‘All ethnic groups matter’: new Chinese textbook cites splits in the West to justify Beijing’s integration policies
- Authors write that China’s past policies ‘entrenched ethnic differences, fostered a narrow sense of ethnicity and … ethnic minority exceptionalism’
- Analysts expect affirmative action for ethnic minority groups will be further rolled back as Beijing backs down from emphasising their distinctive qualities
A new textbook to be taught at Chinese universities cites political division in the West to justify Beijing’s ethnic integration policies, whose focus has shifted from 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.
They also say 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 argues that after the 1970s, 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”.
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It cited “political divides” and “social cleavages” in the United States as examples, and referred to the attack on the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. The textbook said in the US lower-middle class white people “blame people of colour and ethnic minorities” for the wealth gap brought by economic globalisation.
It also listed the “national identity dilemma” faced by different regions – including Europe, Africa, the US and India – and concluded 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 wrote.
The book was jointly written by around a dozen Chinese scholars known for advocating ethnic integration.
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Beijing’s ethnic integration policies accelerated after 2014 when Xi spoke of “a sense of community for the Chinese nation”. At a conference in 2021, he said that building this sense of community should be at the heart of all ethnic minority policies, and he urged local authorities to take more proactive measures.
These included promoting the use of “standard spoken and written Chinese” – meaning Mandarin.
The textbook also details how the present ethnic policies differ from those practised in China before Xi’s presidency.
The changes include 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 book said previous policies were 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.
It also offered critiques of China’s ethnic policies in the past which were modelled on those from the former Soviet Union.
Some outdated measures, it said, “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 would lead to a path dependency of “seeking special policies with special status”, referring to the affirmative policies towards ethnic minority groups.
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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”.
Lai Hongyi, associate professor of social sciences at the University of Nottingham, said the book seemed “to present a new and broad perspective of China’s ethnic issues, from the evolution of the Chinese nation throughout history to the present”.
Lai said it suggested affirmative action cultural privileges granted to ethnic minorities would be “dramatically rolled back”.
The book did not name any ethnic groups in China but it is common to see China’s ethnic minority groups, especially on the periphery, share historical and cultural proximity with groups beyond the Chinese border, including Uygurs, Tibetans and Mongols.
In the text, the authors say pan-nationalism, ethnic separatism and religious extremism from foreign countries were still affecting China.
Ma Haiyun, an associate professor of history at Frostburg State University in Maryland, said these statements showed that “former-Soviet inspired communist policies on nationalities and ethnicities had been abandoned”.
He added that the present policy goal “geared towards not only a political unity but also a cultural assimilation”. However, if the concept “is narrowly defined as Han, then such policy practice will create more tension than harmony”.
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James Leibold, a specialist in China’s ethnic politics and a professor at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, said the book was “the most frank assessment of the need for a policy U-turn” since 2012 that he had read.
The authors maintain that since ancient times, all ethnic groups had embraced the concept of zhonghua – meaning Chinese culture or civilisation.
The book tries to redefine the concept of minzu in Chinese, saying it encompasses the triple meaning of race, ethnic group and nation in English, and argues that China’s ethnic policies are superior to those of Western countries.
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Aaron Glasserman, who researches China’s ethnic policies at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies at Harvard University, said intellectuals from ethnic minority groups were once encouraged to “study and develop their peoples’ distinctive cultures, traditions, history”.
But he said: “On this intellectual front, the old system has already been abandoned, and this new textbook is a nail in the coffin.”
An academic who teaches anthropology at a university in eastern China, and who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the issue, 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.
One example is the book’s description of the decades of fighting between five nomadic groups and the Han regimes at the beginning of the fourth century as a mingling of nationalities, but not wars that impeded the development of the country, as they were previously described.
It is a point Pan Yue, from the National Ethnic Affairs Commission and chief editor of the textbook, had made in 2021.
