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The Art of Ethnography: A Chinese "Miao Album." Translated by DAVID M. DEAL and LAURA HOSTETLER. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. 178 pp. $40.00 (cloth).
For at least two thousand years, the Chinese state has consisted of a political bond-sometimes voluntary, more typically created through military conquest-between people whose language, customs, and physical appearance have been distinctly different from each other. Keenly aware of the diversity of their subjects, Chinese rulers sometimes minimized its importance by stressing the universality of Confucian ethics; at other times they emphasized the inevitability of their economic and military hegemony as a consequence of supposed cultural superiority. What makes this picture more complex, of course, is that for much of the past millennium China has been ruled by people we do not normally think of as ethnically "Chinese." Despite their numerical majority (they today compose more than 90 percent of the People's Republic), Han Chinese, along with less numerous ethnic groups like the Hakka or Hui, were forced to accommodate invading nations like Mongols and Manchus, who collectively ruled much of the empire for some five centuries. Indeed, it took almost half a century for the Manchu Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) to overcome the legacy of a bloody military conquest fully and forge an alliance with Han elites. Together, Manchu, Han, and members of other ethnic groups ruled a vast, multi-ethnic empire for almost three hundred years until the Republican Revolution. Does this make the Qing state a colonial one, however? And what was the significance of ethnicity, nationality, race-the Chinese terms are of relatively recent invention-in helping this empire function?
Laura Hostetler's first monograph, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (2001), argued that the Qing state was colonial, settling nonindigenous people (primarily Han) to help pacify frontier regions. (Not coincidentally, the People's Republic encourages Han Chinese to settle in Xinjiang and Tibet.) Hostetler used the term "colonialism," furthermore, "to highlight the similarities between the methods, technologies, and ideologies that the Qing employed in extending its geographical reach, and those used by European colonial powers during the same period" (Hostetler 2001, p. 30). In other words, the Qing state counts as a colonial power in part because its maps and ethnographic studies of indigenous peoples are...