The Minorities of Chinese Philosophy: Ideology and Identity in the Academic Discipline of “Ethnic Minority Philosophy”

Chinese Philosophy and Its “Proximate Others”

The (sub)discipline of “ethnic minority philosophy” 少数民族哲学, which emerged in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) around the beginning of the 1980s, has remained a peripheral and even marginal phenomenon in the recent history of modern Chinese thought. Most publications concerning “minority philosophies” have appeared in relatively low-key regional and specialized journals and have not substantially informed scholarly discussion within the broader fields of Chinese and comparative philosophy. ¹

As the name itself indicates, the minoritarian status of this discipline is obviously tied up with specific social and political realities as well as discourses on national identity in the PRC. In demographical terms, mainland China, as a so-called “unified multiethnic state” 统一的多民族国家, ² consists of the Han majority (accounting for 91.5 percent of the total population according to the most recent census in 2010) and fifty-five officially recognized ethnic minorities or “nationalities” 少数民族, most of which gained their status following a state-orchestrated project of “ethnic classification” 民族识别 carried out in the mid-1950s (Mullaney, 2011). To this day, many applicant groups are still striving to acquire official minority status (Zang, 2015: 16).

These introductory remarks were not meant to give the impression that the existence of “ethnic minority philosophy” can be reduced to the conceptual reflection of an institutional and political state of affairs particular to the PRC, although it cannot be analytically separated from this either. In a sense, as many of the pioneers of “minority philosophies” in China have already pointed out, the history of this discipline is still very much a “blank page”一大空白 (see, for example, Xiao Wanyuan’s 肖万源 preface to Xiao, Wu, and Abduxukur, 1992: 1; Tong, 1997: 2). In what follows, it will become clear that this state of tabula rasa is one of the reasons why the very idea of “minority philosophy” has served as a kind of screen onto which a variety of different conceptions concerning the nature of philosophy, religion, society, and national identity can be projected.

Before I begin discussing the origins, goals, and orientation of these “margins of philosophy,” a little more historical background is needed. Ever since the birth of the academic discipline of “philosophy” 哲学 in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China, Chinese thinkers have been debating the applicability of this newly imported category and concept to their own cultural heritage and social context (see Makeham, 2012a; Steineck et al., 2018). Since the stakes behind such debates were profoundly political, they have hardly ever assumed the form of disinterested exercises in speculative thinking. Arguments for the existence (or absence) of a distinct form of “Chinese metaphysics,” for instance, have been motivated by latent as well as explicit political and nationalist concerns (see Weber, 2013). In more general terms, the confrontation with Western, and later also Japanese, military and economic supremacy during the late Qing (1644–1911) period was a key motivator behind an unprecedented process of translation and adaptation to a new institutional and epistemological order, of which the reception and renegotiation of the domain of “philosophy” is but one example. Following Joseph Levenson’s classic formulation, it could be argued that this was not simply a matter of vocabulary change but involved a transformation of China’s entire sociopolitical and intellectual language, or perhaps we could also say “grammar” (Levenson, 1968: 157). As is well known, the model “language” or “grammar” for this transformation was that of the West.

Accordingly, modern Chinese philosophical discourse has predominantly understood itself as being the product of an extensive engagement between indigenous traditions such as Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism on the one hand, and various forms of Western philosophy on the other. Additionally, over time, Confucianism has increasingly assumed the position of being a metonym for Chinese culture as a whole. ³ In any case, “the West” has remained the privileged interlocutor and comparative point of reference in the process of the philosophical reinvention of Chinese traditions and has consistently occupied the place of what we might call China’s “significant Other.” ⁴ By contrast, at least in the field of intellectual history and philosophy, considerably less attention has been paid to China’s “proximate others,” to use Jonathan Z. Smith’s (2004) felicitous expression. ⁵ In the present context, the “proximate other” or “internal other” (as opposed to the “wholly other” or the “Other” in general) refers to the non-Han peoples of China: “familiar strangers” (Lipman, 1997) such as the Hui, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongols, Tujia, Miao, and Manchus. Hence, even in the work of thinkers who strive to emancipate Chinese thought from the hegemonic cultural influence of the West, an attempt which has occasionally expressed itself in a rejection of the very label of “philosophy” (see, for example, Ouyang, 2012), the reconversion from the Western “Other” to the Chinese “Self” has largely ignored the latter’s internal multiplicity and hybridity.

Philosophy, Ethnicity, and Culture

The turn toward what John Makeham (2012b) has aptly termed “epistemological nativism” in the human and social sciences at large thus always threatens to hinge on a highly specific and often rather restrictive understanding of what qualifies as “native” in the Chinese context. The epithet “native” is not, for non-Sinitic minoritarian traditions at least, an inherent property, but rather counts as a quality acquired through a process of “sinicization,” or in more concealed and neutral-sounding terms, “localization” (see Jin, 2017). To paraphrase Jin Yuelin’s 金岳霖 (1895–1984) well-known expression, it obviously takes more for a form of thought to qualify as “Chinese philosophy” than simply being “in China” (Jin, 1995 [1934]: 627–29, emphasis added). While in recent years increasing attention has been paid to the role played by race and ethnicity in the exclusion of the non-West from the philosophical canon (Park, 2013; Van Norden, 2017), discussions surrounding the identity of Chinese philosophy have predominantly approached the adjective “Chinese” as if it merely had a “cultural,” and not also a racial and ethnic, significance. This is all the more troublesome given the fact that the precise scope and content of the highly fluid concept of “culture” in relation to race and ethnicity is far from clear-cut. As Étienne Balibar (1988a: 22, emphasis in original) points out, in the same way that race naturalizes relations of power in biological terms, “culture can also function like a nature, and it can in particular function as a way of locking individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy, and into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin.” ⁶

In a recent book from 2019, for example, the influential contemporary philosopher and political theorist Zhao Tingyang 赵汀阳 asserts that Chinese civilization is characterized by a form of uninterrupted continuity and multiethnic and multicultural inclusiveness, something he links to the putative absence of a “transcendental religion” in China (Zhao, 2019: 22–23). Zhao describes Chinese culture as a veritable “whirlpool,” which “assumed a stable structure” and “developed into an inevitable centripetal force and self-reinforcing power” (Zhao, 2019: 23) over the course of history. Within this line of reasoning, “culture” is a perpetuum mobile which accommodates or rather absorbs difference and otherness only to the extent that the latter feed into its supposed “self-reinforcing” trajectory, on which no outside influence seems capable of impinging. Zhao further claims that “ancient China could continuously expand its territory into a super-sized country without being an expansionary empire” (Zhao, 2019: 23). In his view, the so-called “secret” behind this accomplishment “lies in the fact that its expansion was not dividends from outward military expansion, but gifts from outside competitors who were continuously drawn by the centripetal force into the China whirlpool” (Zhao, 2019: 23). As such,

the nomadic ethnic groups entering the Central Plains [. . .], owing to their lack of highly mature systems of knowledge production and social management [. . .], all chose rationally to embrace the highly advanced existing cultural resources of the Central Plains. (Zhao, 2019: 34, emphasis added)

The “inclusiveness” Zhao has in mind is thus unambiguously hierarchical in nature, a point I will return to below. To make things worse, Zhao’s spurious notion that China always has been and thus continues to be a country grounded in the inclusive vision of “all under heaven” 天下, ⁷ instead of the competitive model of the modern (“Western”) nation-state, is adduced as evidence for the fact that a “multicultural and multiethnic China is neither a theoretical challenge nor a practical problem” (Zhao, 2019: 36). One can only be amazed at such an untenable statement, published at a time when the immense scope of the network of internment camps for Uyghurs in Xinjiang had already become obvious for a while and even the Chinese government itself had moved away from its initial attitude of blanket denial (see Zenz, 2019; Thum, 2018).

The pervasive absence of critical inquiries into the precise relationship between cultural, racial, and ethnic determinations of identity in the context of modern Chinese philosophy is undoubtedly tied up with a more general sense of what Yinghong Cheng (2019: 13–16) has analyzed as “Chinese exceptionalism” when it comes to the issue of race (see also Law, 2012; Yi, 2010); that is to say, the institutionally and ideologically reinforced notion that race is neither a significant social issue in China, nor that race as a concept is theoretically applicable to the Chinese context (see, for example, Xiang, 2019). ⁸ Nevertheless, such considerations are arguably crucial to take into account when engaging with what has become known as the “problem of the legitimacy of Chinese philosophy.” ⁹ The longstanding presence of “proximate others” in the sociopolitical and intellectual history of China would seem to require us to consider the semantic range of the qualifying adjective “Chinese” in more than simply “cultural” terms, whatever the precise significance of “culture” may be in this context.

The very use of the term “legitimacy” 合法性 in itself already suggests that this problem of whether or not there is such a thing as Chinese philosophy involves a broader range of considerations than merely philosophical ones, and does not stop short of the assertion of cultural difference. Legitimacy is not an end in itself, but endows the one recognized as legitimate with a certain potential for action, or in simpler terms, with power, be it imagined or real. As Mou Zongsan 牟宗三 (1909–1995), one of the most important twentieth-century Confucian thinkers, famously remarked, “Every cultural system 文化体系 has its own philosophy. Otherwise, it could not have become a cultural system in the first place” (Mou, 2003 [1973]: 28.3–4). ¹⁰ For Mou, denying the existence of Chinese philosophy would be tantamount to robbing China of its status as a “culture” or “civilization,” and thus would fundamentally undermine the latter’s position in the competitive landscape of global modernity. There is, however, arguably nothing particularly “Chinese” about this problem, since many other subfields of comparative philosophy, such as Japanese, Latin-American, or African philosophy, for example, continue to face very similar issues of “legitimacy.” Indeed, as we will see below, the exact same problem has imposed itself within the field of “minority philosophies” in contemporary China as well. ¹¹

What Is “Ethnic Minority Philosophy”?

The discipline of “ethnic minority philosophy” only emerged in the early 1980s, following the end of the Maoist period and the beginning of the so-called “reform and opening up” initiated by Deng Xiaoping. The relative relaxation of ideological constraints allowed for a greater appreciation of the increasingly depoliticized domain of “culture” and “traditional culture,” as well as a revival of religious life and a renewed interest in religion and religious studies (see Yang, 2005: 27). Initially, ideological justification for the inclusion of minority traditions into the field of philosophy was found in the work of Lenin, more precisely in an isolated remark from his Philosophical Notebooks, according to which philosophy comprises the “whole field of knowledge” (Lenin, 1915: n.p.) ¹² and hence ought not to be confined to the study of academic philosophical treatises in the classical or narrow sense. The same broadening of the semantic field of “philosophy” played a significant role in renewed discussions concerning the particularity of Chinese vis-à-vis Western philosophy in general (Xiao, 2012: 166). As Li Bing 李兵 argues, just as in the case of Chinese thought, research into minority philosophies had been hindered by uncritically adopting the straitjacket of modern epistemic divisions which do not serve to render minority thought more accessible, but rather end up distorting and fragmenting it (see Li, 2004; Li and Wu, 2002).

The formal beginning of research into minority philosophies is usually identified with a meeting of the National Program for Philosophy and Social Sciences 全国哲学社会科学规划 in Ji’nan 济南 in 1979, at which a number of scholars from minority backgrounds drew attention to the almost total lack of research into the philosophical traditions of China’s different ethnic groups (Ru and Chen, 2002: 127). These scholars took care to note that the question as to whether the latter had, or used to have, such a thing as philosophy had not even been posed yet (see Guo, 2018: 393). Despite such apparent methodological caution, research within this new line of inquiry, often though by no means always conducted by members of minority groups themselves, initially focused on retrieving, compiling, and editing textual as well as orally transmitted material from minority traditions that was seen as philosophical or philosophically relevant (Guo, 2018: 397–400). In 1981 and 1983, two associations devoted to the study of minority philosophies were established, respectively focused on ethnic groups in northern and southern China. In 1992, these two associations were merged into a single nationwide organization called the Association for the Study of the History of the Philosophies and Social Thought of China’s Ethnic Minorities 中国少数民族哲学及社会思想史学会 (see Ru and Chen, 2002: 128), which, according to the organization’s website, currently has around five hundred members (Association, n.d.). The same year saw the publication of the first work to be entitled A History of Chinese Minority Philosophies 中国少数民族哲学史, covering the philosophical histories of twenty-four different minority groups (Xiao, Wu, and Abduxukur, 1992). Histories of the philosophies of individual minorities continued to appear throughout the 1990s and well into the 2000s; a recent and ambitious example being Xiao Hong’en’s 萧洪恩 eight-hundred-page A Comprehensive History of Tujia Minority Philosophy 土家族哲学通史 (Xiao, 2009).

Closer to the present, a project financed by the National Social Science Fund was initiated in 2010 with the goal of compiling a comprehensive history of the philosophies of all fifty-five minorities in China. This project was led by the prominent minority philosophy scholar and professor at Yunnan Normal University, Wu Xiongwu 伍雄武 (b. 1939), employing eighty scholars from forty different ethnic backgrounds (Wu himself is Han Chinese). According to an official announcement, the project was “successfully brought to a close” in 2017 and will eventually result in the publication of a massive four-volume work of around 3.8 million Chinese characters (Anonymous, 2017). To my knowledge, however, the latter has yet to see the light of day. Similarly, another major project spearheaded by the Association for the Study of the History of the Philosophies and Social Thought of China’s Ethnic Minorities, which was already decided upon at its annual meeting in 2004, namely that of compiling a Compendium of Chinese Minority Intellectual Culture 中国少数民族思想文化全书 (Association, n.d.), has not yet been realized. These prolonged delays might very well be related to recent political developments, more precisely the fact that the association falls under the supervision of the State Ethnic Affairs Commission (SEAC), which was placed under the leadership and closer ideological scrutiny of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Work Front Department in 2018 (Zhao and Leibold, 2020). Specific subdomains such as that of research into Uyghur philosophy, for which ambitious outlines had appeared since the early 1980s (Amanullah, 1981; Abduxukur, 1997), have unsurprisingly ground to a halt following the worsening of ethnic tensions and the increasing crackdown on minority populations and identity under the presidency of Xi Jinping.

Unity, Multiplicity, and Hierarchical Inclusion

One of the motivating ideas behind the development of the discipline of “ethnic minority philosophies” was that of making the history of Chinese philosophy, which had hitherto almost exclusively focused on the dominant ethnic group in China, the Han, more inclusive and comprehensive. At the same time, ever since its emergence, the discourse surrounding minority philosophy has been marked by broader political aspirations, most importantly increasing “national consciousness” 国家意识, strengthening national unity, and smoothing out ethnic tensions in China’s “unified multiethnic state.” As Dai Weihan 戴维翰 emphasized in one of the first articles to deal with the topic of minority philosophy (published in the leading journal Philosophical Researches 哲学研究), research into this field cannot proceed in a disinterested fashion, but must depart from actual and pressing concerns in society. As such, it must strive to offer what Dai calls a “correct analysis and evaluation” and aid in the momentous endeavor of “strengthening the great unity of the Chinese nation” 中华民族的大团结. Dai stresses that research into minority philosophy should serve as a unifying and centripetal force and ought to guard itself against what he calls “using history to negate the present” 以史非今 (Dai, 1985: 74–75). In other words, unearthing the philosophical multiplicity of China’s philosophical past should not compromise the accomplished unity of the Chinese nation (cf. Wu, 2006: 1–4; Cui, 2018: 17).

As such, the call for more inclusivity within the field of Chinese philosophy was from the very beginning understood as embodying specific political and ideological goals relevant to the post-revolutionary context. As Tong Defu 佟德富 (b. 1938), one of the doyens of the discipline of minority philosophy and himself a member of the Mongol ethnic group, ¹³ later put it in his AnOutline of Chinese Minority Philosophies 中国少数民族哲学概论 from 1997,

As an organic whole, the history of Chinese philosophy is the natural unity of the philosophies of all ethnic groups, and not simply an aggregate [of these philosophies]. The philosophy of each ethnic group is an integral part of Chinese philosophy. If the history of Chinese philosophy were to lack even a single nationality’s philosophy, it would remain incomplete and far from comprehensive. On the other hand, if we isolate a given nationality’s philosophy from the integrated whole of Chinese philosophy, it would lack systematicity. (Tong, 1997: 26)

Worth noting here are the terms and conditions of the inclusion of minority philosophies into the history of Chinese philosophy: while this inclusion serves to both diversify and complete the history of Chinese philosophy proper, the latter continues to constitute the ultimate horizon of meaning from which minority philosophies cannot be isolated. As is obvious in many other texts, the relation between “unity” and “multiplicity” or “plurality” 多 which reigns within this form of inclusion is clearly hierarchical in nature: “unity,” that is to say, the “integrated whole” of Chinese history and philosophy, may “enrich” itself by including “multiplicity,” but “multiplicity” is ontologically dependent on “unity,” and not the other way around. “Chinese philosophy” is thus a pre-given and more or less self-sufficient unity which precedes the inclusion of the minoritarian traditions of its “proximate others.” As Zhang Shibao 张世保 argues in hermeneutical terms, while some allowance could be made for the possibility of “interpreting China through China” 以中解中 in the field of philosophy, an approach he ultimately rejects as lopsided, the same does not apply to Chinese minority philosophies: there is simply no way to “interpret minorities on their own terms” 以少解少 (Zhang, 2011: 93–95).

Moreover, it is quite clear that this hierarchical relation between “unity” and “multiplicity” is a direct reflection of the way in which the relation between the Han majority and ethnic minority groups is conceptualized. In a more general sense, the politically charged distinction between majority and minority cannot be analyzed in numerical terms alone. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari observe in A Thousand Plateaus,

The opposition between minority and majority is not simply quantitative. Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate it. [. . .] [The majority] appears twice, once in the constant and again in the variable from which the constant is extracted. Majority assumes a state of power and domination, not the other way around. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 105)

Often invoked in discussions of minority philosophy and the relation between the Han Chinese and their “proximate others” is the anthropologist Fei Xiaotong’s 费孝通 (1910–2005) description of China as having a “structure of unity within diversity” 多元一体格局. In the 1988Tanner Lectures on Human Valuesin which Fei put forward this notion, it is obvious that he considers the Han to be the supreme “nucleus” of this structure of “unity within diversity” (Fei, 1988: 168, 178, 185), that is to say, the “constant” of which ethnic minority groups are the “variables.” In the words of Li Zehou 李泽厚 (b. 1930), a philosopher firmly positioned within the Chinese “majority tradition,” the “cultural-psychological formation” 心理结构 of the Han constitutes an “organic totality,” characterized by “a mutual balance [between its constituent elements], self-regulation, and self-development, while also displaying a certain closure and ability to repel external disruptions or harmful influences” (Li, 1985 [1980]: 31, emphasis added). ¹⁴

To be sure, the pioneers of ethnic minority philosophy never failed to remind their audience that, compared to the Han majority, most minorities are located at a lower stage of social and intellectual development. As such, they urged their readers not to lose sight of the “graded nature” 层次性 of minority and majority cultures and philosophies (Xiao and Zhang, 1995: v). As Xiao Wanyuan 肖万源 (1991: 5) puts it, many “fraternal ethnic groups” 兄弟民族 in China “have remained at a relatively low stage of history in the modern era and the present day.” Tong Defu (1997: 26) on his part bluntly states in his Outline that a considerable number of minorities “are still shuffling toward the threshold of primitive society” 还在原始社会的门坎爬行. The fact that such pronouncements can be found among Han and minority scholars alike indicates that Chinese minorities always have to articulate, even when in an overwhelmingly positive manner, their ethnic, cultural, and philosophical particularity with reference to the Han as the “standard measure” occupying the center of power, (perceived) proximity to the Han majority effectively counting as a means to gauge at which “level” 层次 of civilizational development a particular minority population is to be located.

In an article from 1982, Tong Defu and Wu Dexi 吴德希 stress that philosophy as a “theoretical system” 理论体系 is contingent upon particular social developments, such as the emergence of class society and a division between manual and mental labor. As such, since many minorities in China are supposedly still characterized by a more primitive form of social existence, not all of them can lay claim to a philosophy of their own (Wu and Tong, 1982: 57). As the very name of the Association for the Study of the History of the Philosophies and Social Thought of China’s Ethnic Minorities indicates, a distinction between “philosophy” and the more general categories of “social thought” 社会思想 or “intellectual history” 思想史 (see Zhang, 2011: 93) remains firmly in place. That being said, in Wu and Tong’s view, the relative “backwardness” of many minority populations and what they see as an overall lack of structurally coherent and logically articulated systems of thought among minorities should not lead us to deny the existence of minority philosophies. Following the prominent Marxist historian of philosophy Zhang Dainian 张岱年 (1909–2004), they note that the problem of minority philosophy can be analyzed as that of an as yet absent “name” 名 for a historically recognizable and determinate “actuality” 实. Minority philosophy is already there, in phenomena as diverse as religious texts, orally transmitted myths and legends, proverbs, aphorisms, songs, dances, customs, and material culture; ¹⁵ it simply needs to be brought to light in a systematic fashion by making full use of the conceptual tools of modern philosophical and anthropological research. Within this line of reasoning, in the same way that the Confucian Analects, ostensibly not a systematic treatise of philosophy, can be approached as philosophically relevant, minority traditions should be deemed worthy of the name of “philosophy” as well (Wu and Tong, 1982: 58).

Minority Philosophy, Primitive Consciousness, and Religion

The hierarchical manner in which minority traditions were and are predominantly reconfigured as philosophical is worth considering in more detail. One of the guiding assumptions in the emergence of the discipline of minority philosophy was the idea that due to the “backwardness” of many if not most minority groups, their philosophical thought offered privileged insight into a more archaic and primordial form of philosophical or at least proto-philosophical thinking (see Guo, 2018: 405–9). As such, the basic idea was that research into minority philosophy could serve as a window into “primitive consciousness” 原始意识 (see, for example, Xiao, 1991; Tong, 1995). Accordingly, in the opening chapter of the first volume of his History of the Development of Chinese Philosophy 中国哲学发展史 from 1983, which deals with “primitive thought,” the Marxist philosopher Ren Jiyu 任继愈 (1916–2009) draws on archaeological evidence and ancient texts, contemporary anthropological research into minority populations, developmental psychology, and even primate cognition (Ren, 1983: 41–77). ¹⁶ Like Ren, the majority of the first generation of scholars of minority philosophy continued to operate within the conceptual framework of historical materialism, and thus defined “primitive consciousness” as “a reflection of the relation between primitive human beings and [their] objective existence” (Tong, 1995: 5). In doing so, they clearly assumed that minority groups as objects of anthropological inquiry continued to mirror a certain form of social existence which no longer existed at the more advanced end of the spectrum of historical progress and civilization, that is to say, among the Han Chinese. As Wu Xiongwu writes, the persistence of “primitive consciousness” among China’s minorities allows scholars to “directly investigate and come to an understanding of the germinal state of philosophy through their social consciousness in the modern and contemporary age” (Wu, 1996: 1–2). ¹⁷

For Wu, the category of “primitive consciousness” lies at the basis of all forms of knowledge and social practice, such as religion, philosophy, morality, law, and art (Wu, 1987). Most other scholars, however, treat the category of “primitive consciousness” as largely coterminous with that of “primitive religion.” In this regard, it is crucial to point out that minority populations and their philosophies are often presented as being overdetermined by their religious beliefs and customs. As opposed to the “humanistic” and “this-worldly” Confucian tradition supposedly embodied by the Han majority, China’s ethnic minorities are thus understood as having a more unambiguously “religious” outlook which Confucianism had already managed to transcend at a much earlier stage of historical and cultural development (see Xiao, 1992: 10; Luo, 1991: 10–11; Zhuo, 2014: 61). ¹⁸ While scholars such as Tong Defu and Bao Guizhen 宝贵真 also discern certain “sprouts” or “germs” of “atheist thought” 无神论思想 in minority traditions, these brittle beginnings of humanity’s emancipation from religion are claimed to have remained in an underdeveloped and nonsystematic state (see Tong and Bao, 2006: 429–34). The curious-sounding notion of the existence of atheism among minority groups who are often categorized as fundamentally, and in a sense fatally, religious, corresponds to a very real institutional state of affairs. What I have in mind here are the CCP’s concerted efforts to strengthen the “atheist education” 无神论教育 of cadres, teachers, students, and common citizens in minority areas, particularly in Xinjiang, as part of a broader campaign of “de-extremization” (see Klimeš, 2018) recently institutionalized in a system of internment camps as well as boarding schools aimed at the “educational transformation” 教育转化 of the entire Uyghur population.

Paradoxically enough, the resurgence of calls to install Confucianism as a “national religion” 国教 in contemporary mainland China, inspired by the late Qing reformer and thinker Kang Youwei 康有为 (1858–1927), is actually far from incompatible with the nominally “atheist” CCP’s recent strategy aimed at the total “sinicization” of Chinese religions (Vermander, 2019). The idea that Confucianism constitutes the dominant tradition and veritable essence of Chinese culture has entered into mainstream ideology, both inside and outside of China, which in turn serves to further legitimize and reinforce it, all the while becoming vaguer and more malleable in the process. Confucianism is defined both as a privileged property of the “secular” Han majority as well as a common source of China’s national culture (see Xiao Wanyuan, 1995: 226), which is seen as having proven to be conducive to a form of “socialist modernization” capable of rivaling, if not surpassing, the West. As a result, “sinicization,” “Confucianization,” and “modernization” begin to appear as profoundly interrelated. Given the fact that Confucianism does not belong to the five officially recognized religions in the PRC (Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism), it has retained a much more ambiguous relation to the domain of the religious (on this complex issue see Chen, 2012; Sun, 2013; Rošker, 2017; Lee, 2017: 26–37). Just as importantly, the strongly nationalist dimension of the type of “religiosity” found in Confucian nationalist discourse, its ultimate object of worship often appearing to be none other than the Chinese nation itself, has made it a suitable tool for both reproducing and enriching the dominant ideology,even if, all things considered, Confucian revivalists themselves actually still occupy a rather minoritarian position in sociopolitical discourse (see Makeham, 2008; Van den Stock, 2016: 23–103; Dessein, 2017; Deng and Smith, 2018). By contrast, the perceived irredeemable religiousness of Chinese minority populations and the so-called “particular complexity” 特殊复杂性 (see, for example, Yu, 2002) of minority religiosity appear less as a conduit for effective “sinicization” than an obstacle to effective assimilation.

To be sure, just as with “philosophy,” “religion” too is a highly flexible and indeterminate category. While it is quite common for scholars of minority philosophy to pit the religiosity of ethnic minority thought against the “humanism” of the Chinese (Confucian) tradition proper, we would do well to bear in mind that many twentieth-century Chinese thinkers actively embraced what they saw as the profoundly religious nature of traditional Chinese philosophy, and sought to ground the specificity and legitimacy of Chinese as opposed to Western philosophical thought in its ability to provide a substitute for the morally and socially beneficial functions of religion. ¹⁹ Hence, in modern Chinese philosophical discourse, religion has generally appeared as something to be not rejected, but rather replaced and sublated (see Zhang, 2012). ²⁰ To be sure, traditionalist thinkers in China did not remain unaffected by the modernist rhetoric of secularism, anti-superstition, anti-clericalism, and human emancipation from religious authority. But neither were they immune to Orientalist phantasies of a “spiritual Orient” which provided a stepping stone toward the more serious study of East Asian philosophy in the West, a courtesy which has not been universally extended to other non-Western forms of thought, ²¹ nor indeed, until quite recently, to Chinese minority traditions.

National, Ethnic, and Philosophical Identity

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the arguments deployed by scholars who have mounted defenses of the “legitimacy of Chinese philosophy” reappear in very similar pleas for the “legitimacy of minority philosophy” as a discipline. Some scholars have rightly noted the similarities between their respective “legitimacy crises” (see Bao, 2009; Xiao, 2011; Xiao and Xiao, 2011). Hence, distinctions previously employed to distinguish “Chinese” from “Western” thought recur within characterizations of the peculiarities of “Chinese” as opposed to “Chinese minority” philosophy. Apart from the above-mentioned difference between “humanism” and “religiosity,” we can think here of distinctions such as those between reason and intuition, subject–object unity instead of differentiation, harmony as opposed to opposition with nature, sensibility versus conceptual mediation, concreteness versus abstraction, and so on (see, for example, Tong, 1997: 6–7; Xia and Liu, 2019). As such, the national and ethnic identities of these philosophies are articulated by drawing on a common matrix of distinctions, often indebted to earlier Orientalist representations of non-Western thought in general. A crucial difference, however, is that scholars of minority philosophy move within an arguably even more complex and sensitive discursive field, where the boundaries between cultural, philosophical, religious, national, and ethnic identities are even less self-evident or transparent. More precisely, on an epistemic level minority thought remains suspended in between “religion” and “philosophy,” as well in between its national and ethnic modes of self-identification, not in the least because of obvious ideological and political constraints.

For Wu Xiongwu, still one of the leading scholars in the field, the very existence of different minority groups or “nationalities” in China already presupposes that each of them has its own particular philosophy. Instead of referring to certain epistemological criteria to isolate a number of basic or defining features of philosophical discourse, as opposed to science or religion, for example, philosophy becomes something like the innermost kernel of a people’s being and a veritable precondition for their formation and survival. With reference to the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), for instance, Wu claims that the Mongol conquest of China would not have been possible “without a certain spiritual power, a [number of] core idea[s], and a guiding theory for their actions” (Wu, 1994: 17). For Wu, “philosophy” is both the condition of the possibility as well as the historical outcome of a people’s struggle for survival. In an article where he draws on Fei Xiaotong’s notion of China as being marked by a “structure of unity within diversity,” Wu argues that throughout Chinese history dynasties founded by non-Han peoples such as the Yuan and Qing show us that China, as a nation-state grounded in the Han majority, was able to function as a self-adjusting “unity,” which always managed to sublate ethnic and cultural differences within itself by means of its “assimilative power” 同化力. This leads Wu to maintain that

the establishment of the Yuan and Qing dynasties did not amount to a conquest by a foreign people from the outside replacing the Chinese nation, let alone an interruption or destruction of the Chinese cultural tradition, but rather constituted a majoradjustment of the internal relations between different peoples within China itself 中华民族内部关系的大调整. (Wu, 2004: 33, emphasis added)

This rhetoric of “assimilative power,” which Julia C. Schneider has studied in great detail in the context of late Qing and Republican-era discourses on national and ethnic identity (Schneider, 2017), is often articulated against the background of the global struggle for power between modern nation-states, which is projected back onto the entire historical trajectory of Chinese civilization. ²² More precisely, the unity and self-identity of the Chinese people is presented as being predicated on its ability to absorb external influences, or rather to assimilate ethnic and cultural “internal others” into the Chinese nation. The Chinese nation, as the meta-subject of history, needs to assimilate these “internal others” in order to maintain its own identity over and against properly “external” aggression and intrusion, the prime example of which are the Opium Wars, which forced China into the battleground of a global modernity dominated by the West. This indicates that the rhetoric of “inclusion” and “inclusivity” in the discourse of minority philosophy is not so much inspired by normative concerns over institutional and epistemic practices of exclusion and “othering.” Rather, the call for “unity” to include “multiplicity” is squarely grounded in a concern over maintaining the internal unity of China over against the West, as the “wholly other.” Hence, a pluralist stance is reserved for comparisons between cultures (represented or embodied by specific nation-states), not within cultures (on a “subnational” 次民族国家 level), as Li He 李河 has succinctly noted in a highly illuminating discussion on the problematic notion of “national philosophy” 民族哲学 (Li, 2019: 95). Without the inclusion and assimilation of “internal” difference and otherness, China is assumed to be at risk of being overrun by the homogenizing force of Western culture and thereby forfeiting its self-identity. This logic becomes quite apparent in a text by Xiao Jingyang 萧景阳 in which the author claims that

if the various ethnic groups of China, including the Han, fail to absorb the outstanding culture of other peoples and countries to nourish and replenish themselves, then their own ethnic cultural traditions will by necessity gradually degenerate and wither away, thus causing them to lose their vital force and ending up being eliminated ²³ by the ages. (Xiao Jingyang, 1995: 205)

On the surface, the inclusion of minorities into the field of philosophy implies that Chinese philosophy, just like the Chinese nation, has a “composite” 复合 or hybrid identity. Xiao Jingyang is not alone in arguing that the historical formation of a “complex web of blood ties” rules out any notion of the Chinese as a “pure race” 纯族. However, this rejection of racial purity is not used to deconstruct, but rather reinforce, the idea that the Chinese nation consists of a “Central Plain” 中原, with the Han as the dominant “subject” or “protagonist” 主体 of Chinese history which consistently managed to assimilate less advanced peoples on the periphery of its fluctuating borders (Xiao Jingyang, 1995: 202–6). In a similar sense, the hybridity of the history of Chinese philosophy, as including minoritarian traditions, is never allowed to impinge on its fundamental “unity,” supposedly grounded in the dominance of the Confucian tradition as the basis of China’s “cultural cohesion” 文化内聚 (Xiao Jingyang, 1995: 199).

In any case, national and philosophical unity seems to display a very similar relation to “multiplicity” and “plurality”: that is to say, one of hierarchical inclusion. That said, the close alignment between national and philosophical identity is also one of the main strategies used by scholars of minority philosophies to legitimize the very notion of “minority philosophy” against its detractors. “Philosophy” serves as the unifying principle for intra-national, but also intra-ethnic, identity. In Wu Xiongwu’s view, for instance, the legitimacy of Chinese philosophy, insofar as it is approached as a “national philosophy,” serves to legitimize the existence of ethnic minority philosophies as well. In arguing that the birth of philosophy allows a nation to attain its highest possible form of “self-consciousness” 自我意识, ²⁴ Wu deploys the fundamental ambiguity inherent in the Chinese term minzu 民族, which can refer both to a nation or people in general as well as to a particular ethnic group or “nationality.” In doing so, Wu sounds very much like Mou Zongsan when he writes,

Given the fact that philosophical thought is the very soul and core of the development and coalescence of a people/nation/nationality 民族 and constitutes the basis allowing each people to be itself, each people must by definition (insofar as it was formed as a people) have its own form of philosophical thought as well as a history of the formation and development of its own philosophy. (Wu, 2015: 59)

To be sure, Wu is clear that such “self-consciousness” concerning “one’s own ethnicity” 本民族 must always at the same time involve a fundamental awareness of being an integral part of the Chinese people 中华民族 (Wu, 1994: 19). Minority and national identity are thus presented as mutually constitutive, albeit in a naturalized fashion which largely ignores the political and historical background of the dual processes of the nationalization and ethnicization of identity in modern China.

Somewhat remarkably, in their approach to what counts as an ethnic group or “nationality,” Chinese scholars of ethnicity and minority philosophy such as Wu have continued to refer to the traditional Stalinist definition (see Mackerras, 2003: 23–24), according to which “a nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, a common territory, a common economic life and a common psychological makeup which expresses itself in a common culture” (Stalin, 1913: n.p., emphasis removed). ²⁵ In doing so, however, they have tended to attach more theoretical importance to the fourth and final factor, in direct contrast to the emphasis on the necessary conjunction of all four elements in the original definition. In a 2011 analysis and critique of Stalin’s 1913 text “Marxism and the National Question,” Wu Xiongwu turns the traditional logic of historical materialism against itself and argues that the Stalinist criteria, or, more generally speaking, the notion that nations are the historical product of capitalist society, cannot lay claim to universal validity, and does not apply to the historical reality of China. For Wu, making the genesis of a nation contingent upon its entry into global capitalism would put the emergence of the Chinese nation as late as 1839, with the start of the First Opium War, something he dismisses as nonsensical given what he professes to be the obvious longevity of the Chinese as a people (Wu, 2011: 27). Instead of focusing on the material base as a precondition for the birth of national identity, Wu argues that “cultural relations” 文化关系 constitute the true “essence of a people” 民族的本质. ²⁶ In turn, this specific type of social relations is presented as “self-consciously and intentionally created by human beings, while also being transmitted and embodied by them.” As Wu adds, “therefore, human beings are the subject of culture, in precisely the same sense that they are the subject of modes of production and relations of production” (Wu, 2011: 32). For Wu, “when we say that nationality is a historical category, this simply means that culture and cultural differences must first develop to a certain degree and stage in order for a nationality to come into existence” (Wu, 2011: 36).

Wu Xiongwu’s reappraisal of the causal power of culture as the expression of a nation’s “common psychological makeup” 共同心理素质 is thus understood as coinciding with an assertion of human autonomy, with human beings playing the role of the true “subject” of a nation’s appearance and development. However, it is quite clear that it is “culture” itself, and not the individuals or groups which are seen as its “creators” and “embodiments,” which plays the determining role in this form of autonomy. In other words, the autonomy in question is simply that of the “superstructure” vis-à-vis the material “base.” As such, Wu stresses that culture is not so much the product of a certain “psychological makeup,” but rather the other way around. Accordingly, Wu proposes simply replacing the Stalinist expression “common psychological makeup” with “culture,” defined as “a system of ideas 观念系统 grounded in a common national spirit and sense of national identity” (Wu, 2011: 36–37). ²⁷ For Wu, this “system of ideas” is none other than philosophy itself.

In short, while the liberation of “culture” from the material basis of social existence, a theoretical move which was of crucial importance in the genesis of minority philosophies, does have the salutary effect of allowing for a recognition of the legitimacy of minority philosophy, it at the same time threatens to confine the latter to the position of being the ultimate determinant of a cultural, and thus national and ethnic, form of identity from which no escape seems possible, seeing how it is no longer even contingent upon a nationality or ethnicity’s supposed “psychological makeup.” ²⁸ Wu has expressed the hope that the more widespread revival of traditional forms of philosophy and religion such as Confucianism in modern China will contribute to the flourishing of minority philosophies and join forces with the latter in allowing China to transcend what he sees as the “cultural self-negation” 文化的自我否定 involved in adopting a “Western” and scientistic understanding of philosophy (Wu, 2015: 54; cf. Li, 2007: 20, 35). It seems unlikely, however, that he will find many partners in a form of discourse which has increasingly come to emphasize the autarkic nature of Chinese culture as represented by Confucianism and which has already claimed the task of overcoming Western metaphysics for itself. As a correlate of Confucianism’s supposed “assimilative power,” we are left with a form of identity in which otherness never really figured in the first place. As the important twentieth-century Confucian philosopher Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 (1893–1988) already declared in a manuscript written during the Cultural Revolution, in which he sought to link the putative “early enlightenment” 早启 of Chinese culture resulting from the Confucian sublation of religion with “the principle behind the incomparable expansion of the Han people” 汉族所以拓大无比之理 and the coming realization of human autonomy in communist society,

Confucius [. . .] put his whole faith in human beings themselves and enlightened them to the reason 理性 ²⁹ they possess within themselves, thus allowing them to become more self-aware and self-confident. [. . .] His original intention was not to force others to submit themselves. He did not seek to assimilate others, but in submitting to their own reason, people were unexpectedly assimilated by Confucius. This form of assimilation simply comes down to allowing human beings to gain mastery over themselves and to refrain from abandoning themselves while submitting to others. This is precisely why his assimilative power was of such an incomparable strength. (Liang, 1991: 4.427)

Conclusion: The Shrinking Past and the Vanishing Present

Most of the scholarship on ethnic minority philosophies has thus far remained uncharted territory in the study of Chinese minority identity and modern Chinese intellectual history. To be clear, the findings presented in this article are based on a relatively limited number of textual sources which would need to be studied in more detail and further supplemented with extensive archival research and anthropological fieldwork in order to arrive at a more comprehensive picture of the state (and future) of the field.

That said, I hope I have managed at least to draw attention to the importance and relevance of paying closer attention to the complex interrelations and tensions between ethnic, national, philosophical, religious, and cultural identity to which this still relatively young academic discipline bears witness. For one thing, the problematic field of minority philosophies would seem to call for a heightened sensibility to the immediate sociopolitical context in which the discipline of Chinese philosophy (or “philosophy in China”) is practiced in the PRC and beyond, and thus also for a more precise understanding of the hazy concept of “culture,” which continues to be used in a rather unreflective manner even as other epistemic categories (not least “philosophy” itself) are increasingly treated as symbols of the intellectual colonization of China by the West. While studying Chinese minority traditions in a “purely philosophical” manner is in itself a perfectly valid, interesting, and worthwhile pursuit, it seems to me that there is no reason to assume that concepts such as “culture” and “minority” behave in a more predictable manner and are any more self-explanatory than Zhou Dunyi’s 周敦颐 (1017–1073) “supreme ultimate” 太极 or Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception. In other words, any attempt to bypass the ideological baggage of minority philosophy as a discipline by delving straight into the philosophical riches of minority cultures would have to confront the difficulty of how to articulate the relation of such an endeavor to the concrete reality of minority populations in China and Chinese society as it exists today.

The reader may be justified in wondering where all of this leaves the frail project of minority philosophy in contemporary China. It would not be an exaggeration to say that much will depend on the political future of the PRC and the direction of its minority policies. This future obviously does not look very bright at the moment. As David Tobin explains, a new generation of scholars of ethnic policy has for some time been urging for a move from a politics of recognition and nominal ethnic autonomy to one of stronger assimilation. These scholars espouse a more radical vision of what they call “ethnic extinction” 民族消亡, that is to say, a veritable “fusion” of China’s fifty-six ethnic groups into a single, undivided nation. In the process, ethnic minority groups are expected to submit to the “modernizing” model provided by the Han Chinese (Tobin, 2015: 80–81; see also Leibold, 2013). The recent adoption of draconian biopolitical measures such as the imposition of forced abortions, sterilization, and mandatory birth control in Xinjiang (Zenz, 2020) makes it clear where the sort of ethnic “fusion” envisaged by the Chinese state is heading.

As such, it seems likely that the much touted reinvention of tradition in China will become the exclusive property and privilege of Han Chinese culture, seen as capable of a superior form of modernization precisely by rediscovering its roots in the past and thereby overcoming Western modernity. The increasing tendency to equate Chinese civilization with Confucianism threatens to transform the past into an exclusively Confucian one, holding watch over a vanishing present through the eyes of countless cameras in the streets of Urumqi and Kashgar. For what will remain of a recent tradition such as that of minority philosophy in China once “multiplicity” and “plurality” have disappeared into the “great unity of the Chinese people”? We can only hope that John Fitzgerald was mistaken when he wrote, in a completely different context, that “particularity finally found a place in generalizations about the Chinese people” (Fitzgerald, 1996: 73).