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The Hakka, “guest people” (kejia), are considered a “subethnic” branch of the Han, speaking a Han dialect and with little officially recognized history of their own. In this detective-story-like chapter, the linguist Mary Erbaugh shows how significant Hakka participation is and has been in Chinese political life—within China and in the Chinese diaspora as well. She pieces together bits of evidence from a variety of sources, coming to the conclusion that the Hakka have played a central role in recent political history. Nevertheless, in late imperial China, they were considered an ethnic minority in the southwest and southeast regions where they settled following migration from north central China in the twelfth century. In fact, in the middle of the nineteenth century, ethnic feuds (xiedou) between the Hakka and native residents (bendi) of Guangxi led to the formation of the Society of God Worshipers, later known as the Taipings, a militant millenarian Christian sect that led a popular revolt against the Chinese state. The Taiping Rebellion raged across southern and central China between 1850 and 1864 and represented the single greatest domestic threat to the Manchu rule of the Qing dynasty. Later ideological engineers and official historians of the Communist Revolution identified this moment as prefigurative of the twentieth-century revolution of peasants and workers that created the People ’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Thus, Hakka, correspondingly, are revolutionaries and Han. Today, Hakka constitute 60 percent of the population of the provinces of Fujian, Guangxi, and Jiangxi; there are 80 million Hakka worldwide, 40 million of whom live in the People’s Republic. Since in the official taxonomy the Hakka are not recognized as an ethnic minority—in fact, some Hakka were offended at the suggestion that they were not really “Chinese”—to emphasize leaders’ Hakka identity would be seen as promoting disunity among the Han. For this reason, and as a nod to the famous Secret History of the Mongols, an oral transmission in verse of the origins of the Mongols transcribed into Chinese, Erbaugh titles her chapter “The Secret History of the Hakkas,” emphasizing in this way the curious conveying of their authoritative identity through official inscription in Chinese. She shows an uncanny overlap between areas heavily 185 MARY S. ERBAUGH 10 The Secret History of the Hakkas The Chinese Revolution as a Hakka Enterprise populated by Hakkas and both areas that were the pre-1949 Soviet bases (where the fledgling Chinese Communist Party [CCP] practiced its techniques and tactics) and areas traversed during the 1934–1935 Long March; it appears as if the Communists went from one Hakka area to another as they fled the pursuing Nationalists (Guomindang, or GMD). Hakka language is the tie that binds Hakkas across vast regions of China. It is spoken by 3 percent of the PRC population (and 3 percent are considered Hakka, or 36 million—a proportion larger than the largest ethnic minority, the Zhuang, with 15.5 million) and by 10 percent of the population in Taiwan. Although Hakkas have been poor, they have emphasized education, literacy, and gender equality. (Hakka women never bound their feet.) Their participation in national life exceeds what one would expect of their numbers. At one time three of the six members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo (the highest decision-making group in post-1949 China) were Hakka. Erbaugh traces similar disproportionate representation to late-imperial (1850–1911), Republican (1912–1949), and Communist (1925–) moments, focusing especially on the early days of the CCP, the CCP-GMD civil war, and the first decades of the PRC. Although most of the early participants in the Chinese Revolution are no longer alive, Erbaugh points out some of the ways in which subethnic identities can be employed or denied. Also, her “secret history ” casts into relief the politicization of ethnicity in China, revealing, much as White (chap. 7 in this volume) did in her study of the Naxi of Lijiang, that it is politics, not religion or culture, that is efficacious in contemporary life and that the meaningfulness of identity is always constrained by politics. Moreover , the essay’s ironic tone accentuates the tensions between the rigidity of official taxonomy and the fluidity of real experience and history, a phenomenon that we have observed in several earlier chapters. In this regard, it is illustrative to compare the function of migratory identity in the Communist Revolution (where it is accorded a positive valence) with the significance of that identity for China’s...

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