Available From UC Press

These essays address related facets of the shifting and fluid process of negotiation that is the real nature of ethnic relations in China, past and present, and by extension in the rest of the world. The volume concerns itself both with the overarching identity, first cultural and then national, that we now call "Chinese" and with its constituent ethnicites, including both the majority, which we now call "Han," and various minority or peripheral identities.

Melissa J. Brown is currently a research affiliate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, and editor of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. Education: B.A. Stanford University, M.A. Stanford University, Ph.D. University of Washington

"This collection of ten essays illustrates the excitement of ongoing research in the rapidly expanding area of minorities, race, and ethnicity in East Asia as well as some of the usual difficulties of fieldwork in politically sensitive and geographically remote regions....[T]hese chapters generally provide new and stimulating material suggestive of the kind of work now being undertaken in this area of research....[T]he promising research presented here should further stimulate the scholarly examination of China's cultures and expand a discussion of the great diversity within the categories of "Han" and "Chinese” as well as among the many distinct ethnic groups now a part of the Chinese state."—Linda Benson, Oakland University, China Review International

"This publication's relevance is twofold. On the one hand it touches on the complex issue of Chineseness with all its ideological as well as political and strategic repercussions. On the other hand it documents the state of China related anthropological research, which at present is a particularily fast growing field of Chinese studies."—Barbara Hendrischke, University of Melbourne, Journal of Contemporary Asia

"This is a fascinating collection of ten essays on the subject of ethnic identity construction and negotiation covering a range of different contexts in China and Taiwan....Most of the essays are well written with ethnographic details and theoretical insights tightly interwoven." —Wing Chung Ng, University of Texas at San Antonio, Pacific Affairs