AHC: Independent Zhuang state

The Zhuang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuang_people are by far the largest "national minority" (i.e., non-Han group) in China. Yet there seems to be little separatism among them, and some people have even argued that Zhuang nationality was artificially created by the Chinese Communist Party. It's a bit more complicated than that, of course; see Katherine Palmer Kaup, *Creating the Zhuang: Ethnic Politics in China*:

"Despite these warnings, the Zhuang nationality *has* been largely ignored both in the West and within China itself. Its very existence as a nationality is even frequently denied. Bai Zongxi, one of the leaders of the Guangxi Clique, which ruled Guangxi during the Nationalist era, reportedly accused the Communist Party of creating an artificial minority grouping when it recognized the Zhuang. Bai claimed that there were no differences between the "so-called Zhuang" and the Han majority. Bai's commentary is particularly significant given that he was himself a member of a Muslim minority and was an advocate of minority rights. Even segments within the Zhuang population itself assert that the Zhuang are no different from the Han. In the West, Zhuang have been casually dismissed by scholars as "Sinified" and fully integrated into the Han majority. No major study has been conducted on the Zhuang in English in any field. Early Western studies that tangentially referred to the Zhuang concluded that they were indistinguishable from the majority Han and "as a minority group actually do not pose any minority problem for the Chinese administration."

"Yet today Zhuang peasants, intellectuals, workers, and cadres proudly assert their membership in an ancient and culturally rich minority group. Nearly two millennia of discriminatory policies against the Zhuang, these nationals contend, have pushed the Zhuang into geographically hostile regions, where they live in depressed economic conditions relative to their Han counterparts. Zhuang activists demand the right to govern their own internal affairs and to receive compensation for what they see as centuries of exploitation by the Han, Mongol, and Manchu Imperial rulers. Educational levels among the Zhuang are significantly lower than the nationwide average, and they remain locked in agricultural subsistence economies while their Han neighbors rush to seize the advantages of a rapidly developing market economy. Zhuang intellectuals adamantly demand the promotion of the Zhuang written script throughout Zhuang territory in an effort to "regain" control of Zhuang history, which they claim has been expropriated by Han historiography. Who are these mysterious Zhuang? Do they, in fact, constitute a "unique nationality, with a rich ancient history and culture," as the CCP and Zhuang activists claim? Or are they simply, as one Western scholar has suggested, a purely artificial recent construct of the Communist Party?..." https://books.google.com/books?id=HSKlq1SWwwAC&pg=PA3

For a review of Kaup's book, see http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.2307/3182334

"This is the first book that I know of in English on the Zhuang. That says a lot. There are 16 million Zhuang, living mostly in Guangxi and Yunnan, which makes them China's largest national minority (shaoshu minzu), or non-Han ethnic group. There are more Zhuang than there are Belgians or Swiss or Cambodians. But until now, despite copious ethnographic, historical and folkloric work published in books and journals in China, no foreign scholar has written a full-length book about them.

"There is a reason for this neglect. As Kaup points out, foreign authors have assumed that the Zhuang were simply a group of Chinese peasants, formerly ethnically distinct, but fully "Sinicized" or "Hanified" by the 20th century, and that the Zhuang as a nationality or minzu was created by the Chinese Communist Party for political reasons. According to this argument, there is little to study.

"In this interesting and informative book, however, Kaup demonstrates that this view was only half right. It is true, as she shows, that the Zhuang minzu was created by the Party in order to facilitate the administration of western Guangxi and eastern Yunnan. But the people out of whom the Zhuang were created were far from fully acculturated to local Han Chinese ways. In 1949 only a minority of these people spoke Chinese, and they were distinct from the Han in many matters of custom and costume.

"What these non-Han people did not possess in the mid-20th century, says Kaup, was any kind of common language or culture, or any kind of group consciousness that would make them a cohesive ethnic group. They spoke a variety of related but mutually unintelligible languages, and referred to themselves and to each other by a variety of local ethnonyms. Very few people called themselves Zhuang, and no-one in China thought of a collectivity of several million people by that name. Fifty years later, however, all this has changed, and the Zhuang can legitimately be called an ethnic group with an ethnic consciousness and identity. This identity was given to the Zhuang by the Chinese Communists..."

In view of all this, is there any way to have an indpendent Zhuang state--especially given that the Zhuang constitute only about one-third of the population of the Zhuang Autonomous Region? Unless the PRC were to totally break up in civil war, there is only one way I can think of--have the Japanese win the Second Sino-Japanese War, and have them, as a measure to weaken China, "create" a Zhuang nationality (as the PRC later did) and even an independent Zhuang state (which obviously the PRC did not). After all, Manchukuo was--from an ethnic viewpoint--just as artificial, given the assimilation of the Manchus to the Han...
 
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BTW, the Nung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nùng_people and Tay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_people
languages of northern Vietnam are closely related to southern Zhuang. So perhaps the Japanese-created "Zhuang state" includes parts of both China and Vietnam. Or the French in the late nineteenth century might extend Vietnam's boundaries into southern China, and eventually create a Zhuang state as a counterforce against Vietnamese nationalism...
 
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I imagined once a Zhuang state that existed as a consequence of an expanded French Indochina in the late 19th century. That is probably the way to get it done, I think--Japanese imperialism would come too late.
 
Though it would probably entail earlier PODs (possibly including territory from nearby Burma, Laos and Thailand), what other large non-Han minority groups in Southern China could have benefited from having states established?
 
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Yet there seems to be little separatism among them, and some people have even argued that Zhuang nationality was artificially created by the Chinese Communist Party.

I don't fully understand. Why would the CCP essentially develop from whole cloth a new distinct non-Han ethnic identity? Was it to make it easier for the government to deal with one single ethnic minority, as opposed to a few dozen different ones?
 
It's possible that a Zhuang state could be created with Vietnamese support in Rumsfeldia. The Vietnamese, both North and South, have vested interests in keeping China as weak as possible, and by the time the Lesser Mao's China collapses, a Zhuang nation, to some extent, exists. So a Zhuang state might be carved out of parts of Guangxi and Yunnan.

What would such a state be called? Zhuangguo?
 
I don't fully understand. Why would the CCP essentially develop from whole cloth a new distinct non-Han ethnic identity? Was it to make it easier for the government to deal with one single ethnic minority, as opposed to a few dozen different ones?
They were overeager to copy the Soviet model of nationalities, where groups were created based on an arbitrary combination of language, religion, and geographic location. Ironically the Vietnamese also copied the Soviet nationalities system, and declared that northern Vietnam has several closely related Tai-speaking ethnicities. Vietnam's own Chinese-speaking minority is officially divided into three separate ethnicities.

It's possible that a Zhuang state could be created with Vietnamese support in Rumsfeldia. The Vietnamese, both North and South, have vested interests in keeping China as weak as possible, and by the time the Lesser Mao's China collapses, a Zhuang nation, to some extent, exists. So a Zhuang state might be carved out of parts of Guangxi and Yunnan.

What would such a state be called? Zhuangguo?
Much of northern Vietnam, almost down to Hanoi, would have to belong to this new state. So it's far safer and easier to simply support whatever warlord is controlling the region.
 
They were overeager to copy the Soviet model of nationalities, where groups were created based on an arbitrary combination of language, religion, and geographic location. Ironically the Vietnamese also copied the Soviet nationalities system, and declared that northern Vietnam has several closely related Tai-speaking ethnicities. Vietnam's own Chinese-speaking minority is officially divided into three separate ethnicities.
Ok. But why?

The CCP doesn't seem particularly invested in protecting other minority identities, especially in the west (Xinjiang, Tibet). So if there was no Zhuang identity before China created it out of whole cloth, why would China bother?

It would make more sense to just pursue further Sinicization, to promote cultural unity under the Han Chinese identity. The different groups under Soviet rule all sort-of already existed; they had the beginnings of a national consciousness, which the Soviet government wanted to fold into the class-based consciousness of the Union.

To my outsider eyes, it looks like China is doing the opposite of what the USSR did: creating nationalities out of a single undifferentiated population, instead of uniting disparate peoples in conflict under a larger semi-federalized system.
 
Ok. But why?

The CCP doesn't seem particularly invested in protecting other minority identities, especially in the west (Xinjiang, Tibet). So if there was no Zhuang identity before China created it out of whole cloth, why would China bother?
They were initially wholeheartedly invested in the Soviet model. If they were truly cunning, they would highlight the longstanding linguistic and religious/sectarian divisions *within* the Tibetan plateau to deny the existence of a single Tibetan ethnicity. Uyghurs were simply unknown before the PRC declared its existence, as the Turkic tribes of the Takalaman Desert identified with their town/oasis.

It would make more sense to just pursue further Sinicization, to promote cultural unity under the Han Chinese identity. The different groups under Soviet rule all sort-of already existed; they had the beginnings of a national consciousness, which the Soviet government wanted to fold into the class-based consciousness of the Union.

To my outsider eyes, it looks like China is doing the opposite of what the USSR did: creating nationalities out of a single undifferentiated population, instead of uniting disparate peoples in conflict under a larger semi-federalized system.
Mao was certainly a Chinese nationalist (as in wanting to liberate the nation from imperial powers), but was not an ethnic chauvinist. He associated ethnic chauvinism with the reactionary ways, and went as far as restoring the native names of cities and regions that were renamed into Chinese under the previous KMT and imperial governments. He even had his propaganda songs translated into the minority languages.

Stalin was famous for conjuring new ethnicities out of thin air and then gerrymandering administrative borders. Although Mao did also artificially create new ethnicities, at least he didn't purposefully play divide and rule on that basis.
 
Ok. But why?

The CCP doesn't seem particularly invested in protecting other minority identities, especially in the west (Xinjiang, Tibet). So if there was no Zhuang identity before China created it out of whole cloth, why would China bother?

It would make more sense to just pursue further Sinicization, to promote cultural unity under the Han Chinese identity. The different groups under Soviet rule all sort-of already existed; they had the beginnings of a national consciousness, which the Soviet government wanted to fold into the class-based consciousness of the Union.

To my outsider eyes, it looks like China is doing the opposite of what the USSR did: creating nationalities out of a single undifferentiated population, instead of uniting disparate peoples in conflict under a larger semi-federalized system.

One possibility: maybe the CCP was sincere when it said in the 1950's that it was opposed to both "local nationalism" *and* Han chauvinism? Of course they cracked down harshly on separatist tendencies in Tibet and Xinjiang--but nevertheless they did establish autonomous regions there and in Inner Mongolia--and even a Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, even though the Hui speak Chinese (evidently their Muslim religion and the customs, clothing, diet, etc. derived therefrom were considered sufficiently distinctive to make them a separate "nationality.") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hui_people In the case of the Zhuang, the CCP in the 1950's evidently believed that treating each local tribe, dialect, etc. as a separate "nation" was inconvenient and would leave the people involved too primitive and isolated from each other; while simply "Han-izing" them would cause resentment and be against "Leninist principles."
 
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