Migration and Ethnicity in Chinese History: Hakkas, Pengmin, and Their Neighbors (review)

Abstract

Ethnic identity is forged not just by psychology, but by material forces. China's powerfully unified ethnic identity is famous: Han Chinese descendants of the people of the Yellow River Plain, unified by the Emperor Qin Shi over two thousand years ago. Leong Sow-Theng's beautifully detailed posthumous volume Migration and Ethnicity in Chinese History examines how migration shaped the identity of the Hakka people. His perspective reveals strongly contested and divergent local ethnic identities, languages, and cultures, each modeled in contact and conflict with other local peoples. The Hakkas belong to China's ethnic Han Chinese majority, 94% of the population. (The fifty-six officially recognized national minorities, including ethnic Koreans, Tibetans, Mongols, and Miao, are 6%.) The Hakkas, just 3% of China's population, are the smallest of the seven major Han Chinese subgroups, each with its own local culture and dialect, as different as English [End Page 142] from German. Most northerners belong to the native Mandarin-speaking 70%. The other groups are the Cantonese, the Wu speakers (from around Shanghai), the Min (from Fujian and Taiwan), the Xiang (Hunan), and the Gan (Jiangxi Province). The Hakkas, the only subgroup without their own province, live among the mountaintops of Guangdong, Fujian, Taiwan, Jiangxi, and Sichuan. Yet Hakkas gained so much political power that they include disproportionate numbers of the scholarly, military, and political elites, as well as Deng Xiaoping. In 1984 Hakkas formed 50% of China's most powerful political entity, the Standing Committee of the Politburo.