The formation and development of the Chinese nation with multi-ethnic groups

© L p i After my invitation to deliver the Tanner Lecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, I would like to take this opportunity to discuss the question of the unified multi-ethnic Chinese nation, a topic that I have been exploring for many years. My current understanding of this structure is not fully developed, and so, this talk can only be a starting point for considering this question. In order to avoid a lengthy explanation of some basic concepts, I will use the concept ‘Chinese nation’ (zhonghuaminzu 中华民族) to refer to the billions of people within the geographical territory of China. This includes more than 50 diverse ethnicities, within the single Chinese nation. They are all called ‘ethnicities’ (minzu 民族), but their levels are not the same. My use of the territory of China to delineate the scope of the Chinese nation is certainly not entirely appropriate, because ‘state-nation’ and ‘ethnicity’ are two different but related concepts. At the same time, from a macroperspective one could argue that they are basically or roughly consistent in their scope. As a nation-in-itself, the Chinese nation emerged in confrontations between China and Western powers in the last century. But as a national-entity-of-consciousness, it has been shaped by thousands of years of historical process. This essay will review the process of formation of the structure of the unified multiethnic Chinese nation. Its main aspects are formed by the contact, intermingling, linking, and integration of many dispersed ethnicities. At the same time, it is also a sort of unity with distinctions resulting from the division and extinction of those ethnicities. This may also be the process of formation of all of the world’s nations. The formation of the multi-ethnic structure of the Chinese nation also has its particular characteristics: its emergence dates back to 3000 years ago, with the integration of several ethnicities in the middle region of the Yellow River. Beginning with the peoples known as the ‘Huaxia’, the gradual process of integration was like a rolling snowball, absorbing the surrounding ethnicities into a single core. After it had occupied the East Asian plains area, including the middle and lower regions of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, it began to be called the ‘Han ethnicity’ by other groups. The Han ethnicity continued to grow by assimilating elements of other ethnicities, and continued to penetrate into their territories, constituting a connected and cohesive network, laying the foundation for an indivisible unity resulting from the integration of diverse ethnicities within the territory, forming an ethnicity-in-itself with a shared ethnic consciousness, known as the Chinese nation.