St Cross College, Oxford

College Seminar given on 8 February 2001

On the basis of fieldwork in Xuanwei county, Yunnan, the paper presented reports on an ethnographic event of some importance in contemporary China: the re-emergence of elaborately edited and printed lineage genealogies. In initial interviews conducted in Xuanwei in March 1999, local "cultured people" (wenren), entrepreneurs and even low-level village cadres, when asked about local "cultural" activities or descent groups, often referred to "new genealogies" (xin jiapu) that had recently been completed or were currently being compiled. Contrary to my expectation, these informants were perfectly happy to talk about these matters, although they usually played down their significance by saying that local descent groups (jiazu) were really not important at all in local politics and were only relevant as far as ancestor worship, marriage, generational naming, or terms of address among kin were concerned. This is not necessarily true - during the village elections in July 2000, for instance, cadres told me that descent groups in Xuanwei do in fact serve as vote banks for candidates, although this of course did not happen in these cadres' own villages - but such depreciatory comments indicate that Xuanwei genealogy exists in a carefully maintained de-politicized discursive space, whose broader ramifications merit further scrutiny.

The scope and relevance of the genealogical enterprise that I gradually became aware of extend far beyond the narrow confines of a remote country. Genealogies are part of an essentializing discourse of belonging that is one of the key ingredients in Chinese understandings of the simultaneity of unifying Chineseness and dividing local identities. At different points in time, this unfolding discourse has met (confirmed, refuted, or merged with) efforts from the Empire, Republic or People's Republic at state formation and later nation building, itself changing in the process.

The genealogical enterprise in contemporary China is not a simple re-enactment of an unchanging cultural form, reproducing an equally unchanging Chinese national essence. One of the objectives of my analysis of Chinese genealogies is, as Prasenjit Duara put it, "to rescue history from the nation". Scholarship on nationalism tends either to reject as false a nation's claims to represent a national essence, or, conversely, to acknowledge its importance without treating the essentialism of primordial ethnies as historical phenomena themselves. Anthropology has an important contribution to make to transcending these equally untenable positions how the practice of local notions of belonging and national discourses of national essence mutually condition each other. In this spirit, the paper provides ethnographic and documentary evidence on the unprecedented state presence in contemporary genealogical work in China, inscribing on genealogies and lineages its own narratives of national unity, modernity and China's destiny as a global player. Tracing the history of the nation through the genealogical charts in new Chinese genealogies, I will show how the pattern of rule in contemporary China has shifted from a focus on politics, dominance and control to a differentiated and negotiated process of simultaneous state building, local elite formation, and the hegemony and counterhegemony entailed in the state's constructions of modernity as civility. While lending a much more humane and "normal" face to the state, these processes also will make state rule seem increasingly natural, acceptable and, ultimately, inevitable.

When viewed from the national level, genealogies strengthen the "cohesion" of the Chinese nation (zhonghua minzu de ningjuli), thus connecting the genealogies directly to the two main political issues of the 1990s: the state's construction of a new nationalism and the search for new bonds to tie the fabric of society together after the demise of the planned economy and socialist solidarity. Such genealogical cohesion also has important international aspects, as genealogy ties the overseas Chinese (or the "three types of compatriots" (sanbao: Taiwanese, Hong Kong and Macao Chinese and overseas Chinese elsewhere) directly to their kin and this the Chinese nation on the mainland.

The genealogical mentality incorporates local identities in supralocal histories that are ultimately part of a pan-Chinese discourse on origins and proliferation, potentially adding substance to the new nationalism currently espoused by the Chinese state. The chief attraction of this nationalism seems to be its mix of defensiveness and aggression toward Japan and the West, and in particular the United States. By selectively drawing on the narratives of belonging and the often very practical moral precepts of the genealogies, a nationalism with a more authentic feel could possibly be fostered that would neither rely on an external enemy nor (as in the case of Singapore for instance) have the hollow ring of a deliberate construction of a handful of politicians and neo-Confucian scholars.

However, once formed, such a genealogically informed nationalism may prove rather difficult to put back in its bottle. Genealogies incorporate each individual Chinese in a larger historical narrative of migrating ancestors and proliferating branches, a narrative that in turn is firmly incorporated in the much larger master narrative of a unifying Chinese history, that likewise speaks of inexorable expansion through migration and conquest. In my view, herein lies the real power of Chinese genealogy. The practice of genealogy brews a heady mix of localism, historical diversity, uniqueness, and the historical and unbreakable bond between all agnates and all Chinese, wherever and whenever they may be. The genealogical mentality is a double-edged sword, uniting at a higher level what it separates closer to the ground. This ambiguity would also be incorporated in the nationalism that it informs. Genealogical nationalism will constantly have t be monitored and contained in order not to divide what it ought to unite. That, conceivably, could very well be a price that the CCP not yet wishes to pay.

Frank Pieke