Ethnic Diversity and Market Leninism
January 31, 2010
AN ETHNOHISTORICAL Dictionary of China (published in 1998) draws much needed attention to the almost countless animists, Islamicists, Buddhists and slash-and-burn farmers – all with their own distinct languages and superstitions – that continue to live in China, whether the government acknowledges their existence or not. Despite the homogenising forces that characterise the current brand of Market-Leninism, ethnic diversity remains a key element in understanding China's history.
There are the Altai tribes, who went on a rampage that took them as far as Tashkent before being virtually exterminated in 1751 or so by the Chinese army, which had recently taken control of the Dzungaria region of what is now northern Xinjiang. The remnants of the Altai continued to subsist for a few centuries more, hiding out in the remote mountain regions. They suffered terrible persecution at the hands of the Russians who saw the region as strategically important, and then they spawned a new and dangerous messianic religion known as Burkhanism or the White Faith that centred on a mythical descendent of Genghis Khan who had returned to liberate the region – and the Mongol race as a whole – from Russia and China in the first decade of the twentieth century.
The Bolsheviks then took over Russia and the outlying republics, and despite being given an autonomous oblast of some shape or form, many Altai fled back into Chinese territory during the brutalities of Stalinist collectivisation. Then came the Chinese revolution, and the new Communist government, which couldn’t even bring itself to recognise the Altai as a genuine ethnic people. More persecution followed, and many of them finally returned to their home turf after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. For the most part, it was a miserable existence of subsistence swidden farming and herding, made worse by the violent encroachment of rampant nation-states, which was presumably a relatively new concept in a region of porous borders and impassable terrains. It didn’t help that their region was host to a variety of valuable mineral deposits like wolfram and iron ore and gold, and that the people themselves were not in a position to take advantage.
The stories come thick and fast, and involve a multitude of bizarre rituals and rites, crazy sun and moon cults. You can understand where their resentment towards the Han comes from, and where it gets its driving force. Centuries of Maoist mayhem and exploitation and desecration, and all we have to show for it is a world of grey tower blocks, a miasma of coal dust and fairy lights, and a variety of invented traditions and fake temples referring to Confucius, Buddha and their ilk.
It is insulting on the part of the government that they think that new furniture and a fresh lick of paint can make up for decades of quite appalling brutalisation, which included a Cultural Revolution-era campaign to force-feed local Muslims with pork not as some sort of shock tactic aimed at removing the shackles of religion, but in a vicious and disrespectful show of strength by a ruling power.
There is very little sense of the spontaneous or the indigenous in Chinese culture because most of what was spontaneous and indigenous was razed to the ground in a spasm of violence and eventually replaced by gleaming artefacts of the tourism and heritage industries. Even the genuine looks fake because it has been fenced off, sequestrated, quarantined, renovated, covered in patronising slate plaques and surrounded by tour buses and little stalls selling the same old mass-produced ethnic kitsch and bric-a-brac that is more or less the same in the grottoes of Bizaklik as it is in the temples of Guilin. There is no awe, no reverence to be derived from the coruscating towers and tabernacles that have been erected across Xinjiang just to prove that Beijing somehow respects other cultures.
