Transcript: Live at Pitt: CMU's Benno Weiner on the Evolution of China's Minzu Policy

Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, to Lili Shoup for checking and formatting, and to Zhou Keya for the image! Listen in the embedded player above.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to this special live edition of the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. I’m Kaiser Kuo, and I’m coming to you today from the University of Pittsburgh. Hello, Pitt!

Audience: Woo! (applause)

Kaiser: All right. That’s what I like to hear. Great to be here, and thanks so much for making me feel so welcome. We had a great turnout for my talk yesterday at Carnegie Mellon, and I’m thrilled that so many familiar faces from yesterday are still here. We had great questions then, hopefully we’ll get some great questions today as well. Special thanks to Jim Cook, James, for this opportunity. It’s just been great to see you again after 30, what, 30 whatever years. Don’t want to date myself here. 35 years.

In this program, as regular listeners will know, we look at books, at ideas, at new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, its foreign relations, economics, and society. So, join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to the way we think and talk about China.

Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a National Resource Center for the study of East Asia. The Sinica Podcast will remain free for listeners, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I’m doing with this podcast, please consider lending your support. You can get me at sinicapod@gmail.com.

Today, I am thrilled to be joined by Benno Weiner. Benno is an historian of modern China. He focuses on the history of China’s frontiers, of nationalism, ethnic policy. He is the author of The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier — this book right here — which examines how the early PRC sought to integrate Tibetan areas into the new socialist state. Today, we are going to be discussing China’s contemporary ethnic policies, particularly the so-called second-generation ethnicity policy, the 第二代民族政策 dì èr dài mínzú zhèngcè, and exploring these policies in historical and comparative context. So, Benno, thank you so much for joining me. It’s great to see you, man.

Benno Wine: Thank you. It’s wonderful to be here. Long-time listener, as they say, so this is great.

Kaiser: Yeah, yeah. Well, welcome to the show. Don’t be nervous. I will treat you gently.

Benno: Appreciate that. Thank you.

Kaiser: Let’s start by setting the stage, alright? So, the PRC’s approach to ethnic minorities has changed significantly over the decades. Benno, in your research on the early PRC, you describe a time when the CCP took a relatively pragmatic, even cooperative approach to integrating ethnic minorities through so-called united front policies. Maybe you could walk us through how that early approach evolved into what we now call the second-generation ethnicity policy.

Benno: Sure. I’ll do my best. It’s such a big topic, obviously. In some ways, the fundamental difference, I don’t know if everyone’s really pinpointed this so much in most commentary, between the second generation, so-called second-generation ethnic policies and the earlier iterations, is essentially who the Party blames for the failure or even the resistance to integration into the Chinese nation and state by certain ethnic groups, non-Han ethnic groups. Today, essentially, and we can talk more about, obviously, these new policies in a bit, the blame is placed on the members of those ethnic groups themselves. In the previous iteration, although only honored in the breach sometimes, the blame was placed on the Party itself, and not just the Party, but on the Han majority.

Kaiser: Great Han chauvinism.

Benno: Great Han chauvinism, or great Hanism, or whatever we want to call it. This emerges from the Party’s experiences growing as a party on its way towards revolution. As you may know, originally, when the Party was essentially an urban party in the 1920s, and then when it was sequestered in the mountains of Jiangxi and other central Chinese regions where they didn’t have to deal with non-Han peoples, for the most part, their policies more or less aped the Soviets and they offered non-Han people the right of full autonomy or secession, even, independence. This only changed during the Long March when, for the first time, the Party or the Red Army was face to face with non-Han groups for the first time, marching through parts of Yunnan and Western Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai, and so forth, and running into groups such as the Yi, the Tibetans, the Hui, and others.