Not quite Han: The ethnic minorities of China's Southwest

Abstract

In centuries to come, when historians look back at the history of southwest China, they will see the last half of the twentieth century not so much as the time of “socialist construction,” but rather as the age in which the various peoples of that vast region increasingly adapted to Han Chinese lifestyles. For this is the real—the lasting—story of the past five decades in this part of China. The tidal surges of collectivization and Maoist political campaigns in the region will be perceived largely as events that quickened the process of cultural assimilation. With astonishing rapidity, peoples in the southwest who had once been quite different from China's majority Han population have largely abandoned their ways of life and beliefs, even their sexual mores and family structures, and increasingly taken on the ways of the local Han. Yet at the very same time, ironically, Chinese government policy dissuades most of them from completely abandoning their ethnic status.

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Notes on contributors

Jonathan Unger

Thanks are due to David Bradley, Uradyn Erden Bulag, Anita Chan, Sarah Dunlop, Stevan Harrell, Raphael Israeli, Peter Van Neww, and the editor and anonymous referees of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars for comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper.