Suchergebnisse

Managing ethnic nationalism within the People's Republic of China has become increasingly challenging. As new reforms widen economic disparities between minorities and the Han majority, even the most assimilated of minorities, the Zhuang, have begun to demand special treatment from the central government. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officially recognized the sixteen million Zhuang as China's largest minority nationality in the early 1950s, granting them regional autonomy. Prior to this, however, the Zhuang did not share a common ethnic identity. Katherine Palmer Kaup explores why the CCP in effect created the Zhuang nationality. Why did it launch a massive propaganda campaign to increase nationality consciousness? How is the party now responding to the Zhuang's assertive political demands? This pioneering study unveils the unique culture of the Zhuang people, showing at the same time the CCP's skillful balancing of ethnic and regional loyalties over the past 50 years to integrate the diversity of China's ethnic mosaic

Millions of China's ethnic minority citizens remain subject to competing legal standards, even as state officials strive to strengthen a unified notion of state law. Minority customary law continues to bind many minority citizens in both civil and criminal arenas and often conflicts directly with state law. What happens when these laws conflict? Based on fieldwork in Yunnan, this article shows how local officials and communities navigate legal pluralism and what legal and policy provisions guide them. Granting local judges discretionary authority to set aside state law in favour of customary law, although seemingly undermining law enforcement, may in the long run be the best path to strengthening rule of law in China's minority regions. (China Q/GIGA)

Although a number of scholars have examined differences among members of a single nationality in different localities within the People's Republic of China, none emphasizes the impact which formal territorial administrative divisions have on ethnic identity and consequently on state–ethnic interaction. China's largest minority nationality, the Zhuang, is divided by the Guangxi–Yunnan provincial boundary. The Zhuang on either side of the boundary have been governed by different provincial institutions. This territorial division has encouraged both a pronounced difference in ethnic identity and in official discourse on the Zhuang, and has encouraged regionalist sentiment over pan-Zhuang ethnicnationalism. This essay explores the origin and consequence of two major differences between Zhuang self-expression on either side of the provincial boundary and concludes that the central government has played regional and ethnic politics in Zhuang areas off against one another in a manner that limits both, while purportedly promoting each.