My Words Make Our Views Diverge: Emic and Etic Perceptions of Ethnic Identity as a Sociolinguistic Attribute in Modern Northeast China, 1950–2017

Studies of ethnicity about China in many disciplines, including but not limited to history, have taken two discrete approaches, that of the etic perspective in which an ethnic group is described and analyzed by people who do not belong to the group, and the emic perspective in which an ethnic group creates and expresses knowledge about itself. Although some research in the past decade has recognized the importance of combining information derived from these two points of view, a gap still exists between what may be considered as “objective” and “subjective” understandings of what ethnic identity (minzu shenfen rentong) means to people in China today. This study examines socio-historical surveys (shehui lishi diaocha) and oral histories (koushu shi) compiled between 1950 to 2017 as the principal primary sources to compare how the passive and active use of languages associated with ethnic minority (non-Han) groups in Northeast China that are considered as “small ethnic groups” (xiao minzu) affects both etic and emic perceptions of “authentic” expressions of ethnic identity. The major purposes of this research are to articulate the differences not only in the viewpoints applied in the production of definitions and interpretations of ethnic identity and to show that as ethnic identity is becoming less connected to everyday culture and socialization within “single-ethnicity” (dan minzu) families, language may be an identity trait that is regarded as historically significant but will become an optional and more intentional manifestation of ethnic identity.