Since the evaporation of the Soviet empire, and amid the breakup of the Soviet satellite states, nationalist movements so long kept in check by totalitarian dictatorships, have re-emerged. The fiction that socialism “solved the national question” as Marx predicted, has been clearly exposed. This post-Cold War development is not limited to Central and Eastern Europe, but is a global phenomenon that had an impact on the minority nationalities in China. The sudden independence of the former Soviet republics has had a demonstration effect in China, resulting in a stronger assertiveness by minority nationalities, which have renewed their demands for a change in the status quo. This underlines the continuing importance of the nationalities question (minzu wenti) in the PRC.1 Several scholars have done excellent studies of the minority nationalities in China, but it seems that reviewing the nationalities question is appropriate at this time (Dreyer 1976; Eberhard 1982; Herberer 1987; Benson 1990).
Before turning our attention to China, it will be helpful to first discuss nationalist movements in general. Joseph Rothschild has argued that “fertile circumstances abound in modern and traditional (modernizing) societies,” for the politicization of ethnicity. He concludes that “politicized ethnicity has become the crucial principal of political legitimation and delegitimization of systems, states, regimes, and governments.” (Rothschild 1981:1-3). Recent developments clearly show that Marxist scholars and others underestimated the cultural, psychological and linguistic forces behind nationalism, which they viewed as a historical phenomenon that would eventually be transcended, by global economic and other transnational forces.
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4:17 AM
Moderate Islamist here
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