Rethinking Race and Ethnicity in Imperial China. Lecture by Shao-yun Yang – 1 November 2021

For decades, historians have debated the question of whether concepts equivalent to race and racism existed in premodern Chinese ethnic discourse. Unfortunately, this discussion has been hindered by reliance on an inadequate nineteenth-century practice of classifying identities as racial, cultural, or national. In this talk, Professor Yang proposes a new conceptual framework for analyzing imperial Chinese ethnic discourses and argue that certain discourses previously characterized as racist could be more usefully interpreted as two distinct but related traditions of foreign relations thinking that he terms “civilization-state discourse” and “Chinese supremacism.” He also argues that “structural/systemic/institutional racism”—as understood by critical race theory (CRT) scholars in terms of institutionalized, legally enforced hierarchies of ethnic inequality within a state—did not exist in periods when the “Han” Chinese majority was dominant but did exist in some periods of minority (e.g., Mongol and Manchu) rule, albeit in a form mitigated by universalistic official rhetoric.

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