Abstract
If, as Singapore National University’s Walker Connor has pointed out following German political sociologist Max Weber, a nation is not merely an economic or political construct, but rather a matter of group psychology, “a vivid sense of sameness or oneness of kind, which, from the perspective of the group, sets it off from all other groups in a most vital way, (and) this sense or consciousness of kind is derived from a myth of common descent (where) members of a nation feel or intuitively sense that they are related to one another,” then most of the 56 ethnic minorities living on Chinese soil are not part of the Chinese nation, let alone populations “integrated” by force like the Tibetans. Although Connor is right in pointing out that “by their very numbers, the Han Chinese furnish proof of being history’s most successful assimilators,” not least by using Confucianism as a tool of assimilation, this mastery seems to come to an end the more the modernization of China is proceeding.
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Notes
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Benedikter, R. (2014). The Ethnonationalism Problem: Is There a Feasible Solution in Sight? The Cases of the Uyghurs and Tibet. In: China’s Road Ahead. SpringerBriefs in Political Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9363-1_4
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