology therefore could only grow up in the post-imperial era.
China in the 1920s was a new republican nation. The anti-Manchu revolution (1911) overthrew the Qing Empire and bolstered the ethnic awareness of even ordinary Han Chinese people (Esherick, 2006; Crossley, 2004). The intellectuals of younger generations attacked even more severely the Confucian universalism that characterized the imperial imagination (Levenson, 1968). The new nation builders had to tackle an urgent task: how to create a new unity from the multiple lands and peoples inherited from the imperial past. The new political leaders assayed the scheme of identifying China as a union of five peoples 五族共和, i.e., five nationalities (the Han, Manchu, Mongol, Muslim, and Tibetan peoples) (Dikötter, 1992: chaps. 3 and 4). Ethnology and sociology were born in this context and developed their own responses to the question: How can a new “we” be created once ethnic differences are overtly recognized?
While addressing this question, these new disciplines were not completely cut off from the traditional legacy. As I will show, the ethnologists’ ultimate purpose was not to mark “ethnic differences,” but to delineate the mutual penetration of differences in the formation of the Chinese nation. Ethnic groups, they believed, were not sharply distinguishable. This was conducive to the rise of a comprehensive Chinese culture, which made Confucian universalism the overarching identity of China. This mission was not so different from that of the traditional ethnographers. Sociologists, on the other hand, were more iconoclastic, and made traditionalism their major target. They strove to distinguish themselves from traditional ethnographers and claim a new identity all their own.
We should note that the disciplines of ethnology and sociology in early twentieth-century China do not fit perfectly with our contemporary disciplinary divisions. Today, most Chinese universities have sociology and anthropology departments. However, ethnology, considered to be part of the Soviet legacy, exists as a discipline only in ethnic universities 民族院校. Back in the early Republican period, ethnology was a comprehensive discipline for studying ethnic cultures. It differed from anthropology, which at that time narrowly referred to physical anthropology. Sociology was initiated as a discipline studying urban and rural society. It did not include the study of ethnic cultures until the Sino-Japanese War, when most sociologists were relocated to border areas where they encountered different cultures.
Ethnology: Intellectual Sources and Approaches
Ethnologists of this period were history-minded and respected the literary tradition of Chinese scholarship. At the same time, they were also inspired by German scholarship that emphasized scientific positivism and evidential rigor. The mixture of these elements shaped the elitist character of Chinese ethnology, which valued literary and historical erudition and rejected empirical, journalistic scholarship. In studying ethnicity, Chinese ethnologists were not primarily interested in laying bare ethnic differences. Rather, they endeavored to show that Chinese culture was formed by the mutual penetration of ethnic differences. In this respect, their approach was close to the “internal orientalization” that characterized German ethnology.
History-Informed Ethnography
Like the traditional scholars, ethnologists viewed a rigorous and thorough knowledge of history, rather than the gathering of contemporary empirical knowledge, as fundamental to understanding mankind. They viewed history not as merely a subject of learning but as the incarnation of real knowledge, a comprehensive way to understand the world, and a wellspring of experience to rule the world. It was the foundation of primary education in imperial China. Indeed, the writing of history was monopolized by the literate elite who carefully safeguarded the hierarchy that differentiated intellectuals from the illiterate. Ethnologists’ encounter with ethnicity was mediated through the enterprise of writing a new Chinese history. This intimately connected Chinese ethnologists to China’s literary tradition.
Before the ethnologists, Chinese intellectuals had made painstaking efforts to rewrite Chinese history in order to make sense of a changing China. The vanguard of new history writing included statecraft scholars of the late nineteenth century, revolutionary thinkers, the historical geography school, and scholars of archaeology and ethnology (Peng, 1995; Guo, 2007; Sang, 2008, 2010; Luo, 2013). Authors of the new history painstakingly sought new materials (including newly excavated archival, archeological, and folkloric sources) and new perspectives (such as the positivism and evolutionism popular in Europe) to interrogate classical texts (Sang, 2008: chap. 3). None of these initiatives could proceed without intense and rigorous learning. Among the authors of new history, ethnologists were distinctive because their studies spoke directly to the question of ethnicity. In spite of new professional training, ethnologists, like their historian predecessors, continued to value knowledge in classical texts and evidential rigor.
The pioneers of ethnology thus showed a great interest in the historical movements of ethnic groups and the roles they played in making the Chinese nation. Lin Shu (1903), a famous novelist and translator, was the first to introduce ethnology 民族学, which was hardly distinguishable from folk study 民种学 or race study 人种学 (Jiang, 1903; Wang Jianmin, 1997). 5 The conflation of race, folk, and ethnicity—which was not unusual—resulted in the fusing of nation, ethnicity, race, and people into one entity. From the very beginning, the word minzu had a strong connotation of evolutionism, with a focus on national competition (Liang, 1989: 2-10.10–35). Liang Qichao, a leader in the movement toward ethnology, anticipated that ethnology would uncover the distinct national identity of China, which he presumed emerged from an evolutionary historical process. He urged the writing of a history that would address encounters of multiple ethnic peoples, their intermixing and transformation in history, and their participation in the formation of the Chinese nation (Liang, 1999: 2.736–53). The pioneers of ethnology, like Liang, set the tone for a later ethnology that grafted historical inquiries and methods to the study of the unique national character of China.
A formal and thorough introduction of ethnicity as a scientific discipline had to wait until the publication of “On Ethnology” 说民族学 by Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 (1868–1940) in 1926 (Cai, 1962). Cai defined ethnology as the study of different cultures. It relied on the unearthing of non-literary sources to supplement textual sources in the study of ancient civilizations, thus stretching historical inquiry to its earliest point (Cai, 1962: 6). Cai explicitly connected ethnology to traditional scholarship and in so doing enhanced the status of the former.
German scholarship was another important intellectual resource for ethnology. In the first half of the twentieth century, German influence on all of Chinese academics was widespread. In the humanities, as George Steinmetz (2007: chap. 7) points out, German sinology had a long a Sinophile legacy. German scholars respected Chinese traditions because they both cherished educational distinctions, even though this standard later wavered with the rise of a militarist and merchant elite, who disparaged China (Ringer, 1990). This may explain why German academics, including ethnologists, were popular among Chinese academics. More broadly, Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government adopted an ideology of statism, which was directly transmitted from Germany.
Cai Yuanpei and Fu Sinian 傅斯年 (1896–1950), leading founders of ethnology, were returnees from Germany. They imported and practiced the German idea of a research institute, thereby providing the environment for the growth of ethnology. Cai was a Confucian scholar, a revolutionary activist, an anarchist, and an enthusiastic admirer of German scholarship (Lü, 1997: 402–6; Wang Fan-sen, 2000). This idiosyncratic background earned Cai an unrivalled reputation among his peers. He was appointed president of Peking University in 1917, when the university was still gripped by an intense conservatism (Cai, 1967: 12). Under Cai’s leadership (1916–1927), Peking University underwent dramatic changes in the composition of its faculty and curricula, turning it from a school for bureaucrats to a German-style research university. This transpired while the university maintained both its prestige as the successor to the Imperial College 国子监 and its connection with the central bureaucracy.
In 1927, Cai Yuanpei and a few others founded the Academia Sinica 中央研究院. The Academia Sinica was modeled after French and Soviet academies, incorporating the sciences and humanities, and was highly regarded for the scientific rigor of the studies conducted under its auspices (Chen, 1998). The primary founders, Cai Yuanpei, Wu Zhihui 吴稚晖 (1865–1953), and Zhang Jingjiang 张静江 (1877–1950), were all European returnees who sought to establish a professional research institute in China. Although the Academia Sinica was located in Nanjing, it was not insulated from the influence of Peking University. Students from the university played a central role in the Academia Sinica, and both institutions shared a commitment to cultivating rigorous scholarship.
At the center of this network stood Fu Sinian, a graduate of Peking University and chair of the Institute of History and Philology 历史语言研究所 at the Academia Sinica, and a sponsor of ethnology. While at Berlin University, Fu Sinian took courses in physics, mathematics, statistics, comparative linguistics, the historical school of Ranke, and Tibetan, taught by Herman Franke (1870–1930) (Wang, 2000: 64). He befriended Yu Dawei 俞大维 (1897–1993), Chen Yinke 陈寅恪 (1890–1969), and Mao Zishui 毛子水 (1893–1988), who introduced him to a new world of German oriental studies. Fu was impressed by its historical positivism, and especially by its affinity with traditional evidential scholarship in China, since both tended to exhaust available evidence in order to test hypotheses. Fu and his friends in Germany soon became intellectual patrons who channeled ethnological resources from Europe into China. Back in China, Fu laid out the concrete design of ethnology in China and appointed the first group of ethnologists in the Institute of History and Philology. 6
In short, Chinese ethnology was deeply indebted to both China’s literary tradition and German scholarship of the 1920s. Instead of focusing on the contemporary situation of ethnic groups, Chinese ethnologists intended to show the historical depth of ethnic formation. They identified themselves as new historians who used a new methodology and new sources to reveal the changing pattern of Chinese history. They were proud of their historian-like training and preferred literary and historical erudition over contemporary empirical knowledge, both of which shaped their elitist character. I call them elitist because they rejected the superficial, journalistic-style that characterized marginal intellectuals, including “radical teachers, journalists and students” (Sun, 1986: 158). They also had an aversion for grassroots social initiatives. 7 Their elitist character revealed not only their intellectual preferences, but also their positional function in the academic and wider social fields, a point to which I will return. In the next section I discuss their approach to ethnicity.
Discovering Familiar Strangers
Chinese ethnologists produced ethnographies informed by history to map the existence of ethnic groups that had been marginal in conventional history. The new method of fieldwork gave them a means not only to gather information that had been missing in history but also create a distance from the history that was familiar to them. The various ethnic groups who played an important role in making Chinese history were like voices that had been submerged in the official histories. The ethnologists were determined to excavate their histories and reconfigure the unity of China based upon those discoveries. They thus employed an approach I call “internal orientalization” to discover “familiar strangers” in the Chinese context. 8
“Internal orientalization” is a term used by Suzanne Marchand to characterize the enterprise pursued by German ethnologists during, as she puts it, the “age of empire” (roughly 1830 to 1930). Unlike Anglo-Saxon anthropology (Marchand, 2009: 158), German ethnology during that period did not produce practical knowledge about Oriental ethnic groups, because the Germans did not have significant overseas colonies in Asia. German scholars thus developed a quite different sense of the Orient, one that was less pragmatic, more romantic, less strategic, but more archaic. Their keen interest in the Orient was not tied to an entirely foreign land and people, but to “familiar strangers” who had come to interact in the Euro-Asian continent and whose history was reminiscent of, and indeed connected to, the tribal origins of the German nation. Such scholarship illuminated “our” prehistory by unmasking the history of “others” (Marchand, 2009: 64). The emergence of “others” in their scholarship called into question whether the original “us” was singular and cohesive, while paving the way for a new formulation of “us.” This goal is close to that of the Chinese ethnologists who studied “ethnic differences,” not to solidify the different “others,” but to clarify their connections to “us,” thus incorporating them into a reconstituted “we.”
Despite their various academic backgrounds, 9 Chinese ethnologists were predominately interested in ethnic classification and the ethnic heterogeneity of China. They attempted to underpin the historical connections of ethnic groups and map their distribution within the landscape of the Chinese nation.
The first systematic study of the ethnic/racial make-up of the Chinese people—The Formation of the Chinese People—was by Li Ji 李济 (1896–1979), a physical anthropologist and often credited as the founder of modern archaeology in China, who received his PhD from Harvard and then joined the Academia Sinica (Li Ji, 1928). 10 Li Ji’s work became a model for later studies of the various constituents of the Chinese population and their historical connectedness. In 1934, Ling Chunsheng 凌纯声 (1902–1981), a student of Marcel Mauss, and Shang Chengzu 商承祖 (1900–1975), a graduate in ethnology from the University of Hamburg, were delegated by the Academia Sinica to conduct research on the Hezhe people 赫哲族 of Manchuria (Ling, 1934). 11 This team was later expanded to include Rui Yifu 芮逸夫 (1898–1991), Yang Chengzhi 杨成志 (1902–1991), Xu Yitang 徐益棠 (1896–1953), Tao Yunkui 陶云逵 (1904–1944), Wei Huilin 卫惠林 (1904–1992), Ma Changshou 马长寿 (1907–1971), and a few others. 12
One of the best-known examples of the work of this group was Report of an Investigation of the Miao People of Western Hunan 湘西苗族调查报告, coauthored by Ling Chunsheng and Rui Yifu (2003 [1947]). In 1933 Ling and Rui led an expedition to western Hunan, a land wracked by rebellion among the Miao and ethnic conflicts since the late Qing. Their report opens with a question: How does one classify the different ethnic groups of Hunan? The two researchers employed the most advanced technologies, including photography, tape recorders, and film, to collect visual and aural materials. These new sources were frequently consulted when checking the accuracy of well-known historical materials, such as the Qing-dynasty An Overview of Miao Areas 苗疆全图, A Record of Fenghuang 凤凰厅志, and Tributes to the Imperial Qing 皇清职贡图. By using all these sources, the authors identified ethnic differences while unmasking their historical interrelatedness, thus defying simple classifications based upon any static criterion such as language.
Moreover, the Report devoted ample space to history, geography (chaps. 1, 2, 4) and, in particular, administration (chaps. 6, 7, with respect to the role of Miao officials and Qing garrisons). It showed that the migration of ethnic groups led to the fusion and splitting of ethnic cultures and corresponded to the waxing and waning of Chinese administrative power in this area. In other words, the history of the “others” was never isolated from the Chinese state. In this case, the Report did not portray the Miao as untouched, authentic “others,” thus restoring their agency in history. Instead, by discovering “others,” the Report served the purpose of displaying the robust relations between the peripheries and the center (i.e., the imperial Qing government in the past and the Chinese nation in the present).
A more explicit articulation of the state’s priorities can be seen in the classification model offered by Ling Chunsheng in his Essays on Frontier Culture 边疆文化论集 (1953). In this volume, Ling maps the distribution of ethnic groups in concentric circles. Han Chinese, the ethnic majority, occupy the center, and are surrounded by intermediate rings occupied by Mongols and Tibetans, which in turn are surrounded by distant rings of southwestern minorities. The positioning of these groups was not dictated by their ethnic attributes, geographical location, or even by the degree of assimilation, but by their political importance. The greatest attention was given to the Mongols and Tibetans, whose distinct judicial and political traditions posed a challenge for governance, whereas the southwestern minorities were considered politically “safe,” and so warranted less attention. 13 Obviously, this classification was intended to serve the interests of the nation-state, rather than the interests of the “others.” Though sensitive to cultural differences, ethnologists like Ling were equally attentive to the diffusion of political influence from the center.
Ling and other ethnologists therefore produced an elitist scholarship of ethnic differences, but also maintained a top-down perspective. Their object was not merely to articulate differences, but to trace how various ethnicities could be integrated within the parameters set by the Chinese state. To that extent, they were aligned with the political center, consciously or unconsciously. They produced a new vision of a multiethnic China, one that was different from the imperial vision.
Intellectual Sources and Approaches to Sociology
The Ascendance of Sociology
Unlike ethnology, Chinese sociology had a thinner connection to traditional scholarship. Chinese sociologists, who had been mostly educated and were now teaching in missionary private universities, behaved more locally. They studied concrete social problems and offered practical advice, instead of trying to rewrite Chinese history. They were also metropolitan, because they were returnees from Anglo-American universities and kept wide connections with international academics. Unlike the ethnologists, who took pride in the heritage of the literary tradition and valued erudition, the sociologists were immersed in empirical research and down-to-earth learning. Their outlook was nearly the opposite of the elitist outlook of the ethnologists.
Chinese sociology of the 1930s comprised three clusters: statistics and demography, community studies, and the sociology of law (Wang, 2012). Community studies represented the stream of ethnographic sociology; it was first a subfield of urban studies, then expanded to include ethnic studies. Community studies was launched in the 1930s by Wu Wenzao 吴文藻 (1901–1985) and his students in missionary universities. In their work, the word “community” 社区 indicated a local social space, a tribal society, a village, or an urban neighborhood (Wu, 1990). Within this space, social actors interacted, conditioned by the economic resources available within their community. Localness does not imply that such communities were entirely segregated from each other or impervious to the penetration of macro forces. Instead, the examination of a local space was a convenient way to observe how macro forces brought about social change in particular sites.
The icon of community studies in the 1930s was the Yenching school 燕京学派. Its spiritual roots lay in the tradition of community service in missionary universities. Founded by J. S. Burgess in 1916, Yenching University 燕京大学 was a prestigious missionary university whose evangelical mission focused on the idea of community service. For more than a decade, most of Yenching University’s faculty were foreigners. The Sociology Department record for 1925–1926 shows that only one (Leonard Hsu, a renowned demographer) of the ten faculty members was Chinese (Chen, 2010: 17). When Wu Wenzao chaired the department in 1933, he steered the Yenching school toward professional research. This was also true at West China Union University 华西协和大学 (WCUU), which followed Yenching in establishing the discipline of ethnographic sociology. 14 Wu’s student, Li Anzhai 李安宅 (1900–1985), initiated a similar reform at WCUU (Bing Xin, 1998: 195–225). These early sociology reformers instilled a new vision in the discipline that raised sociology from being an auxiliary of social work and a passive conveyor of Western theories, to a discipline that conducted independent research on Chinese social problems. At the same time, they retained the idea of community service in their research. They studied acute social problems in cities, the countryside, and the frontiers, informed by an urgent practical concern: to ameliorate real problems.
The Yenching model was soon replicated at WCUU, thanks to Li Anzhai’s leadership. Li chaired the Sociology Department of WCUU in 1941, a critical time in China, when the Japanese invasion necessitated the relocation of several major universities to the southwestern frontier regions. The Yenching faculty and students moved to Sichuan. Li was delegated to manage the sociology departments of both Yenching and WCUU. He recruited Ren Naiqiang 任乃强 (1894–1989), Xie Guoan 谢国安 (1887–1966), Liu Liqian 刘立千 (1910–2008), Yu Wenhua 玉文华, and his wife Yu Shiyu 于式玉 (1904–1969), to strengthen the Frontier Research Institute, founded at WCUU in 1942 (Wu, 2008).
In addition, Li Anzhai frequently communicated with the research group called Kuige 魁阁 that had been established at Yunnan University 云南大学. Founded by Wu Wenzao and Fei Xiaotong 费孝通 (1910–2005), Kuige became another research base heavily influenced by the Yenching school. It attracted students with a broad interest in the conditions of peasants and minority peoples in Yunnan, 15 and produced brilliant works such as The Shan of Yunnan 摆夷的摆 (1941), by Tian Rukang 田汝康 (1916–2006), and The Cool Mountain Yi People 凉山彝家 (1945), by Lin Yueh-hwa 林耀华 (1910–2000).
In addition to these two major missionary universities, a few minor private universities also promoted Yenching-style ethnographic sociology. For example, Wu Zelin 吴泽霖 (1898–1990), the founder of sociology at Daxia University 大夏大学 in Shanghai, was originally a quantitative sociologist who had completed his PhD in sociology at Ohio State University. 16 Wu Zelin shifted his interest to the ethnographic study of ethnicity in Guizhou and appreciated the model of community study and was sympathetic to the solutions Wu Wenzao prescribed to improve interethnic communication. He sought examples, including the American colonization of the West, the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s, British colonial experiments in Australia and New Zealand, and the Soviet Union’s social and economic construction in Central Asia and West Siberia, to illustrate a progressivist model of interethnic relations (Wu, 1943). It should be noted, however, that some scholars did have overlapping connections. They were affiliated with different institutions at different times. However, I use Yenching as an example to emphasize a certain approach and style of research adopted by these scholars who might be affiliated with other institutions as well. 17
The ethnographic sociology in missionary and private universities was different from the ethnology entrenched in national research institutions in that it was engaged less with the question of national identity than with remediating concrete social problems. It tended to focus on the present rather than the historical formation of ethnicity. This tendency was strengthened by the intellectual resources transmitted from the Anglo-American social sciences.
Like the founders of ethnology, Wu Wenzao was what could be called an academic entrepreneur. He used his personal connections with American and British social scientists to consolidate ethnographic sociology in China. Wu invited Robert Ezra Park (1864–1944) to give lectures on collective action and sociological method at Yenching University. Park’s lectures inspired Wu’s students, including Fei Xiaotong, who had fond memories of Park (Fei, 2009: 1.133–40). Wu also worked closely with the Rockefeller Foundation, which became a major funding source for his students’ work. 18 Wu especially appreciated the British social anthropology pioneered by Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955). Two of his students, Fei Xiaotong and Li Anzhai, had a close connection with functionalist anthropology. Li Anzhai (1936) translated Malinowski’s essays on magic, language, and science.
Chicago urban sociology and British functionalist anthropology greatly influenced Chinese sociology. The Chicago school offered a horizontal model of human relations that inspired Chinese sociologists to study group contact. Chicago urban sociology burgeoned in an era of great immigration between 1880 and 1924, when a large number of immigrants came to America from Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe. They found assimilation into American cities difficult for both religious and cultural reasons (Persons, 1987: 9), and also because of their non-Anglo-Saxon background. This drove Chicago sociologists, and in particular Robert Park himself, to construct a theory of assimilation based not on cultural homogeneity but on diversity. Park conceived of assimilation as a process that allowed the distinctive characteristics of individuals and groups to be preserved even as they were integrated into the larger society (Persons, 1987: 80). This optimistic attitude did not dispel concerns about demographic imbalances and ethnic competition, both of which propelled conflicts between original residents and new immigrants (Lal, 1990: 4; Park and Burgess, 1924: 161–64, 28–87, 506). However, the Chicago sociologists believed conflicts resulted from horizontal population contact, not from domination (e.g., a caste system) (Persons, 1987: 83). Therefore, conflicts could be reduced by rational communication, which would likely increase the awareness of interdependence and reciprocity between social groups (Lal, 1990: 55).
Horizontal social interaction was a novel concept to Chinese scholars, accustomed as they were to hierarchically structured social spaces, such as the traditional state and the family. Nevertheless, the model of horizontal interaction became central in discussions among Chinese sociologists whose exposure to and immersion in the culture of missionary universities disposed them toward communitarian equality and against the idea of hierarchy. Fei Xiaotong first introduced Robert Park’s theory of contact and assimilation in his review of Yang Baoling’s work on Russian immigrants in American cities (Fei, 2009: 1.108–44). Fei’s adviser, Wu Wenzao, gave an even more thorough and systematic review of the idea of contact in a few methodological essays (Wu, 1990: 144–50, 151–59; Wu, Chen, and Wang, 2010: 462–78). 19
As for the other important source of inspiration—British functionalist anthropology—it too called for empirical field work and criticized antiquarian scholarship. Bronislaw Malinowski encouraged the fieldwork approach and advocated a radical departure from conventional ethnology (Gellner, 1998). Unlike ethnologists, whether from the evolutionary or diffusionist schools, functionalist anthropologists were uninterested in studying the dead culture of non-Europeans (Stocking, 1987). This orientation toward the present provoked contention between social anthropologists and colonial agents, who continued to base their notions about colonialism on knowledge of the past.
Past-oriented knowledge yielded a static view of ethnic groups, which served colonial indirect rule. The most successful part of so-called indirect rule consisted of an ideology that preserved the notion of “custom-bound” native culture and keep intact the indigenous ruling structure (Mantena, 2010; Cohn, 1987). If the British grip on India somehow attested to the effectiveness of indirect rule, its failure was apparent in the African colonies where social anthropologists conducted their fieldwork. 20 The revolt against antiquarian interest in ethnology therefore involved a serious questioning of the efficacy of colonial indirect rule. Chinese sociologists, who stood outside the elite academies and the government, fully comprehended this political gesture on the part of British social anthropologists working in Africa.
Moreover, present-minded social anthropologists wanted to divert the building of colonial society from the securing of political institutions toward the restoration of the social fabric. Old-time ethnographers, including “government anthropologists,” colonial administrators, and missionaries, all wanted to fix natives to their past so as to sustain indirect rule, although the actual underlying interest was “pacifying the natives.” 21 This whole body of knowledge overlooked how reality was devastated by colonialism itself, as attested to by the situation of “detribalized natives.” 22 Detribalization was catastrophe not remediable by any conservative policy. On the contrary, only progressive social programming (in Malinowski’s words, a “forward policy”), where one did not receive orders from bureaucrats on high but relied on local initiatives and adjusted to local needs, and where one did not seek to recover tradition but propel modernization, could forestall total destruction (Richards, 1932).
British functionalist anthropology thus kindled Chinese sociologists’ passion to study the empirical present of China. One of them, Fei Xiaotong, finished his dissertation under Malinowski in London. As a graduate student, he confessed to his old Yenching schoolmates that he had a passion for functionalist anthropology (Fei, 2009: 2.35–38). He sent back detailed reading notes of the most recent issues of Africa, a journal inaugurated by Malinowski at the London School of Economics. These notes contained Fei’s approving comments on Malinowski’s approach to “racial/cultural conflicts” in Africa. Not trying to fix the Africans to their perennial past, Malinowski’s approach directed our attention to a quickly dissolving African culture in the process of modernization. To ease the concomitant social conflicts, Malinowski did not prescribe cultural restoration, but instead a progressivism that would accelerate modernization in colonies (Fei, 2009: 2.39–51). These ideas inspired Fei Xiaotong and other sociologists who tried to distinguish themselves from the privileged history-minded scholars.
In sum, ethnographic sociology in China emerged in missionary and private universities, a different site from the national research institutions that promoted ethnology. With a strong commitment to community service, missionary universities encouraged practical learning for improving society. This commitment was retained in the professionalized sociology that was emerging during the 1930s. Two important intellectual sources shaped the character of Chinese sociology. The Chicago school of urban sociology offered a horizontal model of social relations that stimulated Chinese sociologists to dwell on the possibility of group contact and communication. British social anthropology, on the other hand, directed sociologists’ attention to the present situation of China, rather than its remote past. They cultivated a style of scholarship that was focused on the present, practical, and down-to-earth.
Constructing the Frontier as an Open Society
Not interested in mapping the distribution of ethnic groups, sociologists viewed any classificatory scheme with suspicion. Neither were they interested in bringing to light the movements of different ethnic groups and their eventual integration into the Chinese nation. On the contrary, in their eyes all social groups, and even the nation itself, were mobilized because their character and social shape were formed from individual interactions with the environment. They thus reduced “ethnic differences” to different modes of adaptations. In so doing, sociologists developed an approach I call “deorientalization,” refusing to treat ethnic culture as self-enclosed and tradition bound.
In fact, traces of deorientalization can be found in both Chicago urban sociology and British functionalist anthropology. Instead of configuring migrant communities as bounded and static, Chicago sociologists viewed them as a site of dynamic interactions that constantly refreshed migrants’ cultural identity. Without attempting to discover and conserve historical relics, British social anthropology focused on the destructive impact of modernization on local cultures. Both schools advocated a rational actor model and shed light on the effects of communication, which they expected would bridge cultural differences. These ideas inspired Chinese sociologists to deorientalize their perception of frontier minorities.
Both Fei Xiaotong and Wu Wenzao were keen to study the effects of social contact in their present situation. Fei’s first ethnography, on the Hualan Yao 花篮瑶, is a good example. Bearing little resemblance to standard ethnology, Fei’s work was based not on an exhaustive study of written and oral materials on the Yao culture, but on sources relevant to the contemporary economic and social life of the Yao people. In the early twentieth century there was a large-scale migration of Han into Yao communities; as a consequence, the Yao lost a great deal of land (Fei, 2009: 1.376–450). Fei’s account dissolved the cultural cohesiveness of the Yao people and deprived them of their historical depth since it overlooked their historical fusion with Han Chinese culture. Furthermore, it did not place the Yao people in the political landscape of the Chinese state. In every respect, Fei depicted the Han Chinese as immigrants to modern cities, dislodged from a local society dominated by the Yao people, but threatening to seize resources from them.
In addition to observing the current situation of ethnic minorities, sociologists provided practical suggestions to improve their lives. This could be described as an open society model that matched sociologists’ progressivism. They were critical of high politics, a gesture in line with missionary universities’ commitment to community service. Li Anzhai coined the term “frontier social work” to describe the sort of social progressivism needed to ameliorate ethnic tensions in frontier regions. His long engagement with religious activities in missionary universities (including Shandong Christian University 齐鲁大学, Yenching University, and West China Union University) turned him into a devout Christian. Like his adviser, Li endorsed a forward policy, that is, thoroughgoing modernization instead of isolation. Civic organizations, rather than the government, would facilitate this process.
In his book Frontier Social Work 边疆社会工作, Li Anzhai delineated the major actors who should be in charge of frontier modernization. They were not government officials, but social workers trained in sociology (Li Anzhai, 1945). Unlike the haughty government elite, social workers used their expertise to shorten the distance between local people. They collaborated with local people to repair broken social ties. They adopted non-political measures, such as opening schools, improving the curricula, and studying local organizations to encourage local people to learn their own history, treasure their own place, and increase local participation in the distribution of economic resources and justice.
Without relying on government policies, this model of frontier social work was free to promote local-level civic participation. As Li Anzhai frankly stated, the old government-sponsored frontier policy was too state-centered and too militaristic. It was ineffective because frontier societies were situated in both global and local politics; they were not under the sole control of the central state. State-centrism was ineffective because it failed to recognize the diffusion of global capitalism (Li Anzhai, 1945).
Accounts such as Li’s show that the nation-state receded in sociologists’ descriptions of ethnicity in China. Local processes of population movement were intertwined with the transnational confluence of capitalism, liberalism, and social progressivism. Ethnic contacts were not neatly contained in the space demarcated by the state, nor could conflict be resolved by state measures. This view, highlighting both local and trans-local movements, fit well with sociologists’ identity as both local and metropolitan. In every sense, this approach to ethnicity was distinct from that of the ethnologists.
The Hierarchical Positioning of Ethnology and Sociology
Although both ethnology and sociology studied the discrete units of ethnicity, they developed different approaches to explain ethnic formations. Ethnologists espoused historical inquiries and erudition, and grafted their fieldwork to the literary tradition in China. The primary task they assigned themselves was to elucidate the pivotal role of the amalgamation of ethnic cultures in forming the Chinese nation. In contrast, sociologists were more attentive to the present. They honed their empirical skills while observing the local movements of ethnic populations and the effects of their contacts. Shunning the question of national identity, they were concerned with concrete social problems, such as depopulation, poverty, and social disintegration, which were crushing ethnic minorities as they became absorbed into the modernization process.
These two disciplines indeed had different implications for reality at a time when China was experiencing a national crisis. National identity had not been securely established from the debris of the Qing Empire. On top of this, many Chinese feared the Japanese invasion threatened the very survival of the nation. Ethnology and sociology produced two national imaginations, one that conceived of the nation as fundamentally unified by the nation-state, while the other focused on social integration/disintegration. These two visions competed in wartime China, even as the scholars involved competed for academic accolades and political influence. The positions of these two disciplines impinged on their approaches, and largely explain why the sociological vision was marginalized at the time.
As I have shown, ethnology was embedded in the nexus of traditional scholarship, national research institutions, and German oriental studies. Its connection with traditional scholarship guaranteed that it would privilege texts and history. Ethnologists occupied important positions in Peking University and the Academia Sinica as well as in other national research institutions (Dongnan University 东南大学, Sun Yat-sen University 中山大学, and other national universities). These national research institutions may not have been resource-rich, but they were well connected with the Nationalist government. Their scholars were naturally drawn to the grand questions of state and nation. As noted earlier, the founders of Chinese ethnology also admired German scholarship and had wide connections with other German returnees. In the 1930s and 1940s, a great number of German returnees occupied influential positions in China’s industry and military (Kirby, 1984). A few of Fu Sinian’s closest friends (such as Yu Dawei 俞大维 [1897–1993] and Zhu Jiahua 朱家骅 [1893–1963]) were influential in educational policy making. The personal friendships in Fu Sinian’s circle were sustained by a shared faith in scientific rigor.
Unlike Chinese ethnology, whose founders were politically well connected, sociology emerged in missionary universities, where connections with Anglo-American liberal scholars were strong. Mainly funded by mission boards, student tuition, and private donations, missionary universities enjoyed the sort of stable income that was unavailable to national universities. Moreover, they were relatively insulated from the political repercussions of the frequent regime changes in the Republican period. They were also insulated to some extent from the waves of thought prevalent on the campuses of national universities. Their teachers were known for being practical and present-minded. Before the indigenization of their programs, most missionary schools only offered a superficial education in Chinese history and classics. This led to graduates of missionary universities being dismissed as “illiterate” by the cultural elite (Yeh, 1990: 77–78). 23 Missionary universities were thus indifferent to Chinese traditions, and their research programs were largely removed from the concerns of tradition-minded historians.
This institutional setting, which was substantially different from the one in which ethnology matured, contributed to sociologists’ rejection of traditionalist history and their critical stance toward an unreflective reverence for tradition. Li Anzhai criticized Liang Shumin’s 梁漱溟 (1893–1988) approach to Chinese tradition as well as Owen Lattimore’s (1900–1989) characterization of frontier societies as “feudal.” 24 Fei Xiaotong also had a negative view of the archaism of historians. “The Yenching sociologists,” he declared, “were proud of their own theoretical learning and they looked down at the experts of Academia Sinica, who were immersed in archives and knew only about ancient history. We thought them dumb. They did not like us either, thinking of us as fashionable young people, knowing little about history” (Wang, 2012: 21).
The anti-tradition stance of sociology, however, gained the sympathy of foreign liberal scholars. Sociologists relied heavily on the support of foreign foundations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, which favored collaboration with liberal-minded non-Western scholars. 25 Foreign scholars also supported Chinese sociologists’ attempts to breach the hegemony of traditional scholars. Some of them promoted Chinese sociologists (for example, Malinowski wrote a laudatory preface to Fei’s work on rural China) and their theories and methodologies greatly shaped Fei’s view of the Chinese nation. Others were attracted by the fact that sociologists were less bookish and appeared to be more aware of Chinese reality than most humanist scholars.
For example, in the preface to Inner Asian Frontiers of China, Lattimore (1988 [1940]) spoke highly of the fieldwork approach of Li Anzhai, who learned firsthand about society by entering it, something that also reflected Lattimore’s own experience, in particular his arduous travels to China’s northern frontiers. Close contact with local society opened one’s eyes to the suffering of a people. Lattimore (1990) criticized the Nationalist government’s frontier policy, which he knew well because he was a political advisor to Chiang Kai-shek’s government. He portrayed Nationalist officials as too stubborn, arrogant, and ignorant to recognize the value of sociology or follow decentralized policies that would promote minority autonomy in frontier regions. 26 Liberal Western scholars like Lattimore thus welcomed Chinese sociology at the same time that they rejected rigid government policy that ignored minority interests.
In 1933, Lattimore became the editor of the quarterly journal Pacific Affairs, which was sponsored by the Institute of Pacific Relations. The institute consisted of autonomous national councils in the United States, China, Japan, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. The journal was resolutely liberal and was independently organized, although the editor had to fight incessantly with different politicized groups to survive. 27 This journal became an important outlet for Chinese sociologists and left-leaning scholars (such as Chen Hansheng 陈翰笙 [1897–2004] and Ji Chaoding 冀朝鼎 [1903–1963]). 28 Their liberalism merged imperceptibly with Marxism since both were attentive to social conflict and both objected to authoritarianism and imperialism. Thanks to such connections, Chinese sociology was promoted by liberal circles both inside and outside China.
Their reputation marginalized sociologists in the domestic academic field, with many intellectuals warning of the dangers of seeming collusion between sociologists and leftists. In 1939, a nationwide debate took place on the pages of the Yishibao 益世报. The issued debated was whether the term “minzu” (nationality/ ethnicity) properly described the variegated cultures of people living in China. The eminent historian Gu Jiegang 顾颉刚 (1893–1980), known for casting doubt on the authenticity of ancient sources, cautioned against the media’s sloppy use of the term. Gu believed ethnic labeling would exacerbate rather than diminish conflict because it evoked, and even created, irreconcilable differences among social groups. Like the ethnologists, Gu emphasized that ethnicity was a malleable category, arguing that Mongols, Tibetans, and Manchus were defined as such in order to indicate the territorial boundaries of Mongolia, Tibet, and Manchuria (Gu, 1947a, 1947b; see also Jenco, 2019). Gu’s insistence on the framework that incorporates all ethnic groups within a united state was shared by Fu Sinian but was rejected by Fei Xiaotong. 29
Although Fei was sympathetic to the idea of group interaction, he refrained from acknowledging that such interactions were bound into a national unity. Nor did he believe that discussing ethnic differences outside the national framework would polarize ethnic identities. Fei’s response resonated with the thinking of Marxist historians and minority intellectuals. Garnering empathy from other marginal intellectuals further diminished the legitimacy of sociologists in the eyes of ethnologists.
The debate soon caught the attention of Fu Sinian. In “A Letter to Gu Jiegang” 致顾颉刚书 in 1939, Fu stated, “we should be more discreet when using two words: one is ‘frontier’ 边疆 . . . and the other is ‘minzu’ 民族” (Fu, 1980: 7.2451–52). The word “frontier” implied backwardness, peripheralness, and lack of integration into Chinese society. “Minzu” was even more problematic; it could imply nationalist separation. Accordingly, in a letter from Fu Sinian to the minister of educational, Zhu Jiahua, a scientist-official Fu befriended in Germany, 30 Fu persuaded him to cut financial support for sociologists. 31 Sociologists, including Fei Xiaotong and his mentor Wu Wenzao, were criticized for being shortsighted, frivolous, and amateurish. 32
This episode shows the marginal positioning of sociologists in the academy and politics. Their journalistic style was ridiculed by ethnologists, who associated it with a rejection of statism. As ethnologists saw it, sociologists were too close to demagogues and populist intellectuals. Ethnologists chose to express their opinions in academic journals rather than mass media. They believed ethnic minorities deserved better treatment, such as abolishing the use of derogatory names for minority people and encouraging research on minority languages and culture. 33 Moreover, they had solid faith in the state, rather than any grassroots initiatives, to resolve ethnic problems.
In the minutes of a conference on “Frontier Self-Government and Culture,” held in Chengdu in April 1947, which were published in the second issue of Frontier Affairs 边政公论 in June 1947, we get a glimpse of ethnologists’ public influence. Zhou Kuntian 周昆田 (1906–1989), chairman of the Society for Frontier Studies and senior leader of the Commission on Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs, chaired the conference. Eleven experts were invited, nearly all of them more or less affiliated with ethnology. Using this platform, they argued that political means, i.e., political institutional building, was the key to handling ethnic stress in frontier regions. 34 The solidarity of the Chinese nation, as implied by such discussions, hinged on the performance of a unified state, rather than the acknowledgment of minority rights. As long as political institutions in minority regions functioned properly, they would naturally be conducive to national solidarity. In this view, the Chinese nation was untenable if not buttressed by an effective state. 35
To summarize, ethnology and sociology mobilized different institutional and network resources to secure a place in the academy. These two disciplines were born into different intellectual circles, which dictated that they would occupy different spaces in the academic world. Chinese sociology became entrenched in missionary universities and was welcomed by liberal scholars beyond China. It was, however, only reluctantly recognized by mainstream scholars, including ethnologists. They derided sociologists’ empirical approach as “superficial,” and considered them, because of their connections with leftist scholars, politically suspect. The functional positions of these disciplines influenced their approaches to ethnic differences. Ethnologists, positioned close to the center, explored ethnic diversity not for its own sake, but to illustrate how their research enriched the nation-state. Sociologists, who were more marginally positioned, were attracted by concrete problems and objected to any reification of group identity that was realized through the exercise of power.
Conclusion
The transplantation of ethnology and sociology followed different paths and ultimately produced divergent notions of ethnic difference in post-imperial China. Ethnologists envisioned minority cultures as esoteric and archaic, dissimilar to, although not separate from, Han Chinese culture. They sought to consolidate a national framework while recognizing the fluidity of group-based ethnic identity. This approach, both academically and politically, became one of the major sources of national imagination in China.
The other case is ethnographic sociology, which tended to support the idea of an open society, while relegating the question of nation-state making to the background. It considered ethnic differences real, but not essential; they indicated different stages of development, not a crystallized identity. Sociology gained a stronghold in missionary universities and the transnational intellectual community but was marginalized in domestic scholarship and politics. This reflects the fact that despite its progressivism, Chinese sociology from the beginning was intertwined with the enterprise of imperial remaking.
Sociology’s involvement with imperialism has long been forgotten. As Steinmetz (2013) argues, the linear, progressive model entrenched in sociological training camouflaged the history of Western sociology’s involvement in colonialism. This article is an attempt to uncover that history.
The story narrated here abruptly ended with the Communist Revolution. Even so, the mechanisms discussed in this article are relevant to understanding the popularity of different theories/discourses on ethnicity in the Communist and post-Communist eras. Liberal sociologists were overshadowed by mainstream scholars who monopolized academic resources in the pre-Communist era. They were, however, supported by leftists and developed ties with other marginalized intellectual groups. Immersion in fieldwork made them familiar with corruption and local poverty. This explains why, when the Guomindang was defeated in 1949, most sociologists became revolutionaries and chose to stay to build a new China, rather than going across the strait. For example, Li Anzhai accompanied the People’s Liberation Army into Tibet at the time of the founding of the People’s Republic. Ironically, after 1949, with the establishment of minority autonomous regions, ethnology, though influenced by the Soviet paradigm, was restored. History was again emphasized. Tracing the lineage of ethnic groups and their historical convergences again became the dominant subject of ethnic studies. Ethnographic sociology was eventually suppressed and absorbed into ethnology.
In the 1980s, sociology was finally restored in major Chinese universities. Fei Xiaotong’s theory of the “historical unity of a multiethnic China” became part of official ideology. Its basic tenets were in fact similar to what ethnologists had advocated in the pre-Communist era: a confluence of multiethnic cultures. It would be useful to compare their disciplinary positionalities in these two periods in order to clarify the dynamics of knowledge politics in China. This, however, is a subject beyond the scope of the present article.
Even today, different discourses on ethnicity prevail in the Chinese intellectual world. Some reflect the persistent influence of ethnology, emphasizing the irreplaceable role of the state as a magnet for drawing the allegiance of peripheral minorities. Others continue the debate begun by sociologists several decades ago, arguing for an understanding of the real situation of minorities on the ground. These are undoubtedly ideological competitions. Yet, ideology alone cannot explain the level of intellectual contention. As argued throughout this article, intellectuals are socially embedded in disciplines as well as social networks. Their positionalities significantly impinge on their worldview, of which tastes and approaches are an integral part, as Karl Mannheim (1936) reminded us long ago.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Andrew Abbott, Cheris Chan, Mark Gould, Gary Hamilton, Paul Joose, Krishan Kumar, David Palmer, and Tian Xiaoli for reading earlier versions of this article and offering useful suggestions. I am also thankful to Chan Kato and Gesang Zhuoma for research assistance in finalizing the article. I appreciate the comments provided by the anonymous referees of Modern China.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.