Reflections on the Fulbright Hays Seminar, “Examining China’s Great
Western Development Program: the Social and Cultural Effects upon Ethnic
Minorities and the Han Majority”
Jonathan Good
Reinhardt College
August 2005
Earlier this year, I was
lucky enough to participate in a month-long trip to China, funded by the
Fulbright-Hays foundation, administered by the U.S. Department of
Education. In June, fifteen college and high-school teachers from north
Georgia traveled to various places in China to investigate the impact of
the country’s Great Western Development Program on relations between its
Han majority and its ethnic minorities. We spent our first week in
Beijing, then flew to Xinjiang province in the west, where we visited the
cities of Urumqi, Turpan, and Kashgar. After Xinjiang, we few to Chengdu
in Sichuan province in south-central China, and then took an overnight
train even further south to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. In
Yunnan we also visited the cities of Dali, Lijiang, and Zhongdian,
before flying to Shanghai and then home to Atlanta. In all places we
heard lectures from academics at local universities or research
institutions, and were given tours of things that pertained to
minorities, western development, and Chinese history (of course, we had
some free time as well). I should say off the bat that China’s ethnic
minorities, and its GWDP, constitute entire fields of academic study,
and China really is a world unto itself, one that a person could study
for twenty years and still not have a good grasp of. Nonetheless, I
offer these thoughts, ignorant as they may be, in the hopes of
highlighting some of the issues brought to our attention.
*****
In 1980, China created
four special economic zones on the east coast, as an experiment in
freeing the Chinese economy from its Maoist shackles and replicating
some of the economic success of Hong Kong and Taiwan. Foreign investors
were offered special tax incentives, local governments were allowed
greater independence in making economic decisions, joint ventures with
foreign companies were promoted, and in general markets, not state
planners, were allowed to decide what got produced. These zones were
hugely successful, and were eventually expanded into a coastal belt, the
main reason why China is such an economic powerhouse today. This
prosperity has, on the whole, not been shared by China’s interior, and
so in 1999 Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji announced the Great Western
Development Program, sometimes also referred to as “Go West” or “Open up
the West.” The central government is expending vast amounts on
infrastructure projects like roads, railroads, and dams, sponsoring the
exploitation of oil and mineral wealth, and providing numerous
incentives for businesses to locate or invest in the west, and for
people to move there, all for the purpose of spreading prosperity.
The West is also home to
most of China’s ethnic minorities. Ninety-two percent of Chinese
consider themselves to be “Han,” i.e. what Americans think of when they
hear the word “Chinese.” Some 8% of China’s population, however, is not
Han; the central government recognizes fifty-five different minority
groups, ranging in size from several million to a few thousand. The
Tibetans are perhaps the Chinese minority most familiar to Americans (if
only because many Americans deny that China has any right to rule them).
International boundaries rarely divide nationalities completely cleanly,
and many of the peoples who live in countries bordering China live in
China too, people like the Kazaks, Tajiks, Kirghiz, Mongols, Russians,
or Koreans. The Uighurs, a Muslim Turkic people who do not possess their
own sovereign country, form the majority population in China’s
westernmost province, Xinjiang. The Hui minority are Han who happen to
be Muslim; they number some eight million people spread throughout
China. Yunnan province in the south borders Burma, Laos, and Vietnam and
is home to some twenty-five minority groups, among them the Miao, Dai,
Naxi and Yi, many of whom are related to the peoples of Indochina and
whose cultures have been preserved by some fairly mountainous and
inaccessible terrain. Minority cultures tend to be expressed (or are
represented as being expressed) through distinctive languages,
religions, songs and dances, dress, and marriage, funerary, and other
customs.
*****
The enumeration and
classification of different ethnic minorities is a Communist project. It
is a party-line Fact that “There are fifty-six minzu in China”
(i.e., the Han plus the minorities), like similar Facts that “Mao was
70% right and 30% wrong,” or “Tibet has always been a part of China.” I
asked one of our lecturers in Beijing why the Communists would care to
define so many internal nationalities, when doctrinaire Marxists always
considered such distinctions to be a product of false consciousness. He
replied that the Communists did think that the “ethnicities” were
backward, and that it would be a great achievement on the happy day when
they disappeared – and if fully fifty-five of them disappeared, the
achievement would seem all the greater. (Having taken over a country as
big as China against great odds in 1949, the Communists often felt, in
the early days of the PRC, that anything was possible.) Whether this is
still a long-term goal of the CCP is doubtful. The existence of the
minorities is taken for granted, and we were constantly told that they
enjoy legal equality with the Han. We saw any number of museum displays
of all the minzu in their ethnic costume, a number of books were
available on the fifty-six groups, dolls of the minzu could be
purchased, and there was a set of fifty-six postage stamps, one for each
group, that some of us bought. If the Communists still hope that the
minorities will one day disappear they seem to have done a great deal to
put off that day as long as possible.
Of course, many western
academics would reject this sort of categorization. Immediately they
would ask such questions as: What about cultural divisions within
different groups – especially among the Han, who all do not even speak
the same language? What about people who could be considered members of
more than one group? What about groups that do not believe themselves to
be Han but whose ethnicities are not included among the fifty-six
(apparently some 500 groups have applied for minority status)? Are all
these categories really parallel to each other, or are there differences
in kind as well as degree among them? Etc., etc.
The only person who expressed any doubt about the “fifty-six
minzu” line was the same lecturer who told us about the early
Communist hope of eradicating ethnicity: he reckoned that real ethnic
minorities should possess:
• a
large population living in a large area,
• a written language, and
• a nation-state beyond China (Mongolia, Korea, etc.) or a historic
claim to self-rule (the Tibetans, the Yi)
Such criteria would
lower the total number of ethnicities to about eight or so. Otherwise,
“there are fifty-six groups in China” was not questioned.
I myself do not know enough to comment on it, although I do agree
on some level with our Beijing lecturer: some minorities “matter” more
than others. The Tibetans and Uighurs both number in the millions, both
inhabit large areas, and both have exercised de facto
independence over long periods in the past. If nothing else, these facts
condition these minorities to be more antagonistic toward the central
government and the Han who run it.
*****
Any government can
declare that all groups enjoy legal equality, or even that some groups
possess special constitutional status, but the question is: what does
reality look like? Communists are famous for this sort of thing (as in,
“the Soviet constitution is the freest in the world”). What is it
actually like to be a member of one of China’s fifty-five ethnic
minority groups? Do they really possess equality with the Han? Again, it
would require much study to produce answers to this question for all
groups in China. I will say that we saw little evidence of open
hostility between the Han and the minorities, or among different
minority groups.
What we did see was a great deal of paternalism on the part of the Han
toward the minorities. One man matter-of-factly told us that the ethnic
minorities are the “little brothers” of the Han. A caption to a museum
display informed us that the Qiang people “love to sing and dance to
their heart’s content.” Perhaps the biggest example came in Chengdu,
where we were scheduled to have dinner with some minority students. I
sat at a table with some other seminar participants, two Tibetan boys
and two Yi girls. I was looking forward to speaking with them, and
indeed they were pleasant young people, although communication was
rather limited. One of their (Han) professors came and sat with us
briefly; he mentioned, in front of them, how they were all very poor and
came from very backward places. One of my colleagues at another table
told us later that the student sitting next to him told him not to
expect much in the way of conversation. The professors had apparently
rounded them up, ordered them to attend and not to say anything
controversial, just to dress in their native costume and to sing and
dance after dinner for the guests. I cringed when I discovered this. An
American, after all, cannot help but think in terms of American race
relations – one of the reasons we got the travel grant, indeed, was
because the seminar would provide us with a comparative perspective on
what Studs Terkel has called “America’s national obsession” – and I
simply cannot imagine a Chengdu-style party happening at a U.S.
university. I could see a college hiring, say, its own
(predominantly) African-American student dance team or gospel choir to
perform for some foreigners, if both parties were interested. But I
cannot see the administration rustling up some black people and telling
them to dance and sing, because that’s what you people do, isn’t it?
That would be a major incident, at least at the college I went to.
But was I right to
cringe? America has had a Civil Rights movement, one that has made
racial paternalism forever taboo. China has not had one, and so the sort
of paternalism we witnessed happens on a routine basis. Do the Chinese
minorities themselves object to it, the same way that Indians, Latinos,
or African-Americans would object to being put on display in the U.S.?
Or is it something that they expect – or even appreciate? For me to
object to Han paternalism – am I not simply blaming them for not being
American? I think in some ways that I am. The organization of Chinese
society is different than ours, after all: despite over fifty years of
Communism, it seems much more hierarchical than American society, or at
least that hierarchies are present in places we would find surprising.
Over two millennia ago, Confucius, China’s greatest and most influential
philosopher, defined the proper terms of five relationships, those
between:
•
Father and son
• Older brother and younger brother
• Husband and wife
• Old person and young person, and
• Ruler and subject
As one might imagine,
righteousness and benevolence are prescribed for the former, deference
and obedience for the latter. Such arrangements are the essence of
paternalism, and in the light of the second dictum it becomes telling
that the Han would figure the ethnic minorities as their “little
brothers” – he, at least, expected minorities to mind their station, in
return for which the Han would look after their interests.
And the Han do
look after minority interests, in some ways. We were told repeatedly how
much money that central government invests annually in minority areas
(although this too can be disruptive, viz. a recent news story about the
forced settlement of nomadic herdsmen in Xinjiang). Minority group
members are famously exempted from China’s one-child policy (those in
cities are allowed two children, in the countryside three), and there
are a number of minority universities throughout the country that cater
to minority students and actually require lower entrance standards than
regular universities. How many minorities are grateful for this
treatment? Some must be. More importantly, even if they resent the Han,
how many minorities actually dispute the fundamental justice of
Han rule – do they too feel, deep down, that their Confucian job is to
obey?
Even more importantly, even if they both resent the Han and
dispute the Han right to rule, how can they protest this rule? One of
the major problems with paternalism is that when the patron does not do
his job, there is no recourse for the client. One member of our group
asked numerous lecturers whether there were any “voluntary associations”
in China, things like homeowners’ associations, bowling leagues or the
Rotary Club, the existence of which has often been used to measure the
strength of “civil society,” and the answer pretty much was no – any
such associations are government-sponsored in some way, or underground
and therefore illegal. This goes double for minority organizations – the
regions where they live, usually designated “autonomous,” are actually
the opposite. The government is especially concerned about religion:
Uighurs tend to be Muslim, and Tibetans Buddhist – but if any Uighurs or
Tibetans practice their religion outside the boundaries imposed by the
state, like setting up their own madrassas, or meeting in underground
mosques, or recognizing the Dalai Lama as their rightful spiritual
leader, and they are caught, they can find themselves in serious
trouble. So opposition to government policy cannot, therefore, come in
the form of organizations parallel to America’s NAACP or La Raza, which
are free to raise money and to hire lobbyists to make their case to the
government, PR agents to publicize it (through an independent news
media), or lawyers to sue for redress of grievances (through an
independent court system). We heard of one example of successful
opposition in Kashgar, where we were told that the local government
wanted to demolish a traditional Uighur neighborhood in the city center
and move the inhabitants to a high-rise housing project on the outskirts
of town. This had happened to numerous neighborhoods in Kashgar already
and was also happening to the traditional neighborhoods of Beijing
(known as “hutongs”) when we were there. I was flabbergasted to learn
that the locals got together and protested, and the government backed
down, instead giving them money with which they could improve their
houses. I asked our tour guide how this was possible. He said that if
one or two families had said anything they would probably have been
punished, but since the whole neighborhood had protested, the government
was forced to listen. I wonder if the government had ulterior motives,
however, a point to which I shall return.
In general, it would seem
that minorities do not possess equality with the Han, but are not
necessarily oppressed by them as such - although they certainly
can be.
*****
In preparing for this
trip, I read a number of things including Debra Blum’s Portraits of
“Primitives”: Ordering Human Kinds in the Chinese Nation. In it she
claims that:
The
quest for authenticity, like that for the Holy Grail, ends in failure,
though the search itself turns up unimagined treasures. Discussion is
often of what is “really” a property of this or that minority. What one
finds are rather more like the emblems of minority identity… The
fashion-show-like performances of minority dances, in which all
minorities are played by a few actors, homogenized by bland music and
sameness of fabric, consist principally of parades of purported minority
costumes. Purists might prefer retaining minority people in a more
authentic drab mode, arguing that in the past, the colors were not so
bright and that this is inauthentic. But the minority people themselves
like the chance to be more flashy and smooth.
Before I went to China
this seemed to me to be a very good argument to make. I never liked the
notion that other people are obliged to remain in a certain timeless
state for the sake of Westerners’ aesthetic pleasure, that we get to
experience change over time but they do not. My wife and I had gone on a
trip to South Africa four years before and one of our guidebooks warned
against a similar attitude: do not be disappointed if you do not see
very many traditional round thatched huts in the tribal countryside, if
these have been replaced by square buildings made of wood and corrugated
iron. People still live in them, and that is what is important – it is
not the form of the building but its cultural function that counts. For
everyone who goes somewhere and is disappointed to discover that the
place shares too much in common with home, I say that you are not
observant enough.
Other people still exist as people, even if they like to eat at
McDonald’s every now and then, and if you want to see a culture
hermetically sealed off and completely “unsullied” by any contact with
other cultures, well, as an anthropologist friend of mine says, “go to
Disneyland.”
The trouble, from my
point of view, is that Disneyland is precisely the plan that China seems
to have for its ethnic minorities. Tourism – specifically, encouraging
wealthy east-coast Han to come to the interior to spend their money – is
a major part of the Great Western Development Program, and we saw a
number of things that can only be described as the commodification of
minority culture for tourist consumption. It began in Beijing, where we
went to something billed as a Dai restaurant. It had Dai food, Dai
waitstaff in ethnic costume and a stage on which Dai dancers came out to
perform for the patrons. It was a pretty slick operation, with timing
down perfectly: a number of tour groups came in all at once and sat
down, food was served quickly, and the dancers danced to a tune. At the
end of the dance they threw necklaces into the crowd, and if you caught
one (as I did) you were escorted on stage for the next dance, for the
amusement of your fellow tour members. Near the end of our meal people
came around and tied a red thread around our wrists, apparently a Dai
symbol of hospitality. At the end of the meal everyone was shooed out
and the next groups brought in; out on the street we were assailed by
hawkers trying to sell us sun hats, postcards, watches, and the like.
Near Turpan, in the west, there is a site known as the Bezeklik Thousand
Buddha Caves – a number of caves had been hollowed out on the side of a
mountain in the thirteenth century (when there were still Uighur
Buddhists) to serve as Buddhist sanctuaries. Many still had multiple
images of the Buddha on the interior, although these had been damaged
over the years by Muslims, western archaeologists, and Red Guards. This
was all very interesting – but why the local authorities built a
“traditional Uighur stone village” at the entrance as an additional
attraction is beyond me. In Zhongdian (a historically Tibetan city in Yunnan, recently renamed “Shangri-la” in the hopes of cashing in on the
tourist trade!) we went to see a “traditional Tibetan dance” that felt
like something that might be performed in Branson, Missouri. As we
entered the theater we passed a gantlet of performers who applauded our
entrance and who placed silk scarves around our necks. We sat around
tables and they served us roasted grains and yak butter tea. The show itself consisted of alternating solo acts and
dances to some pretty cheesy music, accompanied by disco lights, bubbles
from a machine and smoke from dry ice. If you liked a certain performer
you could go up on stage and place your silk scarf around his or her
neck. A number of Han military men from the local base were in the
audience getting drunk and acting boisterous, reminding me of the “USO
concert” scene in any number of movies. As we left the town we noticed a
large stupa – a Tibetan Buddhist monument traditionally
containing relics of the Buddha – deliberately planted in the middle of
the roundabout on the outskirts of town. And the preserved old cities of
Dali and Lijiang were very Disney – every single building in these towns
is some sort of restaurant or craft or souvenir store, aimed at
tourists. In other words, many of the “minority” things we saw were
specifically set up for tourists. If we did not exist, then the
attractions would not exist either – we were by no means dropping in on
people as they actually lived their lives.
But so what, eh? In being
uncomfortable with all this, am I not just being a western liberal – or
at the very least a travel snob? If the minorities themselves do not
object to performing, why should I? The trouble is that I am not exactly
sure how much control the minorities have over the situation. The big
criticism of the Great Western Development Program is that it is
essentially internal imperialism, and “opening up the west for economic
development” seems to consist, in large part, of encouraging the Han to
settle and to open up businesses there (Urumqi, Turpan, Kashgar, and
Zhongdian all had large Han populations). Some of these businesses might
be tourist attractions, and some minorities might find employment with
them that they would not have found otherwise. But it would seem that
the profits go elsewhere. One lecturer told us that a Naxi sacred
mountain is now a “money machine,” controlled by a company with
shareholders, most of whom are not locals. The “Dai” restaurant in
Beijing was definitely run by Han entrepreneurs. The worst is when they
dress up Han in ethnic costume – I took a picture of some Han girls in
Uighur print vests in a government store in Kashgar, and our tour guide
in Lijiang pointed out Han women in Naxi dress for us. Now it is true
that the Chinese have a different attitude toward authenticity than we
do.
Everyone knows that the Chinese copying of western products and the
theft of western technology is one of the major trade issues between the
U.S. and China right now. “Shanghai is the world capital for
knock-offs,” said our tour guide there, quite proudly. He had a handbag
that was indistinguishable from whatever prestigious brand it was
supposed to be, and it was even fireproof. (He invited us to give him a
lighter so that he could prove it, but no one had one.) A spokesman for
a technology park in Chengdu tried to make a joke about it: “Sometimes
it takes us a few years to copy something, sometimes a few days, ha ha.
But, the situation is better than it used to be.” (“Or is it actually
worse?” murmured one of my colleagues.) Most of the historic sites we
saw were actually recent reconstructions: many were destroyed during the
Cultural Revolution, and rebuilt in the past fifteen years for the sake
of tourism, hence our section of the Great Wall (which was in perfect
condition and then abruptly ended), and Buddhist temples in Chengdu,
Zhongdian, and Dali. It is true that these were acknowledged as
reconstructions (and that westerners also reconstruct destroyed
antiquities – viz. the Berliner Dom, the Albert Cathedral, or the entire
city of Leningrad), but plenty of old stuff for sale in markets, like
antique coins or Mao memorabilia, was transparently fake – or perhaps I
should say, “reproduced.”
When it comes to minority
cultures, however, I cannot help but think that authenticity matters –
not that minorities should be unsullied by any contact with outsiders,
but that they should retain some control over their own representation.
(It is also nice, as a tourist, to believe that not everything is being
put on for the sake of your consumption, although such a condition is
impossible to achieve absolutely). We did see some examples of local
minority control: in Kashgar, the Uighurs genuinely manufactured goods
that they sold in the street market (although I wonder whether the
government did not recognize the tourist potential of this market, and
therefore allowed the preservation of the traditional neighborhood, as a
picturesque adjunct to it.) In Turpan we were treated to dinner at a
Uighur house, and entertained afterwards by Uighur dancers – a far cry
from the Dai operation in Beijing. In Yunnan we stopped by a household
factory producing the traditional tie-dyed cloth of the Bai people –
this did not seem to be state-run, or owned by some conglomerate. The
Naxi orchestra is a tourist attraction and performs nightly in Lijiang,
but it is the brainchild of a Naxi musician and composed mostly of
elderly Naxi men who hid their instruments during the Cultural
Revolution. And our Naxi tour guide in Lijiang, whom I will call Rose,
was the front person of a company, devoted to “ecotourism,” that had
thirty shareholders from her parents’ village outside Lijiang. Her
parents’ house also had been converted to accommodate guests, who could
stay with them overnight and get a taste of Naxi village life. This was
one of the more interesting evenings we had the pleasure to experience.
But it was telling that Rose’s company was set up, not by the central
government, nor the local government, but the Nature Conservancy, a
American non-profit organization that is allowed to work in Yunnan.
Otherwise, all our tour guides worked for large, state-run tour
companies. From my limited perspective, therefore, it did not seem that
the government was interested in promoting minority-owned minority
tourism.
*****
But why should it? The
Chinese government is, like the Soviet was, composed of a great many
people who hold engineering degrees. Is it any wonder that they would
simply consider figures when they calculate the “alleviation of
poverty,” and that they would consider only the economic utility of the
preservation of minority culture? In fact, is this not better than the
alternative of actively crushing minority culture, as the PLA did in
Tibet in the 1950s – or merely letting the process of modernization take
its inevitable toll? This latter phenomenon is indeed happening to some
extent in the west: “When the Yi come to live in town, they adopt Han
ways and you can’t tell they’re Yi. They’re just the same as us,” said
the spokesman for the Chengdu technology park. Our guide in the park,
legally a member of the Qiang minority, seemed to concur – he liked his
job, his urban lifestyle, and Han friends. A colleague of mine opined
that this process of modernization has been repeated time and again
throughout the world, that he sympathized with, but did not
sentimentalize, minority culture, and that the central government
actually deserved praise for its attempts, awkward as they may be, to
preserve it.
And yet, I do wish the government would not present minorities with such
a stark choice between identity and equality as far as the Great Western
Development Program is concerned. The nationalities universities, for
instance, strike me as the kiddy table. They require lower test scores,
and offer courses in subjects like ethnology and tourism, after which
students seem qualified to represent their cultures to tourists, most
likely in the employment of the state. In order to get a degree in
finance or high technology, which would set someone up for full
participation in China’s booming new economy, such a person would have
to get a good test score and attend a proper university, where he or she
would be expected to assimilate. How about a third choice of being able
to go to a proper university, get (say) a computer science degree, and a
minor in Naxi literature? Or how about making all students at proper
universities take a single course in minority cultures, parallel to my
own undergraduate college’s nonwestern requirement? I realize that I am
once again blaming China for not being like the United States (very few
systems of higher education, indeed, require as much breadth as does the
American). But our Beijing lecturer’s ideas of “cultural ecology” –
essentially, that we look at other things than the bottom line when
evaluating the impact of economic change on people – remains an
attractive, but elusive, ideal.
*****
I repeat my caveat above
about my own ignorance. China is a vast country of over a billion people
and we saw a very small slice of it – perhaps my observations are simply
not applicable to other parts of the country.
Furthermore, the language and cultural barriers we encountered were the
highest I have ever experienced. Add to that the Chinese habit of
avoiding confrontation by telling an interlocutor what he wants to hear,
or of people keeping their true thoughts to themselves lest they say
something wrong and it get back to the authorities, and you are never
100% sure what is going on. And as participants on a group tour we were
shown things that were government-sanctioned and therefore not
necessarily representative of all such things in the country (although
we were spared the sort of Potemkin-village treatment that one
apparently gets in North Korea). Nevertheless, this was a fascinating
trip and I am glad to have participated. And despite all my misgivings I
am cautiously optimistic about the fate of many of China’s minority
cultures. Tourist attractions with dancing minorities will continue to
be built, and more minorities will assimilate into the great mass of Han
in the cities. But between these two poles will remain a space for
minority cultures to exist, especially for those minorities which number
over a million (the threshold, I understand, for the maintenance of a
language), of which there are nineteen in China. These cultures will
not be timeless and unchanging, but once we accept that cultures
“have the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same,”
we will appreciate them for what they are and the diversity they add to
the human condition. The Quebec of 2005 is not the Quebec of 1950, or of
1850, but only the willfully ignorant would say that it is not a
“distinct society” from the rest of Canada, then or now. I predict that
the situation of many Chinese minorities will be somewhat similar.
In fact, many of our lecturers did not question much. An
inordinate number we heard purveyed extended catalogues of
minority customs, such as “the X people wear this headdress and
have the cheek-pinching ceremony, while the Y people wear this
sort necklace and eat raw sheep intestines!” One professor had
recently published a book precisely along these lines. Now I
should say that I often find the instinctive academic
“complication” of various subjects to be somewhat pointless, but
even I found many of our lectures to be rather pedestrian. We
reckoned it was a legacy of Communism: if you stick to
party-approved facts, you cannot go wrong, but the minute you
try to analyze anything, you run the risk of saying something
that the party might not approve of, and land in some pretty
serious trouble. It is true that China is not really Communist
anymore, but old habits die hard (especially among older faculty
outside of Beijing and Shanghai); the country remains
authoritarian in any event, and people are generally reluctant
to contradict the party line, especially among strangers.
For instance, the identity of our trip “leader” was very
important to our host institution – all arrangements had to be
made between the hosts and him. A number of Chinese students had
sat in on one of our lectures, and three of us stayed around
afterwards chatting with them. It was getting to lunchtime, and
we figured that we would ask them to join us for lunch, as you
would not think twice about doing in the U.S. This provoked
nervous laughter and the response: “Thank you anyway!” Now it
could be that they had better things to do, but we got the
strong impression that we were violating the order of things by
not going through the proper channels for the arrangement of
lunch. Twice also I witnessed “roll call” in front of a hotel,
when all the staff had to come out onto the front steps in their
uniforms and line up in proper order for inspection and
recitation of something inspiring. And most universities were
introduced by their national ranking, especially if it was a
high one.
One might also add that “Hanification” is even older than
modernization, that it is in fact the history of China. “Who are
the Han, except people who have lost their identity?” said our
Beijing lecturer – that is, from a very small area, Han culture
has spread over the centuries to encompass a great variety of
people over a vast landmass who to this day look different from
each other and speak a variety of different languages
(Cantonese, Fujianese, etc.). So on one level the loss of
minority cultures has an aura of inevitability to it.