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From S. Robert Ramsey:

Zhuang women posed for a photograph

The Zhuang are China’s largest minority by far–over 18 million at last count. That being the case, why aren’t they more prominent? What has happened to this minority reveals a lot about shifts in China’s policies toward its non-Han nationalities.

In the early years of the People’s Republic, in the 1950s, China prided itself on the ethnic diversity found within its borders. China was a “Republic of many nationalities,” the new government declared. As evidence of its good faith with minorities, the Communist Party created “autonomous” regions, including one for the Zhuang in Guangxi Province even though the Zhuang only comprised 33% of the population there. There was a need to “apologize,” Zhou Enlai explained.

The Zhuang are a Tai people (closely related to the Thai of Thailand), but they had long mixed with Cantonese, and before the Communist takeover, the Kuomintang had been content to let them remain anonymous. Yes, Zhuang spoke a Tai language at home, but otherwise they were indistinguishable as a nationality. They were fluent, often native, in Chinese. Now, though, Beijing was determined to raise their ethnic consciousness. The Zhuang had hidden their identity out of fear of government suppression, Beijing claimed. Their language had been “insulted, ridiculed, and even banned by the reactionary ruling classes,” it proclaimed, but now the dignity of these people would be restored. Thus, in the first surveys of its minorities, the PRC found many millions of hidden Zhuang, almost none of whom admitted to a non-Han origin. Those with the surname Zhao claimed ancestry that stemmed from the palace retinue of the Song court. Those with the surname Wei said their lineage went back to a Han general. Yet, in spite of such attempts to conceal their identity, they were registered as Zhuang. Families and clans were brought protesting out of the Chinese closet!

Today, more than a half century later, we hear little about such issues. The PRC under Xi Jinping has effectively abandoned its image as a “Republic of many nationalities,” and instead, China is portrayed as one nation. The question is, in this new China, will the Zhuang once again be indistinguishable from Han Chinese?

VHM notes:

Language

The Zhuang languages (/ˈdʒwæŋ, ˈdʒwɒŋ/; autonym: Vahcuengh, pre-1982: Vaƅcueŋƅ, Sawndip: 話僮, from vah, 'language' and Cuengh, 'Zhuang'; simplified Chinese: 壮语; traditional Chinese: 壯語; pinyin: Zhuàngyǔ) are any of more than a dozen Tai languages spoken by the Zhuang people of Southern China in the province of Guangxi and adjacent parts of Yunnan and Guangdong. The Zhuang languages do not form a monophyletic linguistic unit, as northern and southern Zhuang languages are more closely related to other Tai languages than to each other. Northern Zhuang languages form a dialect continuum with Northern Tai varieties across the provincial border in Guizhou, which are designated as Bouyei, whereas Southern Zhuang languages form another dialect continuum with Central Tai varieties such as Nung, Tay and Caolan in Vietnam. Standard Zhuang is based on the Northern Zhuang dialect of Wuming.

The Tai languages are believed to have been originally spoken in what is now southern China, with speakers of the Southwestern Tai languages (which include Thai, Lao and Shan) having emigrated in the face of Chinese expansion. Noting that both the Zhuang and Thai peoples have the same exonym for the Vietnamese, kɛɛu^A1, from the Chinese commandery of Jiaozhi in northern Vietnam, Jerold A. Edmondson posited that the split between Zhuang and the Southwestern Tai languages happened no earlier than the founding of Jiaozhi in 112 BC. He also argues that the departure of the Thai from southern China must predate the 5th century AD, when the Tai who remained in China began to take family names.

(source)

Standard Zhuang (autonym: Vahcuengh (pre-1982: Vaƅcueŋƅ; Sawndip: 話壯); simplified Chinese: 壮语; traditional Chinese: 壯語; pinyin: Zhuàngyǔ) is the official standardized form of the Zhuang languages, which are a branch of the Northern Tai languages. Its pronunciation is based on that of the Yongbei Zhuang dialect of Shuangqiao Town in Wuming District, Guangxi with some influence from Fuliang, also in Wuming District, while its vocabulary is based mainly on northern dialects. The official standard covers both spoken and written Zhuang. It is the national standard of the Zhuang languages, though in Yunnan a local standard is used.

(source)

People and name

The Zhuang (/ˈdʒwæŋ, ˈdʒwɒŋ/) (Chinese: 壮族; pinyin: Zhuàngzú; Zhuang: Bouxcuengh) are a Tai-speaking ethnic group who mostly live in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in Southern China. Some also live in the Yunnan, Guangdong, Guizhou and Hunan provinces. They form one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China. With the Buyi, Tay–Nùng and other Northern Tai speakers, they are sometimes known as the Rau or Rao people. Their population, estimated at 18 million people, makes them the largest minority in China, followed by Hui and Manchu.

Sinograph

The Chinese character used for the Zhuang people has changed several times. Their autonym, "Cuengh" in Standard Zhuang, was originally written with the graphic pejorative Zhuàng, 獞 (or tóng, referring to a variety of wild dog).^[3] Chinese characters typically combine a semantic element or radical and a phonetic element. John DeFrancis recorded Zhuàng was previously Tóng, 獞, with "dog radical" 犭 and tóng, 童 phonetic, a slur, but also describes how the People's Republic of China eventually removed it. In 1949, after the Chinese civil war, the logograph 獞 was officially replaced with a different graphic pejorative, 僮 (just tóng, meaning "child; boy servant"), with the "human radical" 亻with the same phonetic. Later, during the standardization of simplified Chinese characters, Tóng 僮 was changed to a different character Zhuàng, 壮 (meaning"strong; robust").

(source)

The closeness of Zhuang and Thai is borne out by an experience I had in a West Philadelphia Thai restaurant with my late friend, Yin Binyong, the applied linguist and language reformer, who had taught himself Zhuang and Hawaiian, among other far-flung languages.  On that occasion, I listened to Yin hold a conversation with the waitress, he speaking Zhuang and she speaking Thai.  That was a lot of fun!

Selected readings

• "Topolectal traffic sign" (3/6/17)
• Fay Beauchamp, "Asian Origins of Cinderella:  The Zhuang Storyteller of Guangxi", Oral Tradition, 25.2 (2010), 447-496.  pdf
• "The languages on Chinese banknotes" (|9/16/13)
• "Mongolian script on RMB bills" (5/6/13)

January 29, 2022 @ 10:23 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and ethnicity, Language policy and planning

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