User:Madalibi/Distinction between Hua and Yi

The distinction between Hua 華 and Yi 夷 is an ancient Chinese conception that differentiated a culturally defined "China" (called Hua, Huaxia 華夏, or Xia 夏) from cultural or ethnic outsiders (Yi "barbarians"). Although Yi is often translated as "barbarian," it could also refer to generic "others," to groups perceived as culturally different, to "non-Chinese," or to foreigners in general.

Depending on context, this sinocentric distinction could be largely cultural, or it could take ethnic or racist overtones (especially in times of war). In its cultural form, the Hua-Yi distinction assumed Chinese cultural superiority, but also implied that outsiders could become Chinese by adopting Chinese values and customs. When this "cultural universalism" took a more racial guise, however, it could justify treating non-Chinese people like animals.

The Hua-Yi distinction guided Chinese perceptions and interactions with non-Chinese peoples and domestic outsiders for more than two millennia, from the Zhou dynasty to the end of the Qing dynasty. Variants of this conception profoundly influenced the way in which East Asian countries (including Korea and Japan) interacted with each other.

This conception of barbarians as culturally less advanced but assimilable shaped the Chinese elite's imagination, imperial China's border relations, and the sinocentric "Chinese world order" which took the emperor as the center of civilization.

The term "barbarian" in European languages had more than one analog in Chinese. Among the "large inventory of Chinese names for foreign people" were the terms Yi 夷, Di 狄, Rong 戎, Man 蠻, Hu 胡, Qiang 羌, and Fan 番 (also written 蕃 or 籓), as well as compounds like Yi-Di 夷狄, Man-Yi 蠻夷, etc. Nicola di Cosmo warns that the distinctions between all these terms are "hopelessly obscured" if we translate them all as "barbarians."

It was expressed in early classics like Confucius's Analects and later elaborated in various commentaries to the Spring and Autumn Annals.

This distinction between China and barbarians rested on the sinocentric assumption that China was the center of human civilization. This distinction presented itself as primarily cultural, but Chinese perceptions of non-Chinese peoples could also become racially charged, especially in times of conflict between culturally Chinese states and nomadic outsiders on the northern edge of the Chinese cultural sphere.

Chinese political discourse and China’s engagement with other groups or states was built on this contrast between Hua and Yi.

Frank Dikotter has characterized this culturalist conception as a myth hiding racialist perceptions. Liu Xiaoyuan has claimed that the distinction was "ethnocultural" (both ethnic and cultural). Nicola di Cosmo makes the same distinction, but insists that the label of Yi was not always applied to non-Chinese, since many states traditionally considered as Chinese (like those of Qin, Chu, and Wu during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods) were characterized as Yi-Di in some classical texts.

Whether the labels had pejorative connotations depended on the term used and the context in which it was used.

To be labeled barbarian was "a cultural rather than a racial distinction."

This conception was part of a sinocentric imagination that placed Chinese civilization at the center, surrounded by concentric circles of increasingly less civilized peoples.

Origins

Di Cosmo, Dikotter, Sterckx (p. 160)

Origin of these conceptions: the concentric vision of the world Yugong (from Shujing) <di Cosmo>, Guliang and Gongyang commentaries to the Chunqiu <Dikotter>

Confucius, who lived during a time of warfare between the Chinese states, gave great importance to the respect of "li," or ritual propriety. As recorded in Analects 3.5, he said that "The Yi and Di-barbarian tribes have their rulers, yet they still are not equal to the Xia states that have no rulers." This sentence implied that even "barbarians" with a ruler were inferior to civilized countries in a state of political turmoil.

Note about the Song re-interpretation of the same passage.

Historian Nicola di Cosmo remarks that these statements did not necessarily mark a "true cultural boundary."

Tang

Abramson (2007)

Ming

• Leo Shin (southern peoples)
• Alastair Johnston (racial visions)
• Serruys (Mongols)
• citation from Fang Xiaoru

Qing

The Qing dynasty was founded by Manchus who came from outside the northeastern borders of the Ming dynasty. Many members of the Chinese intellectual elite called the Manchus "Yi" and many expressed this distinction in ethnic rather than purely cultural terms. The Manchus themselves were sensitive to the use of the term "Yi."

Many prominent Chinese scholars of the mid seventeenth century defended the idea of the "fundamental inassimilability of the yi (barbarian) by the Hua (Chinese)."

• LLL(Spence, Dikotter, Liu)
• Wang Fuzhi (Duara, Dikotter, McDermott, Liu)
• Opium wars (Hevia, Liu)

• Duara (racial conceptions)
• Hostetler (Miao albums)
• Di Cosmo (naming of Hongyi cannon)
• Giersch (Yunnan)
• Newby (Khokand-Qing relations)

Mote 1999

77

“Although the nomadic societies were 'barbarian' according to Chinese usage, and in our eyes were also significantly 'different' as we look at the world from the vantage point of Chinese history, we should take the term 'barbarian' merely to mean 'different' in specific ways."

266-67 (about Jin times)

"A telling element of Chinese cultural distinctiveness is found in the language differences within the vast Chinese population. A sense of Chineseness, shared among all the ‘Han’ Chinese who used the Chinese languages and were aware of a common cultural heritage, transcended the many local and regional variations. That shared sense of Chineseness persisted, despite the separation into Chinese and alien states. In the minds of the time, the line between China within and the non-Chinese (or ‘barbarian’) world without was rarely ambiguous. The fellow Chinese whose language was strange, even / unintelligible, was seldom confused with the non-Chinese whose language was outlandish. That line was meaningful, but it was not fundamentally one of mutual hostility. Even in ordinary times there were of course cultural impulses that might, in stressful situations, give rise to hostility between Chinese and non-Chinese people; there were also many elements of the cultural scene which fostered Chinese acceptance of the border region peoples. Officially, those linguistic and cultural outsiders were seen as humans learning to become Chinese; however arrogant that assumption seems to us today, it helped to lower hostility."

1003, note 5

"As noted previously, ‘barbarian’ is used in the sense in which the Chinese intended it, meaning ‘culturally different’ or simply ‘non-Chinese.’"

Liu Xiaoyuan (2004)

11

"However, when a nomadic, ‘non-Chinese’ civilization emerged in the Inner Asian steppes and became strong enough to challenge the agrarian Chinese culture, the original, largely economic differentiation between the Chinese and the ‘not-yet-Chinese’ within China was overshadowed and eventually replaced by an ethnocultural ‘distinction between the Hua and the Yi’ (hua yi zhi bian). [Note 36:.] The more elaborate these two civilizations grew, the less surmountable the ‘barriers’ between the two seemed to become, though the flows of people, goods, and ideas between the two sides never stopped. Despite the Confucianist assertion that the Hua and Yi were ‘not the same kind’ (fei wo zu lei), the separation between what can be termed as ‘ethnocultural states in the world of China was not as rigid as the nation-states in the European world. It is almost an axiom in the field that “China could be conquered but its system remained.” It is problematic, however, to assert further that the Chinese state always ‘domesticated its conquerors.’ [Note 37.] Because the ancient ethnocultural states in the Chinese world were not separated by clearly demarcated and commonly accepted borders, it is difficult to determine where the Chinese system stopped and other systems began. As a matter of fact, it was commonplace for culturally and ethnically mixed systems to function within the ambiguous frontier zones between the Middle Kingdom and its neighbors.

Unlike the European nation-state system, which divided its members with clearly demarcated national borders, the Chinese ethnocultural-state system connected its participants with graduated, culturally mutually penetrating, and etnically mixed zones. During the tang dynasty, a practice used by the central court to control the non-Han groups along the frontiers was to establish ‘prefectures and superior prefectures of loose rein’ (jimi zhou fu) The idea was to ‘keep the [non-Han] tribes intact in order to use them as defensive barriers and not to alienate them from their indigenous customs.’ [Note 38.] China’s northern beighbors reciprocated by duplicatinghe practice. Such non-Han dynasties as the Liao, the Xixia, and the Jin adopted their own dual systems to administer their own peoples and a 'Han system' (hanzhi) to control the Han population along the southern fringes of their territories."

Lydia Liu 2006

73

Interpreting and translating words and texts that were written by those whose world did not resemble our own is never an unproblematic enterprise. In his study Ancient China and Its Enemies, Nicola di Cosmo urges us to look carefully at the ancient sources and try to comprehend what a particular text was saying and to what audience rather than jump to a blanket imputation of “barbarian” whenever one catches words like man, yi, rong, and di.[Note 6 (pp. 262-63): Di Cosmo (2002), 97. “Di Cosmo’s reading of the early texts and their historical contexts questions the notion that ‘a consciousness had been achieved among the Chou [Zhou] states of a clearly / demarcated ‘us’ and ‘them’ and that such a demarcation indicates a mature notion of cultural unity within China expressed in the classic opposition between a unified Hua-Hsia [Hua-Xia] community and non-Chou ‘barbarians.’” He shows that the binome yi-di began to appear in the Guliang and Gongyang Commentaries but was not found in the earlier Zuo Commentaries. In the Guliang tradition, the yi-di were those who inhabited the reverse side of virtue of morality, and one could punish them without paying overmuch attention to the rules of propriety otherwise supposed to govern interstate relations; hence the famous pronouncement, “As for Yi and Ti [Di], one cannot speak of right or wrong.” But who were the yi-di? If the nomenclature drew a clear boundaries between ‘use’ and the foreigners so named, it was fluid enough to “be applied to states normally regarded as part of the Chou political and cultural system. The states of Ch’in [Qin], Ch’u [Chu], and Wu were all branded at one time or another as Yi-Ti [yi-di] because of their violations of accepted norms” (p. 100).

73-74

Approaching the idea yi as an evolving and contested historical concept / can provide us with new interpretive possibilities so that we need not begin by assuming that the indigenous discourse is merely about one people’s (true or biased) knowledge of the other as opposed to a stable notion of the self – an epistemological reductionism on the basis of which the British conceptualized their ban. There is much to be gained by looking instead at how the idea of yi has historically defined and redefined the boundaries of sovereign rule and fashioned the terms of political legitimacy through war and insurgency. In other words, the yi or yi-di should be grasped as a discursive figure that traverses territorial and political boundaries and has been regarded as dangerous for that reason. The danger lies in proportion to the degree in which the enunciation of yi – the illocutionary force of statements about the yi rather than what is merely asserted – poses a threat to the legitimacy of those who rule just as much as it can provide a discursive weapon to those who oppose the rule. That the weapon is a double-edged sword goes without saying. To comprehend how it works, one must first ask: What kinds of enunciatory positions are made available or not available to the ruler and the ruled whenever the distinction between hua and yi is broached and reiterated?

74

One would have to be blind not to notice the obvious connections between the verbal abuse to which the British and the other Westerners were subjected on the one hand and the military violence to which the Chinese people were subjected during the Opium Wars on the other.

271n77

Among those who shared Wei Yuan’s views were Gong Zizhen, Lin Zexu, and others, down to Liang Qichao’s generation, all of whom were steeped in the Gongyang learning. Gong Zizhen, who was Lin’s close friend, became one of the most important Gongyang scholars of the period. He had studied under Liu Fenglu in 1819 and espoused the latter’s rejection of the hua/yi distinction as well as distinctions between “what is close and what is distant and between what is great an what is humble.” To confront the crisis brought on by the opium trade, Gong reinterpreted the here epochs to call for a radical reform of the Qing and wrote to Lin Zexu to give his friends the moral support he needed to launch the campaign against the opium trade. For an important interpretation of Gong’s role in the Gongyang studies and contribution to the imperial geographical scholarship, see Wang Hui, “Liyi Zhongguo de guannian yu diguo de hefaxing wenti: jinwen jingxue de ‘nei wai’ guan yu Qingchao de diguo shiye jiqi yanbian” (The concept of a ritual China and the legitimacy of empire: the notion of ‘inner/outer’ in the changing imperial vision of the Qing dynasty), Zhongguo shehui kexue pinglun 1.1 (2002): 181-85.

84

Such were the circumstances under which Zeng Jing discovered the works of Lü Liuliang, a renowned Confucian scholar from the Kangxi era, who had reinterpreted the Spring and Autumn Annals for a secret counsel to ‘revere the emperorship and expel the yi’ (zun wang rang yi). [Note 38.] Lü had argued that upholding the distinction between hua and yi was more urgent than observing the righteous bond between the sovereign and his subjects, because moral reasoning began with that distinction. Zeng Jing heeded Lü’s injunction. In an unpublished work, he charged the Yongzheng emperor with ten major crimes and called for the overthrow of the Manchu regime. [Note 39.]

[…]

One of the first things Yongzheng did when composing Awakening to Supreme Justice was to undermine the credibility of the hua/yi distinction”

Ross Terrill

41

Lamentably, the Chinese sometimes likened the Barbarians to animals, whose highest hope could only be to find a niche in the Chinese-arranged realm of all-under-heaven (tian xia). The racism was undeniable. The Shanhai jing (“Classic of Mountains and Seas”), written two millennia ago and still cited in the Qing dynasty, describes a southern non-Chinese people as having human bodies and faces, but birdlike / wings and beaks, and a western people with human faces but the bodies of snakes. Said a close advisor to Emperor Tai Zong in the seventh century, of the Huns, or Xiongnu: “The Hsiung-nu [Xiongnu] with their human faces and animal hearts are not of our kind. When strong, they are certain to rob and pillage; when weak, they come to submit. But their nature is such that they have no sense of gratitude or righteousness.” [Note 37: Rossabi, 1983, 48-49.] Said the Ming Emperor Jia Qing of non-Chinese on the southern border: “The yi and di, like birds and beasts, are without human morality.” [Note 38: Ming Shi Zong shilu, juan 199, 6b-7b.] Alastair Ian Johnston, in his study of Ming memorials on foreign policy, found only one memorialist among 120 who acknowledged that Mongols, “like humans… could reason and understand costs and benefits.” Even this one writer judged the Mongols to be “by nature dogs and sheep.” [Note 39: Johnston, 1995, 188, n. 17.] In late imperial documents, Westerners, too, were portrayed as animal-like. [Note 40: Richard J. Smith, 1996 (“Mapping…”), 88.]

The historian Yang Lien-sheng, in a learned essay making the strongest possible claim that (some) Chinese did have a sense of the “foreign,” and did not equate China with the civilized world, nevertheless acknowledged that Barbarians were likened to animals. “Racism,” Yang concluded sagely, “is particularly difficult to reform if the habit was formed in… the early historical period of a society.” [Note 41: Yang, 1968, 28.] We will be reminded of this in the story of African students in the People’s Republic of China, protesting the condescension they experienced from Chinese officials and Chinese students…

48

The Chinese “world-arranging” function was until the Qin Dynasty the king’s alone. But from the Han Dynasty, the sense of superiority, and therefore the right to rule, spread from just the emperor to a qualified Confucian elite. The learned jun zi (“virtuous one”) could share in the world-arranging role. Thus did a more formidable wall arise between hua (Chinese) and yi (Barbarian). Virtue emanated by definition from those steeped in the Chinese Confucian classics. It followed – at least to the Chinese mind – that the Barbarians could only look up to the (Chinese) Son of Heaven, and that a Barbarian state could never be more than a vassal in relation to the Chinese court.

Cited on 48

Perelomov and Martynow (1983), 187

“The hua–yi dichotomy sprang not from the experience of contacts with neighbors, but from the structure of the Chinese state.”

49

What, in practice, was “wrong” with the Barbarians? Their steppe location counted against them in the eyes of a Chinese polity that assumed cultivation was the normal relation of human beings to land. In Chinese documents, the Barbarians were alluded to as whimsical and arbitrary. This may have meant they simply did not share the Chinese worldview. I am tempted to add that the trouble with the Barbarians, for the Chinese, was simply their existence – a common syndrome in the history of Chinese paternalism, because of the close analogy between state and family. If you were not a “child” of the mother-father state, you were a potential problem; at best, you did not belong to the family.

Dikotter

2-3

“absence of any kind of cultural pluralism”… “the ruling elite, dominated by the assumption of its cultural superiority, measured alien groups according to a yardstick by which those who did not follow ‘Chinese ways’ were considered ‘barbarians’. It is assumed that this world view, originating mainly from the Gongyang school (commentaries on Confucius’ Chunqiu), generated at least one valuable tendency: it obliterated racial distinctions to emphasize cultural continuity. A theory of “using the Chinese ways to transform the barbarians’ (yongxiabianyi) was strongly advocated. It was believed that the barbarian could be culturally absorbed – laihua, ‘come and be transformed’, or hanhua, ‘become Chinese’. The Chunqiu, a chronological history of the Spring and Autumn period (722-481 BC), traditionally attributed / to Confucius, hinged on the idea of cultural assimilation. In his commentary on the Gongyang, He Xiu (129-182 AD) later distinguished between the zhuxia, the ‘various people of Xia [the first Chinese empire]’ and the Yi and Di barbarians, living outside the scope of the Chinese cultural sphere. In the Age of Great Peace, an allegorical concept similar to the Golden Age in the West, the barbarians would flow in and be transformed: the world would be one.

The delusive myth of a Chinese antiquity that abandoned racial standards in favour of a concept of cultural universalism in which all barbarians could ultimately participate has understandably attracted some modern scholars. Living in an unequal and often hostile world, it is tempting to project the utopian image of a racially harmonious world into a distant and obscure past. To counterbalance this highly idealized vision of the Chinese past, some researchers have drawn attention to passages from the classics which are apparently incompatible with the concept of cultural universalism. Most quoted is the Zuozhuan (fourth century BC), a feudal chronicle: ‘If he is not of our race, he is sure to have a different mind (fei wo zulei, qi xin bi yi) [Note 4:.] This sentence seems to support the allegation that at least some degree of ‘racial discrimination’ existed during the early stage of Chinese civilization.

Di Cosmo

“the term ‘barbarian’ common in a number of European languages does not have a single analog in the Chinese language. Yet a number of terms designating foreign peoples (Man, Yi, Ti, Jung, Ch’iang, Hu, etc.) are routinely translated as ‘barbarians.’

100

The category Yi-di was introduced by the Guliang and Gongyang commentaries. It did not appear in the Zuozhuan (di Cosmo, 100).

Leo Shin

113

Yi-di as “another generic reference for ‘non-Chinese’”

References

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