1 Hostetler 2001.

2 The post-1868 Meiji Japanese geographic scholarship on China did the same; see Chen Bo 2016.

3 Bao Ming 2004, 4–5, 172–174. Xu Fayan 徐法言, a young historian, recently (2015) illustrated this cosmopolitan character and the ability of the eight-banner organization during the late 18th century to subsume disparate groups of people based on cases of soldiers from Jinchuan in western Sichuan province who were absorbed into this system long before people of this area were identified as Tibetans by the PRC government in the twentieth century. Some of them performed so well that they were even promoted to serve in quite high positions in the center of Zhongguo, namely Beijing.

4 Bao Ming 2004, 19. - Rather than focusing on their unique “independent” characteristics, the current alternative trend in anthropology of framing groups focuses more on the relatedness between individual groups, which was and still is part of the academic tradition in Zhongguo (e. g. Li Anche, 1944; Ma Yin 1995, 200–201; Fei Xiaotong 1989). Different people are depicted as always living together, rather than being independent and distinct and existing at all times apart from each other, such that they communicate with each other to the effect that “I am in you”, and “you are in me”, a situation Sahlins (2013, 2) calls the “mutuality of being”.

5 Chen 2016, 76.

6 Fitzgerald 2016, 302.

7 Fitzgerald 2016, 302, fn. 17.

8 Wang Rongzu 2015.

9 Operating within the framework of modern conceptions of ethnicity, Ge Zhaoguang traces “Chineseness” back to the Song dynasty and inserts the modern ideology of “Chinese” ethnicity into the conflicts among “states” during the 11th and the 12th centuries, AD. He thus argues that modern China as a nation-state originated during the Song dynasty, suggesting what looks like a competition for being the first in human history to have developed a nation-state ideology with the Europeans, who were generally considered to have come up with this ideology in the middle of the seventeenth century under the Westphalia treaty system. His problematic methodology consists of two stages: first, he adopts the notion of “the nation-state” to be the natural unit and actor in history and thus judges other social and political forms of organization in terms of this ideal, and then he casts this conception back on history as a way of revealing something new.: first, he adopts the notion of “the nation-state” to be the natural unit and actor in history and thus judges other social and political forms of organization in terms of this ideal, and then he casts this conception back on history as a way of revealing something new.

10 This circle was pioneered by Ma Rong 馬戎 from the field of sociology, Wang Mingming 王銘銘 from the field of anthropology, Zhao Tingyang 趙汀陽 from the field of philosophy and Luo Zhitian 羅志田 from the field of history, all of whom I follow in one way or another. In my article I follow the methodology represented in Gu Jiegang's “Preface to the Collection of Discussion on Ancient History” (1926; cf. Gu 1982), as well as his other works, and that in Li Anzhai's sociological study of the Liji and Yili (1929, publ. 2005), and especially his paper on the Zuñi (1937), which were and still are critical works of the anthropology in Zhongguo and in the field Native American studies respectively.

11 Wang 2014. Sahlins 1981; Ortner 1989, 17.