Rescuing the Empire: Chinese Nation-building in the Twentieth Century
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors take modern China's dilemma of how to deal with the legacy of its imperial past as the starting point for a discussion of the drawn-out re-creation of China in the twentieth century.
Abstract: This paper takes modern China's dilemma of how to deal with the legacy of its imperial past as the starting point for a discussion of the drawn-out re-creation of China in the twentieth century. The particular focus is on the important role of non-Han ethnic minorities in this process. It is pointed out that the non-recognition and forced assimilation of all such minorities, in favour of a unified citizenship on an imagined European, American or Japanese model, was actually considered as a serious alternative and favoured by many Chinese nation-builders in the wake of the overthrow of the last imperial dynasty in 1911. The article then proceeds to a discussion of why, on the contrary, ethnic minorities should instead have been formally identified and in some cases even actively organised as official minorities, recognised and incorporated into the state structure, as happened after 1949. Based on the formal and symbolic qualities of the constitution of these minorities, it is argued that new China is also a new formulation of the imperial Chinese model, which resurrects the corollary idea of civilisation as a transformative force that requires a primitive, backward periphery as its object.
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TL;DR: This article examined the ways in which painter Pang Xunqin "translated" the bodies of non-Han people, by examining his visual representation of the Miao people of Guizhou during the 1940s.
Abstract: This paper considers the ways in which the painter Pang Xunqin “translated” the bodies of non-Han people, by examining his visual representation of the Miao people of Guizhou during the 1940s. His work needs to be understood within the context of the history of anthropology in Republican China. Since he worked closely with Chinese anthropologists his work was largely informed by an anthropological understanding of human diversity and of ethnographic collecting and museum practice, a matter hardly explored among current studies on Pang Xunqin. Pang’s representation of the Miao was influenced in equal measure by customary Chinese ethnographic illustration and Western anthropological photography. This paper highlights the many sources that can be found in Pang’s works and reveals how he depicted the peripheral frontier. The biopolitics of the body, employed as a system of ethnic classification by Chinese anthropologists, affected Pang’s visualization of Miao bodies. In order to build a politicized and unifying Zhonghua minzu, Chinese anthropologists, demonstrated bodily similarities between Han Chinese and ethnic minorities in the southwest of China under categories of “Mongoloid” or “Yellow” racial types. Pang thus depicted Miao bodies by emphasizing their bodily similarities with the majority Han Chinese and adopting the physical features of “Mongoloid/Yellow.” His work provides a fine example of the ways in which art can become politicized.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the minzu shibie project initiated by the Chinese Communist Party after 1949 and found that the most dominant Miao subgroup is the Hmu group in Southeast Guizhou.
Abstract: This article studies the Miao classification as an example to examine the minzu shibie project initiated by the Chinese Communist Party after 1949. The Miao classification that originates with the minzu shibie project can be defined as a process of miaoicization; however, it is not a unified Miao group (as projected by the classification team) that has emerged but rather one dominant Miao subgroup that defines the official Miao category in contemporary China. At the moment the most dominant Miao subgroup is the Hmu group in Southeast Guizhou. The overemphasis of Hmu sub-culture to represent all the Miao of China is related to the fact that over the last decades many important leaders in Guizhou have been Hmu. While all Hmu are sinicized to a certain extent, it seems that the Hmu at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale are most likely to be sinicized and to amalgamate with the Han majority.
Journal Article•
TL;DR: The catalog is a richly illustrated record of the wide-ranging textile collections of the Evergrand Art Museum (in Taoyuan, Taiwan) and the private collector Huang Ying Feng who also serves as the director of this museum as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: First, the catalog is a richly illustrated record of the wide-ranging textile collections of the Evergrand Art Museum (in Taoyuan, Taiwan) and the private collector Huang Ying Feng, who also serves as the director of this museum. The present exhibit was curated as a selection of over 500 of the 10,000 items there, and was shown at the University of Hawai’i Art Gallery in 2008 and in 2009 at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin and the Museum of International Folk Art, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Cites background from "Rescuing the Empire: Chinese Nation..."
...…minority clothes that came about after the new Communist government reclassified the “barbarians” as “minority nationalities” in the 1950s (2000:92; cf. Fiskesjö 2006), encouraging their ethnic dress but also intervening more directly than before to orchestrate both its production and use (cf.…...
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