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‘Unity within Diversity’: The Chinese Communist Party’s Construction of the Chinese Nation

Vanessa Frangville

When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took power in 1949, it inherited the territorial boundaries of the Qing dynasty and Republican China (excluding the northern part of Mongolia, which became an independent state after the 1910s). The inclusion of these territories and their populations into the newly established People’s Republic of China (PRC) was not to be questioned, but how to integrate them was a core issue for the CCP. Indeed, beyond extending its administration and control over remote but crucial border areas, and to earn the loyalty of non-Han populations that largely inhabited them, the CCP had to define the Chinese nation in inclusive terms that could coincide with its political objectives and show a sharp difference from the Nationalist’s assimilationist policies.

The objective of this chapter is to examine some key concepts and issues that shaped the CCP’s vision and construction of the Chinese nation over the past century, starting from the late Qing when new narratives of the modern nation-state developed in China, with an emphasis on both the Republican era and the PRC. While I am aware that the implementation or content of ethnic policies may vary from one area to another to adjust to different geopolitical or economic situations (see Castets, Chapter 14, this volume, on the Uygur region; Bulag 2002 on Inner Mongolia), the main purpose of this chapter is to provide a broad picture of the CCP’s discourse on China’s ethnic diversity over the past century. By taking the concept of minzu (and its derivative) as a case in point, I identify trends and shifts in this nation-building process and try to link intellectual debates to policymaking. Through discourse analysis, I show that, up to now, different and sometimes antithetical perceptions of China’s national identity coexist within the CCP, creating tensions and a longstanding oscillation between integration and assimilation. Considering recent developments in Tibet, Xinjiang and Mongolia (from the prohibition of local languages in schools to massive arrests and interments), this chapter argues that even though the CCP’s policy after 1949 tried to use socialist affirmative strategy towards its minorities under the Soviet influence, the legacy of China’s imperial occupation of non-Han border regions has remained its main drive. Such colonialist endeavours have resurfaced more overtly in the twenty-first century as securitisation has become a priority for Xi’s government and have accelerated assimilationist trends by emphasising a Han-centred definition of the Chinese nation.

In this process of imagining and articulating a Chinese nation in the socialist era, the intellectual elite played an important role, from the late Qing and the Republican era to today’s PRC. One key concept they have paid special attention to is minzu (民族), which refers to at least three different ideas: minzu as a national or ethnic group; minzu as a nation, here the Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu 中华民族); and minzu as an informal shortcut for shaoshu minzu 少数民族 (minority ethnic groups), excluding the Han majority. The ambiguous meaning and inconsistent usages of minzu have been the objects of negotiations since the early stages of the formation of the PRC, and were at the heart of fiery debates in recent years, when the CCP policies in border areas were questioned following repeated uprisings in Tibet and Xinjiang in the late 2000s. Considering the symbiotic connection between academics and the government elites in this matter (Leibold 2013; Zhao and Tok 2021), looking into these discussions is essential to understand recent shifts in the CCP’s delineation of the Chinese nation and their impact on policies towards non-Han populations. Indeed, as knowledge producers or ‘actors of China’s knowledge regime’ (Zhao and Tok 2021, 167), public intellectuals and academics have been an important driving force for domestic change throughout China’s modern history (Guo 2013b). In recent years, scholars have been increasingly called on to capitalise on their expertise to advise policymakers at local and national levels (Guo 2013a). Further, as institutional (or personal) connections between academics and policymakers are strong, it is not uncommon for an academic to be both a policy adviser and a decision-maker (Zhao and Tok 2021). This is particularly true for topics related to China’s national identity and ethnic diversity management, for which academics are particularly active in the provision of recommendations to state actors (Zhao and Tok 2021). Thus, this chapter primarily looks at public academic debates to understand the extent to which they have influenced the CCP’s approach to the Chinese nation and related policy in the last decade.

The first part of this chapter gives a brief overview of the emergence of minzu, defined here as a performative utterance that played a major role in the construction of a Chinese nation under the late-imperial and Republican periods. Ideas developed around minzu in the early twentieth century are indeed crucial to comprehending how the CCP positioned itself in its formative years. Although the Leninist model of the ‘national question’ is officially a main inspiration, the young CCP chiefly conceived its policies towards non-Han along imperial views of frontier management. Conversely, notions from the pre-1949 period have been recycled in present-day discourses and policies, as Xi Jinping’s formulation of the Chinese nation, supported by academics-turned-policy-advisers calling for reforms in ethnic policies, borrows heavily from the imperial and Republican models more than from Marxist–Leninist concepts.

The second part looks at how the CCP at first attempted to step aside from previous assimilationist views and policies, and establish a more inclusive, though tightly framed, definition of the PRC as a unitary multinational state (tongyi duo minzu de guojia 统一多民族国家). Indeed, CCP leaders before 1949 were acutely aware of the dialectical relationship between the nation as a whole and its fragmented composition into several national groups, or what became the ‘national question’ (minzu wenti 民族问题, which can express both concerns for the nation and potential issues posed by non-Han integration). However, after 1949, the CCP was caught between the call for recognising and supporting diversity among its vast population and the imperative to maintain its territorial integrity, which resulted in a persistent gap between principles or regulations and practices, especially after the 1980s, when most measures discussed in the 1950s and 1960s were more systematically implemented.

The last part takes a close look at the gradual tightening around ethnic issues and the reshaping of the idea of the Chinese nation throughout the reform era, reaching an unprecedented point in the CCP’s history when Xi emphasised the need to build a sense of ‘community of the Chinese nation’ and introduced, for the first time, the idea of a ‘Chinese nation’ in the constitution in 2018. This assimilationist turn finds its roots in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen protest and the collapse of the USSR in 1991, when national stability and territorial integrity became a priority in the CCP’s agenda. At the same time, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, tensions dramatically increased in peripheral regions, where discrimination and social–economic marginalisation of non-Han had worsened. Consequently, the accommodationist approach that prevailed in the first few decades of the PRC was gradually questioned by scholars calling for a radical change. In influencing policymakers, these scholars competed with those in favour of a status quo in ethnic policies. Minzu thus became the subject of heated discussions about its implications and (mis)usage, leading to an ideological and political divide around the means of integrating non-Han groups into the Chinese nation – and, by essence, around the very definition of the Chinese nation.

The Formation of a Multinational/Multiracial China: From Federalism to Autonomy

Introduced by the Chinese elite in the 1890s, the concept of minzu has been constructed in the past century by borrowing Western, Japanese and Soviet ideas of nation. The term was imported from the Japanese minzoku (民族), a transfer generally attributed to thinker and essayist Liang Qichao (梁启超, 1873–1929), exiled in Tokyo after the failure of the Hundred Days’ reform (1898). Minzoku was itself a translation from German to refer to the notions of Volk or nation in the civic sense, and nation in the ethnic sense (Burtscher 2012).¹ Within the Japanese context, minzoku supported both an ethno-racial division in response to the growing influence of Western powers in the East Asian region (Burtscher 2012), and the necessity of unifying the Japanese people under a racial imaginary during the period of territorial expansion in East Asia (Saito and Tsuboi 2015). This ethno-racial vision also dominated the importation of the minzoku/minzu concept to China, as Liang Qichao insisted on the historical connotation of minzu, in contrast to the political construction implied in other concepts that emerged in the same period, such as kokumin/guomin 國民 (civic nation, citizen).²

However, in contrast to Japan, which defined itself as mono-racial (under the ‘Yamato race’, Yamato minzoku 山本民族), the reality in China was one of an empire that integrated culturally diverse populations through conquests and annexations during the different periods of its history. Despite being perceived by imperial history as a civilising and superior people, the Han category was not forged on the idea of racial purity but remained flexible, without fixed borders, including the populations that submitted themselves to the rites and institutions of the emperor (Elliott 2012; Joniak-Luthi 2015). It was only at the end of the Qing dynasty that Han became a fixed and unified category (Joniak-Luthi 2015), and that a discourse synonymising Han with the legitimate inheritors of Chinese territories (Villard 2010), in opposition to the Manchus who then ruled the empire, emerged.

In this context, two opposing conceptions of the Chinese nation developed at the end of the Qing. On the one hand, part of the elite, such as the revolutionary philologist Zhang Bingling (张炳灵, 1869–1936), determined the Chinese nation in both geographical and cultural terms by introducing the terms Zhonghua minzu (literally, the nation of the central Hua region) and Zhonghuaren 中华人. Under this conception, only the ‘Han race’ (hanzu 汉族) were legitimate descendants of the Yellow Emperor to which power would legitimately return (Chow 1997). This narrow definition opened the possibility of abandoning the non-Han occupied territories, such as Tibet, Mongolia and Xinjiang, to establish a republic centred solely on historically Han territories (Leibold 2004).

On the other hand, reformists such as Liang Qichao, careful of preserving the entirety of the Chinese territories conquered by the Qing (of which the Han represented a limited portion), proposed a wider definition of the Chinese nation as an entity resulting from a merger or amalgamation (ronghe 融合) of different peoples, following the American ‘melting pot’ model (Leibold 2004, 176). The Manchus, and similarly the Hui (including the Turkic-speaking Muslim populations of the western regions)³ as well as the Mongols and the Tibetans, were also pictured as descendants of the Yellow Emperor (Liang 1989) and could be part of the Chinese nation if only they assimilated into the Han.

By the time the Qing dynasty fell, the latter vision had been espoused. In 1912, the last emperor’s abdication decree stipulated that it handed over to the new Republic of China ‘the complete territorial integrity of the lands of the five races – Manchu, Han, Mongol, Hui and Tibetans – which shall combine to form a great Republic of China’ (Gao 2016, 248).⁴ A ‘Republic of Five Races’ (wuzu gonghe 五族共和) was thus established, assuring the integrity of the inherited national territory. The Han still remained the ‘spine’ (gugan 骨干) around which the other minzu would integrate themselves through a process of assimilation or tonghua 同化 (Leibold 2007, 32). Revolution leader and first president Sun Yat-sen (孙中山, 1866–1925) indeed favoured a discourse of integration of non-Han peoples, also called ‘peoples of the borders’ (bianjiang minzu 边疆民族), within the Han nation as being in their own interest; the adoption of the customs and institutions of the Han would allow their survival in a transforming world. At the centre of the question of survival was also the notion of blood (xue 血); the future of the non-Han depended on their capacity to biologically mix with the Han, thus stepping from a culturalist vision into a racialised representation of the Chinese nation.

Thus was set in motion an organic rhetoric concerning the relations between the Han and non-Han, presented in the speech Sun gave during the creation of the republic in 1912, which constituted the Chinese nation as ‘one family’ (yijia 一家), or ‘one body’ (yiti 一体) (Leibold 2004, 182; Sun 1982). Similarly, the ground was set for a nation imagined on two levels: the supra-nation or zhonghua minzu; and the infra-nation (or nations, minzu), also comprising the Han, which took the form of a group conceived as historically homogenous and unified. This conception of a Chinese nation likewise reveals an essential dichotomy in the formation and evolution of the discourse of national construction in China: the systematic opposition of Han versus an indistinct mass of numerous non-Han people. This distinction was embedded in the use of shaoshu minzu (literally, minority nation), a term that emerged in 1923 through the Comintern when Sun Yat-sen invited the CCP to form a united front; it was also put forward in Sun’s speech at the opening of the first meeting of the Nationalist Party (Guomindang 国民党 or GMD) in 1924 (Liu 2001; Jin 1987). From then on, the term shaoshu minzu appeared regularly in speeches from both the GMD as well as the CCP.

The relation to territoriality was also primordial in juxtaposing state and national space. The loss of Mongolia in 1911,⁵ as well as the threat that Japan presented to Manchuria and Russia in the north-west, confirmed the urgency of rethinking the Chinese nation in less exclusivist terms. Sun thus formed the connection between state and nation: ‘One sole nation had founded one sole country’ (yige minzu zaocheng yige guojia 一个民族造成一个国家). Although Sun and GMD leader Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi 蒋介石, 1887–1975) did not necessarily share the same vision of the Chinese nation – China being multinational for Sun (who even supported self-determination in the 1920s) while Chiang conceived China as made up of only one nation – both advocated assimilationist policies (Grunfeld 1985; Zheng 2019).

The young CCP, on the other hand, in its 1922 Second National Congress, suggested a Chinese Federated Republic (Zhonghua lianbang gongheguo 中華聯邦共和國) including China proper, Mongolia, Tibet and Xinjiang (Brandt, Schwartz and Fairbank 1966), borrowing from Sun’s idea of a multinational China. In its 1931 Soviet Constitution of Jiangxi,⁶ article 14, the CCP even explicitly supported the idea of self-determination of its peoples and opened the possibility for the future independence of non-Han populations that did not historically identify with China (Villard 2010, 316–17; Zhu and Yu 2000, 48).⁷ The unconditional adhesion of all non-Han groups to a Chinese multinational state was, however, taken for granted, and support for self-determination was rather rhetorical to be in line with Moscow (Leung 1981). Mixed experiences with non-Han populations along the Long March (1934–35) led CCP leaders to rethink their position, as they realised that non-Han were not natural allies and that Red Army bases in non-Han regions could face strong resistance from the local elite (Liu 2004, 79–81). The Yan’an period marked a definitive shift from Marxist–Leninist dogma on the national question. Subsequently, the inclusion of the non-Han people into a unified Chinese nation was stressed again, building more tightly on Han-centrism.

After the Long March ended, no further mention of independence was made in the CCP’s official statements. The ‘national question’ was no longer framed in terms of a struggle for independence from the state, but in terms of class struggle under the soon-to-be Communist republic. Quyu or ‘autonomous regional zones’ (minzu quyu zizhi 民族区域自治) replaced the idea of ‘national autonomy’ (minzu zizhi 民族自治) for the regions primarily inhabited by non-Han groups. The primary connotation of the local in quyu thus placed the regions under a central authority while also putting in place a system of relative autonomy (Bulag 2020a). The autonomous region system, based on the entanglement between national diversity and territories, was obviously the legacy of both empire and Soviet principles.

Multiple Yet One: The CCP’s Dialectical Process of Nation-Building

As the CCP began to implement new laws and rewrite its constitution after 1949, debates on the nature of the Chinese nation took place again. The CCP confirmed its vision of a Chinese nation composed of several groups in its 1954 constitution, of which article 3 stated that the PRC was a ‘unitary multinational state’ (tongyi de duo minzu guojia 统一的多民族的国家).⁸ Nevertheless, not all agreed on the term minzu. Inspired by Soviet terminology, minzu was then used to refer to nation or natsia (Нация or the most advanced state of society) and determined according to Stalinist criteria such as a community formed around a shared language, economy or territory as well as a sentiment of belonging to a common culture. For some, including historian and philologist Fan Wenlan (范文澜, 1893–1969), the Han had formed a nation/minzu corresponding to the four Stalinist criteria, without interruption, since the unification of China under the Qin (221 BC) (Fan 1954). Fan’s vision was contradicted by intellectuals who reiterated that, according to Stalin, the nation was a product of capitalism, and it was therefore impossible to apply the term minzu to China before the Opium Wars in the mid-nineteenth century (Yang 2009; Liang 2016). On the other hand, ‘nationality’ (narodnost, Народность) was translated as buzu 部族 (from buluo 部落, tribe, not as advanced as minzu). Whether to qualify non-Han as a nation or as a nationality was debated. Eventually, buzu was rejected as too derogatory and in contradiction with the idea that all ethnic distinctions were to disappear with the enactment of socialism and the end of classes (Zhang 1997). Thus, the term minzu was finally adopted by the CCP for all the groups, Han and non-Han alike (Jin 1987; Thoraval 1990).

At the same time, Han chauvinism (dahanzu zhuyi 大汉族主义), a term coined by Mao,⁹ was a constant concern up to the early years of the PRC, as a ‘principal threat in … relationships among nationalities’ (Nationalities Affairs Commission 1953; translation from Leung 1981), akin to ‘bourgeois ideas’ (Mao 1977). The 1954 constitution’s preamble hence prohibited ‘great nation chauvinism’ (daminzu zhuyi 大民族主义) as well as ‘local nationalisms’ (difang minzu zhuyi 地方民族主义).

This does not mean than the Han versus non-Han divide disappeared. It was even reinforced by the vast state-launched campaigns of ‘minzu identification’ (minzu shibie 民族识别), which led to the official recognition of 55 non-Han minority groups (shaoshu minzu) in the 1960s–70s. Officially based on Stalin’s four criteria mentioned above, in practice, for most cases, minzu identities were assigned by the authorities, who gathered several different groups under state-constructed categories (Mullaney 2011; Yang 2009; Zhang 1997). Further, the identification project on the ground was rooted in colonialist modes of classification and transformation (Mullaney 2011, 99). Mullaney convincingly describes how, for instance, ethnologists and other social scientists sent by Beijing to Yunnan in the 1950s relied not so much on Soviet models but on the materials of Henry Rodolph Davis, a British army officer whose depiction of Yunnan peoples had become highly influential among scholars in the Republican era, thus valorising the British colonial episteme (Mullaney 2011, 54; Davies [1909] 2010). Such strategies allowed for a rapid, pragmatic and manageable taxonomy. The minzu category thus became fixed and exclusive. Up to today, this very recently constructed narrative of ethnic composition of China prevails, anchored within an ahistorical discourse of a millennia-old Chinese nation (Frangville 2007, 5; Pan 2016). In fact, the PRC’s official discourse on a Chinese nation composed of 56 minzu including 55 minorities dates back to 1979, when the Jinuo were declared the fifty-fifth minority.

Within this process, the term minzu entered everyday official vocabulary, translated into English as ‘nationality’. Even if all the groups that comprised China, both Han and non-Han, were described by the term minzu regardless of their social organisation or the state of their historical evolution, minzu slowly became associated with the non-Han. In the administrative language, all minzu-related affairs were, first and foremost, related to non-Han minzu and their relation to the majority or the state. For example, institutes of research and training were established for non-Han Party members (minzu xueyuan 民族学院). Other measures included the commencement of studies on the non-Han (minzuxue 民族学), reviews featuring the loyalty of the non-Han to state measures that were meant to instil ‘national unity’ (minzu tuanjie 民族团结) and policies reserved for the non-Han (minzu zhengce 民族政策). The semantic shift of minzu to shaoshu minzu had taken place while the usage of minzu to describe the totality of the nation weakened in favour of renmin or ‘people’ (人民) – the 1954 constitution, for instance, never mentioned Zhonghua minzu (Chinese nation) but stressed Zhonghua renmin (Chinese people). This is also true in the revised constitution of 1982, in which the concept of Zhonghua minzu does not appear at all and class prevailed over ethnicity.

In the decade following Mao’s death, several university disciplines that had been labelled ‘bourgeois’ since 1950, such as ethnology, were re-established. A new generation of ethnologists and sociologists emerged who attempted to question the minzu classification carried out during the three decades prior, notably by pointing out the lack of coherence in its criteria (Mullaney 2011). Consequently, new campaigns were launched by the CCP in the 1980s to help people ‘recover’ (huifu 恢复) or ‘change’ (gaibian 改变) their minority identity, but no new minorities were identified. All self-reported new groups had to fit either into the Han category or into one of the 55 non-Han groups (Wang 2019, 145). The official division between 56 minzu, of which 55 were ‘minorities’, was subsequently considered a classified affair, and this layout was eventually written in stone in 1987 as the state declared that the identification project was closed, and no other groups could claim to be a distinct minzu (Mullaney 2011; Yang 2009). The CCP’s official (dichotomic) vision of the Chinese nation was, and remains, one of one Han majority and 55 minorities.

New contradictions also developed throughout the 1980s. On the one hand, there was a gust of liberalisation and a ‘craze for culture’ (wenhua re 文化热), whereby the accumulated interest for rethinking Chinese identity in cultural terms saw the light of day. The CCP re-established religious sites and created a positive discrimination policy favouring non-Han in terms of public employment, education, fertility and taxes. On the other hand, the overlap between Han culture and Chinese culture was strengthened in intellectual and popular discourses and permeated the CCP’s policy towards non-Han. By the same token as minzu denoted non-Han only, Han-ness became, by default, a synonym for Chinese-ness. In fact, ‘the PRC ideology also play[ed] a role in promoting Han chauvinism’: non-Han were still considered ‘backward’ and their ways of life ‘outmoded and unhealthy’ (Sautman 1999, 291–2). The constant ‘othering’ of non-Han combined with discourses of Han superiority has been described as ‘internal orientalism’ (Schein 1997) or the result of an ‘internal colonialism’ (Gladney 1998) that arose from the Maoist area and developed after the 1980s. The Han continue to be seen as a normative, devoted and invisible majority, while the non-Han are constantly infantilised, instructed to be politically loyal and remain underrepresented in the highest political institutions (Li 2008). Even though the legislation established by the CCP provided, and still provides, instruments for recognising and condemning acts of discrimination against non-Han, very little effort has been made to implement them. As documented in scholarly literature, discrimination (and racism) against non-Han in employment (Mobius, Rosenblat and Wang 2016), earnings (MacDonald and Hasmath 2020; Zang 2011), criminal sentencing (Hou and Truex 2020) and everyday encounters (Chen 2019; Grose 2015) is not only ignored but denied in public speeches. As Deng Xiaoping (邓小平) (1904–1997) repeated on several occasions, ‘there is no ethnic discrimination in the PRC’ (Deng 1993; see also Sautman 1997, 80).¹⁰

Nevertheless, from the 1990s on, the CCP started to explicitly define the Chinese nation along the concept of race, reminiscent of the early twentieth century. The attachment to the state was increasingly formulated in terms of blood ties and other biological metaphors. Common ancestry of the Han and non-Han was stressed in official media, and several studies tried to demonstrate genetic similarities between, for instance, Tibetans and Han (Sautman 1997, 86; Meissner 2006), thus stressing national uniqueness and unity and representing Han as the main trunk of the ‘yellow race’ branched off to include the non-Han (Dikötter 2010, 9). Sustaining a ‘scientific’ framework, CCP leaders in the reform area constantly referred to the metaphor developed by renowned anthropologist Fei Xiaotong (费孝通) (1910–2005), who explained the subjugation of non-Han identities to an overarching Chinese national identity with the term duoyuan yiti geju (多元一体格局) or ‘pluralistic and organic unity structure’ (Fei 1989). Fei’s attempt to balance ethnic diversity and national unity thus became a political framework for the CCP, especially after the fall of the Soviet bloc and the dismantlement of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. His terminology was adopted by successive political leaders from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping (Zang 2015, 219).

However, tensions grew in non-Han areas as the result of the deployment of hundreds of thousands of People’s Liberation Army officers and Han migrant workers sent by the state from the interior, the arrest of local leaders and religious figures, as well as increasingly race-based nationalism, with the Han at its core, supported by Beijing. While officially Han-centred nationalism was promoted by the state, non-Han nationalisms were suppressed, sometimes with much violence. This led to the fragmentation of Chinese identity (Gladney 2004) and the emergence of movements in non-Han regions to protest against CCP policies. While non-Han loyalties were expected to be overridden by the CCP’s ideological enlightenment, ethno-nationalism rose in regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang. ‘Splittism’ and ‘terrorism’ were commonly used by the Chinese authorities to condemn such protests, leading to the implementation of martial law in Tibet in 1989 and 1990 and the ‘strike-hard’ campaign in Xinjiang from 1996. Increasingly, the CCP became torn between two main trends at the dawn of the twenty-first century to define the Chinese nation: assimilation and integration.

Turning towards Assimilationism: Forging a ‘Collective National Consciousness’

In general, the necessity to stress unity over diversity became a priority from the 2000s onwards. A more ‘ethnic’ and ‘depoliticised’ approach to the national question was discussed by academics. Terminology was once again a hot topic. One main concern was that minzu as ‘nationality’ (in the Soviet sense) could create confusion and invite different non-Han groups to perceive themselves as entirely different and distinct nations, owing to their distinct social organisations and their own historical pasts, which predated the construction of a Chinese nation (Bulag 2010). This move towards a less political and more cultural categorisation was pursued through a re-translation of the term minzu according to various cases. In the mid-1990s, the English title of the official journal Minzu tuanjie (民族团结) became Ethnic Unity (in place of National Unity), and, during the 2000s, many state commissions were renamed with the word ‘ethnic’, such as the Commission on Ethnic Affairs (guojia minzu shiwu weiyuanhui 国家民族事务委员会), previously known as the ‘State Commission on Nationalities’ Affairs’. However, other intellectuals resisted this ‘ethnicisation’. The anthropologist Pan Jiao (潘蛟), for example, argued for the retention of the translation as ‘nationality’ instead of ‘ethnic group’ to maintain the political position that minzu enjoyed in its formation and development, as well as to prevent the erasure of the achievements of minority groups that were connected to their ‘nationality’ status, such as regional autonomy (Pan 2003). Some preferred to avoid translating minzu in order to preserve the specificities tied to the concept; thus, in the 2000s, the Central University of Nationalities (zhongyang minzu daxue 中央民族大学) became the Minzu University of China (thus rendering its objective obscure to all non-Sinophones). This university was effectively revealed to be the home of an indigenisation of the concept, notably under the aegis of Zhang Haiyang (张海洋) and Hao Siyuan (郝时远) (Hao 2013).

A third option consisted of a complete revision of the notion of minzu and its replacement, in some cases, by zuqun (族群 literally zu, ‘lineage’ and qun, ‘group’). Zuqun is also a term commonly used in Taiwan to conceptualise the island’s diversity within the context of the democratisation of the 1990s (Schubert 1999). The term describes the ‘sub-ethnicities’ in the interior of the same nation. In the Chinese context of the 2000s, researchers who defended the double usage of minzu (that is as nation/nationality or ethnicity) agreed to use zuqun in place of minzu, relegating minzu to the ethnic sense of the term (thus specifically replacing shaoshu minzu). They also proposed to retain minzu solely to describe the Chinese nation in its entirety (Zhonghua minzu) (Leibold 2013; Elliott 2015). This proposal overlapped with the new debates as well as the search for an innovative conceptualisation of the Chinese nation of the twenty-first century. It is notably the result of the efforts of Ma Rong (马戎), a sociologist from Peking University, to rethink policies that, according to him, have led to divisions and conflicts in terms of Han–non-Han relations, as well as relations between the non-Han and the state, a dangerous situation for Chinese unity. This perception became more relevant after the revolts in the Tibetan and Uyghur regions during the period surrounding the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008. The turmoil in these regions, revealed to the world as it has been to the rest of China, aroused strong concern among certain leaders and university figures who, like Ma, warned of a dismantling of the Chinese state akin to the Soviet example (Ma 2007). Consequently, Ma (2014) proposed a ‘depoliticisation’ (quzhengzhihua 去政治化) of the domestic question of minority groups; specifically, he advocated for the abolition of the privileges associated with the minzu minority status and the levelling of relations through an American-style ‘acculturation’ or wenhua hua 文化化 (Ma 2017). The ‘melting pot’ model of a society harmoniously merging a variety of elements into one common culture, proposed by Liang Qichao a century prior, once again took centre stage among theoreticians who aimed to reform the conception of the Chinese nation after the year 2000.

Such proposals for a new terminology found resonance among policymakers, and it opened the path for more radical viewpoints that have significantly impacted CCP policy since 2010. Indeed, the necessity of accelerating this merging through a series of political measures was also supported by researchers at Tsinghua University, namely Hu Angang (胡鞍钢) and Hu Lianhe (胡联合). Typically, Hu Angang is a member of several CCP committees and activities at his Institute for Contemporary China Studies, one of China’s main thinktanks involved in writing policy recommendations and reports commissioned by various governmental organs. Hu Lianhe, on the other hand, well known for his research on social stability, recently took on important roles under the CCP’s United Front Work Department in charge of, among other things, managing ethnic and religious affairs and represented the Chinese state at the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (Leibold 2018). Like Ma, the two Hus debated the terminology, advocating for the replacement of minzu with zuqun in terms of ethnic identification. But, more importantly, they also stressed a series of concrete political measures to favour the ‘merging’ (jiarong 交融) of the different communities under one monocultural state or guozu (国族 literally ‘country’ and ‘lineage’) (Hu and Hu 2011).¹¹ These measures included monolingual education in Mandarin, the abandonment of all privilege or special treatment for the non-Han (including the system of regional autonomy), as well as the promotion of interethnic marriages and celebrations labelled ‘Chinese’, and the radical reconfiguration of local practices that could be perceived as being in competition with national practices.

The most concrete examples of the application of these measures by the CCP happened from 2017 in the peripheric regions of Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia, where the use of Mandarin in schools has been strictly enforced and the teaching of local languages largely marginalised. Outside schools, activities promoting Tibetan language in the Tibetan autonomous region were labelled ‘illegal’ in 2018 in a police statement (Roche 2021). In Inner Mongolia, from 2022, Mandarin will be the only language of instruction and Mongolian only a topic of instruction for a very limited time in school programs, a shift that triggered several protests when it was officially announced in 2020 (Atwood 2020; Bulag 2020b). In Xinjiang, since 2017 and the launch of massive internment campaigns, most schools at all levels have become residential, forcing children and university students to live in a Mandarin-speaking environment and separating them from Uyghur-speaking households.¹² Further, many textbooks in Tibetan or Uyghur have disappeared from library bookshelves and their authors have been condemned (Clarke 2021; Henry 2016), while new textbooks have been increasingly subjected to ‘harmonisation’; often translated from Chinese, they intentionally omit cultural specificities or references to local history and characters (Mahmut and Smith Finley 2021).

In addition, Uyghur and Tibetan cultural heritage are increasingly reshaped and metamorphosed by local authorities to suit Chinese Han domestic taste, from transforming Uyghur domestic spaces to ‘modernise’ them (Grose 2020) to desacralising mosques or simply erasing major cultural spaces such as mazars (mausoleum) and cemeteries (Ruser et al. 2020; Thum 2020). Such radical changes have taken place alongside the implementation of mandatory celebrations of the Chinese Spring Festival – a holiday that brings many domestic tourists from inland China who are invited to enjoy ‘Xinjiang tasty Spring Festival fried snacks’¹³ – the Dragon Boat Festival (Grose 2021) and other events that are disconnected from Uyghur cultural practices and are artificially implemented in Xinjiang as part of a ‘national culture’ or a ‘Chinafication’ program (Castets, Chapter 14, this volume).

In the same region, bonus points in university entrance exams for Uyghur-language-educated prospective students have decreased, while children of Han and Uyghur mixed couples are given extra bonus points,¹⁴ another measure to encourage mixed marriages (an idea that was already developed in the Republican era and linked to the idea of biological survival, as mentioned above). The promotion of interethnic marriages is indeed an important argument of the Hus and has been implemented in Tibet and Xinjiang, in particular, where local administrations offer various compensations to young mixed couples, from monthly allocations to housing and easier access to social services. Such incentives have been common in these regions since 2014.¹⁵ The interethnic marriage trend has accelerated in Xinjiang since 2017, often at the expense of Uyghur women, who are increasingly coerced into marriages with Han migrants.¹⁶

In the meantime, special programs have been implemented to ‘train’ Tibetan and Uyghur rural labourers to engage in construction and manufacturing work across China. In 2020, no less than 543,000 Tibetans were trained as factory workers to be relocated, in part, to inland China.¹⁷ Following the deployment of non-Han female factory workers to inland China in the 2010s, forced labour in Xinjiang has now been widely documented and includes specific schemes to send Uyghur workers to inland factories.¹⁸

These measures, which are implemented in their most extreme forms in the Uyghur region, demonstrate Xi Jinping’s determination to strengthen the CCP’s leadership over non-Han-related policy: under Xi, the CCP must play an active role in ‘forging’ (zhulao 铸牢) a unified Chinese nation.¹⁹ Xi reaffirmed the CCP’s current vision of a Chinese nation in which the national spirit ‘integrated each minzu group in their blood and soul’ (ronjin le ge minzu renmin de xueye he lingyun 融进了各族人民的血液和灵魂), or what he calls a ‘communal consciousness of the Chinese nation’ (Zhonghua minzu gongtongti yishi 中华民族共同体意识).²⁰ He also introduced, for the first time in the PRC’s history, Zhonghua minzu into the preamble of the amended 2018 constitution.

Conclusion

Contradictory trends that already existed among policymakers in the 1960s are still manifest today, but those who oppose autonomy for non-Han seem to have won over those in favour of ‘real’ autonomy for non-Han. Consequently, although no official mention of further modifications in the CCP’s ethnic policies has arisen in the past few years at a national level, the situation on the ground has changed dramatically through the systematic implementation of new laws and regulations at a local level. The concretisation of a unified Chinese nation linked to indivisible territories is more than ever a priority for the CCP. The debates on the formation of a Chinese nation, and the methods to unify it according to foreign or indigenous models of integration and assimilation, have been pursued around the representation of a supra-nation (minzu, guozu) composed of sub-nations (minzu, zuqun). This ideology implies a necessary adhesion to a model of a supra-nation that was mainly defined in reference to the Han, a fragmented category but one considered unique and superior nonetheless. Yet, this model is not unanimous, and has triggered not only numerous conflicts in all the peripheral regions but also inspired within the Han a colonial irrationality that continues to produce inequalities, discrimination and stereotypes. The policies enacted these past years, whose climaxing form we currently see in the Uyghur region, does not inspire new and exciting political debates.

In this context, minzu still plays a major role in the CCP’s rhetoric to produce a discourse on ‘unity within diversity’, and to shape an imaginary of a pacified and unified Chinese nation, described in biological and common ancestry terms. Indeed, minzu allows the CCP to continue to operate a narrative that can distinguish it from other colonial powers. Even though China formally supports the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the CCP has never agreed to apply the concept of indigenous peoples or the rights of indigenous peoples within its borders; non-Han cannot in practice exercise their rights to prior consultation concerning any change in their territories. The terms ‘indigenous’ (yuanzhumin, yuanjumin, xianzhumin or tuzhuren) or indigeneity (tuzhuxing) are, in fact, conveniently understood as only applicable to Western colonial contexts (Wilson and Stewart 2008, 2), and are rarely, if ever, used in Chinese language to refer to China (Elliott 2015, 207). As we have observed, the PRC considers that China is not, and never was, a colonial power; the progressive ‘fusion’ of various peoples into today’s Chinese nation is seen as a historical, natural and voluntary process. Since indigeneity is admittedly a political, non-natural category that implies rights and benefits, it is ‘at odds with the concept of China as a “unified polyethnic state”’ (Elliott 2015, 209) and consequently is rejected. For these reasons, the concept of minzu will certainly continue to prevail in the CCP’s narrative of the Chinese nation.

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