2: Hiding in Plain Sight: Language and the Construction of China's Ethnoracial Majority

China is home to both the world’s largest ethnoracial group, the Han, and also the world’s biggest language by number of native speakers, Mandarin. But can the one be identified with the other? Few spoke Mandarin when it was codified by Chinese intellectuals less than a century ago. Unlike the previously dominant Literary Chinese, Mandarin was intended not for an elite minority, but rather made to be accessible to all members of the Chinese nation. This nation, in turn, was one newly conceived of as having an identifiable ethnoracial majority. Although language is often mobilized as a seemingly objective criterion to demarcate race, ethnicity, and nationality, China’s massive linguistic reconfiguration forces us to reexamine our assumptions about how language and human collectivities are connected. Indeed, the Chinese case shows the malleability of both language and ethnicity. Though notions of Chineseness have existed for millennia, the apparent political necessity of a unified ethnoracial majority gained salience after 1911 as China transitioned from empire to nation-state. I argue that Han Chineseness in large part was a future-oriented linguistic creation, a state-made ethnoracial designation resulting from a yet-to-be-realized reconfiguration and reinterpretation of existing cultural elements, language chief among them. Investigating the making of China’s ethnic majority helps us move beyond prevailing US-based conceptualizations of race and ethnicity that center on white supremacy, black subordination, and mass immigration, demonstrating how ethnoracial classification is not merely a descriptive and retrospective act, but also a prescriptive and prospective remolding of social reality.