NATION, ETHNIC GROUP, AND CULTURE

No universally accepted definitions of the terms have been established. In their recent book entitled

Empire to Nation, Esherick et al. (2006) acknowledge that it is devilishly difficult to define the term

nation. They give only a loose and elusive statement about the term: “nations are socially and discursively constructed polities” (ibid: 5). They cite Benedict Anderson’s book title and suggest that nations are “imagined communities.” Furthermore, they emphasize that the nation is politically constructed. It is the state that makes the nation and not vice versa.

By contrast, Connor (1994: 36) emphasizes that the essence of nation is a groupfeeling, namely the

“psychological bond that joins a people and differentiates it, in the subconscious of its members, from all other people in a most vital way.” In a narrow sense nation is a self-defined grouping that gives people a sense of sameness, of oneness, or of belonging on the basis of the belief of shared blood. In a broad sense nation refers to the citizenry of a state, and what further complicates the connotation of nation is the propensity to use the term as a substitute for the state. Consequently nationalism is often equated with loyalty to the state and not to the nation.

Ethnic group is considered to be a group of people with common descent, cultural tradition, and a shared sense of identity (Connor 1994: 43). Smith (1985: 22-30) maintains that ethnicity involves a common name, a sense of descent, a shared history, a distinctive shared culture, an association with a specific territory, and a sense of identity and solidarity. The meanings of nation and ethnic group overlap when nation is restricted to the narrow sense of the word. They both include a sense of belonging among the members of a nation/ethnic group. Yet ethnicity involves not only identity, but also culture. In this project I use ethnic groups to refer to the Chinese, Manchus, Mongols and other peoples living in the Qing empire.

The various ethnic groups in the Qing formed through long-term political, social, and cultural processes. Strictly speaking, ethnicity was constantly in fluidity; in this sense I recognize that it might be anachronistic to apply the term ‘ethnic groups” to the various peoples of the Qing. On the other hand, however, the state created laws and regulations governing each major ethnic group in the empire;

arguably, the sociopolitical boundaries between the groups, especially those between the Manchus and the Chinese, were clear and fixed as long as the laws remained in place. Moreover, the ethnic groups believed

that they were different from each other. For instance, the Taipings in the 1850s and 1860s and the revolutionaries in the 1900s articulated that the Chinese were different from the Manchus in terms of ancestry, culture, and so forth. These facts speak for the notion of “attitudinal boundary,” that is, the perceptions of the members of an ethnic group that exclude them from other groups (Armstrong 1994: 141).

The state in traditional societies plays a partial role in that state policies favor some ethnic groups and are a threat to others (Brass 1985: 26). The notion is applicable to the Qing regarding its ethnic policies. In fact complex relations existed between the ethnic groups in terms of the treatments they received from the state. I will demonstrate that some groups received favorable treatments at the expense of others, and in this sense an ethnic hierarchy was created and maintained by the Manchu rulers. I use the term “culture” frequently in this study. Culture, broadly speaking, is the way of life of an ethnic group, including food, language, and customs. In some cases it may encompass highly abstract matters such as ways of thinking and political structures. In the Qing context the male hairstyle and dress were significant for the Chinese. The Manchu rulers imposed Manchu male hairstyle and dress on Chinese men as they believed annihilation of Chinese ethnic marks would suppress Chinese self- consciousness, which in turn would be beneficial to Manchu rule. On the other hand, the Manchus, after they had lived in China proper for a century or so, began to adopt the Chinese language. Thus in a sense cultural assimilation took place in two ways, the result being that the Manchus and the Chinese were largely identical in physical appearance as far as men were concerned. But this is not to say that the Manchus assimilated to the Chinese or vice versa. On the contrary, the two peoples remained two distinctive ethnic groups. Ethnicity, in addition to “culture,” also includes the history and tradition of a group of people, and the belief that they share something in common in their blood. In the context of Qing

China, the Manchus were largely “sinicized” culturally in the sense that they gradually adopted the Chinese language and ideology, but they remained a different people from the Chinese in terms of

ethnicity. The Chinese and the Manchus believed that they were two different peoples; they had different ancestors; they remained biologically “pure” after the Manchus had lived in China proper for over two centuries because of the ban on intermarriage and other institutions reinforcing the ethnic line.