This chapter focuses on the transformation of approaches to ethnicity in China’s transition from empire to nation state. That is, how and why these approaches evolved from a maintenance-oriented strategy aimed at pacification and stability in pre-modern times to a transformative strategy aimed at classifying and engineering identities in the socialist era. Historically Confucian universalism provided a neutral and inclusive approach to ethnicity, but it could not accommodate the idea of the nation in modern times. After late Qing and Republican failures at nation building, the CCP accomplished this task through a mix of class universalism and state classification of identities. The new approach served to incorporate minority members as equal citizens in the new modern state by politicizing previously localized identities at the national level. The contradictions therein – promoting political incorporation but also ethnic identities to fit that goal – or centralization and ethnicization, created the first set of institutional dynamics for ethnic strife in contemporary times.

This chapter focuses on the transformation of policy instruments for co-opting minority groups: how and why Chinese approaches evolved from a maintenance-oriented approach in pre-modern times to transformative strategies aimed at egalitarianism in the socialist era. In pre-modern times, hegemonic strategies were used to induce frontier pacification and cooperation, with emphasis on elite co-optation and outer peripheral regions. This approach was practical for the minimalist imperial state with limited infrastructural and resource capacity. In modern times, the Republican regimes attempted nation building by mixing elite appeasement and mass assimilation, to little avail. The CCP turned upside down pre-modern methods by repudiating traditional ethnic elites and penetrating ethnic regions with preferential egalitarian strategies. The new approach promoted political incorporation but also ethnicized policies to fit that goal. The contradictions therein – centralization but ethnicization – created a third set of institutional sources of ethnic tensions in contemporary times.

This chapter continues with the argument that the built-in tensions of the autonomous system – at once centralization and ethnicization – have intensified in the reform era, fueling ethnic strife in contemporary China. The focus of the chapter is the system of ethnic autonomy. On the one hand, the demise of class universalism and the rise of identity politics have made political centralization less justifiable but also more imperative, thanks to the centrifugal tendencies of identity politics, which are now unconstrained by class universalism. On the other hand, the demise of class universalism and the advent of identity politics have made autonomy rights more imperative but also more polarizing, as they are now instrumental to interethnic competition in a new market economy. These new institutional dynamics are illustrated with three contending perspectives from within China: the liberal autonomists, integrationists, and socialist autonomists. From different angles, the three schools help to highlight the institutional sources that contribute to increased ethnic tensions in Tibet and Xinjiang in the reform era.

Chapter 7 explores children’s navigation of their relationship with significant adults in skipped generation families. The analysis adapts Goh’s (2011) concept of ‘intergenerational parenting coalitions’ in seeing the migrant parents and grandparent caregivers as forming ‘multi-local intergenerational parenting coalitions’ - a variant of the ‘multi-local family striving teams.’ Children’s experiences of growing up in multilocal intergenerational parenting teams differed. Children in cohesive families usually received much material and emotional support.But if the middle generation had conflict with the grandparents and remitted little the children could lack nurturing, or alternatively, some children and grandparents clung to each other for solace. Children were usually looked after by paternal grandparents while care by maternal grandparents indicated special family circumstances that impacted on the children’s relationship with caregivers. Children’s closeness to grandparents vis-à-vis migrant parents was also influenced by who they had spent most time with. Even so, all children in skipped generation families enjoyed better relationships with their migrant parents if the two sides interacted regularly. Visits to the city during the school holidays offered many of these children opportunities for interaction with their migrant parents. But the children’s experiences of these visits also varied by the urban lot of their parents.