Habitus of the Minor: The Visuality of Inner Asians in Modern China (1930s-2010s)

Abstract

The indigenous peoples inhabiting the Inner Asian regions of the Tibetan Plateau, the Mongol steppes, and Chinese Turkestan experienced the last century in a highly condensed historical trajectory. They emerged from a Manchu imperial ethnic oligarchy at the beginning of the century as subjects of princedoms, kingdoms, and Buddhist theocracies ruled by co-ethnic aristocrats. Soon afterward, they were eagerly wooed by various Han regional hegemons during a 16-year-long “five-race republicanism,” which counted them as one of five distinct constituencies in the condivisione of a five-race union. That hypothetical union was followed in 1949 by an ethnocratic system of one unipolar ethnic majority – the Han – sided by fifty-five “ethnic minorities.” Judicious studies exist to elucidate the political and military processes by which the Inner Asian sultans, princes, high lamas, and the peoples under their co-ethnic rule were incorporated, either by force or through negotiation, into the current People’s Republic of China. What remains an unexamined question is – what is the cultural process that has been habituating the non-Han peoples into seeing their new status as ethnic minorities in a “nation-state” that promotes the self-determination of the dominant ethnicity but suppresses their own? Incorporating cultural products and institutional history of the cultural production nexus (Ministry of Culture and various state-owned film studios), my study advances a cultural historical turn in explaining China’s broken and token autonomies for non-Han indigenes today. Specifically, my study accounts for the visual construction of a Chinese ethnopolitical hierarchy whereby centrally controlled cultural production was tasked with reconstituting, solidifying, and curating state-promulgated non-Han identities. By studying cultural texts produced from both the Han metropole and the non-Han frontiers, my work offers a nuanced cognitive mapping of modern China’s ethnopolitical landscape not only as autonomist expression facing its regulation by a strong state but also its response to a weak state at certain historical junctures.