Coming to Terms with the Nation - Thomas Mullaney
| Автор: | Thomas Mullaney |
| Издательство: | Ingram |
| Серия: | Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes |
| Жанр произведения: | Историческая литература |
| Год издания: | 0 |
| isbn: | 9780520947634 |
China is a vast nation comprised of hundreds of distinct ethnic communities, each with its own language, history, and culture. Today the government of China recognizes just 56 ethnic nationalities, or <i>minzu,</i> as groups entitled to representation. This controversial new book recounts the history of the most sweeping attempt to sort and categorize the nation's enormous population: the 1954 Ethnic Classification project (<i>minzu shibie</i>). Thomas S. Mullaney draws on recently declassified material and extensive oral histories to describe how the communist government, in power less than a decade, launched this process in ethnically diverse Yunnan. Mullaney shows how the government drew on Republican-era scholarship for conceptual and methodological inspiration as it developed a strategy for identifying <i>minzu</i> and how non-Party-member Chinese ethnologists produced a «scientific» survey that would become the basis for a policy on nationalities.