Abstract
Accompanying the tremendous growth of the PRC economy has been the ethnicization of social conflicts. This chapter explores why tensions between social groups in the PRC have frequently been cast in ethnic terms in recent decades. It questions the characterization of such tensions as “ethnic conflicts” and argues instead that they are reflections of fundamental issues of social justice, which will not be resolved solely by ethnic solutions, such as minority rights and ethnic autonomy. The chapter explains how ethnicity is made salient as a result of the increased density of ethnic mixing resulting from intensified migration within the PRC, as well as the impact of other aspects of economic liberalization and global integration. It is also a reflection of a social fragmentation that is the result of the crisis faced by the state. The crisis is marked by the undermining of the state as an autonomous unitary actor by the forces of decentralized economic power within the country and global pressure from without. The state’s failure to effectively address critical problems like regional disparity and economic and physical displacement contributes to the ethnicization of identity, as groups are put in increasing competition with each other in overlapping spaces and markets. The turn to a cultural basis of identity, therefore, arises as the material basis for a “civic” identity tied to the state no longer exists.
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Notes
- 1.
One of these was the 1986 “Howard Beach incident,” in which a Trinidadian immigrant, Michael Griffith, was killed after being attacked and chased onto a highway by a gang of whites. Another incident took place in 1990 and involved a dispute between a Haitian-American shopper and a Korean-American shop owner. It escalated into a boycott by blacks of Korean groceries, culminating in firebombings and fights. In both these cases, African-American community leaders arguably stoked African-American resentment by highlighting police bias in these incidents. The 1991 Crown Heights incident began with an Orthodox Jewish driver hitting a 7-year-old immigrant boy from Guyana. Several nights of rioting followed, as a dispute over whether a Jewish ambulance failed to treat the dying boy. What is significant in these three cases is the contrast between the consciousness motivating African-Americans, as descendants of involuntary immigrants, who saw the incidents in terms of a history of oppression of blacks in the USA, and the perspectives of the victims’ communities, who saw these offenses in more specific context.
- 2.
The three efforts to establish the East Turkestan Republic in 1933, 1944, and 1949 were short-lived.
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Cheng, G. (2014). Interpreting the Ethnicization of Social Conflict in China: Ethnonationalism, Identity, and Social Justice. In: Hao, Z., Chen, S. (eds) Social Issues in China. International Perspectives on Social Policy, Administration, and Practice, vol 1. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2224-2_7
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