Ethnic China

Xiaobing Li is professor and chair of the Department of History and Geography and director of the Western Pacific Institute at the University of Central Oklahoma. Patrick F. Shan is associate professor of history at Grand Valley State University.

• Introduction: Beijing’s Dream and Ethnic Reality, Xiaobing Li and Patrick Fuliang ShanPart I: Perception, Definition, and IdentityChapter One: From Five “Imperial Domains” to a “Chinese Nation”: A Perceptual and Political Transformation in Recent History, Xiaoyuan LiuChapter Two: Elastic Self-Consciousness and the Reshaping of Manchu Identity, Patrick Fuliang ShanChapter Three: Muslim Voices in the Late Qing Debate over the Definitions of Guo and Zu, Yufeng MaoParty Two: Policy and MarginalityChapter Four: Uyghur Women in Xinjiang: Political Participation, Employment, and Birth Control, Xiaoxiao Li and Mei ZhouChapter Five: Commodifying Naxi and Mo-So Minorities in China’s New Economy, Linda Q. WangChapter Six: The Hui People: Policies, Development, and Problems, Ting Jiang and Xiansheng TianChapter Seven: The Protestant Church Shortage and Religious Market in China: Spatial and Statistical Perspectives, Zhaohui Hong, Lu Cao, and Jiamin YanPart Three: Relations, Confrontation, and SolutionChapter Eight: Still “Familiar” But No Longer “Strangers”: Muslims in China, Jieli Li and Lei JiChapter Nine: Faith and Freedom: Tibetan Buddhist Movements, Xiaobing LiChapter Ten: Struggling for a Better Solution: Communist Government and Minorities, Qiang FangChapter Eleven: The Tibet Issue and U.S. Tibet Policy, Guangqiu Xu Conclusion: New Challenge and Potential Prospects, Xiaobing Li and Patrick Fuliang Shan

Although ethnic politics is not the Achilles heel of the People's Republic of China as it was for the former Soviet Union, it is an important and multifaceted set of issues that necessarily command the attention of China's leaders. Ethnic China presents a dozen well-crafted, thought-provoking, and well-balanced chapters by Chinese American scholars on a broad range of issues relating to ethnicity. They reveal a gap between rosy official depictions of a harmonious, ethnically well-integrated society and a rather grimmer reality in which rapid economic development is not a panacea for all the problems that exist in the multi-ethnic society of contemporary China.