| This project, a three-case study of cultural revival among the Dai, Bai, and Muslim Hui minorities of Yunnan Province, examines the relationship between Chinese national and minority identities. It is my contention that Chinese minority cultural activism, which includes phenomena such as linguistic promotion and religious education, can and does express claims derived from a Chinese political identity, a conception of minority membership in the Chinese national community. One reason I argue this is so is that these Dai, Bai and Hui activists talk about what they are doing in terms of two main discourses that relate directly to concepts of citizenship and Chinese identity more generally: the discourses on minority autonomy and on China's post-1949 modernization. Certain instances of minority cultural activism are thus efforts to put some teeth into the party-state's promises of autonomy, and to reject the stereotype of minorities as backwards and uncivilized. The modernization of minority culture, as activists and ordinary minority people see it, is a means of asserting their rights within the contemporary Chinese body politic.; In light of these findings, I argue that the Chinese case confounds predominant theories of nationalism and the nation-state. Prevailing views of the nation and nationalism do not allow us to make sense of minority cultural activism, except when it stems from or indicates separatist impulses. Nor do these theories explain the Chinese party-state's involvement in and support for minority cultural identities, practices and institutions. While the real geo-political world presents numerous examples of multi-ethnic states, theoretical conceptions of the nation, and the integrative assumptions regarding culture on which these are based, presuppose a cultural homogeneity at odds with the phenomena I detail. Sub-national or trans-national cultural ferment is inherently problematic for the nation—in fact, logically so—for it implies schizophrenia, the failure to establish a coherent national identity. For these reasons, I argue that the post-Mao cultural revival among the Dai, Bai and Hui indicates the need to rethink our models of the nation and national development, and the place of culture in the formation and constitution of identity. |
