Appropriating Otherness and the Contention of Miao Identity in Southwest China

The development of the Chinese Empire and Civilisation was predicated on the construction of non-Chinese cultural others in China's long-written history that marked the Chinese frontier and its expansion. Miao was one of the prominent ethnic categories of otherness. The formation and transformation of ethnic frontiers were often registered in the dominant paradigm of Sinicisation in the imperialist perspective, and insurgency and forced migration from the native point of view. This paper attempts to explicate a more nuanced interaction between non-Han natives and the Chinese imperial/national agents centring on Miao otherness in Chinese conception, and in articulation with natives’ conception of Chineseness. It argues that in face of imperial expansion and nation-building projects in pre-modern and modern Chinese history non-Han natives actively appropriated Miao otherness to form their own identities, through which the Miao ethnic boundary was constructed and demarcated within the Chinese state.