My research focuses on how Chinese-language discourse conceptualizes the two Muslim groups in Northwestern China—Sino-Muslim population, Hui, and Turkic-Muslim population, Uyghur. I hope to measure, quantify, and compare the cultural associations that Hui, Uyghur, and the Han majority carry along cultural dimensions such as violence and how political language impacts areas of representation in everyday discourse. Ideally, I also wish to quantify changes in Chinese cultural attitudes towards ethnic minorities over the twentieth century. I am still working on digitalizing historical Chinese documents using OCR.
For contemporary corpora, we employed a baseline wrod2vec model from Tencent AI Lab, which was trained in 2021 on large-scale corpora, likely consisting of official and formal texts. My own model is trained on a smaller subcultural corpus (1.5M sentences) that I scraped from Zhihu, the Chinese equivalent of Quora. Due to the availability of sources, the analysis will be biased towards Han-Chinese perception of other ethnic groups. I also work on a collection of local history materials published by administrative units (Wenshi Ziliao) as my historical corpora.
Methods We Expect to Use: Word Counting, Word2Vec Embedding, LLM
The classical Chinese philosophy of statecraft deemed the alien ethnicities at the frontiers of the empire as untrustworthy and uncivilized, therefore ill-suited for efforts of integration and homogenization. This line of thought justified the administration of diverse ethnic communities as separate, loosely governed, and unequal entities. Since the 19th century, the perception of ethnic minority populations had certainly been magnified by conflicts and rebellions in the Northwest. However, as many scholars have pointed out, the nineteenth century also saw the birth of a new ideology in the Chinese discourse, when it became more common to conceive of civilizing missions, nationalistic frontier policies, and aspirations of a consolidated, homogenizing nation-state. One of the crucial historical questions is to understand the interaction between the intensification of nation-building and ethnic tensions.
My project taps into this literature by analyzing the historical legacy of empire over the twentieth century and in contemporary China. While the former imperial borderlands were nominally incorporated into the new state in the 1950s, the Party-state has so far failed to fully integrate their populations and turned to brutal policies of forced assimilation after decades of unsuccessful nation-building. What cultural tension underlies the unofficial, grassroots discussion? What can everyday discourse tell us about the collective psychology surrounding ethnicity and ethnic populations in China?