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Pure and True

The Everyday Politics of Ethnicity for China's Hui Muslims

By David R. Stroup

What are the boundaries of Hui identity?

The Chinese Communist Party points to the Hui—China’s largest Muslim ethnic group—as a model ethnic minority and touts its harmonious relations with the group as an example of the...

Satirical Tibet

The Politics of Humor in Contemporary Amdo

By Timothy Thurston. Foreword by Stevan Harrell

What does comedy look like when the wrong punchline can land you in jail?

Humor has long been a vital, if underrecognized, component of Tibetan life. In recent years, alongside well-publicized struggles for religious freedom and...

Exile from the Grasslands

Tibetan Herders and Chinese Development Projects

By Jarmila Ptáčková

Reconstructing lifeways on the Tibetan Plateau

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748207

At the beginning of the new millennium, the Chinese government launched the Great Opening of the West, a development strategy targeted at remote areas inhabited mainly by...

The Nuosu Book of Origins

A Creation Epic from Southwest China

By Mark Bender, Aku Wuwu, Jjivot Zopqu

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295745701

The Nuosu people, who were once overlords of vast tracts of farmland and forest in the uplands of southern Sichuan and neighboring provinces, are the largest division of the Yi ethnic group...

Lessons in Being Chinese

Minority Education and Ethnic Identity in Southwest China

By Mette Halskov Hansen

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295804125

Two very different ethnic minority communities—the Naxi of the Lijiang area in northern Yunnan and the Tai (Dai) of Sipsong Panna (Xishuangbanna), along Yunnan’s border with Burma and Laos—are featured in this...

Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State

By Justin M. Jacobs

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295806570

Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State views modern Chinese political history from the perspective of Han officials who were tasked with governing Xinjiang. This region, inhabited by Uighurs, Kazaks, Hui, Mongols, Kirgiz,...

Manchus and Han

Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861-1928

By Edward J. M. Rhoads

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295997483

China’s 1911–12 Revolution, which overthrew a 2000-year succession of dynasties, is thought of primarily as a change in governmental style, from imperial to republican, traditional to modern. But given that the dynasty...

Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China

By Stevan Harrell

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295804071

Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in the 1980s and 1990s in southern Sichuan, this pathbreaking study examines the nature of ethnic consciousness and ethnic relations among local communities, focusing on the Nuosu...

Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers

By Stevan Harrell

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295804088

China's exploitation by Western imperialism is well known, but the imperialist treatment within China of ethnic minorities has been little explored. Around the geographic periphery of China, as well as some of...

Medicine and Memory in Tibet

Amchi Physicians in an Age of Reform

By Theresia Hofer

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295743004

Only fifty years ago, Tibetan medicine, now seen in China as a vibrant aspect of Tibetan culture, was considered a feudal vestige to be eliminated through government-led social transformation. Medicine and Memory...

In the Land of the Eastern Queendom

The Politics of Gender and Ethnicity on the Sino-Tibetan Border

By Jinba Tenzin

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295804842

The story underlying this ethnography began with the recent discovery and commercialization of the remnant of an ancient “queendom” on the Sichuan-Tibet border. Recorded in classical Chinese texts, this legendary matriarchal domain...

On the Margins of Tibet

Cultural Survival on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier

By Ashild Kolas and Monika P. Thowsen

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295804101

The state of Tibetan culture within contemporary China is a highly politicized topic on which reliable information is rare. But what is Tibetan culture and how should it be developed or preserved?...

A Landscape of Travel

The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China

By Jenny T. Chio

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295805061

While the number of domestic leisure travelers has increased dramatically in reform-era China, the persistent gap between urban and rural living standards attests to ongoing social, economic, and political inequalities. The state...

Governing China's Multiethnic Frontiers

By Morris Rossabi

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295804057

Upon coming to power in 1949, the Chinese Communist government proclaimed that its stance toward ethnic minorities--who comprise approximately eight percent of China’s population--differed from that of previous regimes and that it...

Mapping Shangrila

Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands

By Emily T. Yeh, Christopher R. Coggins, Stevan Harrell, Ralph A. Litzinger

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295805023

In 2001 the Chinese government announced that the precise location of Shangrila—a place that previously had existed only in fiction—had been identified in Zhongdian County, Yunnan. Since then, Sino-Tibetan borderlands in Yunnan,...

Doing Business in Rural China

Liangshan's New Ethnic Entrepreneurs

By Thomas Heberer

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295804095

Longlisted for the 2009 ICAS Book Award

Mountainous Liangshan Prefecture, on the southern border of Sichuan Province, is one of China's most remote regions. Although Liangshan's majority ethnic group, the Nuosu (now classified...

Religious Revival in the Tibetan Borderlands

The Premi of Southwest China

By Koen Wellens

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295801551

Revival of religious practices of all sorts in China, after decades of systematic government suppression, is a topic of considerable interest to scholars in disciplines ranging from religious studies to anthropology to...

Empire and Identity in Guizhou

Local Resistance to Qing Expansion

By Jodi L. Weinstein

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295804811

This historical investigation describes the Qing imperial authorities’ attempts to consolidate control over the Zhongjia, a non-Han population, in eighteenth-century Guizhou, a poor, remote, and environmentally harsh province in Southwest China. Far...

The Han

China's Diverse Majority

By Agnieszka Joniak-Luthi

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295805979

This ethnography explores contemporary narratives of “Han-ness,” revealing the nuances of what Han identity means today in relation to that of the fifty-five officially recognized minority ethnic groups in China, as well...

Lijiang Stories

Shamans, Taxi Drivers, and Runaway Brides in Reform-Era China

By Emily Chao. Foreword by Stevan Harrell

Lijiang, a once-sleepy market town in southwest China, has become a magnet for tourism since the mid-1990s. Drawing on stories about taxi drivers, reluctant brides, dogmeat, and shamanism, Emily Chao illustrates how biopolitics and the...