Thomas S. Mullaney, James Leibold, Stéphane Gros, and Eric Vanden Bussche, eds., Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation, and Identity of China’s Majority

Thomas S. Mullaney, James Leibold, Stéphane Gros, and Eric Vanden Bussche, eds., Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation, and Identity of China’s Majority

In studies of the peoples of China-based empires and succeeding republics there are two streams of work on group identity that have never really intersected despite engagement with some common theoretical problems. On the one hand there is the inquiry into the nature of “Chineseness” carried out by Tu Weiming 杜維明, Allen Chun 陳奕麟and others. On the other hand, there are the more historicized investigations of ethnicity, which usually focus on groups that are now ethnic minorities of the People’s Republic. Scholarship in the latter vein is often framed with the idea of the ‘frontier’, but it rarely defines ‘frontier’ clearly, and one often gets the impression that the term just means places where Chinese are a minority. Also, as Chris Vasantkumar notes in Critical Han Studies: “the division of labor between Han studies and minority studies that has historically shaped Chinese social science has to some degree been perpetuated in the practices of foreign scholars” (p. 236).