Today I'd like to dive in a little to the kinds of issues that I'm hoping to get at while I'm out doing fieldwork. As such, I'll be taking a look at the importance of cultural difference in China, and how it is portrayed. Previously on this blog, I've talked about the incredible diversity of China's languages, and the fascination with the culture and geography of its western regions. The major takeaway from these posts is that China is a huge country. Like any expanse of land so large, China differs vastly from end to end. China's stunning diversity is not something that we always think about in the west. Afterall, I'd wager that most people don't have much difficulty imagining China looking like this:
However, its sometimes hard to imagine that this is also China:
That's China? Yes, that is the Kubuqi Desert in Inner Mongolia, and it, like the Longji Rice Terraces in Guangxi Province, is in China. Sure, the distance between them is great (about 32 hours on the fastest route, according to Google):
So, with such stunning geographic diversity, it should be no surprise that China is also incredibly diverse ethnically. This is often a surprise for people who are unfamiliar with China. Truthfully, China's ethnic diversity is not something that is widely discussed in conversations about Chinese culture. Why? Sheer population numbers may be partially to blame. Talking about how China's population breaks down by ethnicity into percentages may prove to be deceiving. Yeah, China's population is ethnically 92% Han. But because the population of China is 1.3 billion, the remaining 8% of the population that is not ethnically Han Chinese is numerically huge.
China recognizes 55 ethnic minority nationality peoples officially, and these groups range in population, geographic location, language spoken, etc. In official rhetoric, these groups all belong to the "family" of Chinese peoples (or zhonghua minzu, "中华民族"). Often, these 55 minority groups, along with the majority Han, are depicted together, dancing and singing in traditional costume, like this:
Or this:
A little corny? Granted. But the trope of the singing, dancing minority skit (like the one in the video above) is so prevalent that it is a predictable staple of every year's Spring Festival Television Gala (chun wan, 春晚), with minority performers usually singing and dancing to songs like "Great China" (Da ZhongGuo, 大中国), which declares:
我们都有一个家
We all have one home
名字叫中国!
and its name is China!
兄弟姐妹都很多
Our brothers and sisters are numerous
景色也不错!
And the land is beautiful!
These sketches play out in the same way year after year. All the minority performers offer the mostly-Han audience a fleeting glimpse of another culture, and a chance to clap hands and stomp feet right along with the music. Outside of these glittering, festive galas, though, the picture gets muddied. Very little substantive knowledge about minority culture ever gets transmitted in public representations. Often, the image of ethnic minority culture presented appears to be a generic, exotic, non-Han other, like the mural below, found in Xining. Upon seeing it, I took it upon myself to figure out just what it meant. Xining is, afterall, in northwestern China, far from the areas where the seemingly Southeast Asian motifs in the mural would be present. When asked about which minority the drawing supposedly represented, most people simply answered something like "I don't know; one of the southern ones" or simply "just some minority."
I'm often reminded of the complaints of some of my Native American students and colleagues at Oklahoma about the way Native Americans have been portrayed in the U.S.: that not all Native Americans live in teepees and wear feathered headdresses. These depcitions of China's minorities, which are simply ambiguously non-Han give rise to a caricatured view of ethnic minorities, and blurs the lines between different cultures. In this sense, minorities are often simply reduced to a single, vaguely homogenized, non-Han type. As anthropologist Dru C. Gladney notes, such a one-size-fits-all conception of ethnic minorities leads to a kind of fetishism that is especially inappropriate in more conservative cultures, like especially devout communities among the Uyghur, and Hui.
Perhaps more problematic than these generalized caricatures, though, are the depictions of particular minority groups which reduce their subjects to a not much more than a few essentialized traits. Often these caricatures rely heavily on stereotypes to make their subjects instantly recongnizable to the viewer. These characteristics become a kind of shorthand for how minorities are regarded by some Chinese people. For instance, when I lived in Jinan, in east China, Hui Muslim culture was largely reduced by many Jinanese to series of dietary habits. The Hui, to many Jinan residents, were people who didn't eat pork, and sold hand-pulled beef noodle soup, and barbecue mutton kabobs. Other aspects of Hui/Islamic culture were mostly unknown. While in some cases, Hui people in public art are depicted in a fairly harlmess way (such as in the bronze statute of legendary Hui explorer, Zheng He, and the statue of an elderly Hui man washing his feet before prayer, both pictured below):
Public sculptures of Hui culture more often resemble the bronze statues found in a Lanzhou park, pictured below.
Or, worse, like these figurines representing the various ethnic minorities of Xinjiang province (namely, Uyghurs) at a Beijing novelty shop:
Reducing ethnic minoirities to essentialized or cartoonish figures such as these, opens up opportunities for misunderstandings in cross-cultural communications, and feelings of estrangement or apartness among members of the group. Understanding how any why such representations of ethnic culture mat in contemporary China. These are, of course, large puzzles to try and figure out. During the next 11 months, questions like these will make up an important part of my research, and so you can probably expect that I'll revisit many of these ideas in the days, weeks, and months to come. It's a conversation I'm interested to start having.