Coming to Terms With the Nation : Ethnic Classification in Modern China

Mullaney, Thomas; Anderson, Benedict (FRW)

ISBN 10: 0520262786 / ISBN 13: 9780520262782

Published by University of California Press, 2010

About this Item

Unread book in perfect condition.

Seller Inventory # 9031226

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Coming to Terms With the Nation : Ethnic Classification in Modern China
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520262786
• ISBN 13: 9780520262782
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: As New

About this title

Synopsis

China is a vast nation composed of hundreds of distinct ethnic communities, each with its own language, history, and culture. Today the government of China recognizes just 56 ethnic nationalities, or minzu, as groups entitled to representation. This controversial new book recounts the history of the most sweeping attempt to sort and categorize the nation's enormous population: the 1954 Ethnic Classification project (minzu shibie). Thomas S. Mullaney draws on recently declassified material and extensive oral histories to describe how the communist government, in power less than a decade, launched this process in ethnically diverse Yunnan. Mullaney shows how the government drew on Republican-era scholarship for conceptual and methodological inspiration as it developed a strategy for identifying minzu and how non-Party-member Chinese ethnologists produced a "scientific" survey that would become the basis for a policy on nationalities.

About the Author

Thomas S. Mullaney is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. His first book, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (University of California Press, 2010) examines the process by which Chinese social scientists and Communist state authorities decided which of the country's minority groups to recognize, and how this transformed the modern Chinese nation-state. He is also principal co-editor of Critical Han Studies: Understanding the Largest Ethnic Group on Earth (University of California Press, Forthcoming), an edited volume that brings together path breaking new research on China's ethnic majority. He is currently working on a global history of the Chinese typewriter, situating this misunderstood technology within the broader history of China's nineteenth- and twentieth-century development of a non-alphabetic, character-based information infrastructure encompassing telegraphy, typewriting, stenography, braille, word processing, computing, and text messaging.