ENZE HAN
▶ FIELDWORK LOCATIONS: XINJIANG AND INNER MONGOLIA
The first time I felt how deeply intertwined one’s personal identity and field research experience can be was during my doctoral studies on ethnic politics in China. In 2008, I spent a year in various regions in China where large numbers of ethnic minorities reside, including Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and the southern parts of Yunnan province. The purpose of the study was to understand the political logic behind different patterns of ethnic identity construction and explain varying responses to Chinese nation-building policies.1 Contrasting experiences in different ethnic regions in China for the first time made me keenly aware of the crucial role identity plays in field research. I am an ethnic Han Chinese (the majority and dominant group in the country), which inevitably played a key role in my relations with research subjects, affected my access, and influenced my research findings.
My first stop was Inner Mongolia where, through contacts arranged at a university in Beijing, I stayed with a Mongolian family outside Baotou and traveled easily with a local guide on a motorcycle to visit various herding families. At the time, the Chinese government was implementing a settlement scheme for Mongolian herders. The goal was to move these nomadic communities to urban or suburban areas so they could be better managed—all supposedly done in the name of environmental protection of the overgrazed grassland. With such a large-scale resettlement project, strong grievances arose about the amount of compensation, the methods of resettlement, and corruption in the local government. Although my host Mongolian families and their social circles were aware that I came from the outside—and so must be a Han Chinese—locals were more interested in whether I knew people in Beijing and could help them petition the Chinese government about their grievances regarding the resettlement scheme. In their view, as someone who came from Beijing and as an educated PhD student, I must have the knowhow or the connections to help them. Although people acknowledged our cultural or ethnic differences, I was never made to feel sensitive about being a Han Chinese, nor told that this could complicate my relations with the local Mongolian community.
However, after I left Inner Mongolia and arrived in Xinjiang, the ethnic marker between me and the Uyghurs became a highly sensitive issue. Instead of simply being treated as an outsider, I was equated with the enemy. It started to dawn on me that being a Han Chinese doing research among the Uyghurs was almost impossible. From the Chinese state’s perspective, the two most politically prominent and volatile ethnic regions in China are Xinjiang and Tibet. From the perspective of many Uyghurs, the Chinese state has engaged in a hardline approach in Xinjiang to repress their separatist political aspirations as well as their desire for more religious and cultural autonomy, but to no avail. Even people who do not hold such political views are more often than not treated the same, and repression breeds more resistance. Resistance by the Uyghurs is not simply toward the Chinese state but also carries with it a strong animosity toward anything Chinese. In Xinjiang, interethnic division between the Uyghurs and the Han Chinese runs very deep because the latter are often presumed to be agents of the state or colonizers who have come to settle on “Uyghurs’ land.”
I was in Xinjiang’s capital city, Urumqi, in the summer of 2008, hoping to gain access and interview Uyghur people for my research. I had a list of names given to me by some Western contacts who had previously conducted research in Xinjiang, but I soon came to the realize that the interethnic division between the Uyghurs and the Han Chinese was too large a hurdle for me to cross. Even though I was a PhD student studying in a North American university, as a Han Chinese, the “oppressor” group for the Uyghurs (or at least perceived as such), I was treated with strong suspicion and even open hostility. Many Uyghurs simply refused to talk to me, either because they suspected I was a spy for the Chinese state or because they held grudges against the Han Chinese for denying their dream of cultural and political autonomy. Everywhere I went, I could feel hostile looks that made me uncomfortable. At the same time, I witnessed how easy it was for Caucasian researchers, particularly those from the United States, to access the community. I believe this was the case either because of Uyghurs’ self-perception of their own Caucasian identity or because the Uyghurs believed the United States could help check the power of the Chinese state and even help them realize their political dream of independence. Such disparity in our field research access highlighted the differences between me and those Western researchers, even though we both might be doing our PhD in North America.
This was the first time I faced the crucial role of one’s identity in field research. It had never occurred to me that one’s identity and phenotypical traits could have such a strong impact on research access. I also began to understand the co-constitutive nature of the researcher’s own identity and his or her research findings. I recognized the difficulty of remaining objective when conducting field research on a topic that may be personal. Because of the difficulty of access and the rejection and hostility I received from the Uyghur community, it was inevitable that these negative experiences colored my emotional reaction to them.
In the end, these negative experiences proved to be useful for my understanding of the political grievances and demands made by the Uyghurs toward the Chinese state. Indeed, my personal experience of the tense interethnic relations in Xinjiang meant that I was not at all surprised by the violent riot in Urumqi in 2009, in which Uyghur mobs violently attacked and killed more than two hundred Han Chinese civilians. The violence prompted a harsh crackdown by the Chinese state, and that vicious cycle has continued in Xinjiang to this day. It was difficult for me to develop a sense of empathy toward the Uyghur cause due to my own ethnic background and, perhaps, nationalistic sentiment. The ease of access to the community and the type of reception one gets influences researchers’ personal affect toward their research subjects in many ways, and certainly also may influence the research conclusions.
The contrast between my research experience in Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang has led me to question the issue of positionality and subjectivity in ethnographic field research. In the discipline of political science, an extraordinary amount of emphasis has been put on objectivity and the search for the truth. Using good methods, it is expected that scholars can discern patterns of power contestation and the causal logics of political phenomena. We are warned about the pitfalls of cognitive biases that may arise from our own gender, racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds, but few have discussed at length the possibility of the interactive relationship between the researcher and the research subjects. Sociologists and anthropologists have written at length about positionality2 and how researchers’ identities can yield different outcomes in the research process. But this sensitivity has not been taken as seriously in the positivist discipline of political science. Or, at least, someone like me who was trained as a positivist political scientist had not been sufficiently forewarned to be conscious of the potential hazards of such a relationship.
I have thought hard about the lessons I learned doing field research on China-related issues as an ethnic Han Chinese. Despite all the debates on research objectivity and replicability, what if our research results are inherently co-constituted by who we are? Because I am from the dominant majority group in China, my access to the repressed Uyghur community was significantly curtailed due to the structural antagonistic relations that I simply could not escape. Furthermore, the hostile responses I received also colored my perception toward the Uyghurs. I received a cold and aggressive response and concluded that the problems in Xinjiang seemed to be rooted in the entrenched intercommunal boundary and animosity between the Uyghurs and Han Chinese.3 Western scholars who conducted research on the same topic may have concluded that the Uyghurs are friendly, passionate, and innocent and that the violence in Xinjiang reflects the Chinese state and its repressive measures. In fact, this is a case of “one person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist.”
So where do these different experiences leave us? Was I more biased than my Western counterparts? Or is all of our research essentially biased in different ways depending on who we are? I believe there is a need to engage in more reflexivity in our fieldwork, recognizing our own subjectivity and positionality and how that shapes our research findings. I do not think there is a need to despair that one’s research is more or less biased than that of others. What matters most is to clearly acknowledge this issue rather than proclaim a universalist objectivity. If researchers from different backgrounds communicate and collaborate more and juxtapose and contrast our different perspectives, our findings may generate a fuller picture of the truth.
I later shifted my research focus from domestic ethnic politics in China to Chinese foreign relations with Southeast Asia, and I was more conscious of the effect of my personal identity in my research. I started to appreciate that the research findings I collected through interviews in Southeast Asia were “situated knowledge” due to my identity as a Chinese national. Scholars from other parts of the world would not necessarily be able to replicate my experiences, nor to reach similar conclusions. When I interview government officials and ordinary people about their perceptions of the Chinese migration or Chinese investment in a particular Southeast Asian country, being Chinese inevitably affected their response. An American scholar working on the same topic might be given different responses because of the perceived competitive foreign policy goals of the United States to counter China’s expansion of influence in the region.
Informants often say different things to people depending on which perceived identities are at work. Indeed, no two researchers have the same fieldwork experiences because no two researchers are identical, and it is natural that our research is heavily influenced by who we are.4 Rather than presenting my findings as objective “truth,” it is more honest to state that my research findings are heavily influenced by my national identity as Chinese. Likewise, I would appreciate other researchers being more conscious and explicit about their own identities. It is important to realize the effects of subjectivity and positionality in our approach to field research so we make more modest claims in our search for “partial truths.” By doing so, we might have a better understanding of the complexities of the world and our place in it.
______
Enze Han is associate professor in the Department of Politics and Public Policy at the University of Hong Kong.
PUBLICATION TO WHICH THIS FIELDWORK CONTRIBUTED:
• Han, Enze. Contestation and Adaptation: The Politics of National Identity in China. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
NOTES
1. Enze Han, Contestation and Adaptation: The Politics of National Identity in China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
2. Patricia Ticineto Clough, The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1992); Richard Tewksbury and Patricia Gagné, “Assumed and Presumed Identities: Problems of Self-Presentation in Field Research,” Sociological Spectrum 17, no. 2 (April 1997): 127–55.
3. Enze Han, “Boundaries, Discrimination, and Interethnic Conflict in Xinjiang, China,” International Journal of Conflict and Violence 4, no. 2 (November 2010): 244–56.
4. Vasundhara Sirnate, “Positionality, Personal Insecurity, and Female Empathy in Security Studies Research,” PS: Political Science & Politics 47, no. 2 (April 2014): 398–401.