THE ZHUANG: ETHNOGENESIS - 僚人家园

{THIS FILE IS GUI 7NTRO It incorporates new research done in Guilin, Spring-Summer, 1994. REVISED June, 1994 PRINT DATE OF THIS COPY: December 27 , 2000}

INTRODUCTION

This work is a history of the most numerous of the Chinese minority peoples, the Zhuang, from their earliest antecedents to the end of the Sung dynasty. If we accept, as many do, that the peoples known to the Vietnamese as the Nung and the Tai are, by many standards, one people, then they are also the largest of the Vietnamese minority peoples. If we also accept that they can be regarded as one people with the Zhuang, as many agree, then it is probable that this ethnic group is, after the Kurds, the largest of the world's peoples who are not currently organized into their own national state.

Despite their size, and their historical importance on either side of the Sino-Vietnamese frontier, the Zhuang/Nung have been almost entirely neglected by scholars who write in English. There are many reasons why this is true. As they have an identity and a long history in both China and Vietnam, a full understanding of them is to a large degree dependent upon Chinese and Vietnamese scholarship. Yet the scholars of neither nation have done the necessary ground work for that full understanding. The Chinese themselves have largely ignored the Zhuang, with the exception of recent scholarship done in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, the home of most Zhuang people. But this scholarship is itself little known in China outside that region. The Vietnamese have, of course, been hampered by lack of resources and diverted by many more pressing problems.

This work concentrates upon the Zhuang of China, but it is not possible to afford them even a relatively full treatment if the Nung and related ethnic groups of Vietnam are not also considered for comparative purposes. Too, the history of the Sino-Vietnamese frontier region can not be neatly compartmentalized by national boundaries. While, in the period covered by this work, the original materials are themselves almost entirely Chinese-language sources, I have consulted Vietnamese scholars and Western scholars of Vietnam whenever possible, and consulted available Chinese, French, and English language translations of Vietnamese materials and the many valuable studies done by resident French scholars and soldiers. I have been fortunate to be able to check many of my conclusions during the course of repeated recent trips to Vietnam. While obviously restricted in its coverage of Vietnam, it is my hope that this history of the Zhuang does illuminate some important issues of Vietnamese history as well, because they were critical to Sino-Vietnamese relations as they formed the majority of the population on either side of the frontier.

Another important obstacle to English-language scholars has been the undeniably high political content of scholarship in both China and Vietnam. The scholars of both nations have been constrained until very recently by the bonds of reductionist Marxism. Both Vietnamese and Chinese scholars have also labored diligently under conditions where their respective governments treated them as no more than another weapon in the millennium-long contest to dominate their shared frontier region. This work attempts to clarify many of these problems of analysis, while avoiding whenever possible the bogs of extended historiography. It is primarily the history and culture of the Zhuang which interests us, though we cannot avoid analyzing in some detail the many strange ways in which the Han Chinese, and the Vietnamese, sometimes have chosen to view them.

Perhaps another reason that this topic has been largely neglected is the confusion inherent in any study of an ethnic group over many centuries. Ethnic identities are inherently confusing because ethnicity is largely a subjective matter. It depends on the perceptions of the group studied, and of those around them. When one of those peoples shifts, over the course of the period in which they are studied, from being a majority to being a minority subsumed by an immigrant majority, then many conflicting perspectives are possible.

In approaching the ancestors of the Zhuang in the early period, for example, we soon learn that the Chinese terms used to name them constantly changed as the developing Chinese majority, the Han, became more familiar with them and learned to make finer and finer distinctions. The pre-Qin conquest notions of the poorly differentiated "Hundred Yue" slowly gave way to a Han Chinese awareness of concrete ethnic identities. But, because the Chinese were above all impressed by the differences between the cultures of the minorities and their own relatively monolithic culture, they sometimes missed unifying similarities among those peoples. Rather than treating some as unified ethnic groups on the basis of language and shared culture, Chinese often utilized minor distinctions such as geographic location or clothing color to label them as so many isolated "tribes" [buluo].

The question, then, of when precisely it is permissible to refer to a Zhuang people is a complex one which easily leads to many confusing qualifications as one tries to follow the evolution of the ethnic group over a long period. For us, the essence of Zhuang ethnicity is that they are a Chinese minority people whose identity has been created in interaction with the Han Chinese majority. In a sense, we argue below, without the Han Chinese the Zhuang would not have come into being. Without the stimulation of the Han Chinese conquest the Bai Yue might have remained a welter of loosely-related peoples. But, if the Han Chinese stimulated the Zhuang to a new developmental path, they also determined that path would be followed as a minority people. In our analysis the future of the Zhuang was sealed with the defeat of Nong Zhigao in the Sung era. Had King Nong won his several wars against the Vietnamese and the Han Chinese, his people might be known today as the Nong and would perhaps have their own state embracing much of south China and north Vietnam, and, presumably, with very close ties to modern Thailand.¹ But his defeats at the Kunlun Pass and on the plains before Nanning meant that they would ultimately be disparate minority peoples, the Nung/Tai of Vietnam, and the Zhuang of China.

Because one bar to an understanding of the history of the Zhuang is the shifting nature of that identity, we have tried to be careful in our use of names for them. If we were to be entirely consistent, we should use the term Zhuang only to refer to the ethnic group from the defeat of King Nong forward. This requires, however, that after the disappearance of such clearly identifiable and ethnically unified Yue progenitors of the Zhuang as the Luo Yue and Xi Ou in the period following the Qin conquest, we should endeavor to restrict ourselves to the use of such vague and clumsy terms as "proto-Zhuang" or "ancestral Zhuang." To fail to do this, however, is to court the postmodernist charge that we are adopting a primordialist analysis, which I understand to be the belief that there is something inherent in a given ethnicity which is based in such a concept as "blood" or "race." I do not mean to imply such an analysis. I do believe, however, that there is a sort of mainstream of Zhuang evolution, and that stream arises in the neolithic and flows to the present, though with many branches, channels, and rivulets which eventually dry in the heat of the Han intrusion into the area.

We recognize, however, that the use of such terms as "proto-Zhuang" or "ancestral Zhuang" not only is often awkward and always inelegant, but limiting ourselves to them does some violence to the views of the Zhuang themselves, many of whom would argue that the Han view of the Zhuang identity is simply the Han view, and that there is an underlying ethnic unity which the Zhuang themselves have constantly clung to throughout their history. Nong Zhigao, for example, is very much a "Zhuang" hero. From this perspective, some important element of the Luo Yue, the Xi Ou, the Nong clan, etc., is Zhuang, and vice-versa. We shall therefore be careful in our references in an effort to explain a complex topic, but imbedded in this investigation, as in all ethnohistory, is an inescapable element of subjectivity and confusion.

The methodology of a survey such as this is necessarily eclectic, though the framework is throughout a historical one. The insights of archaeology and anthropology are critical, and I have tried to utilize them in a responsible fashion, though I have not hesitated to generalize or extrapolate from them where I think my own understanding of the history and culture of the Zhuang, aided by long-term residence among them, supports such generalizations. The most important theoretical perspectives which I have drawn upon are probably recent immigration theory, recent feminist scholarship on the many complex issues of gender and sexual role, and comparative insights drawn from the field of military history.

Immigration theory has wide utility for this study. It gives us a vocabulary with which to address the many problems of minority-majority relations and permits us to draw upon comparative studies of such relations. And immigration theory also embraces the study of ethnicity, vitally important to a study of the Zhuang. Our own studies of the Chinese immigrant communities of the nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest have also informed this study, though perhaps in ways which are seldom obvious.

Gender is important to this study because, I believe, it embraces the most economical explanation for the survival of the Zhuang, as well as a critical element of their culture which sets them clearly apart from the Han Chinese. It is relatively easy, for example, to explain the persistence of Mongolian ethnicity in the face of millennia of relentless Han pressure. The Mongols historically have relied upon quite a different economic system than have the Han Chinese. It is widely agreed that it has been their economy which has protected them from many pressures which might otherwise have hastened their adoption of Han Chinese culture. Moreover, the differing economic systems of the Mongols and the Han provide clear cultural boundaries or "ethnic markers": we have no problem in distinguishing them as distinct ethnic groups. The Zhuang, however, are not pastoral nomads but rice-raising agriculturists who prefer the same ecological zones as do the Han Chinese. Their phenotype, moreover, is such that they easily pass as Han, and in recent history many have chosen to do so. But their culture has always been supported by a gender system in which the role of the genders, particularly that of the female, is remarkably different from those of the Han. This gender system, like all of Zhuang culture, is constantly reinforced by one of the central arts of Zhuang culture, antiphonal singing. Zhuang culture has been continually carried forward from generation to generation in the songs.

Insights drawn from the field of military history are also important to this study. The story of the Zhuang people is largely a military one as they have served for more than two thousand years as mercenary soldiers in both Chinese and Vietnamese armies. An important explanation for their continued survival as an ethnic group lies in the martial culture which has permitted them forcefully to resist assimilation by the Han Chinese when so many other peoples could not. The Sung era has been selected as the end point for this volume, although the work continues, because it was in my judgment the last point at which an independent Nong kingdom straddling the Sino-Vietnamese border would have been militarily possible. From that point on, the Nung and related peoples were indeed doomed to be no more than a martial minority in the lands of the Chinese and Vietnamese.

This work has been made possible by repeated visits and extended periods of residence in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. I am grateful to all of the many scholars and administrators who have helped me there over more than a ten-year period, but particularly to Ho Xianglin and Qin Shuguan whose encouragement and thoughtful criticism have made the work possible. The support of friends like my long-term assistant Qin Xiugui and my calligraphy teacher, Wu Xundao, has also been important. My former colleague and friend, Professor Eugene Anderson, has kept me from many errors in my studies in anthropology, read the entire manuscript and made many thoughtful suggestions for improvement. Professors David Marr and Keith Weller Taylor have both been of inestimable assistance, though neither would necessarily support the conclusions which I have drawn when working with matters Vietnamese. I owe a particular debt to Sifu Al Dacascos and friends at the Wun Hop Kun Do Koon in Beaverton, Oregon, whose patient tutelage in Kajukenbo has brought home to me emotional and physical truths derived from the arts so important to Zhuang history and culture, the martial arts, truths of wu which have done much to illuminate the wen or intellectual truths of scholarship. I am also grateful to the staffs of the libraries at Shifan Daxue in Guilin, at the Minorities Institute in Nanning, as well as those at the libraries at Taiwan National University, the Academica Sinica, and the Chinese Studies Center at the National Library in Taiwan. I am grateful to the Fulbright Foundation, to Lewis & Clark College, and to Pacific University for financial support. Above all I am grateful to the many Zhuang people who have shared their perspectives on their history and their ethnicity with me, and, of course, to my family who supported me throughout.

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