(TibetanReview.net, Mar19’24) —“Minorities” appear to have become a dirty word in President Xi Jinping’s China, as the party-state shifts focus, instead, to speaking of “all ethnic groups” to combat “ethnic minority exceptionalism” and promote the concept of zhonghua – meaning Chinese culture or civilisation, or the wholeness of the Chinse nation.
A new textbook to be taught at Chinese universities appears to make this clear. It cites political division in the West as a situation to be avoided and to justify Xi’s ethnic integration policies, which has shifted focus from speaking of minorities to “all ethnic groups”.
The book, An Introduction to the Community for the Chinese Nation, was published in February and will soon be listed as a compulsory text at many universities, as is the case with courses on Marxism and Xi Jinping Thought, reported the scmp.com Mar 18. It has been jointly written by around a dozen Chinese scholars known for advocating ethnic integration.
Its chief editor is stated to be Pan Yue, the director of the National Ethnic Affairs Commission, responsible for drafting laws on China’s ethnic minority policy and enforcing those laws and regulations.
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The report cited observers as saying it is the most direct articulation of China’s ethnic integration policies since Xi first coined the term “a sense of community for the Chinese nation” in 2014.
They have also said it signals that affirmative action for ethnic minority groups will be further rolled back as Beijing backs down from emphasising the distinctive qualities of those groups.
The book is said to argue that after the 1970’s, under the influence of neoliberalism in the West, “antagonisms between various groups based on subnational and subcultural identities have continued to grow, with racial and ethnic tensions being particularly intense”.
It is stated to cite “political divides” and “social cleavages” in the United States as examples, referring to the attack on the Capitol Building on Jan 6, 2021. The textbook is said to claim that in the US, lower-middle class white people “blame people of colour and ethnic minorities” for the wealth gap brought by economic globalisation.
It is also said to list the “national identity dilemma” faced by different regions – including Europe, Africa, the US and India – and conclude that policies in other countries all failed to address it.
“Neither the harmonising ‘melting pot’ policy nor the ultra-diverse model of ethnic governance works,” the authors were stated to have written.
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The report noted that Beijing’s ethnic integration policies accelerated after 2014 when Xi spoke of “a sense of community for the Chinese nation”. Later, at a conference in 2021, he was stated to have asserted that building this sense of community should be at the heart of all ethnic minority policies, and to have urged local authorities to take more proactive measures.
These were stated to include promoting the use of “standard spoken and written Chinese” – meaning Mandarin.
The textbook is also said to detail how the present ethnic policies differ from those practised in China before Xi’s presidency, with the changes including an emphasis on the wholeness of the “Chinese nation” and a shift in special focus from ethnic minorities to “all ethnic groups” and “all regions”.
The new policy requires all ethnic groups to embrace the unifying concept of zhonghua – meaning Chinese culture or civilisation.
Previous policies were stated to be mainly concerned with “managing the stomach” – meaning making people rich. But now both the “stomach” and the “brain” had to be managed – meaning intervening in the mind.
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The book is also said to offer critiques of China’s ethnic policies in the past which were modelled on those from the former Soviet Union.
Some outdated measures, it was quoted as saying, “have deviated from the original intent, entrenched ethnic differences, fostered a narrow sense of ethnicity and given rise to the erroneous thesis of ethnic minority exceptionalism”.
This was stated to lead to a path of dependency of “seeking special policies with special status”, referring to the affirmative policies towards ethnic minority groups.
The textbook is stated to claim that while some Han, the largest ethnic group in China, were upset with those affirmative policies – such as exempting some ethnic minority groups from the one-child policy and allowing them more relaxed university admission criteria – some in ethnic minority groups “looked to the West for their ethnic roots and to foreign countries for their cultural origins”.
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Lai Hongyi, associate professor of social sciences at the University of Nottingham, has said the book seemed to suggest that affirmative action cultural privileges granted to ethnic minorities would be “dramatically rolled back”.
While the textbook did not name any ethnic groups in China, it is common to see that China’s ethnic minority groups, especially on the periphery, share historical and cultural proximity with groups beyond the Chinese border, including Uyghurs, Tibetans and Mongols, the report noted.
Ma Haiyun, an associate professor of history at Frostburg State University in Maryland, has said that the new policy goal is “geared towards not only a political unity but also a cultural assimilation”.
Ma has cautioned that if the concept “is narrowly defined as Han, then such policy practice will create more tension than harmony”.
Aaron Glasserman, who researches China’s ethnic policies at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies at Harvard University, has noted that intellectuals from ethnic minority groups were once encouraged to “study and develop their peoples’ distinctive cultures, traditions, history”.
But, he has added: “On this intellectual front, the old system has already been abandoned, and this new textbook is a nail in the coffin.”
On the issue of teaching the new textbook, an academic who teaches anthropology at a university in eastern China, and who has asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the issue, has said he and his colleagues expected it would be difficult to teach the course because of the large content and the fact that some of its Chinese history interpretations differed from those in previous history textbooks.