Moussons (Jul 2024)
Classifications et marquage ethniques du territoire par l’État chinois impérial et moderne. La création du district autonome des Sui en Chine du Sud-Ouest
Abstract
At the beginning of the 1950s, the nationality policy of the People's Republic of China granted the Sui, a Tai-speaking minority (Kam-sui group of the Kadai branch) in southern Guizhou, the status of nationality under the Chinese name "shui" and allocated them an autonomous administrative territory in their name with the rank of district. The study presented here provides an example of the territorial production of the Chinese state captured on a local scale, where questions of ethnic identification and regional autonomy present their own configurations. We begin by examining the classification procedures of the Qing imperial state, which at the end of the seventeenth century drew the first official contours of a Sui territory by dissociating them from the other 'barbarian' (Miao) populations of the region. The role of the classifications produced by Chinese ethnology in the Republican period in the future recognition of the Sui as a nationality is then highlighted, as is the founding role of the Sui scholar Pan Yizhi, of Sui ethnicity, who was briefly entrusted with the vice-presidency of the Sui autonomous district in 1957. The recent re-publication of his work, which was ill-treated during the Cultural Revolution, allows us to retrace the stages in the process of its creation. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the instrumentalisation of this founding period for contemporary local development purposes.
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