The 1949 Revolution heralded a major shift in policy. The racist discourse which had been rife since the late nineteenth century was now officially abolished and Han nationalism firmly discouraged. China was described as a unitary multi-ethnic state, although the government, after briefly offering ethnic minorities (described as nationalities) the right of self-determination, rapidly withdrew this offer. [776] Instead they encouraged ethnic minorities to apply for official recognition of their ethnic identity status, with fifty-six eventually being accepted (including the Han). They were extremely diverse in nature: some had a very powerful sense of ethnic identity, combined with separatist aspirations (the Uighurs and Tibetans), some had a strong and continuing sense of ethnic identity but no separatist ambitions (for example, the Yi), [777] some had an extremely weak sense of ethnic identity (such as the Miao, Zhuang and the Manchus), [778] while others, hangovers from a distant past before their more or less total assimilation by the Han, barely existed except as a bureaucratic entry (for example, the Bai and the Tujia). [779] This last category, in fact, encapsulates mainstream Chinese history, with the slow but remorseless process of Hanification. Those ethnic minorities with the strongest identity were granted a measure of autonomy with the establishment of five autonomous regions (known as the Inner Mongolian, Xinjiang Uighur, Guangxi Zhuang, Ningxia Hui and Tibet Autonomous Regions), enjoying limited powers of their own, including the right of the minority to appoint the chief minister; it was never intended, however, as a means by which ethnic minorities could exercise some form of autonomous rule. [780] There are three ethnic groups that, over the last century, have sustained strong separatist movements, namely, the Mongols, Tibetans and Uighurs in Xingjiang province. The Tibetans enjoyed considerable autonomy until the Chinese occupation in 1951, while Xinjiang, which means ‘new territory’, saw brief independence as East Turkestan, or Uighurstan, in 1933. Each enjoys the status of an autonomous region, though in practice that autonomy is attenuated. In the Mongolian Autonomous Region there are four times as many Han as Mongols, thereby rendering the latter relatively impotent: indeed, the homelands of China’s old conquerors, the Mongols and the Manchus, are both now overwhelmingly Han. In the Tibet Autonomous Region, the Han are still outnumbered by Tibetans, while in Xingjiang, which is China’s leading producer of oil and gas, they now account for at least 40 per cent and perhaps more than half, compared with 6 per cent in a 1950s census. [781] Each of these regions thus has been subject to the classic and oft-repeated process of Han settlement, which has changed, and is continuing slowly but surely to change, their ethnic balance. Not surprisingly, relations between the Han and the Tibetans, and the Han and Uighurs, who are mainly Muslims and speak a Turkic language, remain suspicious and distant. [782]
By curbing Han chauvinism, eschewing the claim that the Han represent the core of China and granting the ethnic minorities full legal equality, [783] the Communist government has avoided the worst assimilationist excesses of the Nationalist period. Under Mao, the language of race was replaced by that of class. However, the underlying attitudes of the Han have remained little changed. There is an ingrained prejudice amongst great swathes of the Han Chinese, including the highly educated, towards the ethnic minorities. According to Stevan Harrell, a writer on China ’s ethnic minorities, there is ‘an innate, almost visceral Han sense of superiority’. [784] He quotes the example of a Han official who had worked on a government forestry project in the middle of a Yi area and who, despite living there for twenty years, had never tried Yi food on the grounds that it was dirty and would make him sick. Far from the ethnic minorities being seen as equals, they are regarded as inferior because they are less modern. There is an underlying belief that they have to be raised up to the level of the Han, whose culture is considered as a model for the minorities to follow and emulate. [785] Their cultures are recognized at a superficial level, for example in terms of traditional dress and dance, but not treated as the equal of the Han in more substantive matters. In essence, this is not so different from the kind of Confucian ethnically infused cultural hubris that informed the imperial era. Although racialized ways of thought became less explicit after the 1949 Revolution, they never disappeared, remaining an integral, if subterranean, part of the Chinese common sense; and, since the beginning of the reform period, they have been on the rise in both popular culture and official circles. [786]
