Michael Dillon's new book provides an informed and sweeping overview of China's ethnic diversity and the complex and politically charged relationship between the Han ethnic majority, the Chinese Party-state and China's over 120 million minority peoples. The book is aimed at a general audience, with engaging prose and erudite analysis throughout.
In the preface, the author admits ethnic issues are “contentious and highly politicized” in the People's Republic of China but also asserts his aim is to provide “a balanced account,” one that seeks to avoid “the entrenched positions that are often adopted in debates about these issues” (p. 7).
Individual chapters explore major minority communities, including the Hui Muslims, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Manchus and the numerous ethnic groups of Yunnan province. The author draws adroitly on the research of other experts as well as his over 30 years of fieldwork among the Hui and Uyghur peoples of China's northwest, and to some extent first-hand information related to the Mongols.
Dillon's descriptive lens is wide, providing brief coverage of lesser-known groups, such as the Wa, Tu and other groups that sit outside the PRC's rigid 56 classificatory taxonomy, such as the Chinese Jews and the Hakkas. There is a refreshing chapter on ethnic issues on Taiwan, where the author explores the embrace of cultural diversity and indigeneity following the process of democratization, and hints that Taiwan might represent another, more progressive model for governing diversity.
The author stresses the importance of China's minority population throughout, arguing they have a significance well beyond their numbers; but he is also cognizant of their “lesser” status in a country and civilization long dominated by a large Sinic (now classified as Han) population. In certain times and places, this peripheral position is celebrated in carefully orchestrated performances of cultural exoticism; at other times and in other places, it is subjected to coercive transformational processes. Regardless, the inequalities of power define the relationship between majority and minority in China: an issue that is frequently mentioned by Dillon but is not at the forefront of his analysis.
The book does contain some mistakes throughout, such as reference to the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959 (p. 22), and the sort of simplification that is necessary for a book targeted at a generalist audience. The chapters are highly discursive, moving rapidly from a tour of the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park in Beijing to recent policy innovations in Xinjiang under Chen Quanguo. It is regrettable that the author sometimes uncritically adopts the Party-state's discourse, but his emphasis on balance and synopsis does highlight the spatial and temporal fluidity of ethnic diversity in China.
When Dillon speaks about post-Mao ethnic policies as “remarkably successful” from Beijing's perspective (p. 203), he misses the considerable internal opposition to the ethnic accommodationist approach, and the new focus on more forceful forms of ethnic integration and cultural reengineering under Xi Jinping. When he argues that economic development is viewed as “the ultimate answer to the problems of ethnicity” (p. 206, and see also p. 214), he also misses the important departure under Xi Jinping with the Party-state's renewed emphasis on the “spiritual” and “cultural” basis of national belonging in China.
Finally, the author's discussion of Wang Zhengwei's 2015 article in Qiushi and the 2005 White Paper on “Regional Autonomy for Ethnic Minorities in China” now seem passé in the face of the recent “assimilatory turn” in ethnic policies under Xi Jinping, and thus needs to be balanced with some of the writings of Zhu Weiqun and other conservatives who are now in the ascendency.
Alongside Zang Xiaowei's Ethnicity in China (Wiley, 2015), Lesser Dragons provides a welcome update to previous overviews of ethnic issues in China published by Colin Mackerras, Dru Gladney and others. But one is left wondering whether the “new era” of Xi Jinping thought marks a fundamental turning point that requires separate treatment, and the mass interment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang represents the leading-edge of a more radical and interventionalist form of ethnic governance in China.
