Han China: Glue and Crowbar of a Nation

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Han China: Glue and Divider of a Nation

Han ren or “Han person” has been a term that has been circulating through China from the time of the Han dynasty for people who considered themselves to be descendants of that family that finally fell in 220 AD, beginning in the valley of the Wei River. However, the idea of a Han nationality is a new entity unto itself. This use of the term came at the time when China shifted from its roots of being an empire to the system of a modern nation-state. The idea gained its greatest popularity under the time of Sun Yat-sen—the republican movement leader who helped to bring down the Qing Dynasty of China in 1911, the last empire. Sun had been influenced a great deal by the strong sentiments of Japanese nationalism during his time in that country and brought the idea to China. He advocated the idea that there were five peoples of China. He seemed to cling to the Han people the most because of the fact the group included the diverse people that belonged to the Sino-linguistic group, and Sun was actually of Cantonese descent, making the northern people very wary of his intent. By using Han ren he was able to climb above the deeply embedded distrust between the north and the south. He rallied the non-Cantonese people such as the influential Shanghainese and Zhejiang as well as the northern Mandarin speakers in order to band together to take on the Machu and other threatening foreigners like Mongol, Tibetan, and Hui as well as the Western imperialists that were knocking down the door. He was able to create a type of new imagined community that could band together and rise above the adversity brought on by foreign invaders to become a great people.

Once Mao brought the communist party into power and founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the idea of a Han nationality took a different role. The Communists felt that there were approximately fifty-six nationalities within China that included the Han majority—a far cry from the five groups assumed by Sun. For this regime it was a political necessity to become more complex in their system of categorizing nationalities because they needed the support of the ethnicities on their borders in order to follow through with their plans of forming a new type of nation-state. In the beginning they really wanted to hide the internal differences of their people so as to unite them against outside interference and threat. However, once China grew to a point of power where they were the ultimate threat in their area and Western imperialism declined, the Chinese people began to look in the mirror and realize that differences did exist. These differences helped to ally them with the people on their borders for the most part, but it could possibly create a feeling of uneasiness because the internal deviations from the majority Han culture can create problems if they are merely suppressed instead of faced.