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The Call of Mao or Money? Han Chinese Settlers on China's South-western Borders

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Mette Halskov Hansen
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As a consequence of its economic reforms China is currently experiencing internal migration at an unprecedented scale. An estimated 120 million people, or more than 15 per cent of the total rural labour force in China, have for different lengths of time left their places of origin to settle mainly in urban centres. Most of them go to the southern and eastern economically booming regions, but quite a few have chosen to go to ethnic minority areas in the border regions of the People's Republic. These areas, which have often been described and perceived of as economically and culturally backward, are also subjected to new largescale in-migrations of mainly Han Chinese. Han Chinese – whether officially classified or identifying themselves as such – make up a considerable proportion of the population in most so-called minority areas in China today. A number of recent (mostly sociological) studies have contributed to knowledge of the policies and consequences of sending Han to minority areas since 1949. Especially with regard to Tibet, the actual scope of Han migration remains a hotly debated issue. However, while the number of ethnographic studies of various ethnic minorities in China has increased markedly during the last 15 years (since it became possible to do fieldwork in minority areas of the People's Republic), the Han Chinese living in the same areas have rarely been subjected to this kind of fieldwork-based study. Most researchers of ethnic minorities in China have been struck by the pervasiveness of the discourse on the Han as a more “advanced” (xianjin) nationality. But this discourse has not been thoroughly analysed in relation with how different groups of Han Chinese, living themselves among non-Han peoples in minority areas, reproduce, neglect, dispute or contribute to this discourse.

Type
Research Notes
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 158 , June 1999 , pp. 394 - 413
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1999

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References

1. Tianming, Huang, Bianjing xiao ge (Song of Dawn at the Borders) (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1965), p. 1.Google Scholar

2. The research presented in this article is to a large extent based on fieldwork carried out in 1996–97. About 100 Han Chinese migrants participated in one or more interviews. For suggestions and comments on previous versions of this article I especially thank Frank Pieke and Koen Wellens. I am grateful to the Danish Council for Development Research for providing the necessary financial support for the fieldwork.

3. Croll, Elisabeth and Ping, Huang, “Migration for and against agriculture in eight Chinese villages,” The China Quarterly, No. 149 (06 1997), pp. 128–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A large number of other reports and investigations on various aspects of these migrants have been published in and outside China, and the social consequences of these migrations are often debated in Chinese media. See for instance, Pieke, Frank N. and Maliee, Hein (eds.), Chinese Migrants and European Chinese: Perspectives on Internal and International Migration (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Xia, Ma and Weizhi, Wang (eds.), Migration and Urbanization in China (Beijing: New World Press, 1993).Google Scholar

4. For instance; Yasheng, Huang, “China's cadre transfer policy toward Tibet in the 1980s,” Modern China, Vol. 21 No. 2 (04 1995), pp. 184–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Clarke, Graham E., “The movement of population to the west of China: Tibet and Qinghai,” in Brown, Judith M. and Foot, Rosemary (eds.), Migration: The Asian Experience (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994)Google Scholar; Rong, Ma, “Han and Tibetan residential patterns in Lhasa,” The China Quarterly, No. 128 (12 1991), pp. 814–836Google Scholar; Qingli, Yuan, “Population changes in the Xinjiang Yugur Autonomous Region (1949–1984),” in Central Asian Survey, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1990), pp. 49–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rong, Ma, “Economic patterns, migration, and ethnic relationships in the Tibet Autonomous Region, China,” in Goldschneider, Calvin (ed.), Population, Ethnicity and Nation-building (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Rong, Ma and Naigu, Pan, “Wo guo Zangzu zizhi diqu de Hanzu renkou” (“The Han Chinese population in our country's Tibetan Autonomous Region”), in suo, Beijing daxue shchuixue renleixue yanjiu and zhongxin, Zhongguo Zangxu yanjiu (eds.), Xizang shehui fazhan yanjiu (Research of Tibet's Social Development) (Beijing: Zhongguo Zangzu chubanshe, 1997).Google Scholar

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7. The Chinese term bianjing diqu, “border regions,” is used to describe the vast areas reaching towards the borders of China and historically largely inhabited by non-Han peoples.

8. Concerning colonization of consciousness, for instance through the rationalization of identities in China, see Gladney, Dru C., “Salman Rushdie in China. Religion, ethnicity and state definition in the People's Republic,” in Keyes, Charles F., Kendall, Laurel and Hardacre, Helen (eds.), Asian Visions of Authority: Religion and the Modern States of East and Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).Google Scholar See also Wellens, Koen, “What's in a name? The Premi in Southwest China and the consequences of defining ethnic identity,” in Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1998), pp. 17–34.Google Scholar

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11. Ibid. p. 75.

12. Ibid. p. 75.

13. The local government is trying to promote tourism and in 1996 more than 1.5 million tourists (most of them Chinese) visited Sipsong Panna.

14. Debin, Li, Fang, Shi and Lin, Gao, Jindai Zhongguo yimin shiyao (The Essentials in the History of Migration in Modern China) (Harbin: Harbin chubanshe, 1994), p. 364.Google Scholar

15. Information from unpublished reports on the local population from the government's local statistical department.

16. All these data are from an unpublished local repon.

17. Conn, Bernard S., Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 4.Google Scholar

18. Ibid. p. 5.

19. This term is normally used to distinguish them from cadres in the state farms (nongchang ganbu).

20. Later the farms were reorganized from army farms to state farms administered independently from the army and from the local government. To avoid confusion I use the term state farm throughout the paper.

21. Land Reclamation Department, “Zhigong duiwu (“The team of workers”), unpublished draft, 1997.Google Scholar

22. Figure from the end of 1995 from unpublished statistics from the Prefecture Statistical Department.

23. Workers from Qidong, Liling and Qiyang were also sent to the districts of Simao, Honghe, Dehong and Lincang, all in the province of Yunnan. Equally, 60,000 other Hunanese peasants were recruited to go to the province of Xinjiang to work in state farms (Debin, Li et al. , The Essentials in the History of Migration, p. 377).Google Scholar

24. See Hansen, , Lessons in Being Chinese.Google Scholar

25. Sipsong Panna Land Reclamation Department, Banna qing (The Situation in Panna). (Yunnan: Jinghong, 1990) p. 54–55.Google Scholar

26. Land Reclamation Department, “The team of workers,” p. 21.Google Scholar In 1993 there were only 1,170 of the educated youth left as employees in units under the Land Reclamation Department.

27. These are indeed among the poorest areas of Yunnan and many individual migrants, Han, and Biyo, (Hanizu)Google Scholar especially, come from there. Also in the 1950s and 1960s the government recruited workers for the state farms in Mojiang.

28. Peasant migrant from Qidong.

29. See also Mette Thunoe's study of international Chinese migration in which she argues for the use of Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the habitus for going beyond mere strategic economic calculation when trying to understand patterns of migrations: Thunoe, Mette, “Moving stones from China to Europe: the dynamics of emigration from Zhejiang to Europe,” unpublished paper, 1996, p. 20.Google Scholar

30. By wenhua this interviewee did clearly not mean “education,” but something broader than that. He had explicitly explained how the “cultural level” (wenhua shuiping) of the Hunan people in general was high even in areas where many only went to school for a very short time.

31. Concerning the influence of the content of state education on perceptions of “minorities” and “majority” see Hansen, , Lessons in Being Chinese.Google Scholar

32. Clifford, James, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1992), p. 310.Google Scholar For interesting literature concerning the Chinese diaspora and transnationalism see especially Ong, Aihwa and Nonini, Donald (eds.), Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (New York: Routledge, 1997).Google Scholar

33. In spite of the fact that the head of the government and the head of the local Communist Party are officially equals in terms of power, everybody agrees that the highest actual power is with the head of the Party, and this position has always been occupied by a male Han Chinese as in most minority areas.

34. There are several hundred small travel agencies in Jinghong and many of them are run by Han from the second generation.

35. Even so, Chinese scholars writing about the peasants and workers who went to work in the state farms also mostly use the term yimin. See Li, Lu and Xiuyin, Wang, “Cong wo guo wushi niandai you zuzhi de yimin kenhuang tanxi yimin gonggu wenti” (“An exploration and analysis of the stability of the migrants organized to open up wasteland in our country during the 1950s”), Renkou yanjiu. No. 4 (1986), pp. 28–31.Google Scholar Sometimes the term kenmin, people claiming wasteland, is used to describe that kind of migration organized by governments since the time of the Qing Dynasty. See Debin, Li et al. , The Essentials in the History of Migration.Google Scholar

36. Also people transferred to new job positions in India were, according to Myron Weiner's study, reluctant to use the word migrant about themselves because it had “lower-class overtones.” Weiner, Myron, Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 41.Google Scholar