2 - Changing Approaches to Ethnic Governance

Summary

This chapter focuses on the changing strategies of ethnic governance in China’s transition from empire to the modern nation state. That is, evolution from a maintenance-oriented strategy to a transformative strategy aimed at national integration in the socialist era. Pre-modern Chinese dynasties applied diverse and indirect rule over their extensive frontier regions. This “minimalist state” came under serious challenges in modern times when the idea of the nation state arrived. After late Qing and Republican failures at modern state building, the CCP completed the transition to a modern state by establishing a uniform and direct form of ethnic governance based in titular ethnic status. Known as the system of autonomous regions, the new system served to incorporate frontier regions but departed from pre-modern practices of diverse and de-ethnicized rule. The contradictions therein – promoting political integration but also ethno-territories to fit that goal – or centralization and ethnicization, created a second set of institutional dynamics for ethnic strife in contemporary times.