Mullaney, Thomas S. Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China. Berkely:
University of California Press, 2011.

Thomas S. Mullaney is currently an assistant professor of history at Stanford University and received his Ph.D at Columbia University. His primary research interests include race, ethnicity and nation formation. This current work was researched within the last decade largely through the archives of Beijing, Kunming, Chengdu, London, and Worcester.

In China today, every nationally recognized ethnic identity has been categorized and symbolized through systematic commodification that is most visibly represented by “nationality doll sets” among numerous other consumable representations. What Mullaney asks is how these official ethnicities codified and became legitimate. Like Benedict Anderson who provides the forward to this book, Mullaney is concerned with the process of identity formation. This process is especially significant in the systematic census gathering of the state. Not only does the census provide a rationalization of individual identities, it also pushes individuals into those identities. Through framing questions, representatives of the state force individuals to define themselves using those terms provided; a process of rationalization that projects upon future reality. Mullaney’s work focuses on early communist ethnographers who, rather than simply providing individuals with predefined categories allowed them to “fill in the blank.” This generated a nearly illegible complexity of identifications that far exceeded the ethnic diversity defined as standard in China today. The history of how this illegible complexity was made legible is thus one of the primary questions Mullaney seeks to answer through his work.

Yet another facet of Mullaney’s argument is that the communists were attempting to resolve a problem that had been left over from the collapse of the multiethnic Qing Empire that the Nationalists had failed to answer. This was the problem of how to integrate in a legitimate way numerous, starkly different cultural identities under the dominance of a Han-majority. His work is thus fundamentally linked to the creation of a nationally recognized Chinese identity. By arguing that it was these scholars who first organized China’s minorities into rationalized ethnicities he is suggesting that the Classification Project was the first to imagine these communities. All of these arguments and questions fall under the larger question, which I believe was the most compelling for Mullaney’s inquiry, simply where have all the unrecognized categories gone? Did the distinct identities which failed to obtain categorization simply disappear or were they somehow consumed and integrated into the larger accepted categories, or do they somehow continue to exist, although unrepresented?

To begin to find an answer to these questions, Mullaney turns to the Ethnic Classification Project which took place during the early to mid 1950s. The history of this project is of itself valuable as it makes sense of an important government policy that is little discussed and little understood. The evidence that Mullaney uses is particularly interesting as it represents sources only recently declassified. He also relies on personal interviews, diaries and other excellent primary sources. The use of Henry Rodloph Davies materials on Chinese ethnographic data is also interesting. Mullaney argues that it was Davies who laid the foundation of the Chinese modern classification system and that his influence can be traced not only through the Communist efforts but also during the Republican period as well.

Mullaney’s argument that the fifty-six-minzu model was not produced simply by way of discourse alone, nor as an agency less non-actor is rather undisputable, and thus somewhat unarguable. His examination of how the process of organization invested the ethnically marginal with new terminology for defining the self however, is particularly interesting for my own research. How members of common society are influenced by state ideology in describing themselves is an important question for anyone interested in how the state intersects with its citizens. The issue of becoming Chinese while at the same time becoming whatever ethnicity is itself worthy of further study, as is how these competing identities affected one another

Along with the numerous western scholars cited as contributing to Mullaney’s theorization of this work such as James Townshend, Pamela Crossley, Magnus Fiskesjo, among others, one Chinese scholar stands out as particularly significant to its construction. Shi Lianzhu, a researcher in the Ethnic Classification Project, published a work in 1995 that traced its official history. This history Mullaney viciously criticized, providing him with sufficient initiative to motivate his own engagement with this process.

The issue of census taking is a critical one for anyone concerned with the processes of modernity or the interactions between the nation-state and society. By focusing on how this issue was worked and reworked in Modern China, Mullaney has contributed significantly to our understanding of the process of identity formation, specifically how ethnicity is not a ridged category, but one that once defined, can create in a constant interaction with its participants. More narrowly, Mullaney also provides an exceptional history of census building itself in China, a process that significantly differentiated from simple Stalinist modalities. Thus this work is an important contribution to the formation of a distinct Chinese communism that created its own frameworks to make sense of non-industrial organization. By demonstrating this level of agency and innovation, Mullaney successfully refutes scholarship which had simply dismissed Chinese classification as slavish obedience to Soviet theories. Nevertheless, by creating standardized ethnicities, the communist state also acted upon individuals in a way that actively defined them, at times with the violent implementation of coercive methods. The work is also significant because it provides history to extinct ethnic identities which were unable to find place within the official narrative. ( )