China’s Minority Fiction

Abstract

China’s Minority Fiction Sabina Knight (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution China’s fifty-five officially recognized “minority peoples” make up less than 9 percent of the People’s Republic of China. Still, they number more than 130 million, and their literature deserves study both for its political urgency and for its lyricism and philosophical power. Multiethnic fiction speaks volumes about Chinese attitudes toward minorities, as well as these peoples’ historical understandings, their search for roots, and longings for cultural survival. [End Page 48] What Holds China Together? How has literature enabled China’s evolving empire? Rather than a continuous polity, “China” names a culture. It may be this culture’s seemingly infinite resilience that confers political legitimacy. What has made Chinese culture so resilient? For three thousand years a powerful literary tradition has held together diverse and sometimes competing civilizations. The written language has been the glue that connects Chinese people to a shared cultural past. Throughout the region’s history, what counts as “Chinese” has been shifting. Yet even as Chinese characters, literally “Han words” (漢字), have evolved over time, expert sinologists can still read the inscriptions on tortoise shells and sheep scapulae from the Shang Dynasty (1600–1046 bce). Identification as a people has hinged on this written language. Written Chinese has also enabled communication across disparate spoken dialects, including those of ethnic minorities. For ethnic groups with their own languages, from the Mongols and Manchus that once conquered and ruled the realm to contemporary Tibetans and Uyghurs, writing in Chinese has brought status and acceptance. The cost has been Sinification, a homogenizing trade-off. Literary writing has also been fundamental to governance, likely more so in China than anywhere else. To enter the civil service, scholars had to master the core philosophical canon and poetic composition. Thanks to a long tradition of scholar-officials who remonstrated with rulers, such texts also served as voices of conscience. The Chinese Communist Party continues to recognize the political power of writing, and literature in particular, through the PRC’s official organ for writers, the Chinese Writers Association (CWA). Who Counts as Chinese? During the Civil War of 1946 to 1949, the Chinese Communist government adopted the Soviet paradigm using the term “nationalities” (民族) to refer to ethnic groups within the empire. Ethnic Han Chinese had earlier conceived of themselves in terms of a center-periphery model. This new notion of “nationalities” made the empire’s internal nations, cultures, and ethnicities distinct categories of official discourse. These distinctions paved the way for the establishment of the “autonomous regions” of Inner Mongolia (1947), Xinjiang (1955), Guangxi (1958), Ningxia (1958), and Tibet (1965). China’s label of “autonomous” for these areas should not be taken at face value. They are always subject to Beijing’s dominion; their powers of self-rule are even less than the modest rights begrudged to Indigenous peoples on US reservations or among Canada’s First Nations. In China, these cultures’ distinctiveness has meant that their inclusion within the PRC has entailed battles over independence and identity that some have called civil wars. China’s fifty-five officially recognized “minority peoples” (少数民族) make up less than 9 percent of the PRC. Still, they number more than 130 million, and their sparsely populated homelands account for over 45 percent of the country’s area. On the Chinese Writers’ Association roster of 12,000-plus members, more than 1,500 are self-identified ethnic minorities. Many of these non-Han writers represent their group’s first generation of published authors. Since 1976, Chinese presses have issued hundreds of novels by minority writers on ethnic themes. In addition, at least eighty literary magazines (about half in ethnic languages) publish poems, stories, and essays by minority writers. These ethnic groups all have long oral traditions, and their cultures are distinct enough to make China a multinational polity, more analogous to the European Union than to a single country. Fiction and Survival Dynamic and defiant, fiction by China’s ethnic minorities offers clarion voices amid the din of Chinese nationalism and party discourse. Often lyrical and nostalgic, this fiction documents the pluralism of cultures within China’s historically shifting borders. In so doing...