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81 Chapter 3· From “Minority Film” to “Minority Discourse” Questions of Nationhood and Ethnicity in Chinese Cinema· Yingjin Zhang In recent years, cultural critics have returned to the relationship between nationhood and ethnicity with a renewed sense of urgency if not anxiety. This has been, in part, to criticize the established paradigms and epistemes (such as “center-periphery” and “majority-minority”) and, in part, to reconfigure the geopolitical space in the contemporary world. This study seeks to investigate the functioning of a set of critical categories—ethnicity, race, nation-state—as well as other related terms, such as nation-people, nationalism , state discourse, cultural hegemony, and subjectivity, in the field of Chinese cinema. Proceeding from “minority film” (shaoshu minzu dianying) as a special genre in Mainland China to “minority discourse” as a critical practice in New Chinese Cinema,1 I will demonstrate that the categories of the nation and ethnicity have been put to use through a complex process of negotiation in Chinese cinema from the early 1920s to the present. Two levels of such negotiation can be differentiated at this point: the level of filmic discourse (i.e., film narrative and narration) and the level of critical discourse (i.e., film theory and criticism). I shall start with the second level so as to identify issues of crucial importance and then return to the first level by way of reading a number of films that illuminate these issues.· Theoretical Excursions: Race or Ethnicity? Chris Berry published an article in which he equates minzu, an ambiguous Chinese term, with “race,” an extremely loaded English term. By insisting on equivalents such as “race characteristics” for minzu tedian, “race form” for minzu xingshi, “race-ization” for minzuhua, “race color” for minzu fengge, and “racial minority” for shaoshu minzu, he attempts a deconstructive reading of minzu that has resulted in, unfortunately, not so much a clarification as a conflation of several distinct categories in Chinese film studies.2 While Berry is certainly correct in identifying “sinocentrism,” which he would rather term “race-centrism,” in post-1949 Chinese film, what he sees as “race- 82 Yingjin Zhang ization” (or “sinification” as used elsewhere by Paul Clark)3 is, I would contend, a politically motivated and manipulated process of cultural production . This cultural production brings out not just a unified discourse of solidarity among fifty-five “ethnic minorities” (shaoshu minzu) in China but also an ambivalent filmic discourse on which the dialectic of Self and Other is inevitably predicated. From this perspective, Berry’s formulation becomes problematic. His indiscriminate use of “race” as an overriding term on the one hand obscures the difference between “race” and “ethnicity” and, on the other, conflates the “state discourse,” which champions the Han Chinese cultural hegemony over ethnic minorities, and the “politics of nationalism ” in Chinese film, which has strategically drawn on minority cultures in the formation of the “Chinese characteristics” (minzu tedian) as opposed to Western discourses and technologies. As a consequence of this conflation, Berry readily locates in recent Chinese films a fundamental challenge to the discourse of race and “race-ization,” while altogether neglecting the possibility that some of these same films might have unknowingly reinforced the Han cultural hegemony in their individual efforts to challenge the state discourse. Before discussing specific representations of ethnic minorities in Chinese cinema, I will read through a set of definitions of ethnicity, race, and nationstate in the social sciences and literary studies. In China and Its National Minorities , Thomas Herberer asserts that “China is a multinational state formed from the territorial expansion of the largest nationality (Han) and from a fusion between the Han and different peoples over the course of history.”4 According to Herberer, the term “minority” in China embraces a group of non-Han people who share their distinctive specific characteristics derived from race, language, religion, customs, morals, traditions, dress, social organization , and so forth.5 While Herberer notices that the Chinese language never distinguishes among peoples, nation, nationality, and ethnos—all of them being lumped together under a single term, minzu—he refuses to collapse them into the English term, “race.” My objection to the equation of minzu with “race” should not be taken to mean that racial discourse does not exist in modern China. As a matter of fact, the discourse of race has been studied by Frank Dikötter, who argues, among other things, that there were no pervasive differences between the Han Chinese and the Manchus with respect to racial perceptions of...

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