Critical Han Studies Through the Lens of Internal Colonialism: China, Guangdong, and Hong Kong
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When the concept of ‘internal colonialism’ has been applied to China, it has often been focused on the plight of ethnic minorities. The political and cultural subordination of non-Mandarin Han groups, however, has drawn little attention. We argue that critical Han studies, by posing a challenge to the state ideology of Han ethnic unitarism, provides a theoretical arsenal capable of broadening the application of the internal colonialism framework to the study of non-Mandarin Han groups and regions in China. To provide empirical support for our argument, we examine ethno-geographic representation among Chinese political elites. We find an internal heterogeneity and ethnic hierarchy between different Han groups who have integrated into the political ruling class of China, which is dominated by the Mandarins, to various extents: the Wu people of Shanghai and Zhejiang represent the top layer of the hierarchy; the Xiang of Hunan, the Hokkien of Fujian, and the Gan of Jiangxi constitute the intermediate layer; and the Cantonese and the Teochew of Guangdong belong to the bottom layer. These findings provide the basis for our discussion of internal colonization in China with a specific focus on Guangdong and Hong Kong.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".