The Effect of Nation-Building on Ethnicity: Experimental Evidence from China

• In Event: Gender, Ethnicity and Identity Politics in Post-Communist Countries

Abstract

While most studies assume ethnicity as a naturally determined feature, this study contributes to a recent literature on the endogenous salience of ethnic identity by exploring how the silence of ethnicity may vary depending on the historical nation-building process and the political economic conditions. We shed light on this question utilizing a unique natural experiment in China. In the 1950s, the Chinese Communist Party assigned 55 state-recognized ethnicities to over 400 previously self-recognized ethnic groups, in which different rules were applied in different districts. In consequence, across geographic boundaries, the same ethnic group often broke up into different official ethnicities or two different groups were labeled as one. Exploiting this artificial assignment of state-recognized ethnicities in Southwest China, historically known as the most ethnically diverse area in China, we conduct a survey experiment on the citizen’s perception of ethnic preference and identity. Our experimental design also covers two generations, parents and students, which captures not only geographic variations but also generational dynamics in the salience of ethinic perception in China.

Authors

• Jun Fang, University of Michigan

• Ji Yeon (Jean) Hong, University of Michigan