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Changing Ethnicity pp 127–159Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Pride and Prejudice?—The Stories of Third-Generation Cadres

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Abstract

This chapter discovers the young cadres’ expression of ethnicity as a way of seeing and interpreting which goes beyond political classification. By analysing young cadres’ leisure activity, consumption, their usage of social media and the discussion of hybridity, this chapter depicts how young cadres’ negotiate the past and present, develop new interpretations and find Yi’s place in the modern multi-ethnic nation-state.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Xi Dada is a humourous and casual way of calling President Xi Jinping, and is widely accepted by netizens and younger generations. Dada, literally translated as “big big”, in many dialects mean “uncle” or “father”, and some media interpret this appellation as a sign of Xi depicting himself as of patriarch of the Chinese people. See, for example, http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/22/confucian-stubborn-and-macho-chinas-leader-is-xi-bigbig/?_r=0.

    Many people are aware that it is an intentional construction of Xi’s personal image, but still admit that the construction is successful and bring the president closer to the wider population.

  2. 2.

    Chinese twitter.

  3. 3.

    Chuanchuan is a special dish that is highly popular in Southwest China. Chefs first prepare the ingredients by cutting vegetables and meat into irregular shapes and then fastening the pieces to bamboo skewers. Then the customers would choose what they would like to have and what flavour they prefer, and the chef would boil the food by request.

  4. 4.

    A translation of the lyrics of the songs mentioned above is given in the Appendix.

  5. 5.

    Tizhi, or the Institution, refers to the organisation of State organs, State-owned enterprises, and public institutions. In many people’s mind, there is not a precise or specific definition to the “Institution”, and they tend to identify singers or actors who appear mainly in programmes produced by China Central Television, or other programmes sponsored by propaganda departments.

  6. 6.

    There was one line of lyrics from the song My Beautiful Hometown: “I love the Yi mountains, and I love the Yi waters”.

  7. 7.

    Bench project, in Chinese is “bandeng gongcheng”, which send out free benches to Yi people who live in the high mountains and could not move to a lower place at the moment. In a traditional Yi house, people do not sit on benches but would sit on the floor around a triangular-shaped fireplace.

  8. 8.

    I had this interview with Ap Yup in his office and his wife was also in the room playing computer games. She would sometimes join in our conversation to give some specific details when Ap Yup failed to provide, and when I was about to finish my interview, she asked me if she could say something about the issues I previously discussed with her husband.

  9. 9.

    The remarks for Muli County was “the most peaceful, stable and harmonious Tibetan area in China”.

  10. 10.

    “Wu zhi shao nv” literally means “innocent teenage girl”, but is now a fixed term describing a certain group of people. “Wu” means “no”, which means “non-Party” member in this phrase; “zhi” means “knowledge” and stands for intellectuals; in practice, it usually refers to university graduates; “shao” stands for “shaoshu minzu”, the ethnic minorities; and “nv” suggests the gender, female.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Sociology, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China

    Zhitian Guo

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  1. Zhitian Guo
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Guo, Z. (2020). Pride and Prejudice?—The Stories of Third-Generation Cadres. In: Changing Ethnicity. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9491-1_5

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