---Robert Andrew Edmondson

China in the post-Mao era inherits two traditions of minority relations, each with built-in scales of civilization, and strategies of acculturation and assimilation. Both the Confucian and communist civilizing projects utilized metaphors that identified periphery groups as feminine and promiscuous, childlike, and ancient. The communists in the 1950's and 1960's combined an extensive minority identification project with the mapping of autonomous zones to create a complete administrative grid. Despite policies that pushed toward homogeneity, many groups, some previously assimilated, reasserted ethnic boundaries. In many cases, periphery groups accepted the backward stigma imposed by the center, as well as new broader boundaries of group composition, which often lumped several unique ethnic groups under one name.

Technology and economic progress are art of the discourse of hierarchy in China today, which previously derided minority culture as superstitious and backward, but the emerging Chinese modernity holds a space for the discourse of authenticity as well. The resurgence of ethnic identity has recently been accompanied by state sponsorship and promotion. Often geared toward tourism, these projects objectify and standardize living tradition, or resurrect dead elements of minority cultures and present them with attention to Chinese aesthetics. Ethnic boundaries are shifting to Han categories, group membership is fixed, and boundary markers are sanitized and promoted by the center. In this Chinese modernity, periphery groups are being moved out of the discourse of hierarchy into the realm of the authentic, and have become integral to a new Chinese identity as a developing multinational tourist attraction.