Center for Chinese Studies

In the initial stage of the Arab Spring, China did not have a clear policy towards what was happening in the Arab world. The result was cooperation with the West during the Libyan crisis. For the first time in its modern history, Chinese Navy dispatched ships in a rescue mission far away from its shores. The Chinese media was cheering its Government' s efficiency and military capabilities aimed at saving Chinese workers abroad, trying to redirect attention of Chinese public from the main issue -the people' s uprising.

What do representations of China’s minorities do? This chapter makes the case that a rigorous examination of how minorities have been portrayed in Chinese public culture must be driven by attention to the effects of such portrayals. Undertaking such an analysis entails historical specificity, political economy and a contingent approach to social hierarchy. Hierarchy is arguably undergirded precisely by discourses of superiority – or what I will call ‘supremacism’ – within the Chinese social field. In what instances do supremacist constructions take on an ethnic dimension? Is a notion of ‘internal Orientalism’ (Schein, 1997) durably generative in probing this process?

To the extent that ethnic minorities have been the symbolic placeholders for the Other in China, close, historically contextualized interpretive readings are required to identify just what it is that they contrast. The counterpart of minorities has been commonly amalgamated into the monolith Han/state/urban/intellectual/elite/ masculine/modern/civilized/center, and so on. This implies a complementary signifying chain in which representations of the non-Han would bundle the feminine, the natural, the primitive and myriad other associated attributes. But when these characteristics appear constant over time, what keeps them in place? And alternately, what allows for exceptions and mutations in the signifying chain? Who, exactly, is doing the Othering? When minorities represent themselves, what is reworked and what is reiterated from dominant culture? These questions are engaged in the following pages, along with contributions from Luo Yu on yuanshengtai (原生态) and on relevant mainland scholarship, concluding with an intimation of a rising post-alteric imaginary.

This article considers the future of “indigeneity” in China through examining the case of the Buyi (Bouyei), an ethnic group that has historically been closely aligned with state-building processes. I first introduce a Chinese concept—yuanshengtai—which refers to a perfect combination of pristine nature and culture. By parsing how this notion glosses the historical continuity, cultural distinctiveness, and environmental sensibility of local peoples, I contextualize its potential as an alternative to highlight indigenous identity through ethnic branding and cultural promotion in a country without official endorsement of “indigenous peoples.” The article proceeds to delineate the paradox of the Buyi, who seem to lack enough cultural difference in branding yuanshengtai, and in turn traces the trajectories and constraints of cultural production in late socialist China.