Abstract
The present article focuses on the Han (汉) in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) where they constitute the largest of the fifty-six state-recognized population categories referred in Chinese as minzu (民族). Well into the 1990s, the official English-language translation of the term minzu was “nationality”—a direct reference to the Soviet nationality policy which was one of the major influences in the formulation of the Communist minzu policy. Recently, however, minzu has been increasingly often rendered in official documents as “ethnic group,” arguably in an attempt to do away with the national connotation of the term and to discursively distance China’s minzu model from the Soviet Union which disintegrated along the borders of nationality republics in 1991. The Han minzu has a population of 1.2 billion and constitutes, according to the 2010 census, 91.6 percent of China’s total population. The Han are recognized by the Chinese state as the national majority and the core of the Chinese multi-ethnic nation. The Han majority minzu, and the other fifty-five minzu commonly referred to as “minorities” (shaoshu minzu, 少数民族), are the outcome of the Minzu Classification Project (Minzu Shibie, 民族识别) launched by the government in the 1950s. The aim of the project was to get a better grasp of China’s ethnic complexity and classify the multi-ethnic population into a clearly defined, administratively-manageable number of categories. In the aftermath of the project, minzu have become the official blueprint for the reproduction of “ethnic” difference in China. While people who situationally self-identify as Han live also in Taiwan, in Southeast Asia, and overseas, identity processes of these Han differ significantly from those in mainland China due to different political, historical, and institutional contexts. Although Han are popularly referred to as an “ethnic group” not only in the official discourse in China but also in the Western media and in numerous academic publications, ethnicity and minzu classification are not equivalents: Minzu categorization is only a part of much more complex and messy processes of ethnicity in China. With regard to the Han, the identification as Hanzu (汉族, i.e., members of the Han minzu) is only one among a number of collective identities between which Han individuals switch in social interactions and which can all be situationally performed as ethnic. Moreover, the Han identity remains in an opaque relationship with such signifiers like Hua (华) or Zhongguoren (中国人) rendered in English as “Chinese.” Though nominally indicating citizenship shared by all the fifty-six minzu, in practice, even in academic publications, “Chinese” and “Han” are often used as synonyms. Hence, discussion of the contemporary Han must not only include ethnicity and minzu classification, but also other racial and national meanings that this collective identity has been ascribed in 20th-century China.
Joniak-Lüthi, Agnieszka