Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China Volume 18 (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780520262782)

China is a vast nation comprised of hundreds of distinct ethnic communities, each with its own language, history, and culture. Today the government of China recognizes just 56 ethnic nationalities, or minzu, as groups entitled to representation. This controversial new book recounts the history of the most sweeping attempt to sort and categorize the nation's enormous population: the 1954 Ethnic Classification project (minzu shibie). Thomas S. Mullaney draws on recently declassified material and extensive oral histories to describe how the communist government, in power less than a decade, launched this process in ethnically diverse Yunnan. Mullaney shows how the government drew on Republican-era scholarship for conceptual and methodological inspiration as it developed a strategy for identifying minzu and how non-Party-member Chinese ethnologists produced a "scientific" survey that would become the basis for a policy on nationalities.

Author: Thomas Mullaney
ISBN-10: 0520262786
ISBN-13: 9780520262782
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 11/04/2010
Pages: 256
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.30w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 12/03/2010 pg. 16