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Paper short abstract

The paper shows how the firm categories of socialist-era ethnic classification persist amid fluid interactions among postsocialist China, Vietnam and Kazakhstan. The work of state ethnologist-bureaucrats over many decades thus continues to shape cross-border experiences of the ‘rise of China’.

Paper long abstract

The twentieth century building of state socialism in Eurasia entailed a multifaceted categorisation of people unprecedented in scale and ambition. Alongside ‘class’, ethnicity (sometimes ‘nationality’) became a central pillar of the new revolutionary order in states such as the USSR, China and Vietnam, enshrined through a vast bureaucratic-ideological operation as state ethnologists fanned out into former imperial “frontiers” to identify and classify the peoples living there. Despite dramatic sociopolitical and economic changes since the 1990s, ethnonyms enshrined during these classificatory processes continue to carry important political weight today in China, Vietnam and various post-Soviet countries, appearing on ID cards and serving as key pivots in citizens’ interactions with their states.

Drawing on a wider ethnographic project on the afterlives of high modernist classification projects, this paper focuses on the persistent hardness of ‘ethnicity’ as a bureaucratic category under otherwise more fluid ‘postsocialist’ conditions, particularly in Vietnam and Kazakhstan in the context of the storied ‘rise of China’. In an era of massive flows of capital, people and goods across China’s borders, the categories of socialist ethnic classification seem anomalous extrusions, cloaked in the 'rigid polarities and flat totalisations' (Berman 1982) of twentieth-century modernity. Yet states’ ongoing investment in these categories, including through the activities of bureaucrat-anthropologists in official ethnological institutions, reveals how ideas about the ‘nation’ are also at stake as new currents of economic and political power radiate from China. This should be of concern to all anthropologists of politics and the state in many global locations.