3 - Changing Approaches to Policy Instruments

Summary

This chapter focuses on the transformation of policy instruments for co-opting minority groups: how and why Chinese approaches evolved from a maintenance-oriented approach in pre-modern times to transformative strategies aimed at egalitarianism in the socialist era. In pre-modern times, hegemonic strategies were used to induce frontier pacification and cooperation, with emphasis on elite co-optation and outer peripheral regions. This approach was practical for the minimalist imperial state with limited infrastructural and resource capacity. In modern times, the Republican regimes attempted nation building by mixing elite appeasement and mass assimilation, to little avail. The CCP turned upside down pre-modern methods by repudiating traditional ethnic elites and penetrating ethnic regions with preferential egalitarian strategies. The new approach promoted political incorporation but also ethnicized policies to fit that goal. The contradictions therein – centralization but ethnicization – created a third set of institutional sources of ethnic tensions in contemporary times.