Nine nations of China
It's taken as a given that Nigeria is a diverse place. That's one of the basic facts that students of comparative politics assume is true. But diversity in China? The Party line is that China is a remarkably homogeneous place. The reality is more complex. Even linguistically, there is diversity.Patrick Chovanec, an associate professor at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management in Beijing, created an interactive map for The Atlantic describing some of the diversity contained in China. (If you go to the article using the link below, you can click on each of the regions and read Chovanec's description of the characteristics of each region.)
The idea is based, in part, on The Nine Nations of North America by Joel Garreau, which was published in 1981.
Jeremiah Jenne, the blogger at Jottings from the Granite Studio, points out that Chovanec's idea is also probably based on the work of anthropologist G. William Skinner. Jenne writes, "In The City in Late Imperial China (1977) Skinner argued that China could be understood as a set of nine macroregions..."
Jenne concludes, "Originality aside, the basic idea behind both maps is an important one to bear in mind when looking at China. We tend to fixate on political boundaries, even when those boundaries and borders are drawn more for administrative convenience... The size of China’s national borders can obscure an incredibly complex and diverse set of economic, cultural, and social distinction..."
The Nine Nations of China
We tend to imagine China as a monolith: 1.3 billion people sharing the same language, history, and culture. The truth is far more interesting. China is a mosaic of several distinct regions, each with its own resources, dynamics, and historical character...
As China’s economy becomes more integrated, these regional differences are taking on greater importance than ever before. Each of the Nine Nations faces a unique set of challenges and opportunities in carving out its own competitive niche...
Dan Harris, writing at China Law Blog, sees value in an article "that seeks to make the well-worn (and pretty well-known) point that China is not monolithic...", but he sees the geographic basis for the "nations" as artificial as the political boundaries.
Harris writes, "My problem I see with this map is that it is exactly that. A map. And as a map, it distinguishes among regions geographically and that is not how I view many aspects of China. Just by way of an example, I see Beijing having commonalities with Shanghai just because they are two powerful and relatively sophisticated big cities. Different as these two cities are (and they are plenty different, in their cultures, in their attitudes and even in their languages), they still share many commonalities in terms of business."
So, how should we portray diversity and make reasonable generalizations while avoiding stereotyping and oversimplification?
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Labels: China, cleavages, demographics, economics
posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:00 AM
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