The Han: China's Diverse Majority by Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Han: China's Diverse Majority by Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi John Herman The Han: China's Diverse Majority by Agnieszka JoniakLüthi. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 187. $50.00. In The Han: China's Diverse Majority, Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi confronts head-on one of the more perplexing aspects of contemporary China: Are the Han Chinese an ethnic group, and if so, what makes them an ethnic group? The Han nationality, or Hanzu (汉族), officially constitute 91.5 percent of China's population, or 1.2 billion people. The Hanzu are identified by the Chinese state as the national majority, the core of the Chinese multiethnic nation, which officially comprises fifty-five other national minorities (minzu 民族). But what does being Han mean to those classified as Hanzu? More importantly for this study, how can the Hanzu seem so united in their Han-ness while at the same time seem so fragmented and divided by native-place ties, language, and cultural practices? "Can we apply," as Stevan Harrell writes in his foreword to Joniak-Lüthi's volume, "the same concepts and the same kinds of analysis to the 1.2 billion Han that we apply, say, to the ten million Uyghur of Xinjiang or the fifty thousand Mosuo or Na of the Sichuan-Yunnan border?" (p. vii). Moreover, how are the Han as an ethnic group different from the Chinese as a nationality? These are just a few of the questions Joniak-Lüthi addresses in her study. Joniak-Lüthi begins her examination with a tight, well-crafted analysis of the history of "Han-ness" in order to show how a "relatively open and inclusive" (p. 34) Han culturalism influenced by historical contingency hardened during the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries into a more exclusive Han nationalism. The premodern notion of Han-ness, according to Joniak-Lüthi, was framed in terms of a "Confucianism-influenced imagery, which contrasted culture and refinement—associated with Han-ness/Chinese-ness—with [End Page 249] wildness and primitiveness, or everything beyond the limits of Han/Chinese culture" (p. 26). The differences between Chinese culture and barbarism resulted from specific institutions linked to Confucianism, most notably family surnames, patrilineal descent traced through genealogies, rituals and beliefs associated with wedding and funerary practices, occupations (such as fixed-field grain production, Boat People), and literacy (writing and literature) (p. 54). Because this "relatively open and inclusive" premodern Han-ness was subject to a multitude of external influences over time, the integrity of Han-ness was repeatedly fragmented, intermixed with other identities, and remade anew throughout China's long history. This concise examination of premodern notions of Han-ness adds to a growing body of literature that persuasively debunks the belief that the Han people today are a coherent race, the product of one continuous organic historical tide (p. 23). The shift from this "relatively open and inclusive" premodern Hanness (imperial culturalism) to a more exclusive racialized modern Han-ness gained momentum during the second half of the nineteenth century as the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864) promoted the concept of "race" into the lexicon of political discourse as it sought to rally Han/Chinese support to overthrow the Manchu occupiers of China. As Joniak-Lüthi notes, Han-ness/Chinese-ness was a significant identity in China prior to the nineteenth century, and people utilized their Hanness/Chinese-ness as a marker in negotiating social positions in local contexts, as well as in larger empire-wide settings, but from the ashes of a failed Taiping rebellion and facing the growing threat in foreign imperialism, Chinese intellectuals and revolutionaries like Sun Yatsen, Zhang Binglin, and Mao Zedong aspired to unite what they saw as a culturally and ethnically fragmented population under one coherent national identity and to situate the Han at the center of a fledgling Chinese nation-state. These intellectuals and revolutionaries pursued a strategy present in many parts of the world at this time—the creation of a coherent national community by standardizing a national language, national history, and national identity founded on the predominant premodern notion of cultural unity. In China's case, this modern...