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.

About the Author
Thomas S. Mullaney is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University.

Reviews
"This rich, nuanced and erudite book is a great accomplishment." -- Elena Barabantseva University of Manchester The China Journal "A very important contribution to our understanding of the birth of the modern Chinese nation." -- Jeff Kyong-McClain Journal Of World History "An exemplary piece of scholarship... Tackles broad historiographical questions with a manageable and concrete set of new data." -- Howard Chiang, Princeton University British Jrnl For The History Of Science "Brief but elegantly argued... Mullaney makes brilliant sense of mountains of data." -- Ruth Rogaski, Vanderbilt University Hist Stds In The Natural Sciences



Book Information
ISBN 9780520272743
Author Thomas Mullaney
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint University of California Press
Publisher University of California Press
Weight(grams) 363g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 18mm