Communist Multiculturalism

Stevan Harrell is professor emeritus of anthropology and environmental and forest sciences at the University of Washington. He is the author of Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China (University of Washington Press, 2001) and An Ecological History of Modern China (University of Washington Press, 2023); and editor of the University of Washington Press book series Studies on Ethnic Groups in China.

"McCarthy's fine study is an important new contribution to evolving understandings of 'multiculturalism with Chinese characteristics,' forcing readers to contemplate how completing forms of ethnic nationalism interacts with shared forms of citizenship practice. This book is a must-read for both scholars and students of ethnic relations in Reform-era-China."

Elena Barabantseva:

"Make[s] important contributions to the existing perspectives on China's ethnic minorities not least for their new rich ethnographies and research findings. One . . . major input is the exploration of the 'big' questions on Chinese national identity, citizenship, and modernity from the perspective of ethnic minorities."

"McCarthy provides rich new ethnographic materials on the contemporary Dai, Bai, and Hui in Yunnan, and contextualizes these materials in each minority's pre—Communist and Communist history. She is fully conversant and engaged with the large literature, in Chinese and English, on ethnic minorities in China."—Maris Boyd Gillette, Haverford College

"McCarthy makes the important conclusion that minority members' own promotion of their culture is to a large extent a way of asserting citizenship rather than a way of establishing dissent. She challenges theories of nation and ethnicity that tend toward regarding internal cultural diversity as a threat to internal cohesion."—Mette Hansen, University of Oslo