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Talk:Han chauvinism

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I started trying to rework the article into something suitable for Wikipedia. It has a lot of interesting stuff, but I realized that it was obviously copied from an academic paper and there isn't an release of copyright that I could see.

I try to stay clear of politics. On (Chinese) New Year's eve, I'm not going to light fireworks like everyone else, and that's how I'll show that I don't support the government. If I don't set off fireworks, all my neighbors will know that I don't give a damn about this country. I'm just going to sit at home and watch the special New Year's program on TV. They'll have a lot of acrobats, singers, comedians, and minority dances. Those minorities sure can sing and dance.... I really like to watch those minority girls, they're a lot "looser" (suibian) than our Han women. They bathe naked in the rivers and wear less clothing. Our women wouldn't act that way... Some of my friends have even gone down to Yunnan, or was it Guizhou?, to see if they could meet some minority girls, they are very casual, you know. Han women aren't free like that. It's frustrating. Just like our politics, we can't do anything about it (mei banfa). So why try?

                I argue that the representation of the "minority" in China reflects an objectivizing of a "majority" nationality discourse that parallels the valorization of gender and political hierarchies.[1]  This process reverses subject/object distinctions and suggests the following parallels: Minorities are to the majority as female is to male, as "Third" World is to First, and as subjectivized is to objectivized identity.  The widespread definition and representation of the "minority" as exotic, colorful, and "primitive" homogenizes the undefined majority as united, mono-ethnic, and modern.  The politics of representation in China reveal much about the State's project constructing in often binary minority/majority terms an "imagined" national identity (Anderson 1983).  Through reading the representation of minorities in China, this article suggests that we learn much, perhaps more, about the construction of majority identity, who in China are known as the "Han" nationality.

                Following the tragedy of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, there have been an onslaught of scholarly publications attempting to define and re-define China's "quest for a national identity" in various terms, including: Confucianism or neo-Confucianism (i.e., recent suggestions in the political economy literature that it is Confucian culture that has led to the rapid industrial successes of the East Asian economies of Japan and the "four little dragons": Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore), language (the popular notion that if one speaks and reads Chinese they are Chinese), Han Chinese sedentary agriculturalism (contrasted with "minority" nomadism, see Fei Xiaotong 1989), the geophysical space of the country occupied by the PRC (Zhongguo, the central kingdom centered in the territory of China, see Thierry 1989) or a bio-genetic neo-racist notion of pan-Chinese Yellow-ness (as the Su Xiaokang 1989 television series River Elegy seems to suggest).[2] 

                By contrast, a burgeoning literature on the anthropology of the Self has argued for movement away from reified definitions of Self to emphases upon "multiplicity, contextuality, complexity, power, irony, and resistance" (Kondo 1990:43).  Similarly, studies of ethnicity and nationalism have begun to move away from either culturally or primordial-based formulations, to the analysis of power relations, particularly in contemporary nation-states (Anderson 1983:16; Comaroff 1987; Hobsbawm 1990; Gladney 1991; Keyes 1981).  The connection between the relationally-described identities of nationalism and gender was made most clearly in the conference volume Nationalisms and Sexualities (Parker, et. al., 1992).  The authors convincingly argue that, "like gender--nationality is a relational term whose identity derives from its inherence in a system of differences" (Parker, et. al., 1992:5; compare also Caplan 1987:10).  In this paper I wish to extend this argument to address the issue of relational identity in China through the analysis of the politics of minority/majority representation.

                Perceptive China scholars have noted the colorful portrayal of minorities in China as derogatory, colonial, and useful to the state (Diamond 1988; Thierry 1989), but this extends to imperial times and is not particularly new (see Eberhard 1982).   Studies of modern Chinese art have also drawn attention to the important place of minorities in the formation art history of the PRC (Chang 1980; Laing 1988; Lufkin 1990).  I would like to suggest here (and I believe that this is a new direction) that the objectified portrayal of minorities as exoticized, and even eroticized, is essential to the construction of the Han Chinese majority, the very formulation of the Chinese "nation" itself.  In other words, the representation of the minorities in such colorful, romanticized fashion, has more to do with constructing a majority discourse, than it does with the minorities themselves.  This minority/majority discourse then becomes pervasive throughout Chinese culture, art, and media.  In her recent book, Woman and Chinese Modernity, Rey Chow (1990: 21) also makes the important connection between ethnicity and the construction of Chinese womanhood, but Chow's is an external argument about the Western construction of China as feminine, while I am linking internal constructions about the minority Other within Chinese society.  In conclusion, I also extend the argument to popular culture in general, with a reference to the interesting continuance of this discourse in the recent film, Ju Dou, by Zhang Yimou.  Significantly, and here this study makes a contribution to those discussions that attempt to move beyond Edward Said's Euro-centric "orientalist" critique, the representation of minorities and the majority in Chinese art, literature, and media will be shown to have surprising parallels to the now well-known portrayals of the "East" by Western orientalists.  This "oriental orientalism," and the objectification of the minority Other and majority Self in China, will be shown to be a "derivative discourse," in Partha Chatterjee's (1986:10) terms, stitched from Chinese, Western (namely Morganian and Marxist), and Japanese ideas of nationalism and modernity.

                This approach rejects the traditional center-periphery construction of Chinese society, with the so-called "minorities" on the distant margins of Chinese society and nationality.  It also challenges the dominant idea that "cultural change [in China] was overwhelmingly one way" (Naquin and Rawski 1987:129), or that anyone who came into China, foreigner, minority, or barbarian, was subject to "Sinicization" (Ch'en 1966, Lal 1970).  In these more traditional configurations, Chinese culture functioned simultaneously, to quote James Hevia,[3]  as both "sponge and eraser" of foreign cultures: China not only absorbed outsiders, it dissolved them, and the few that survived on the "periphery" were generally thought "marginal" to the understanding of Chinese society.  During my fieldwork I was often surprised to find that many of the reforms in China, whether they be in spheres related to the market economy, privatized agriculture, or religious and political freedom, were first allowed in minority areas, and these often directly influenced the nature and force of change among the Han (see Gladney 1990a).  In this paper I want to extend the argument further and show that even in the areas of popular culture, art, film, and moral value, the so-called "peripheral minorities" have played a pivotal role in influencing and constructing contemporary Chinese society and identity.  I am addressing public culture in its often state-sponsored production and reproduction, concerning myself more with representations in nationally-distributed media and film, rather than a specific field site. 

                I also suggest that the commodification and objectification of minorities in China represents something more than a response to Western consumer tourism, providing the state with not only hard currency, but also important symbolic capital, to use Bourdieu's (1977:6) construction.  The exoticization and representation of minorities is an enterprise that took on enhanced importance with the rise of the Chinese nation-state and is central to its nationalization and modernization project: The homogenization of the majority at the expense of the exoticization of the minority.  The so-called minorities, long confined to the margins of Western and Chinese theoretical discourse on Chinese society, are no longer marginal, and perhaps never should have been, to our understanding of contemporary China.

THE DISPLAYAL AND COMMODIFICATION OF THE MINORITY OTHER IN CHINA

                One cannot be exposed to China without being confronted by its "colorful" minorities.  They sing, they dance; they twirl, they whirl.  Most of all, they smile, showing their happiness to be part of the motherland.  The 4 hour Chinese New Year's program is a yearly special broadcast throughout China to its 1.1 billion population.  And, even though only 8 percent of that population is supposed to be minority (the Han majority occupy 91% of China's population according to the 1990 census), fully one-half of the evening's programming is devoted to smiling minority dancers.  A brief examination of the opening minutes of the evening's program immediately reveals the crucial role minority peoples play in the contemporary construction of the People's Republic of China. 

                The program begins with a view of the clock tower on the Central Radio and Telegraph Building located on Chang An Avenue striking 8 o'clock, the time for the start of the show that lasts until midnight.  It is the most popular program on television during New Year's, carried on the CCTV Central Broadcasting System that is received throughout China, including Tibet, Mongolia, and even Taiwan and Hong Kong.  In my several years of field work in China, I noted that most families from Beijing to Xinjiang on New Year's Eve preferred to stay at home and watch this program surrounded by relatives and a few close friends.  During the 1991 broadcast, I sat with Chinese friends in their apartment in Beijing, and was repeatedly told to sit and watch the program with the rest of the family, even though I preferred to catch up on the local gossip.  After the clock shown on the television struck 8:00 p.m., the doors to the elaborate stage opened and revealed a wide array of colorfully dressed minorities advancing onto the stage.  After a brief introduction to the evening's program, four well-known television personality hosts wished the audience a "Happy New Year" and initiated the first choreographed program of the evening by stating: "China is a multi-national country, 56 different nationalities, like 56 different flowers.  The many nationalities wish to extend to all of you a Happy New Years through a special Tea and Wine Happy New Years Toast!"  The program follows with first Tibetans, then Mongols, Zhuang, Uzbek, Korean, Wa, Hui and other minority dancers presenting Buddhist "hata" (scarves), other minority gifts, and cups of tea and wine to the studio audience, singing their native songs in their native languages, with a Chinese translation superimposed on the television screens as subtitles.[4]  In striking resemblance to the tribute offerings of the ancient Chinese empires, the minorities perform, sing, and perform ritualized prostrations as they offer their greetings to the studio audience, who appear to be largely members of the Han majority.  They appear so, because the studio audience is uniformly (as if in uniforms) dressed in conservative suits with ties, Mao jackets, or other formal dark "Western" attire, which is in marked contrast to the "colorful costumes" of the minority entertainers.  Non-minority entertainers and hosts exclusively wore Western-style suits and dresses.  The rest of the 4 hours of programing has well over half of its programs devoted to minority songs and dances.[5]

                After the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, the State embarked upon a monumental endeavor to identify and recognize as nationalities those who qualified among the hundreds of groups applying for national minority status.  The question of one's nationality, which is registered on one's passport and all official documents, is determined by Stalinist and historical criteria that determine if one is a member of a group that was ever linguistically, economically, geographically, or "culturally" distinct from the so-called Han majority population (see Fei 1981; Yang 1992).  This recognition may make a considerable difference in obtaining certain privileges accorded to minorities, in some cases including permission to have more than one child, obtaining entrance to university, having access to local political office, special economic assistance, and tax relief programs.  Those who were recognized by the state are always portrayed in the state-sponsored media as happily accepting that objectivized identity, as the caption for a photograph of several minorities in traditional costume pictured in a brochure introducing the "Nationalities Cultural Palace" (Minzu Wenhua Gong) in Beijing reads: "The Happy People of Various Nationalities" (Minzu Gong 1990:12).  Significantly, Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, is bordered on both sides by the slogans: "Long Live the People's Republic of the Chinese People" (Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo Wansui) and "Working Peoples of the World, Unite!" (Shijie renmin gongren tuanjie).  These state-sponsored signs on public buildings and in the media emphasize for the Chinese populace over and over again that China is a multi-ethnic and multi-national state -- a point that is critical to China's representation of itself to itself, and to the international sphere.  China regards itself as a multi-national nation-state that must be reckoned with by other multi-national, "modern" nation-states.

                As multi-national, China portrays itself as democratic, claiming "autonomous regions, prefectures, counties, and villages" based on the Soviet model, but in name only, since the Chinese constitution does not allow true geopolitical secession -- something perhaps the conservative Russian right-wing now wish Stalin would have thought of when he approved a Soviet constitution that allowed for political secession of the (now former) republics.  The myth of democratic representation is critical to China's construction of itself as a modern multi-national state, distinguishing and distancing itself from the ancient fuedal Chinese empires that did not allow for representation.  As Spivak (1990: 105) argues, "One of the gifts of the logic of decolonization is parliamentary democracy."  Given public criticism over China's treatment of Tibet, it is not surpising that Tibetans are often represented as the most willing subjects of Chinese "democratic liberation."  In one state-sponsored pictorial, a Tibetan is portrayed as happily voting, as if they really did control their own destinies.  The caption reads: "Happiness Ballot" (Nationality Pictorial 1985:10).  In another published painting, several minorities are portrayed on the Great Wall, happily proclaiming in the caption: "I love the Great Wall" (Nationality Pictorial 1985: 21, Figure 1 Click here for Link to Figures and Illustrations) -- though the Great Wall was primarily built to keep nomadic peoples out.  It is also interesting to note that in this figure clearly geared for school children, the figures on the Great Wall, with one exception, are clearly Muslim: the men wear Turkic and Hui (Muslim Chinese) Islamic hats, and the woman is veiled.  The odd-man out strangely enough is an African.  Perhaps he is represented on the wall with the other minorities to represent their ethnic solidarity; more seriously, perhaps it is to emphasize their corporate "primitivity" (i.e., promoting the idea that China's minorities are like "primitive" Africans), which is key to understanding the position of the minorities in the Marxist-Maoist evolutionary scheme (see below).

The commodification of minorities is accomplished through the representing, packaging, and selling of their images, artworks, and "costumes" in the many pictorial-gazeteers, such as Nationalities Unite (Minzu Tuanjie) and Nationality Pictorial (Minzu Huabao), as well as in museum displays, such as in the "Nationality Cultural Palace," an enormous exhibition hall and conference center on Chang An Avenue which houses a store selling minority artifacts and costumes as well as temporary exhibitions regarding minority nationalities. It is bordered by the Nationality Hotel and offices of the State Commission for Nationality Affairs, the ministry charged with administrating all dealings with minorities in China. In minority areas there are boutiques, open markets, tourist stores and even "cultural stations" (wenhua zhan, see Schein 1990) where minority goods are collected, displayed, sold, and modeled. Books and sets of photo cards published by the State introduce the 56 nationalities of China and are widely distributed to school children, foreign students and tourists, and carried by officials on trips abroad as gifts to their host institutions. In baseball card fashion, the back of the card has each group's statistics: summarizing the nationality's distinctive history, language, and culture. The nationalities themselves are portrayed on the front by a "representative" iconographic image, generally a picture, of that group, colorful and usually female.

                It is noteworthy that of the 56 nationalities introduced in the state-sponsored English language pictorial Chinese Nationalities (1989), only 3 minorities are represented in the first picture as males.  All 53 others are represented by a beautiful, alluring minority young woman, in a colorful "native" costume.  The minorities are almost always portrayed in natural, romantic settings, surrounded by fauna and flora.  Significantly, however, the Han are represented in the same book by conservative, middle-aged women, in an urban setting, with what is generally thought to resemble "modern," Western-coiffured hair, dressed in Western-style sweaters and modest pants and long-sleeve outfits (see Figure 2 Click here for Link to Figures and Illustrations).  This displays what the authors perhaps considered to be their modernity, and by extension, their normality, civility, and subjectivity.  The authors of Chinese Nationalities chose that photo to represent the Han, not one that bears any resemblance to a "traditional" Chinese society, even though the minorities are always shown in their "traditional" dress.  Instead of being represented as singing and dancing, one photo has the Han women with single infants, in strollers.  The caption reads: "Its good to have only one Child" (Chinese Nationalities 1989: 20).  When minority men are portrayed, and then rarely, they are generally exoticized as strong and virile, practicing strange and humorous customs, or possessing extraordinary physical abilities in sport, work, or the capacity to consume large amounts of alcohol -- much more than a typical Han (Chinese Nationalities 1989: 16).  "To drink like a  Mongol" is a compliment one often hears about one's drinking ability in China.

                The state, through commodifying and representing its minorities as colorful and exotic engages in a project familiar to the representation of colonized peoples by colonial regimes.  By publishing an extraordinary collection of "orientalist" erotic post-cards, the Algerian Malek Alloula (1986) examines French observations of Algeria, and claims to be sending the postcards back "to its sender" (Alloula 1986:5), unveiling the role of the "colonial harem" as both orientalizing the Other and subjectivizing the European Self.  Through state-sponsored representation of the minority Other as exotic much the same is accomplished in China, only in the context of what Michael Hechter (1975) has termed "internal colonialism."[6]

ESSENTIALIZING THE HAN

                The representation of the Han as "normal" and "un-exotic" is critical for understanding the construction of present-day Chinese identity.  Just as Peter Worsley has shown that the discourse of First and Third World's helps to confirm the so-called First World's superiority (see Worsley 1984),[7] the subordination of nationalities in China leads to the clear promotion of the Han to the vanguard of the peoples of the People's Republic.  While research on the rise of Russian Nationalism has been popular in Soviet studies since the 1970s, both by foreign and Russian scholars, as yet no larger studies of the creation of Han nationalism have emerged -- perhaps because it is often assumed that "Han" is generally equal to "Chinese."  Few have questioned how the Han became the ninety-one percent majority of China.  Yet in China, identity papers register one not as "Chinese" (Zhongguo ren), but as Han, Hui, Manchu, or one of 56 stipulated identities.  In China, national identity is not only "imagined," it is stamped on one's passport.

HAN MODERNITY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF PRIMITIVITY

                The Han are frequently represented as somewhere near the "modern" end of a Marxist historical trajectory upon which China's minorities must journey.  Much of this derives from a continued commitment in Chinese social science to the study of minorities as "living fossils" indicating the origins of "primitive communism."  Matrilineality, communal living and property holding, and even extra-marital sexuality among the minorities all become "proofs" of how far the Han have come.  Chinese Marxist social science has been heavily influenced by stage evolutionary theory, particularly as represented in the writings of the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan (see Yang 1992).  In his famous 1878 treatise, Ancient Society, Morgan described in his first chapter, entitled the "Ethnical Period," the development of society from savagery, to barbarism, and then to civilization.  Tong Enzheng, the Sichuanese anthropologist and museologist, was one of the earliest to publicly criticize Chinese anthropology's heavy reliance, almost reverence, for this theory of societal evolution:

Because of the esteem in which both Marx and Engels held [Morgan's] works, and especially because Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, affirmed many of his views, there has been a tendency among scholars to mistakenly equate his positions with specific positions taken by Marx and Engels, positions which themselves were mistakenly equated with the fundamental principle of Marxism. As a result, Morgan's most representative work, Ancient Society has been canonized, and for the past 30 years has been regarded as something not to be tampered with.... therefore, to cast any doubt on it would be to cast doubt on Marxism itself [Tong 1989:182, 184].

In China, minority studies became an avenue for proving Morgan (and it was believed, Marxist thought in general) to be right, over and over again, through the examination of minorities as representatives of earlier forms of society, "living fossils" of savagery and barbarism (Tong 1989: 185). The Han, as representative of "higher" forms of civilization, were clearly more evolved, and were to lead the way for minorities to follow. As if to underline the continued dominance of this theory, Fei Xiaotong (1989), China's most revered social scientist, presented a 1988 Tanner lecture in Hong Kong, entitled: "Plurality and Unity in the Configuration of the Chinese Nationality," which was latter published in the Beijing University Journal. In the article, Fei traced the rise of the Han people from multi-ethnic origins prior to the Qin dynasty, and their almost unilineal descent down to the present day, despite absorbing and being conquered by various foreign tribes and nations.

As soon as it came into being, the Han nationality became a nucleus of concentration. Its people radiated in all directions into the areas around it and, centripetally, absorbed them into their own groups and made them a part of themselves.... As the non-Han rulers' regimes were mostly shortlived, one minority conqueror was soon replaced by another, and eventually all were assimilated into the Han.... But as the national minorities generally are inferior to the Han in the level of culture and technology indispensable for the development of modern industry, they would find it difficult to undertake industrial projects in their own regions, their advantage of natural resources notwithstanding.... Therefore, our principle is for the better developed groups to help the underdeveloped ones by furnishing economic and cultural aids [Fei 1989: 39, 45, 47, 52].[8]

                Fei Xiaotong's understanding of national identity and social development is based on a strong commitment to Stalinist-Leninist nationality policy, based on Morgan's theory of stage development evolutionism, and Engel's prediction of the withering away of class and national identity with the removal of private property.[9]  While there are many nationalities in China, the Han are defined to be in the cultural and technical vanguard, the manifest destiny of all the minorities.  While many younger scholars, like Tong Enzheng, are beginning to challenge the dominance of the Marxist-Stalinist-Morganian paradigm, it still heavily influences the popular discourse regarding nationalism and Han superiority in China, as well as state policy.

                The popularity of this discourse is evidenced by a recent film, Amazing Marriage Customs (Jingu Hunsu Qiguai, literally "Strange modern and ancient marriage customs"), distributed by the Nanhai Film Company.  Filmed entirely in China with government support, the film is a survey of marriage customs throughout China, with a heavy dose of minority practices, especially in Yunnan.  What is noteworthy about the film is not the typical exoticization and eroticization of minorities as described below, but the deliberate structuring of the film along stage evolutionary theory.  At the beginning of the film, we are shown primeval visions of a neolithic past and the emergence of primitive mankind.  The narrator intones:

Getting married is natural, but during long period [sic] in history, men had no idea of 'love' and 'marriage.' From 'childhood' of human history, 3,000,000 B.C. to the end of matrilineal society in 5000 B.C., marriage history transits from group marriage, polygamy, to monogamy stage [sic]. Each stage has its own development, traces of which could be found, only three decades ago in China.... From 3,000,000 B.C. to 1,000,000 B.C. human society began to form. There was nothing called marriage, or it was called primitive promiscuity [yuanshi luanhun de jieduan, lit., "stage of primitive confused marriage"]. From 1,000,000 B.C. to 100,000 B.C. human society divided into blood families [xueyuan jiazu]. Promiscuity existed, called consanguine group marriage. In matrilineal society, group marriage outside tribe [sic] started. In ancient society, nothing called marriage could be found in group marriage. The relationship was casual.[10]

                The film then presents a succession of minorities in various stages of transition from "matrilineality" to "patrilineality," including intimate scenes of marriage and mating rites among the Naxi, Dong, Bouyi, Yao, Hani, Wa (Va), Moso, Zhuang, and Miao (Hmong).  Several of these groups are described as practicing "free love" and very "open to sex."  In one scene, Dong women are shown bathing in the river, only barely covered by their triangular tops, and as the camera focuses on exposed breasts, the narrator states: "The (women) take a bath in the river after work, what a lovely scene.  The scenery is beautiful enough, they make it more fascinating."  In one particularly explicit bathing section featuring Miao (Hmong) women, the camera zooms in on a group of women disrobing completely in the river, and with long lens shots taken through the grass in a voyeuristic fashion, the narrator notes the arrival of several men:

They've asked their lovers to come. What for? To watch! A thorough examination indeed! If he's satisfied, must do something [sic], in a very polite way of course. He present her a red ribbon, in a serious manner. Very happy indeed! The ribbon is a token for engagement. With this token she is somebody's. How romantic!

                Following the "matrilineal" section, the film introduces the Uygur Turkic Muslims of Xinjiang.  "Islam" we are told, "respects patriarchy and husband right."  And "women are subordinate."  The final scene begins with views of the Tiananmen and Forbidden City and, against a background of Han couples dating in the park, the narrator states:

The characteristic of modern marriage is freedom, monogamy, and equality between sexes. The law of marriage stipulates.... No force on either side. Or a third party interfering! Love is most essential in modern marriage. Having love affairs [tan lianai, lit., "speaking about love relations"] is a prelude of marriage. In the countryside of Beijing you may observe this wonderful prelude.

The film then notes that in a "modern large" city it is often difficult to find a mate, and therefore computerized dating is featured as a "modern" solution for finding a mate. The film culminates with a grand mass wedding of 100 couples, dressed in formal Western attire, who were actually married at the Beijing Hotel as a result of successful computerized matchmaking. The narrator concludes: "Monogamy means equality between the sexes. This harmonious union of love, marriage, and sex life notes the result of evolution in history." By the end of the film, the viewer is left with the distinct feeling that the minorities and "primitives" had more fun.[11]

                The minorities play a very important role in China's official vision of history, nationality, and development.  Their "primitivity" contrasts with supposed Han "modernity."  Minorities become a marked category, characterized by sensuality, colorfulness, and exotic custom.  This contrasts with the "unmarked" nature of Han identity.  "Han-ness" for the Chinese connotes civility and modernity, and this is perhaps why more "educated" minorities such as the Manchu and Koreans, are never exoticized as sensual or primitive.[12]  The Han, though they supposedly comprise 91.2 percent of China's population, are rarely described or studied as Han per se, whereas whole research centers and colleges are devoted to the study and teaching of minorities in China.  Anthropologists of Euro-American society have begun to note a similar process in the unmarked majority category of "whiteness".  Majorities, according to Virginia Dominguez's (1986) revealing study of Louisiana Creole identity, become "White, by definition."  It is only the so-called "ethnics" (a term in the Oxford English Dictionary that comes into the English idiom as denoting "heathen"), who are marked by "culture."  Majorities by extension, become denaturalized, homogenized, and essentialized as "same."  This is particularly true, it seems, of Asia, where large blocks of Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans are thought to be "homogeneous."[13]  In the West, it is "whiteness" that is beginning to be problematized in the effort to scrutinize and come to terms with minority/majority discourses.[14]  This has yet to be done with “Han-ness” in China.

EXOTICIZING AND EROTICIZING MINORITIES IN CHINA

                While minorities are no longer portrayed as barbarians in China, and many of the disparaging Chinese ideographs that formerly scripted their names with "dog" and "bug" radicals were changed in 1949, their portrayal in public media is not only much more "colorful" and "cultural" than the Han (thanks perhaps to Stalin, whose four criteria the Chinese State adopted for recognizing a people as a nationality included "culture"), but also much more sensual.  One of the favorite themes is that of minority women, especially the Dai (Thai), Hani, and Li, bathing in the river. 

                The image of Dai (Thai) and other minority women bathing in the river has become a leit-motif for ethnic sensuality in China, and often appears in stylized images throughout China, particularly on large murals in restaurants and public spaces.  School children are often encouraged to make wood-block prints of Thai bathers and other exotic representations of minorities.  One of the most famous incidents regarding the public portrayal of minority nudes in China was that of the Beijing Capital Airport.[15]  Yuan Yunsheng returned from 16 years of exile in Manchuria to be assigned by the State to paint a mural at the Beijing airport in 1979.  He chose for his subject the Dai (Thai) people of Xishuangbana, whom he portrayed in his Water Festival, Song of Life on the background of a floral jungle motif, working, dancing, and, of course, bathing.  However, the bathing mural on one side of the room eventually proved too problematic, and it was covered up in March 1980.  Although the mural was proudly displayed in many official Chinese publications from October 1979 to early 1980, minority cadres from Yunnan began to object that the bathing mural was simply too offensive for public displayal and denigrating to minorities.  It had also been causing a disruption in the dining room where it was exhibited due to the crowds of people who went to view it. 

                While the nudes eventually proved so controversial that the mural was covered up, and I understand that it has since been uncovered, covered, and uncovered again, I would argue that as the murals were commissioned and  approved in the first place -- displayed for nearly half a year -- this indicated that the nude and even erotic portrayal of minority women was officially sanctioned.  Partly as a result of this popular image, many Northern Chinese, like the friends of my taxi driver, have flocked to minority areas to voyeuristically gaze upon this minority "custom," to the extent that there are now few minority women who continue to bathe this way in the more densely populated areas.  From the statement of the driver at the start of the article, and the reported presence of "sex tours" to Yunnan and other minority areas, it can be argued Thai and other minority women in China have become at a popular level, in Camille Paglia's (1990:40) terms, the ultimate "sexual personae" for the "Eastern Eye" of the broader Han Chinese society.  This objectified minority woman exudes sexuality, the very opposite of the Nefertiti-like portrayal of chaste, reserved, and bound women, which Paglia argues became the model for the Western woman, but has also come to denote "modernity" for Chinese women as well, similarly restrained in their "ritual bonds" (Paglia 1990:71).  While it may be argued whether the images of minority women bathers are actually "erotic" or "sensual" in the eye of the beholder, they are clearly images that do not apply to Han women, who are generally represented as covered, conservative, and "civilized" in most state publications.  Nudity is often idealized and romanticized in China as being natural, free, and divorced from the constraints and realities of "modern" life.  Minorities become likely subjects for such romantic yearnings.  Here the audience becomes an important issue, but as in any discussion of public culture this is difficult to assess.  Suffice it to note that in official public arenas, such as airports, hotels, and government offices, images of naked Han women are rarely found.  Representations of unveiled minority women are frequently found in the official public sphere.[16]

                In her perceptive article on the popular David Henry Hwang play, M. Butterfly, Garber (1992: 123) stresses the importance of clothing in making the link between gender representation and transvestism.  The link between clothing and nationality, in which minorities are generally dressed in "costumes," while the majorities merely wear "clothes," is clearly made in Chinese museums, popular culture, and film.  The changing of clothes and the altering of a restricted Han Self is precisely the basis for the 1985 movie, Sacrificed Youth (Qing qun ji).  In this film by the Beijing film studio's woman Director, Zhang Nuanxin, a young Han woman from Beijing is sent down during the Cultural Revolution to the Thai (Dai) minority region of Yunnan in Xishuangbana, near the border of Burma and Thailand, where she is confronted by more "liberated" Thai female customs.  She wishes that she could be as free, and in a moment of rebellious assertion and self-transformation, she exchanges her drab, blue worker's clothes for a Thai Sarong, whereupon she is pronounced "beautiful" by her Thai hosts and girlfriends.  This leads her further on the road to self-criticism and the cultural critique of repressed Han identity.   In this instance of re-tailoring the nation, to borrow a phrase from Parker, et. al. (1992:120), for Duoli, the Han woman, cross-dressing becomes a trans-national political act.[17] 

                In another scene of Sacrificed Youth, Thai women are shown in the classic cultural trope as freely bathing nude in the river -- a rare bit of soft-porn for a 1985 film in China.  The protaganist of the film, observes the Thai women swimming from a distance and wishes that she was not so inhibited by her Han mores that she did not feel she could join them without her swimsuit.  "Later," she declares, "I learned to swim like they did, and I never wore a swimsuit again."  The bathing scene is prefaced by an encounter between a group of Thai young working women and men, who stop to sing antiphonal sexually suggestive songs to each other.  Here too, the sent-down Han observer declares: "I could not join them, which made me feel inhibited and culturally behind."  Admiration for minority sexual freedom and "natural" state of being, becomes the foil by which Han majority and State-supported values are criticized.  Both scenes are introduced and concluded by long shots of verdant, rushing waterfalls, suggesting perhaps that it is the natural sphere, with its cleansing element of water, that transform what the State denigrates for Han as erotic and perhaps "pornographic" into what is natural and unfettered. 

                Pornography in any form is restricted in China as illegal.[18]  This includes any publication, foreign or domestic, that the State censors regard as morally inappropriate for its broader population.  Foreign visitors in the past were regularly searched upon entry for magazines, books, and videos regarded as pornographic, and there are regular police raids upon a burgeoning black market industry of (literally) underground video parlors and markets for erotic literature.[19]  While there has been a profusion of illicit pornographic material in the 1990s and it has become much more widely available in urban areas, it is still illegal and arrests may be made.  In the mid-1980s a wide variety of magazines and books with sexually suggestive titles and scantily clothed men and women proliferated throughout the nation's bookstores and news stands.  Particularly popular was the jian mei ("make, or establish, beauty") genre of athletic magazines and playing cards which portrayed mainly Han Chinese and foreigners lifting weights or posing in skimpy bathing suits.[20]  State censors prohibit depiction of total nudity and these publications were frequently reviewed and confiscated.  Yet despite this severe restriction upon and preoccupation with the sale of nude representations of foreign and Han Chinese women, throughout China, in State-sponsored media as well as foreign and domestic tourist shops, images of nude minority women are publicly displayed, National Geographic-style, in various suggestive poses (see Figure 4 Click here for Link to Figures and Illustrations).  Not only are nude representations of minorities displayed in galleries and public spaces like the Beijing Capitol Airport (see below), but they are readily available for sale in hotel tourist boutiques and minority crafts shops, such as the Central Institute for Nationalities Minority Handicrafts Store and the Nationalities Cultural Palace.

                Scholars of traditional China are quite familiar with the long and wide-spread tradition of erotic art and literature, which had little to do with minorities.  In Sex in China, the Chinese "sexologist," Ruan Fangfu (1991:2), notes that the earliest sex manuals came from China, where one could find the classic sexological text dated in 168 B.C., He Yin Yang Fang (Methods of Intercourse between Yin and Yang), as well as the pre-Tang Important Methods of the Jade Chamber, Book of the Mysterious Penetrating Master, and other classical texts which now are found in comic book form through Taiwan and Southeast Asia, but are still restricted in China.[21]  After surveying this abundant traditional literature, Ruan (1991: 29) groups them in three categories: descriptions of the mystical benefits of sexual intercourse; the health benefits of intercourse if following certain theories and texts; and the inherent pleasurability of sex.  The Dutch sinologist, Robert Van Gulik, collected hundreds of Chinese erotic sex manuals that proliferated in the late Qing, and popular classics, like Dream of Red Chambers and On the Water Margins, are extremely explicit and rarely published in their unabridged forms.[22] 

                If erotic images and public portrayals of Han Chinese sexuality are an acknowledged aspect of everyday life in traditional China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, why have they been so absent, so repressed, in the China mainland since 1949?  George Mosse's (1985) argument linking totalitarianism and sexuality might have some bearing here.  Mosse argues that unlicensed sexuality represents a threat to totalizing states.  If Foucault (1980:24) is correct that the "policing of sex" is an important component in maintaining the unmitigated power of the central state, then China's repressive prudishness is perhaps the best example of this endeavor.  The policing of sex tends to also roughly coincide with radical leftist authoritarian campaigns in China, e.g., the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, the 1984 Spiritual Pollution campaign, and the more recent post-Tiananmen 1989-90 Six Evils campaign, in which public sexuality, pornography, and prostitution were all condemned as "feudalist" and thought to be an insidious part of the "democratic" or liberal movements that led to the crack downs.  In July 1990, the Vice President of China's Supreme People's Court, Lin Zhu, issued a new decree that traffickers in prostitution and for pornography would be subject to the death penalty.[23]  China is one of the few non-Islamic nations where prostitutes, pimps, and purveyors of pornography are routinely rounded up, imprisoned, and even, perhaps, executed under the "hoodlum offenses" statute.[24]  Slightly explicit films such as Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum, and more recent, Ju Dou, all proposed, approved, funded, and produced by the state during more liberal periods, are routinely banned once more radical political winds prevail.[25]   In other studies, Ardener (1987: 114) and Mayer (1975: 260) have shown how "prudery" serves to reinforce, and even invent, social hierarchies.  In China, enforced prudishness and controlled fertility among the Han, as opposed to represented minority sensuality, serves the state's national project of emphasizing Han solidarity, civility, and modernity.

                Sex becomes one of the most public of private contested political spaces in China.  In a state that regularly monitors the monthly menses of its women workers, engages in Malthusian birth-planning programs, and strictly regulates the age at which one can marry (21 for women, 22 for men), it is not surprising that sexuality has become highly politicized.  Elsewhere, I have discussed the role that liberated sexuality played in the Tiananmen Square student protest, particularly in the student's public attempt to wrest political control of their bodies away from the state (Gladney 1990c).  Here, I am arguing that it is the repression and control of sexuality among the Han, and its open representation among the minorities, which demonstrate the important role eroticization of the engendered minority Other plays in the Han construction of Self. 

PAINTING MINORITIES: THE INVENTION OF THE YUNNAN SCHOOL

                In the early 1980s, several northern Han painters were assigned to Southern China to paint minorities and other "appropriate" subjects, leading to what has since been called the "Yunnan School" (Yunnan Huapai) of modern Chinese painting.  The Yunnan School has been regarded as one of the first distinct "schools" to emerge in contemporary Chinese art and has had a tremendous influence on the current generation of artists in China.  In the early 1980s, Jiang Tiefang, Ting Shao Kuang, and He Neng became known in China for challenging accepted norms of painting, particularly including nudes with accentuated breasts in brilliant colors.   This led, according to Joan Lebold Cohen, noted critic and dealer of Chinese art, to the founding of the "Yunnan School of Heavy Oil Painting in 1982" (Cohen 1988).  It is significant that Ting Shao Kuang, one of the most prominent and successful members of the "school" has stated repeatedly that there is no such organized "school", rather his and other similar work represents a style of art that is new in its subject matter (mainly minorities), and style (use of heavy oil and bright colors in abstract forms).  In a 11 July 1992 taping interview with Ting Shao Kuang by the Los Angeles Chinese television station, Channel 18, Ting stated: "There is no such thing as the Yunnan Art School.  We are all different artists from China trying to revolutionize the repressed mainland Chinese painting through the use of minority subjects, sexuality, and heavy oil colors, in often Western-influenced styles."  It is revealing that Ting should now say this, since one of his well-known paintings is entitled: "Dawn of the Yunnan Art School" (Ting 1990: 11), and he has become one of the wealthiest and successful representatives of the Yunnan Art School style.  The "Yunnan School" may very well exist only in the West, where it has met with financial tremendous success.   Joan Cohen (1988), claiming that the school represents a "renaissance" in Chinese painting, suggests that the most significant event in the development of the Yunnan school was when He Neng, Jiang Tiefang, and Liu Shaohui were commissioned to produce paintings for a documentary film project, "featuring the costumes, habits and environment of the various minority peoples living in Yunnan" (Cohen 1988: 5).  By traveling to the minority areas, Cohen explains, the northern Han artists found that they could express many of their artistic interests through the color and style of minority representation. 

                Liu Bingjiang's Nude, shown at the Oil Painting Research Association Exhibition in Beijing 1979, is clearly a minority representation, indicative of early Yunnan School tendencies.  On a colorful background, a dark-skinned female nude is realistically portrayed kneeling with her hands on the ground in a submissive posture, wearing nothing but her jewelry.  Given the tapestry background, her jewelry, and most importantly, the posture, the painting is one of the earliest works in the Yunnan School style.  According to Cohen (1987:46), her kneeling position is not within the officially sanctioned "academic painting repertoire" and thus suggests to Cohen a "South Asian" influence.  It is important to note that the bracelets she wears clearly resemble shackles, and combined with the posture, the painting evokes erotic subservience and submission.

                Unlike abstract Han figure paintings, it has been and still is officially acceptable to vividly and realistically paint, exhibit, and sell minority nude artwork.   In another example, Chen Zhangpeng's oil of a nude is appropriately titled, Innocence.  Reflecting Western influence, especially Gauguin, Picasso, and even Andrew Wyeth, this painting situates the exoticized minority subject in the both the past and the present.  Joan Cohen's caption explains: "Chen's sketchy study of a nude kneeling next to a tiger expresses the ancient Chinese idea that the untrammeled nature of the wild creature is innocent.  Likewise, primitive people, uncorrupted by civilization, are innocent, a concept similar to Rousseau's romantic notion of the noble savage" (Cohen 1987:65).

                The "innocence" of minorities in China contrasts well with representations of Han Chinese women as the modern workers of the industrialized nation, who Chairman Mao once declared, "Hold up half the sky."  The notion that the minorities represent the beautiful "noble savage," unsullied by Chinese political machinations and the degradations of modern Chinese society is an important theme for China's modern artists.  It may very well represent a Gauguinesque romanticization of the "savage" in contrast to the modern alienation of Chinese urban life.  It may also be viewed as a cultural critique, or rejection, of modern Han China; an accepted venue for criticizing the depersonalizing, totalitarian state.

                In an interview with the Yunnan painter, Xiao Jia-he, a former student of Jiang Tiefang, and himself the son of an intermarriage between a Han and Jingpo, he stated that the reason he liked to paint minorities was, "They are pure and beautiful.  It makes me feel peaceful when I paint them."  When I asked him why seven of the ten paintings in his exhibition with such titles as Ancient Girl, Tara's Toilette, Summer Solstice, Blossoms, Morning Prayers, and Homage at the Spring, portrayed minority women in kneeling, submissive poses, with voluptuous scantily-clothed figures, he said:  "Because I like the human body, and I think this portrays the essence of female beauty.  Its also difficult to capture an entire woman's body in a small painting if she is standing" (Personal interview, 30 July 1991).  It is significant that in later conversations, Xiao Jia-he explained that once he came to the States, he was urged by American gallery owners and agents, particularly the Allen H. Fingerhut Group who strongly promote most of the Yunnan Art School paintings (and published Cohen's 1988 book on the "Yunnan School"), to increase his use of motifs and colors popularized by the Yunnan Art School, since it sold well in the U.S.  "They told me to use more pastel, gold, and bright colors; to paint beautiful, large-breasted women in elongated form, and to use 'ethnic' clothing.  I even included a lot of African clothing because of my interest in Africa.  I tried to make my art look more erotic (xing aide) but not pornographic (se qing)" (personal interview, 30 July 1991).  Though most of his artwork was popularly received, comments from viewers at one of his exhibits critical of his representation of minority women caused him to reevaluate the Yunnan Art School style.  "I have since rejected the Yunnan Art School," he told me in a later interview (29 February 1992), "They are only interested in making money, repeating the same old saleable paintings.  It is too repetitious.  It is not art....I refuse to jeopardize my artistic career just to make money."[26]

                By objectifying minority women as colorful, exotic, and erotic, robbing them of their individuality, and subjectivity, these Chinese artists are engaging in an anthropological enterprise well established by Lewis Henry Morgan, Franz Boas and other early American Historicists who posited a "common psyche" share by all primitives.  Though Boas and later anthropologists stressed individual contributions to the construction of cultural artifacts, and through painstaking ethnographic work brought to light the individual contributions of many "primitive artists," his commitment to the notion of a common cultural determinism and psyche in artistic construction nevertheless contributed to the objectification of the minority Other.  In his path-breaking 1927 study of Primitive Art, Boas revealingly wrote: "The same motive recurs over and over again in the tales of primitive people, so that a large mass of material collected from the same tribe is liable to be very monotonous, and after a certain point has been reached only new variants of old themes are obtained" (Boas 1927 [1955]: 330).  It is precisely the repetitive nature of "primitive" art construed as generic, unsigned, and anonymous, that makes it so attractive to the "modern" collector: Since primitives are all similar in their artistic representations, their artwork and thought patterns homogenized by a uniform culture, why should one piece of art need a signature?  According to Sally Price, it is their anonymity and timelessness that makes primitive art so attractive to the time-bound, modern individual: "In the Western understanding of things, a work originating outside of the Great Traditions must have been produced by an unnamed figure who represents his community and whose craftsmanship respects the dictates of its age-old traditions" (Price 1989:56).

                Significantly, the use of "traditional" minority art, colors, and styles may be said to have paved the way for the public reintroduction of the Han nude in China, but only in a very highly stylized, Picasso-like form.  Western motifs, styles, and color, with minority subjects, become a thinly veiled means of challenging traditional Chinese artistic conventions.  Han female nudes, when they are officially and publicly represented at all, are generally in highly stylized forms, often  in the Picasso genre, as a famous oil, Daughter of the Sea, by Jiang Tiefeng demonstrates.  On a brochure featuring a print of Jiang's 1988 "Playing Water," there is an eroticized and Picassoesque portrayal of the Yunnan Thai water-festival, including black sensuous dancing figures, with large breasts and nipples accentuated in bright red colors (see Figure 6  Click here for Link to Figures and Illustrations).  The back side of the promotional brochure reads:

Jiang Tie-Feng is the most influential contemporary artist of the People's Republic of China. His "Yunnan School" represents the first new Chinese art movement in 700 years, and the rebirth of artistic traditions that have been repressed since the Ming Dynasty [Fingerhut Group Publishers, painting brochure, 1992].

                The Picassoesque portrayal of Han women and the abstract representations of the minority women has become so popular now in the West that not only have Chinese artists like Jiang Tiefang, He Neng and Ting Shao Kuang become extraordinarily successful and wealthy, purchasing houses in Bel Air and Beverly Hills, but they have spawned a whole lucrative industry now sweeping the upscale art industry in China and abroad.  After a visit to a Shanghai exhibition of his work in Spring 1992, Ting told me that he was literally mobbed by his fans.  "If I had painted Han that way when I was in China before, they probably would have arrested me.  Now I am a hero" (personal interview, 11 July 1992).

                The Austin Galleries is a series of chic art dealerships with galleries in Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, Carmel, and Laguna Beach.  At the well-appointed Chicago gallery, I was attracted in November 1991 by the large Yunnan school painting of a minority dancer prominently displayed in the glass case fronting onto Michigan Avenue.  Not only were there several Yunnan School-style paintings by a Han Chinese immigrant, Wu Jian, but there were similar versions by a certain artist, Wong Shue, who turned out to be originally from Jamaica.  The gallery consultant, Bella Cipkin, explained that the genre is the most popular selling artwork in the gallery, with large paintings selling for $8-10,000, and many artists are beginning to copy the flowing, colorful style.  She stated that it was the most popular art form to come along in years and sold the fastest in all seven of the Austin Galleries.  Cipkin noted: "The mauve colors and liberating minority art in its breathtaking sensuality goes well with the furnishings in professional's homes."  She also went on to suggest that one of the reasons the art might becoming more popular in the U.S. was because it represented minority art: "What with the problems in Tibet and all, Americans want to support the ethnic people in China all they can."  It is important to note here, of course, that very little of the Yunnan School art is produced by minorities themselves.

                "Minorities film" has followed oil painting in reforming the accepted norms of Chinese taste.  Paul Clark (1987a:20), noted critic of Chinese film, argues that it is the "propensity of minorities film to explore normally avoided subjects" that made them so successful and influential.  In a Channel Four documentary on "New Chinese Cinema," Wu Tianming, the director of the now famous Xi'an Film Studio, where many of the influential "fifth generation" filmmakers were working (including Zhang Yimou, Tian Zhuangzhuang, and Chen Kaige), quoted a Chinese proverb: "When there's no tiger on the mountain, the monkey is king," indicating that it is distance from the centers of power such as Beijing and Shanghai which allowed his studio the freedom for exploration.  In the Channel Four documentary, the young director of the new, more realistic minority films, On the Hunting Ground (1985), and Horsethief (1986), Tian Zhuangzhuang, explained why he chose to film in minority areas:

I had several reasons. For one, Beijing Film Studios wouldn't let us direct when we were assigned there.... On the Hunting Ground and Horsethief may deal with regional minorities [lit: minority nationalities], but they're actually about the fate of the whole Chinese nation [New Chinese Cinema 1988].

                According to Paul Clark in his analysis of Chinese Cinema, it is the search for a "national style" (minzu fengge) that was lacking among the Han which director's found among minorities.  "Paradoxically, one of the most effective ways to make films with `Chinese' style was to go to the most `foreign' cultural areas in the nation (Clark 1987b:101).  The search for a national identity in China, apparently became more readily understood in opposition and contrast to minority cultures thought to be more vibrant and easily objectified than that of the amorphous, invented Han Chinese Self.  Through the representation of minorities as sensual, liberated, and colorful, Chinese filmakers and artists found a "metaphorical resource" (James Hevia, personal communication): They were able to introduce taboo and often illegal art into the Chinese cultural mainstream.  These artistic motifs then eventually influenced the broader Han majority accepted cultural repertoire of artistic convention, leading to the establishment of a "national" style and identity.

                Through the national medium of officially approved film, Han national identity becomes clearly objectified.  In Zhang Nuanxin's Sacrificed Youth, there are two scenes where there is an explicit rejection of sensual involvement by the female protagonist, precisely because she is a "Han."  In the first instance, Duoli, the Beijing Han youth sent down to the countryside, is being cajoled while gathering firewood in the forest by her Thai co-workers about a ride in an ox-cart she received home from another Beijing male whom she had met in the market place.   When she protests that there is nothing between them, her Thai co-workers chide, "Don't be afraid to tell us!"  She replies: "We are Hans you know, we don't start love affairs that young" [literal translation: "We are Han people, we don't talk about love that early"].[27]

                In the second instance, she is sitting alone with the very same Han youth late at night in the dark, romantic forest, listening to the enchanting music of a distant Thai celebration. 

                Duoli: What are they singing?

                Male friend: Can't you tell? "My lover's hands are tender and fair"

                Duoli: Don't they find it embarrassing?

                M: Why should they? Isn't it better to speak out one's feelings?  Unlike we Hans, always beating around the bush.

                D: Speak out yourself then, no one tries to stop you.

                M: But can you?

                D: Why not?

                H: Ok.  What's on your mind now?

                D: I...I find... its getting cold.  Let's go home.

                H: Is that all?

                D: Yes. 

                H: [while gazing at her in her sarong].  You are a Han from head to toe.  [Literal: No matter what you say, you still are a Han ].

In an interview with Zhang Nuanxin, the female director of Sacrificed Youth, published in Camera Obscura, Zhang states that she made the film in order to encourage the expression of Han female subjectivity and beauty:

After I read the original short story by Zhang Manling, I felt there were many things in it that I'd experienced myself. I'd been down in the countryside, too. I'd felt that the older and less attractive clothes were, [sic] the better. When we were very young, we couldn't make ourselves attractive, nor could we express love [Zhang Nuanxin 1989:21].

                Indeed, it is the need for self-discovery, awareness, and expression that Chris Berry (1991: 6) has argued pervades much of "Women's Cinema" in China.  Yet it is only by going to minority areas and contrasting the repressed, bounded Han female self to the constructed minority Other as unrestrained and beautiful that these goals can be explored on the screen.  This goes against Julia Kristeva's utopian construction of the position of women in Confucianized Chinese society, and though it is framed as a Western critique, I agree with Rey Chow that it nevertheless idealizes the position of women in China to an inexcusable degree.

                There are important parallels here to the National Geographic tradition of the sexual portrayal of the Other for a conservative readership which generally regards such portrayals of its "own" as pornographic.[28]  Clearly, in both cases there is a hierarchy of self: voyeurism of the Other is permissible when they are regarded as less familiar, less civilized, than one's own.  As the Chinese film critic Paul Clark has argued in an East-West Film Journal article, "Ethnic minorities in Chinese Films: Cinema and the Exotic," film in China from the beginning was regarded as a foreign medium, a venue for viewing the exotic and strange.  When China became closed to the outside world after 1949, minorities for the first time took the place of foreigners as subjects of the exotic.  As Clark (1987a:15-16) explains: "Film audiences could travel to `foreign' lands without crossing the nation's borders." 

                But I would go farther than Clark's emphasis on fascination with the exotic.  In China there is more to it than the typical National Geographic-style romanticization of the primitive, which one might argue is found in almost any society.  Here, the State is intimately tied to, in control of, and provides funding for the politicized process of portraying the Other.  In Said's (1978) terms, the state has turned its gaze upon the internal other, engaging in a formalized, commodified oriental orientalism, that may be focused on the minorities but represents a long tradition of fascination with the outsider in Chinese society.[29]  The real issue here is why the state should choose to explicitly support such an enterprise.  I argue that the politics of this representation of minority Other is both an extension of power-relation practices in the traditional Chinese state, as well as a product of China's rise as a nation-state.

CONTESTING AND COOPTING OTHERNESS: EROTICIZING (EVEN) THE MUSLIMS

                While minorities appear to have had little choice in the way they have been exoticized in the media, and Han must also conform to their de-exoticized essentialization, there have been several attempts at contesting that restricted space.  Not only did the student democracy movement emphasize the sensual, the unique, and the individual, but recent films such as River Elegy (He Shang), Sacrificed Youth, Red Sorghum, and Ju Dou all represent various popular levels of contestation (see Wang 1989:32).  Minorities have also attempted to voice their objections.  The covering up of the nude bathing portion of Yuan Yunsheng's Beijing Capitol Airport painting was partly due to complaints from Yunnan minority cadres.[30]  In Urumqi, Xinjiang, a large group of Uygur Muslim artists rallied in protest in 1987 over an exhibition at the Overseas Chinese Hotel of portrayals of Uygurs and other Central Asians by Han artists that they claimed denigrated them as either too humorous or sensual.  Paintings primarily by Han artists portrayed the Uygurs singing, dancing, riding donkeys and balancing watermelons on their heads.  Worse yet, many paintings portrayed Uygur women in revealing skirts engaged in erotic dances, such as Ting Shao Kuang's Silk Road, which portrays a bare-breasted minority women on a background of deserts and camel caravans.  For many Uygur, these representations are particularly offensive, as they regard themselves as conservative Muslims. 

                While one might be prepared to allow for the fact that Southwestern minorities may have more "open" sexual practices than the Han in China today, they are not the only minorities portrayed as sensual and erotic.  While the Thai women did traditionally bathe in the nude (though many may fear to now), and the Nuoso as a matrilineal society may very well have allowed extra-marital sexual practice at the matrilocal residence, the Uygurs and other Muslim peoples can hardly be said to be more publicly erotic or sensual than the Han in their traditional culture (see Gladney 1990b).  Uygur women are widely known throughout China to traditionally cover themselves with purdah-like head scarves and wraps that envelope their entire faces and hair (see Figure 5  Click here for Link to Figures and Illustrations).  Unlike the Middle East purdah where eyes and sometimes faces are exposed, Uygur veils cover the entire face.  As Muslims, they are generally much more conservative than Han Chinese in the public sexual sphere.  Despite their protestations, these representations continue, underscoring the extraordinary contrast between the Han and minority spectacle in China. 

                Like many tourist hotels, The Sheng Tang ("Ascendant Tang") Hotel in northeast Beijing has a tile mural of a Tang dynasty minority dancer, with accentuated nude breasts, in the center of its main dining hall.  On the opposite walls, erotic stylized murals from the Dunhuang Buddhist grottoes grace the dining room.  Like many public places in China, the sensual "Flying Absarases" are an officially sanctioned art subject (Cohen 1987: 17-20).  I once asked a group of Han scholars viewing this mural if they thought the dancers were minorities or Han, and they all said minorities, even though the theme is from the Buddhist caves of Dunhuang, supposedly the cradle of Chinese Buddhist religious tradition.  While Buddhism became transformed into a "Chinese" religion, its sensual representation in art and absarases have apparently retained the attributess of foreigners and minorities, not Han.

                In the Chinese tourist pictorial, A Picture Album of Turpan Landscape and Custom (1985:16), a Han artist, Gu Shengyue, portrays the sensual images of the Dunhuang caves, with floating female absarases and their accentuated breasts, hovering above him, almost as if to say:  "Though these Uygur claim to be Muslim, we know what they are really thinking about when they sing and dance."  They have become yet another landscape in the national repertoire of China.  In another portrait from the same pictorial, erotic Buddhist figures are portrayed hovering above ecstatic Uygur dancers (Picture Album 1985:18).  Central Asian dance and artistic displayal come to represent a metaphor of sensuality and eroticism for Han China, even though the region is now dominated by Muslims.

                Extremely realistic is the figure painting Nude with Apples, by Tang Muli (in Cohen 1987:101), a Han artist who has traveled widely abroad.  With a Central Asian hat, sitting upon a Xinjiang carpet, and eating apples, often produced in China's dry, cold Northwest, the Realist painting of a complete frontal nude is clearly meant to portray a Central Asian minority, though the model may very well be Han.  Perhaps Tang Muli knew that a Han woman could never be portrayed so vividly and realistically.  Yet, this is despite the fact that Muslims are the most conservative of all peoples in China. 

                The last painting of eroticized Muslims I will note is also the most startling: Zhao Yixiong's 1979 oil, Awakening of Tarim (Figure 3  Click here for Link to Figures and Illustrations).  Of this controversial painting, Cohen (1987:54) writes: "Tarim symbolizes the beginnings of modernization on the edges of the great Takla Makan, China's most terrible desert.  She awakens on a vibrant patchwork of Silk Road images: camels, mosques, oil derricks, Buddhist deities, oases, grapes, gourds, and pomegranates."  While paintings of Uygur and other Muslims by Han artists such as Huang Zhou have had a long history in China, they were never so eroticizied as Zhao Yixiong's.  His painting makes clear the dramatic linkage between nationality, women, and modernity:  By depicting his nude Uygur female subject as "awakening" from the midst of her traditional life to a "modern" world filled with oil rigs, airplanes, and nuclear installations, Zhao Yixiong perhaps suggests that it is only in throwing off the traditional minority culture of Islam, with its covered women, mosques, and caravans, that Tarim the woman and the region, can be modernized.  With camel caravans and mosque minaret literally emerging from between her thighs, this painting would, of course, be extremely offensive to Uygurs.  Nevertheless, it was commissioned to be painted by Zhao Yixiong, who, as a painter for the Chinese Museum of Chinese History and Revolution, is employed by the state to represent the Other in strikingly similar Orientalist fashion as that of Alloula's Colonial Harem.  

                Cohen informs us that Zhao's painting was not allowed to be exhibited by the Chinese authorities.  One might assume this was due to its explicit, erotic nature.  Yet, according to Cohen (1987: 54), "The [Oil Painting Research Association] excluded it because of the green streak on the woman's buttocks -- an Expressionist gesture that was apparently thought to be offensive."  Extraordinarily, expressionistic representation was rejected as proper for minority portraiture, favoring explicit realism.  By contrast, realistic representation of the Han female body has been heavily restricted by the Chinese State.  Just as the subordination of Chinese women reifies the elevated position of men, so the exoticization of minorities essentializes the imagined identity of the Han and reaffirms Han feelings of superiority.  Public, state-sponsored minority representation as both more sensual and more primitive than the Han supports the state's agenda: With the proper educational and economic progress they will eventually attain the modernity that the Han have attained, and enter into the same civilized restrictions under the authority of the state as vanguard.  Symbolic tribute by minorities becomes an important link with China's past, establishing their own feudal pasts, and a signal of who will lead the future.  It also legitimates the state's authority to enforce homogeneity, morality, and "civility" among the nearly 92 percent Han majority, while difference is "temporarily" tolerated among the "backward" minorities.  In a socialist society that claims to be post-Confucian, gender and ethnic hierarchies continue to be articulated in a discourse of morality -- the proper ordering of the social universe.  It is precisely resistance to that order which makes the film Ju Dou so controversial. 

                The recent furor over the nominating of the film, Ju Dou, for an academy award was primarily due to its offensiveness to Chinese moral and hierarchical sensibilities, according to the press (WuDunn 1991:B1).  Not surprisingly, Ju Dou was made by a product of the Xi'an film studio, director Zhang Yimou, who starred in Wu Tianming's iconoclastic film, Old Well.  Ju Dou, a young bride, is physically abused for not being able to become pregnant by her elderly, probably impotent, husband.  She is beaten repeatedly, tied, and even pinned down by a horse-saddle on which her elderly husband sits while he sexually abuses her, in what may probably be China's first, and perhaps last, bondage-style film.  In order to save herself (the old man had already beaten to death two previous wives), she seduces his adopted son, and the resulting story of their infidelities is what the Chinese find most offensive.   Just as Ju Dou is expected to accept her fate, even at the point of death, so are Han Chinese women required to restrict their sexuality in the services of the state.   Similarly, minority women are allowed to be portrayed erotically because that too serves the interests of the regime.  This may also be a contributing factor in the State's general exemption of most minorities from the birth-planning program.[31]  Minority women are encouraged to be fecund, their bodies are less controllable than that of the ritually bound Han women.  Perhaps one metaphorical reason the State exempts most minorities from birth-planning is to preserve the notion that minorities represent uncontrolled sensuality, fertility and re-productivity; Han represent controlled, civilized, productivity.  Yet it is primarily not women's bodies that are at issue, it is the state's (and by extension, the patriarchal male's) control of them.

                In a fascinating parallel to the "Thai-bathers" motif pervading much of minority art, there is an critical moment in Ju Dou in which Yang Tianqing, the adopted son, voyeuristically observes Ju Dou bathing through a hole in the washroom wall.  This scene bears striking resemblance to the voyeurism of the Miao men and film viewers of Miao women bathers in the Amazing Marriage Customs film described above.   Note that in each case it is water and bathing that leads to the voyeuristic gaze and the construction of the sexual object.  As he enlarges the hole for a better view, she discovers him and covers the hole with straw from the inside of the washroom.  Later, she once again finds that he has removed the straw from the inside for an unobstructed view.  This time, however, in a radical departure from traditional Chinese female modesty (but more like the Miao and Thai bathers), she allows him to view her naked body, savagely marked by his adopted father's beatings.  The shock engendered by her beautiful but grotesquely bruised body both compels and humiliates the viewer.  Similarly, Han voyeurism of minority women, and the submission of Han women to the patriarchal social order, is what the state, for its own self-perpetuating reasons, considers proper in China. 

                Zhang Yimou's reversal of those roles in his film Ju Dou, delegitimates the state's authority to objectivize the Other, both woman and minority, and this may be an important factor in the Chinese attempt to prevent its nomination for an academy award.  By turning her gaze directly back on the adopted son, Ju Dou both humiliates him and establishes her subjectivity, resisting his use of her as an object of sexual desire.  By taking her affairs into her own hands, and later seducing him, she establishes her own identity and asserts individuality. 

                Minorities, too, by allowing the objectivizing gaze of the state-sponsored media, establish their identity and right to a voice in their own affairs, appropriating and turning whenever possible these objectivizing moves to their own benefit.  In this way, the maintenance and assertion of minority "culture", no matter how exoticized or contrived, may be seen as a form of resistance.  By participating in their "training" by the Han Chinese state, supporting minority art and culture, they often find ways to promote values that may be contrary to the state's modernizing program.  These glimpses of a more naturalized, colorful, liberated and sensual lifestyle, that urban Han Chinese now find so alien to their own living situations, contributes to their popularity as colonized and gendered subjects (see Chatterjee 1989: 624).  It also might explain why minorities and their exoticized portrayal in the Yunnan Art School are extremely popular in the West, where many long for a similar naturalized lifestyle, often as a way of critiquing China's image as a totalitarian homogenizing state.  Successful marketization of these images in the global capitalist economy perpetuates minority/majority discourses in China and abroad.  The appearance within and without China of books, courses, and institutions devoted to the study of "China's Minorities" reflects this homogenization: the pretense that one could draw a clear line between the minorities and the rest of "Han" China.  This article has argued otherwise, attempting to directly link minority with majority discourses in the public sphere.   In China and elsewhere, constructing minority identities is directly related to that of the majority.  As Han-ness is related to "whiteness," so the majority in China is invented as an un-marked category, courtesy of a subjugated, stygmatized, and identified minority. 

                Though alienated moderns may wax nostalgic over exoticized representations of imagined pasts, the belated arrival in China of Hobsbawm's (1991: 163) universalized "nationality principle" coupled with the government's expressed desire to be reckoned as a "modern nation-state" indicates that the identification, and exploitation, of minorities for tourist dolars and nationalization programs will mean their continued stygmatization as exoticized subjects -- a stygmata that they may only infrequently turn to their own benefit.  Minority co-optation of these motifs may help increase their own autonomy, turning the tables of representation.  Yet these attempts at subjectivity and independence will always be threatening to any totalizing, objectivizing state that seeks homogeneity of the majority at the expense of the minority.  It is no surprise that Ju Dou was banned and minorities are encouraged to do little more than sing and dance in the People’s Republic.

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