China’s cultural chauvinism recoils - Windows Live

• China’s cultural chauvinism recoils - Windows Live

  tags: no_tag

  • By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

    The Japan Times
  • Today, about 60 percent territory of the People's Republic comprises territories that historically had not been under direct Han rule. China, in fact, now is three times as large as it was under the last Han dynasty, the Ming, which fell in the mid-17th century. Territorially, Han power thus is at its zenith, symbolized by the fact that the Great Wall was built as the Han empire's outer security perimeter. Xinjiang and Tibet, by themselves, make up nearly half of China's landmass.

  •  

    To help Sinicize the minority lands, Beijing's multipronged strategy has involved five key components: cartographically altering ethnic-homeland boundaries; demographically flooding non-Han cultures; rewriting history to justify Chinese control; enforcing cultural homogeneity to help blur local identities; and maintaining political repression.

  • While Beijing was quick to clamp down on information about the events in Tibet and Xinjiang, it applied media-management lessons learned in Tibet to its handling of the news on Xinjiang. One lesson was that it had to go beyond suppression of facts to information spin to tone down coverage of the developments. So, as opposed to the way it shut out the media from Tibet, it readily took foreign journalists to the violence-scarred Urumqi for stage-managed tours.
  • While India celebrates diversity, China honors artificially enforced monoculturalism, although it officially comprises 56 nationalities — the Han nationality (which, according to the last census in 2000, accounted for 91 percent of the total population) and 55 ethnic minority groups. China seeks not only to play down its ethnic diversity, but also to conceal the cultural and linguistic cleavages among the Han majority, lest the historical north-south fault lines resurface with a vengeance.
  • Today, thanks to the greater self-awareness flowing from advances in information and communications technologies, the Hakka, Sichuanese, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Fujianese, Swatow, Hunanese and other communities officially classified as Han are reasserting their distinctive identities and taking pride in their cultural heritage.