 Good evening, everybody, and a thousand welcomes. Giajeev goleir achoyd ja agus faultis fir roith chuygon achoyd speciall thyshaw. Fomit harfwet, wyach, giaf as ocht, a thee laurlin en ocht. So, I am Mary Galleher. I am Professor of French Studies in UCD's School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics. And I am the convener of APREN, or APREN, UCD's Asia Pacific Research Network. On behalf of UCD and especially on behalf of the APREN organizing team, I'd like to thank you for tuning in on this November evening to what is the last APREN seminar, Gathering of 2021. We are really very fortunate and are very grateful to be welcoming this evening for our last talk of the year, Professor Nathan Hill. Professor Hill is Sam Lam, Professor in Chinese Studies at Trinity College Dublin. He wears the hat of a director of the Trinity Center for Asian Studies. His PhD was awarded by Harvard in 2009. And prior to coming to Dublin, Professor Hill taught in London where he headed the Department of East Asian Languages at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. He was also director of the London Confucius Institute. So Professor Hill's research fields are Tibetan linguistics, History of Chinese, Tibetan Burmese, Comparative Linguistics. I've written Berman here. I think that might be correct. And he also has a research interest in natural language processing for low resource languages. Professor Hill's research projects have been funded by the ERC, the AHRC in the UK and the British Academy. And they have been in the fields of Tibetan, Tibetan, Berman, Historical Linguistics, and also Sino-Tibetan Historical Linguistics. His most recent book appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2019. And the title is Historical Phonology of Tibetan Burmese and Chinese. Other titles from 2010, Tibetan Verb Stems and from 2009, Old Tibetan Inscriptions. Professor Hill's title this evening has nothing to do, I think, with the Verb Stems or Tibetan Inscriptions. But I think it's going to take us on a very interesting journey. It is the Chinese state approach to the national question in the 20th century. So thank you so much Nathan for coming to speak to us this evening and I give you Professor Nathan Hill. Well thank you very much Mary for this kind introduction and maybe I should begin by explaining that I've slightly changed the scope of the talk and first I'll explain the reason for that. Around the time I was hired at Trinity there was some discussion of China's approach to the national question in the pages of the Irish Times that I myself weighed in on and Mary actually kind of sort of in the aftermath of those discussions issued this invitation and I was too lazy to immediately take it up so there's been you know maybe six months of time that I permitted myself to prepare it and in the meantime actually I have organized a series of talks at the TCD that has touched on some of the same questions. So in particular Julia Schneider of University College Cork that gave a very interesting talk about the Republican period in China and then we've had several people speak about the recent Xi period. So then I had sort of to some extent you know taken out the support from underneath my own planned presentation. So what I'm going to do tonight is to zoom out a little bit and talk about the national question in slightly broader terms and then we'll sort of travel towards China in the 20th century. And I should excuse myself that then it's a very broad scope and involves a number of topics that I myself not particularly expert in so I'm you know just learning but I see a kind of story that can be told and if any of you feel like I have grossly misrepresented some some thing that you know more about then you can please kindly you know correct me at the end. So I'm going to start my story with with the word nation which comes from Latin nazio it's a it's a it's a noun that's that's that comes from a denominator verb and means to be born the the the verb and in sort of in Latin texts it could mean people, tribe, family, any kind of group that maybe has some commonality to do with birthplace in particular but not only it might be sort of people with a shared interest for instance like even like a hobby yeah but particularly in in in Cicero and in the church fathers a nation as opposed to other words like familio or gans or something meant foreigners or gentiles. So in terms of the nation becoming a sort of social political reality this happens in in in late 12th century early 13th century Bologna at the founding of the University of Bologna where many students from outside of the city of Bologna had come to study and they found it useful to organize basically in their struggles with the city fathers into nations so there were there were 14 or or it depended on the time period 13 14 nations in the called the ultra montane university and then there was also a cis montane university so the cis montane university was for all those nations from from Italy and then the ultra montane university was for all those nations from the other side of the Alps so you had nations like France, Spain, Provencal, Picard, Normandy and and what were these nations they were they were a group of students from that area that had had had a function in the administration of the university the university was a collection of nations and they were democratically organized they had they had you know legal rights within the recognized by the city and importantly tying back to this this notion of foreigners citizens of Bologna studying at the university were not members of a nation because because they were under the jurisdiction of the city so that's how you get this understanding that nation as foreigner comes to mean nation as you know a group of students organized for the purposes of university administration according to where they were from and actually in the best documented nation from Bologna is the is the German nation and in in 1306 the rule was it was based on your birthplace but in 1417 the rule was it had to do with your native language particular in the in the German nation which covered Bohemia and covered Hungary it was a huge territory so so that's where we get that you know that's we get the first manifestation of of nation as a as a social political category for the organization of human beings and it enters into let's say international politics through ecclesiastical councils so the first ecclesiastical council where bishops voted according to nation rather than just sort of each bishop has one vote was at the council of Constance in in which lasted from 1414 to 1418 but this actually culminated a trajectory so so sort of you can sort of distinguish three phases at first it was just convenient for lobbying purposes for for the curia or the pope to sort of meet bishops by nation right it makes sense like French bishops have some things in common maybe some shared interests you can't meet all the bishops to to lobby individually so you you you meet them for lobbying purposes according to nation and then at the council of Pisa which is the one right before Constance voting was according to nation in the sense of calling upon bishops to cast their votes according to nation this is like the I don't I mean as an American I compared to like the democratic convention where you call on you know Vermont and then you say who do you cast your votes for but but it's but they don't just have one vote as Vermont you know each delegate has a vote so that's how things were in Pisa but in Constance it was each nation gets exactly one vote and I can't help but sharing a fact that kind of two thirds of the way through the council the French delegates were of the opinion that England was too small to to to to constitute a nation and then the English or let's say the bishops you know who who constituted the English nation wrote a rebuttal where where a lot of their argument for for England counting as a nation involved that it was composed of many kingdoms like you know in the same way that Germany or France was composed of many kingdoms eight kingdoms in particular four of them from Ireland so you know I think that's I don't know I found that a a fact worth telling this this audience about so so then we have already you know we have the nation goes from a an organizational unit for university administration and then clearly you know because these bishops many of them had been trained in universities they brought that idea to to the the forum of international politics now the next step is to actually to to to change the political jurisdiction of the world to reflect nations and this is a process I don't know very much about but I think it can be addressed in in in a theoretical and historical way so I'll start with the theoretical which is it's it's clearly tied to the rise of capitalism and why we can ask ourselves is the nation state a useful form of political organization for for capitalism and there's a big literature here but I'm just going to rely on Rosa Luxemburg because I I I find that she has a pretty good answer where the key factors include the creation of a home market so in a in one of these you know nested political regimes of feudalism you had trade barriers everywhere but for capitalism it's useful to to flatten out and have sort of free market areas and so the creation of the home market was was an important consideration in in the organization of of of political and social life into nation states and then the other one was the the exercise of legal violence at the nation state level so on the one hand you want if you're a member of the bourgeoisie you want your life to be peaceful right you want to be able to not hire your own soldiers to watch your house but on the other hand you also want to be able to use the army to to open up markets abroad and to yeah to to to help your interests your commercial and economic interests so that's that's her argument for why the nation state is a sort of good form of social organization for under for capitalism and then how does it come to be well I think it's pretty clear that it starts in england and I won't go into the details but you know the war of the roses sort of gives you the the result of the war the roses is that it's clear that only one person has legal jurisdiction over the use of violence in the territory you get the dissolution of the monasteries which kind of flattens out land ownership structures around well and and and and to create sort of pride more private holdings in in land and then this process let's say really significantly results in the civil war where you can really say you know the budding capitalist farmer class takes over the state and then in the same breath we can mention the Dutch revolution the French revolution and by now it's it's pretty clear that the nation state as an organizational form is on the march and then I think you have two two sort of forms of political organization on the global stage in let's say the 17th century to the early 19th century and those are the nation states so england france holland and then Germany and and Italy which which bring together small polities to to to match some preconceived notion of a nation and then you also have a large multinational empire so the ottomans and the austrians and the russians and the chinese these are all you know vast multinational empires and and the sort of idea of the nation state the ideology of the nation state would require that they be carved up into their constituent nations and that process I think probably begins with the independence of greece from the ottoman empire and really culminates in the in the force for war where where both ottoman empire and and austria and to a lesser extent russia are are carved up into their constituent nations each each one or maybe not each one but many of them getting their own states so now is is where I want to jump to the the national question in in international socialism which is going to very clearly inform the chinese context so the sort of in in those days there was something called the social democracy which meant which was explicitly marxist and it was only later that that social democracy split into the more reformist kind of approach that we now associate with the word social democracy and and and communism so before that split we we talked internationally about the social democracy and there was a discussion where where it's it's clear that on the one hand socialism was sort of on the side of the underdog in general that's the sort of idea but on the other hand it was meant to be international and and I just want to highlight what I see as a sort of you know to really use a marxist term a contradiction imminent in socialism from the beginning which is even the articulation of being international prescribes the idea of of the nation in itself and for instance in in the organization of the first international so the the the international working men's association there were delegates from different nations there was a french delegate and a german delegate whatnot so at the same time that that as a as a political goal the obliteration of the nation state as a form of social organization was in sites that that that's you know concept of the nation state was actually inscribed into their own practice so so there was a debate within social democracy about what what should we you know how should we approach the national question and then there were very specific national questions how should we approach the polish question how should we approach the irish question and some people thought it should really be taken on a case by case basis it's argued that this was the approach of of of marx and angles and it certainly was the approach of rosa luxembourg that you had to you had to look at a struggle for national liberation and you had to say you know is this particular struggle on the side of progress in history or is it progressive or is it progressive is it reactionary and and size up the the concrete circumstances on the ground but the official policy of social democratic parties you know led by the social democrat social democratic party of germany let's say before at the very end of the 19th century turn of the 20th century was that nations should have the right to self-determination and then i will talk specifically about an essay called marxism and the national question by joseph stallin from 1913 which is you know significantly before the russian revolution where uh so he was georgian and partly because of that because he was a a member of a of a minority nationality uh lenin called on him to sort of write the position paper for um for what the bolshevik position should be on the national question and and what he said was that nations should have you know reiterated the orthodox position basically nations should have the right to self-determination including secession if they if they wanted they should have the right to uh education in their in their own language uh and if they choose to be part of larger polity such as russia they would have the right to local autonomy but um it should be noted that he saw that as necessarily territorially contiguous so uh in particular the context of his 1913 paper was against this organization called the bund which was a social democratic organization primarily or no no exclusively organized around or for the for the benefit of the jews living in in russia who argued that you know you you could be jewish and live anywhere in russia there was no specific territory to point to um but in this article stalin was saying that that um uh local autonomy should really be tied to a jurisdiction uh and you know everyone in that jurisdiction would then collectively exercise that local economy rather than having sort of an id card that says you know you're a georgian but you're living in i don't know kazakhstan you still vote with the georgians he didn't like that idea at all so that was the the position uh that stalin articulated in 1913 and then that was adopted uh by the communist party of china and um now i should just make a slight digression and say that uh that in the qing dynasty um the uh the the qing recognized and i sort of don't know what term to use here because i don't want to say nation i don't want to say ethnic group right um but the the qing organized itself with a recognition that the the manchus the mongols the tibetans the weigur and the chinese those five peoples all had a distinct constitutional if you like relationship to the state and that was kind of similar to austria and the ottoman empire um so i won't dwell on it but you know the the the managers were in charge and they were organized into banners they lived in special plate parts of town they had a special haircut um uh and they they tried very hard to maintain their linguistic and and cultural identity despite uh being very thin on the ground and and all you know knowing chinese and being spread all throughout china uh the mongols and the tibetans had um a lot of scope for uh local decision-making let's say uh the weigurs had been only recently incorporated into this state and were clearly the sort of um the sort of extra group so just by way of example there's a large dictionary uh uh compiled under the shangshi emperor uh which which gave words in uh in the first edition gave words in in the four languages uh chinese mongolian tibetan uh and uh and manchu uh but then they came out with a later addition that added weigur and i think that's a nice metaphor for how the state kind of conceptualized the the weigurs and then the other groups that we would we would now see as national minorities or or or i should have said minority nationalities uh like the hanyi or the yi or the lisu in mostly in yunnan uh were were really kind of off the jing dynasty's radar and and were were considered as others yeah and and and there's a book for instance it is sort of illustrated book of peoples of the world and it has you know about a hundred um peoples like this in it but also includes you know the french and the dutch and sort of other uh peoples of the world yeah uh then in the in in when the jing dynasty was overthrown those uh chinese nationalists who saw themselves as or saw that as an important goal uh conceptualized in terms of uh anti-colonial national liberation struggle we need to cast off uh the yoke of the chinese sorry the manchu oppressors in the same way that we have to cast off the yoke of the english and the french and then there was a question of course how shall we relate to the other nations that live inside of china and and uh let me just say that in the republican period there were multiple views on that question uh ranging from let them have their own nation states to um to they must all become chinese uh and the the republic of china never really had the the stability the control on the ground to both effectively articulate a coherent uh let's say position on uh the the national question nor to implement it but the uh the the china the chinese communist party uh when they came to power in 1949 they had made their position clear that that it was the position that stalin articulated in 1913 so the first uh thing they then had to do was figure out how many nations uh they were governing so uh oh and i should say that they they they had already by this time promised that uh that the minority nationalities would be given uh representation in the people's congress according to population uh before they knew how many they they were going to be so then they conducted a census and and in in using a methodology that would be approved of by many people today uh they they left the the question what uh nationality are you open so you could write anything you could say you could answer anything um and the result is that they got a little over 400 different answers now 14 of those uh included uh over 100 000 people uh so uh including things like uh i mean well certainly tibetan but also uh things like mong or juang but as many as 20 of these uh of these answers only one person gave uh and there was also an other you know option that or like you could write anything right so so how many people wrote other yeah or uh it was over 30 000 people who did that uh so when they looked at this and they said well now what this isn't going to work if we give these 20 nations that only have one person in them equal you know proportional representation in the in the uh in the in the people's congress then every single chinese citizen is going to have to sit in the people's congress and that's not it's not going to work so then they uh the state sort of told the ethnographers okay go back and and revise this list to to have fewer yeah and they did that under enormous time pressure and came up with this list of uh 56 that are in use now and um particularly important in doing that in unan was the work of the the british colonial officer and amateur linguist uh hp davies who had compiled uh word lists from throughout uh unan and and had sort of argued that because these people's words are similar to these people you could kind of glom together various um groups into into larger groups so this was a consultative process so it wasn't like the state just said okay you guys you're in this in this minzu uh but uh sorry nation but um but but you know if if if if you if you were to low down on the list of numbers then you basically had to decide which which of the larger nations you wanted to belong to and there are some strange uh results from this um for example there's one village in unan uh where there's a people called the katsu who decided for reasons having to do with their own sense of identity uh and and the history of their of their ruling dynasty that they would be classified as mongols even though uh they lived among people who ended up being classified as ye from a linguistic perspective you can look at the low lowest family of the low lowest language family it has four distinct branches uh some of those branches have multiple nations in them like the honey and the gino but then a nation like the ye actually includes speakers of languages across those four branches and then in those in situations like that one language in this case no su was was chosen as the language for that nation um so so um yeah so uh you know china has over 400 languages spoken in uh but only 56 of them are sort of recognized by the state and even in the in the practice of of um of linguistics in china it's kind of politically correct to to not say that things are different languages than the official language of their minzu to give one example there's a family the the gyaronic family which is spoken there's about seven seven or seven to twelve languages in the gyaronic family um and it's it's manifestly as related to Tibetan as it is the chinese or burmese it's it's kind of part of that same sort of Tibetan family but um but very interesting and divergent but the gyarong speakers are classified as as Tibetan so as the sort of social reality on the ground is that the gyarongs are understood by Tibetans as speaking kind of bad Tibetan uh and quickly depending on where you live in the gyarong speaking area people are switching either to Amdo Tibetan or to Mandarin chinese so just a few words about um how nationality's policy worked you know uh both in theory and in practice there are some there was there have been some benefits to being a member of a minority nationality those in included regional autonomy and and that manifested in things like the the governor of your province or or prefecture would be a member of your ethnicity uh you would be given extra points on the college entrance exam you could also there's a special sort of college preparatory year available between high school and university for um four members of of minority nationalities there are quotas for government jobs in um in uh in uh regional in in in autonomous uh national regions uh and and and the rules about how those quotas are filled uh are set uh at the at the local level so for instance in in in our Mongolia there's you know so many percentage uh that that of government jobs for Mongolians and and they're in our Mongolia they've decided that to qualify for that you have to speak Mongolian uh whereas um in other regions uh there are still those quotas for government jobs but there's no requirement uh to speak uh the local language and then also uh the one child policy was uh was not applied to um to members of minority nationalities um some people will say that uh a lot of these measures are were sort of existed in paper only or um or or I have to put it that um that the the the minority nationalities have not exercised real autonomy I think what is most clear is that the right to secede uh which the communist party was perfectly happy to see out of Mongolia exercise in in uh in I think it was in the early 30s when they did that um that right is is no longer considered uh something that uh that that nationalities should exercise um other than that I I would I would say from my perspective that um the the thing that constitutes the non-freedom of uh national minorities is the one party system which applies equally across China yeah so and that these things these policies like extra points on college admissions you know did have a concrete meaning to to those people who who um who they apply to um a lot of this was sort of not really applied during the cultural revolution because in during the cultural revolution everyone had a lot of other things on their mind but but uh in the sort of late 70s or you know in 79 early 80s uh I think there was a renewed attempt both also in in legislation to to stick by the policies uh from you know implied by the 1913 article of Stalin's uh but uh starting in the in the sort of mid to late 2000s uh when there were sort of ethnic violence in in Tibet and in Xinjiang uh certain members of the Chinese intelligentsia started to articulate the opinion that this framework this this this traditional approach to the national question was no longer fit for purpose and there's two schools of thought there that are that are most worth mentioning uh one is associated with Maron uh who argued that China should have a kind of melting pot uh a sort of civic society where where um national identity would melt away uh in and be replaced with a loyalty to the um to the state and to to a to a new nationality called the Zhonghua Minzu I mean it had been articulated from the beginning of the of the of the republic and and even earlier uh but no one really goes around thinking I'm uh Zhonghua they think I'm Chinese or I'm Tibetan um and that any exercise of of difference would be relegated to your private life yeah you know you can speak Tibetan in at home you can go to your Buddhist monasteries uh you know by without having it interfere with the public sphere the other thinkers were were two people with the last name who who authored articles so they're called in literature the two who's and and they had a more uh let's say aggressively assimilationist stance which was that it would be better for everyone if uh if even in private people would just put away their um their antiquated uh you know backward identities and joined the modern uh Chinese uh identity uh and the the state has never officially uh changed its policy um and in fact reiterated uh a sort of commitment to continuity uh with the sort of framework that Stalin laid out in 1913 but if you look at actual practice uh even in speeches of of Xi Jinping there are sort of phrases that are lifted from articles by the the two who's and the the extra points on on the college entrance exam is being phased out one child policy is already gone so that the special you know exemption from it is no longer relevant the um extra year uh possible year but but after high school and before college that's also on the way out um minority or uh teaching in the local language has been has not been obliterated it still exists to some extent but has been quite radically curtailed and even in kindergarten now all all teaching should be medium of Chinese so um so that's the the state of play at the moment which is more or less let's say an implicit repudiation of um of the the socialist approach to the nationality to the national question but I want to sort of end by saying that that uh my own observation is that this change in uh nationality's policy is kind of linked to a broader embracing of the conceptualization of China as a nation state which is which is part of this contradiction that emerged uh you know from early on in social democracy um and you know Mao clearly thought of China as a nation state and thought that it was important for China to be strong as a nation state and I think Xi Jinping is just applying the logic inherent in the social form of the nation state that that um that one state should have one nation and the way to do that is either like in Austria you break you break up the Austrian empire and you say okay the the Czechs get their own nation and the Hungarians get their own nation or the other thing you can do is you can say everyone who belongs to a minority a nation has to assimilate to the majority nation and that's another way that you can you can get this one-to-one map between um between the state and and the nation so uh you know when we are tempted to critique changes in um in Chinese nationality's policy I you know I would encourage us to understand that uh in that critique should be a critique or or may well be a critique of the nation state as a if you like a technology of social political organization um and that's I think where I will end my talk thank you so much Nathan uh for that most wide-ranging and I have to say uh spellbinding uh tour d'horizon is the only word that really comes to mind because you really plan I mean I did say you were going to be taking us on a on a journey I I didn't I didn't think it was going to be just quite as um as expansive for me I mean it really did certainly expand my horizons so I'd just like to tell everybody that questions are um really warmly uh uh invited and the thing to do is to find your Q&A button on your screen and to type in your question there this is a webinar format so that's the best way of communicating your your question so um I suppose I'm just going to actually do what I should have done already I should have already opened so I'm just opening my Q&A just to make sure that I don't miss any questions that that are asked and of course I have one ready myself um and it's it's this question uh Nathan I'm just wondering I think it might be a little bit from left field but still I go ahead I'm just wondering nowadays do you think there is what could be called creolization going on um in in China um and I'm not really thinking so much of languages as you know nations or cultures and um and sort of identifications and belongings and that's I suppose that's one half of the question and the other half is well there are two other there's third there are three thirds if you like so that's the first question first third the second third is is there you know is there is this would this be linked to mobility I mean I know there are a lot of migrant workers in in China and I'm just wondering you know about but I understood that that migration of workers was just for one year and then you would have to go back to base um that you wouldn't be allowed to kind of migrate and settle so to do it's got to do with maybe internal borders between these different languages and identification groups and I did have there was a third element oh yes it's to do with visible difference I mean so people have in their heads what you described as you don't let's say home languages which don't really get um you know which don't really which they don't really necessarily associate with that much in the public sphere but is there is there also you know um a sort of a visible difference element to all of this I'm sorry for throwing three at you oh no that's fine I've I've got it covered okay so um I'll just start even though you said not to take it from a linguistic perspective I will start with the the linguistic perspective on realization which is that you know yeah even at the sort of height of um of um what to say generosity on the part of the state vis-a-vis um local languages like sponsoring publications and having local language education straight through university uh it was a social reality that you know to get ahead in life uh no good knowledge of chinese would be helpful and for for for um for certain kinds of interactions with the state or with commerce a good knowledge of chinese was necessary so um under that context uh you started getting lots of loan words uh and when I was in lasa in in uh 2001 it was clear that uh you know although although there was there was no question that that the Tibetan was a thriving language that that all of the vocabulary of of modern life was sort of the default was chinese and um and I'll just give an example that I remember which is I was talking to to someone just you know the coffee shop or something and then and then she turned to someone to ask what the Tibetan in Tibetan she asked what the Tibetan word for dictionary was using the chinese word for dictionary and that's a funny one to me because of course as a as a learner of Tibetan that was certainly a word I knew yeah um so that so that's so so crealization as a linguistic phenomenon certainly going on and then particularly in Amdo there has been a sort of reaction against that uh of like we we must you know not use uh chinese loan words and we must always find a Tibetan word to use instead uh and and that um actually one thing to point out about that particular let's say manifestation of nationalism has has not I have not seen any uh sense in which it's uh threatened considered threats to to to to the nation to well to the state and maybe that's just because people people who don't speak into bed and don't even notice that it's happening but uh but anyhow that there is that sort of met that very typical you know like uh like German in the in the early 19th century uh let's get it rid of all the French loan words uh so so that is going on specifically in Amdo in in in Tibet now the now onto migration that the that you were referring to this um so back in the day one of the ways that so the the economic policy of during the Mao period was to basically extract resources from the countryside and to spend them on heavy industry in the cities and that was done with with fixing prices to to sort of make sure that happened you know keep agricultural products cheap keep industrial products expensive but then what kept farmers from just moving to the city well they had you were you were registered everyone had their local registration and and your work group leader had to approve you know your marriage all sorts of things right so uh that system is currently still in place uh a lot of the powers associated with it have been loosened but for instance actually an amusing case is um you oftentimes hear about how good math education is in Shanghai well that math education is only measured on those people who who have the right to live in Shanghai who go to these these the actuals who are allowed to go to school in Shanghai uh who are really an elite group at this point right uh so so you get this this situation where people do migrate to the cities and they work as a kind of urban proletariat without any kind of legal standing and then they have to go home to the countryside for all of their or certain kinds of interactions with the state now in the old days one of the ways you would you would encourage uh let's say Chinese colonization of peripheral regions is by uh giving the people the right to change their locality of registration if they serve for a while you know in out west and and this was I talked to some some people in in the early 2000s who were Chinese who were taxi drivers or construction workers who availed themselves of this opportunity everyone hated all the Chinese people they hated living into that they thought they didn't like the altitude they didn't like the climate they hated it um but if I think you had to work there seven years and then you had the the right to live anywhere in China so then you would move to Beijing so that that that's kind of that let's say to the extent that there was a policy of of demographic replacement and I don't know whether there was or not but it has been sort of successful but not super successful right um and now what you see happening especially in Xinjiang is that if you uh so so most people let's say most people have been released from the vocational rehabilitation centers um and are either back home or are in actual prison and many of the the the the internment centers have been turned into prisons but also if you if you're unemployed in Xinjiang if you just sort of turn up at the you know the job center and say oh I'm unemployed they'll say well here's a bus to work in a factory in the east yeah um so there there is an attempt specifically with with Uyghurs I don't know about other people uh to to encourage let's say uh migration out east um and and then the who's definitely promoted sort of international mingling as one way of withering away national identity and so I think that well let's say one perspective on on both moving or incentivizing on or Chinese people to move to the west and incentivizing westerners to move back east might be let's say at the ideological level this this inter uh international mingling but uh you know other people we had this uh this webinar a few months ago and this question came up around this around the Uyghurs other people would say it's it's partly a way of in in the context of rising wages in China overall it's a way of maintaining a kind of proletarian working class by by let's say ethnicizing that class so and then that kind of turns nicely to your third point which is kind of the the meaning of phenotype where let's say and I haven't heard much discussion about this in China but I have one friend whose prediction is that or or he says look at the US in the US we were we were able to take people from another continent and and strip them of their language of their religion of of any kind of continuity of culture and and treat them as property yeah and and yet they have not you know fully assimilated into the majority group yeah and and that might to some extent have to do with a sort of phenotypical uh uh identifiability but I think it's also just clearly really useful for for for capitalism yeah um so so my friend's prediction is that is that a consequence of this approach of everyone speak Chinese everyone you know stuck being your your buddhist or muslim or whatever you have to be you know be Chinese speak Chinese eat Chinese food it doesn't it won't necessarily obliterate a national identity yeah I mean I would be tempted to say of course that Ireland has some experience with this vis-a-vis the UK you know we're speaking English right now and why is that you know um but but you know the UK despite uh you know spending a thousand years and a great deal of time and effort and money on on uh facing the Irish nation they weren't uh successful right so uh and and let's say again using a sort of you know uh Marxist terminology I would say in a in a dialectical way the more heavy handed your efforts uh to to a face uh national identity are the more likely that that will provoke dialectically a an assertion of of difference thank you so much for that for that wonderful answer Nathan and I see that there is a another question you're not going to get much rest um so this is a question from uh and now Nori Kodate so it's uh China's approach to the national question to what extent has it been shaped by globalization in many western nations the nation state model has been challenged in recent years due to globalization and so we have the erosion of national autonomy um in uh the shaping of domestic economy uh for example and uh now is wondering if there is something different and unique happening in China you know due to its position in the world so that's his question so we might have to kind of you know sit around and have a beer to to scratch under the surface of that question but it it seems to me like the there well there there are two there are two things that are well yeah no well here's a here's a few thoughts certainly um immigration uh has an effect on the national question you know so like in in ireland now you have a lot of Brazilians and you have a lot of Nigerians and whatnot and and I think that that implicitly is a challenge to to the notion of a nation state I think it's generally understood that newcomers should assimilate somehow yeah that there's some that's the kind of American model that Mao Rong was promoting uh of course you know with people who who have not chosen to move somewhere but have always lived there like like the the Mongols in Mongolia um that's a different question and and actually some American scholars think that we should not talk about Chinese nationalities policy but but instead talk about indigenous peoples and indigenous rights I sort of feel like the discourse of indigeneity kind of accepts the inevitability of one particular nation winning and and the other one's not winning in a way that I'm a little uncomfortable with but I understand which is why I've tried to really tell this story from from the perspective of you know China's own ideology which is a social democracy uh the the other thing that you know that could be being mentioned is that um is that I think it's clear that uh I don't know let's say the Bretton Woods institutions are used to constrain the sovereignty of post-colonial nation states uh in in some kind of Erzach's colonialism uh that we call globalization uh and it's clear that that China is is is smart about interacting with that regime let's say and and the way I think of it is that that western governments think that the political exists inside of the economic so that that kind of the relations of production you know cannot be politically questioned this is the the the the sort of thatcherite you know there is no alternative right uh whereas in China they may they may love their international capitalism but they know the political is the wider circle and the economic exists at the at the leisure if you like of the political and and and we'll use the economic as a political tool thanks very much Nathan um I don't think there are any other questions in in the chat and it is uh one minute past seven I was just wondering if I could just ask one last question and it's it's it's a sort of fairly um limited one but it's just it it really is uh sort of pressing on my mind um is there do you do you think that there is a sense in China that you know being multilingual is sort of in any way a positive thing and if so what would be the languages that it would be really good to be multilingual in you know the answer is unambiguously English yeah that um uh you have to study a foreign language in in high school uh in in China and there's a limited list it's something like English German French Spanish and Japanese but uh you know effectively everyone chooses English there there is some indication really just in the last year that um that let's say if China is really going to be a kind of systemic rivalry the United States then then then English can't be as important as it has been in in China so so in particular I forget whether it's grade school in in Shanghai you know no longer they're no longer teaching English and that's considered a sort of uh you know a a sign of the changing winds there's been a discussion for a long time about uh not requiring it for university entrance exams but I don't think there's any there's any sign that let's say that discussion has gotten more active and more loud but I don't think there's any sign that policy will be changing on that right and would you see any the sorry a follow-up question but just would you see is there any sort of natural competitor in that out of that list to English you know no it's Chinese if it's not English you know there's there's I think there's yeah I don't want to sort of fall into a certain kind of discourse it's becoming quite common now but it's clear that that that Chinese is as China becomes more important economically politically in in in academia you know let's I'm just talk personally you know when I decided to learn Chinese or Japanese first I chose Japanese because the quality of scholarship coming out of Japan at the time was much higher than that that was coming out of China and the quality of scholarship coming out of Japan has not gone down but the quality of scholarship coming out of China has gone way up and and also way up in quantity so so I think that um you know China as China becomes a more important country on the global stage Chinese becomes a more important language on the global stage but on the other hand actually if you look at like like really in the hard sciences kind of 15 years ago people still wrote in Chinese maybe because they just didn't have the knowledge to write in English whereas now the language of publication of academic work especially in the sciences is is English but I mean I think that's comparable to Germany for instance whereas Germany doesn't see it as a particular threat that English is the lingua franca of of the global thanks for that um so I don't think there are any more questions so I think it really just remains for me to to free you Nathan after you've really given us enormous value for that was that was an extraordinarily illuminating an extraordinarily illuminating talk and it kept going it just kept going right through the the answers to those questions so I really want to thank you so much for having accepted that invitation though all those months ago and all I can say is it was worth the wait oh thank you so much so thank you thank you so much and of course I'm just