It's Got That Swing: The Politics of Ethnic Policy in China

In recent years the Chinese state has implemented a series of repressive measures to curb ethnic minorities’ expression of their distinctive cultural identities. Some see this assimilationist turn in ethnic policy as a reflection of the Chinese Communist Party’s inherent hostility to cultural difference; others see it as a consequence of the regime’s abandonment of its multiculturalist and Marxist-Leninist roots and embrace of state capitalism and Islamophobic tactics for countering terrorism and extremism. But such explanations neglect the fact that ethnic governance in China has long involved a dynamic interplay of assimilationist and multiculturalist programs championed by different factions within the regime. This project asks what previous swings in ethnic policy can reveal about what is behind the current the assimilationist turn—and where it might be headed—and offers a case study of the politics of policymaking in the PRC. 

Aaron Glasserman

Aaron Glasserman is a historian specializing in ethnic politics and the history of Islam and Muslims in China with comparative and transnational interests in nationalism, state-society relations, law, and Islamic religious and political movements. He received a PhD in History from Columbia University in 2021 and a BA in Near Eastern Studies (with certificates in Chinese and Arabic) from Princeton University in 2013. His research has been published or is forthcoming in The China Quarterly, The Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, The International Journal of Asian Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and several edited volumes as well as Foreign Policy and ChinaFile. He is an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and was previously a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China at Princeton University.