CREATING THE ZHUANG: Ethnic Politics in China.

CREATING THE ZHUANG: Ethnic Politics in China. By katherine Palmer Kulp. Boulder (Colorado): Lynne Rienner Publishers. 2000. 221 pp. (Tables, B&W photos, map.) US$52.00, cloth. ISBN 1-55587-886-5.

The Zhuang are the largest "minority nationality or people" (non-Han group) in China; in 1957 the province of Guangxi was renamed the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. This sounds like the formal recognition of a people denied a homeland - people such as the Ukrainians or Latvians - but nothing could be further from the Zhuang experience.

As a distinct people, the Zhuang came into being only in the early 1950s, after the Communist conquest of China. They were previously known by a number of different names; they had no shared identity or history, no common language. They were quite unlike other nationalities in China (Tibetans, Mongols, Uighurs) who had a highly developed sense of their own identity and of their difference from the Han.

One of the questions Katherine Kulp addresses in her scrupulously researched study is whether a people can be a people without formal consciousness. Her conclusion is that this is quite possible, given a fragmented topography, lack of education and pervasive poverty. The Zhuang were always distinct enough to warrant being called a nationality (people); they simply did not realize it themselves. An outside stimulus was what was needed to raise a latent ethnic consciousness to a formal one. The stimulus was the arrival of the Communists.

Why did Beijing designate the Zhuang as a formal nationality and give them first half and then all of Guangxi? There are several possible reasons, each loaded with interpretation. One is that Beijing needed a special system of government to administer a region very different from others. A second is that Beijing was following Soviet policies towards nationalities. A third is that by recognizing the Zhuang as an official nationality, Beijing ensured that the largest minority nationality would be an unthreatening one, unlike the recalcitrant but numerically inferior Tibetans, Mongols and Uighurs. A fourth is that Beijing needed the Zhuang to eradicate the influence of the previous Han rulers of Guangxi. A fifth is that Beijing wanted the Vietnam border under special, essentially military, rule.

Kulp's extensive interviews in Guangxi and in neighbouring Yunnan and her detailed documentary research lead her to the conclusion that the first explanation is correct, that the Zhuang were recognized and granted an autonomous region in order to integrate them politically into a unified Chinese administrative system. Making Guangxi a Zhuang region required raising Zhuang consciousness. Raising consciousness was the order of the day in 1950s China. The CCP was engaged in consciousness-raising struggles on many fronts, to develop class consciousness and to develop national consciousness. These struggles presupposed that people had yet to recognize who they were.

Kulp does a fine job of recreating the often irrational passions of the time and struggles manfully with the ideological and terminological problems which haunt the scholar of Chinese Marxism, but one major element is missing from her analysis: in the stress on political systems she has little to say about military issues. The CCP takeover of Guangxi was a military one and fighting continued in some areas until 1952, three years after the formal conquest. Kulp cites astonishing figures for the number of "anti-Communists" killed in this period -- 470,000. This figure may be a translation of a Chinese term "annihilated" (xiaomie) which does not have to mean physically killed but, whatever the term, the figure speaks of a highly contested takeover and therefore of a crucial role for the People's Liberation Army, one which continued right through to the 1980s.

Becoming Zhuang was not easy. The Zhuang were recognized only a few years before China's descent into the Cultural Revolution. Guangxi was thrown into chaos, the new "Zhuang" attacked as "local chauvinists" by Red Guards. To add insult to these attacks, the Zhuang were labelled later, in Zheng Yi's Scarlet Memorial, as cannibals. Both accusations are deeply unjust. Consolidating the Zhuang identity did not restart until the 1980s. Under the new economic policies that stressed making money, not ethnicity, the protagonists of Zhuang identity faced more propitious conditions.

But whatever the initial reason for their recognition was, or how tortuous the path, Kulp argues that the long-term outcome was the creation of a genuine nationality, with its own language, a recovered history and a strong sense of identity. It took a long while to happen. The evidence that Kulp has collected is of a vibrant people growing in self-confidence, -- i.e., real ethnic self-determination -- although they are now ignored by Beijing.