He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Invention of China, and reported the following:
From page 99:Visit Bill Hayton's website.The question of who was, and was not, Han could be extremely divisive, particularly in Guangdong province, where older inhabitants still remembered the Hakka-Punti war. The compilers of different local-level gazetteers took different positions. For example, two counties, Shixing and Xingning both contained large numbers of Hakka-speakers: the Xingning gazetteer mentioned this fact but the Shixing book did not. The issue came to a head when a writer with revolutionary sympathies, Huang Jie, published his ‘Textbook of Guangdong Local History’.This extract is part of the conclusion of my chapter about ’The Invention of the Han Race’. While many people might assume that the existence of the ‘Han Race’ is a scientific fact or even that everyone in China is a part of it, this chapter shows how it was actually written about for the first time in 1900. I explain how European ideas about the alleged differences between races were transferred to China and adopted by some of the most important thinkers of the day. These ideas were the focus of intense political arguments with reformers arguing for the unity of the ‘yellow race’ while revolutionaries were calling for action by members of the ‘Han race’. It took a few years but the ‘Han Race’ revolutionaries became more successful. However there were then arguments about exactly which groups within China could consider themselves to be ‘Han’. This final argument proves that the idea of a Han Race owes much more to politics than to science.
Huang Jie had co-founded the ‘National Essence Society’ (Guoxue baocun hui) the year before to promote political change, with inspiration from a conservative view of the past. The society’s anti-Manchuism combined revolutionary zeal with the Social Darwinist fear that the Han race had to be preserved from the threat of extinction. This, the society argued, could only be done through the mobilisation of ancient culture. Huang Jie and his fellow National Essence Society members saw an opportunity in the education reforms to transform the thinking of the new generation by providing them with ‘national essence’ textbooks.
Huang Jie’s 1905 Guangdong History textbook stated baldly that, ‘Among the races of Guangdong are Hakkas and Hoklos who are not Cantonese and not of Han racial stock.’ This infuriated Huang Zunxian, then living in quiet banishment in the province, and provoked him into organising, along with fellow Hakka scholar-officials, a ‘Society for Investigating the Origin of the Hakka People’. The society used all its influence to lobby the provincial education authority which, eventually, agreed to have the sentence removed from the book. Huang Zunxian died in March 1905 but his struggle continued. Although other textbooks were published that specifically excluded the Hakka from membership of the Han, by 1907 the provincial authorities had agreed to remove all the offending sections. Thus, in his final act, Huang Zunxian demonstrated the emptiness of the notion of a ‘Han race’ by showing it could be expanded or contracted not by science but by political pressure from influential people. Henceforth, the Hakka and the Hoklo would be Han.
But empty or not, the idea of a Han race became the revolutionaries’ most powerful weapon. It enabled them to create alliances between literate officials and illiterate peasants. It was no longer sufficient to be a cultured Hua, or a member of the ‘yellow race’ – change could only come from the Han
This is a very typical page from my book. Some of the names and terms might be unfamiliar, but don’t worry because I explain them all in the earlier pages. The whole point of the book is to bring the last 25 years of academic research to a general audience without any specialist knowledge. I examine how China came to think of itself as China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Apart from race, I look at questions of history, nation, language and territory and show how a small group of intellectuals introduced new ideas to the country following their contacts with European and American thinking. I use the stories of particular individuals to explain how and why this happened. It’s a good read!
I wrote this book to tell the story of modern China in a new way. I wanted to show how it is a hybrid of ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ ideas. So much of our understanding about China today is actually comprised of relatively recent innovations: the name of the country, its ethnic identity, its boundaries and even the idea of a ‘nation-state’ were all introduced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is a lively tale.
--Marshal Zeringue
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