Global China, Local Chinas: Modernization and Ethnic Identity in the People's Republic

by Shepherd Laughlin

Shepherd Laughlin

This thesis argues that globalization intensifies ethnic consciousness. While scholars present intensifying globalization and the resurgence of ethnic movements as twin developments of the post-Cold War global political order, they disagree over whether a causal relationship exists between the two. Three paradigms for understanding the influence of globalization on culture-differentialism, convergence, and hybridization-have been proposed in current scholarship. Taking the hybridization paradigm as its starting point, this thesis explores the relationship between socialist modernization and the political relevance of ethnicity in China, with a specific focus on China's minority nationalities. Constituting over 100 million people, these groups are situated at the interstices of powerful international actors but are rarely studied. Using process tracing carried out at two levels of analysis within China from the beginning of the Deng Xiaoping reforms in the late 1970s until the present day, this study shows that globalization causes changes in both state policy and subjective community identity that favor increased ethnic consciousness. The study of this process in China, an authoritarian state with a fifty-year history of active repression of ethnic-based movements, strengthens the case for the applicability of the hybridization paradigm at the global level.