Ethnic Identity in Tang China is the first work in any language to explore comprehensively the construction of ethnicity during the dynasty that reigned over China for roughly three centuries, from 618 to 907. Often viewed as one of the most cosmopolitan regimes in China's past, the Tang had roots in Inner Asia, and its rulers continued to have complex relationships with a population that included Turks, Tibetans, Japanese, Koreans, Southeast Asians, Persians, and Arabs. Marc S. Abramson's rich portrait of this complex, multiethnic empire draws on political writings, religious texts, and other cultural artifacts, as well as comparative examples from other empires and frontiers. Abramson argues that various constituencies, ranging from Confucian elites to Buddhist monks to "barbarian" generals, sought to define ethnic boundaries for various reasons but often in part out of discomfort with the ambiguity of their own ethnic and cultural identity. The Tang court, meanwhile, alternately sought to absorb some alien populations to preserve the empire's integrity while seeking to preserve the ethnic distinctiveness of other groups whose particular skills it valued. Abramson demonstrates how the Tang era marked a key shift in definitions of China and the Chinese people, a shift that ultimately laid the foundation for the emergence of the modern Chinese nation. Ethnic Identity in Tang China sheds new light on one of the most important periods in Chinese history. It also offers broader insights on East Asian and Inner Asian history, the history of ethnicity, and the comparative history of frontiers and empires.

This comparative study of the Naxi and Tai minority groups in Southwestern China examines the implementation and reception of state minority education policy. Hansen (Center for Development and the Environment, U. of Oslo) argues that state policy is not uniformly successful among all minorities, no

Beijing has faced the challenge of granting autonomy to ethnic minorities but maintaining their loyalty to the Chinese state. This paper tackles complex issues of ethnic identity and nationalism among the most politically sensitive groups in China: the Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongols, Huis, and Kazaks. Specifically, it draws on original research conducted by the authors, the 2006-2007 Chinese Ethnicity Surveys, to explore the extent to which ethnic minorities are sinicized and the meaning of being Chinese. With an analysis of current arguments about whether national identity in contemporary China is based on a Han-dominant Confucian tradition or a multiethnic society that originated during the Qing empire, Separate but Loyal examines ethnic identity through the lens of ethnic-language learning, religious practices, and interethnic marriage. It also provides an illuminating comparison of perceptions of group identity and national identity in China with those in the United States and Russia. The survey points to some surprising findings, including the fact that ethnic minorities in China showed higher levels of both ethnic identity and national identity than U.S. and Russian respondents. These findings seem to support the argument that national identity is based on the multiethnic Chinese state, and they offer a rare empirical perspective on how the government can maintain the balance needed to preserve its legitimacy.

Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800–1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that period, reinterpretations of Chineseness and its supposed antithesis, “barbarism,” were not straightforward products of political change but had their own developmental logic based in two interrelated intellectual shifts among the literati elite: the emergence of Confucian ideological and intellectual orthodoxy and the rise of neo-Confucian (daoxue) philosophy. New discourses emphasized the fluidity of the Chinese-barbarian dichotomy, subverting the centrality of cultural or ritual practices to Chinese identity and redefining the essence of Chinese civilization and its purported superiority. The key issues at stake concerned the acceptability of intellectual pluralism in a Chinese society and the importance of Confucian moral values to the integrity and continuity of the Chinese state. Through close reading of the contexts and changing geopolitical realities in which new interpretations of identity emerged, this intellectual history engages with ongoing debates over relevance of the concepts of culture, nation, and ethnicity to premodern China.

This book describes and analyzes the situation of minority languages in China.