Coming to Terms with the Nation
Ethnic Classification in Modern China
About the Book
With a foreword by Benedict Anderson, Thomas S. Mullaney's first book recounts the history of the most sweeping attempt to sort and categorize China's enormous population: the 1954 Ethnic Classification project (minzu shibie). 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 minzu, and how non-Party-member Chinese ethnologists produced a "scientific" survey that would become the basis for a policy on nationalities.
Praise for Coming to Terms with the Nation
The details of the far-reaching Ethnic Classification Project of 1954 have so far remained shrouded in mystery, but thanks to declassified archives, hitherto undiscovered documents and interviews with surviving members of the Yunnan expedition, Mullaney’s splendid account throws light not only on one of the most sweeping registration documents in the history of the modern state, but also on how the Qing empire became the nation we know today as ‘China.’
This is the most brilliant study yet of how nationality, or ‘ethnicity,’ is created in a specific, and highly contingent, series of historical events.
It is both a delight to read and a body of work for many disciplines to ponder.
This rich, nuanced and erudite book is a great accomplishment, and will undoubtedly stand out among the growing literature on Chinese ethnic policies.
