Were the “five races” on the flag already well established as the “canonical” Chinese races at some point during the Qing dynasty (or even earlier)? Or was there debate early in the republic about who would have a stripe on the flag and who wouldn’t? Were there any other major proposals?
Was it simply that the five “stripe” races had been organized non-Chinese polities fairly recently before the Chinese conquered them (or they conquered China, in the case of the Manchus), whereas other ethnic groups generally had been part of China for a much longer, and their polities had been conquered a long time ago (like back in the Han dynasty or the like) if they were ever organized as such in the first place?
Were the “five races” on the flag already well established as the “canonical” Chinese races at some point during the Qing dynasty (or even earlier)?
Pretty much, yes – the Qing part, that is. While the Qing were pretty flexible as to whom they considered to be their subjects, and what status they may have held, in general terms the Qing tailored their public image towards the five groups that ended up on the early republican flag, though at the same time they played a significant part in creating those identities, especially as the process of changing them from cultural-political to ethnic ones is concerned.
The Manchus themselves were the principal focus of Qing ethnic policy, but broadly speaking, the Qing attempted to harden the edges of various groups in order to create clear and distinct cultural and ethnic categories. Critical to this were religion and written language, and it can be argued that there was a push towards the development of certain ideals for the members of the key imperial ethnicities:
| Group | Religion | Written Language | Values |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manchus | Shamanism (imperial rites) | Manchu | Martial valour |
| Han | Confucianism | Chinese | Literary attainment |
| Mongols | Tibetan Buddhism | Mongolian | Martial valour |
| Tibetans | Tibetan Buddhism | Tibetan | Piety |
| Muslims | Sunni Islam | Chaghatai Turkic, Arabic | – |
Many of the major actions of the Qing state during the 60-year reign of the Qianlong Emperor can be interpreted as being part of a process of realising these ideals, such as by eliminating awkward liminalities. The Banner Han (hanjun), who occupied an ambiguous space as members of the Army of the Eight Banners alongside the Manchus while also identifying as ethnic Han Chinese, were by and large recategorised, either by being discharged from the Banners and thus becoming 'civilian' Han, or by being recategorised as ethnic Manchus; the Jinchuan, a Tibetan diaspora in Sichuan who were not adherents of the Gelug orthodoxy, were suppressed in two major military campaigns; the eradication of the Zunghars, an Oyirad ('Western Mongol') tribe who had resisted Qing overlordship, was retroactively justified as partly the result of their refusal to acknowledge their Mongol-ness and consequent submission to the Qing. And of course the Qing worked to try and buttress certain values within particular groups, particularly the Manchus, who were geographically scattered across China and thus most vulnerable to acculturation to Han Chinese culture and values.
In this, the Qing were not totally successful. While Manchus did retain a few cultural distinctions from their Han neighbours, what ultimately was the critical point of difference was not ongoing cultural practice, but a recognition of distinct origins and affiliation with the Banner system, which gave a degree of form to a Manchu self-conception of ethnicity separate from the Han Chinese. In addition, the Qing never really worked out a strategy where an ideology of culturally ambiguous universalist imperial rule could be reconciled with the monotheistic outlook of Islam, and so the Qing period would see a continual ramping-up of tensions between the empire and its Muslim subjects, culminating in major revolts in the 1850s and 1860s in Yunnan, Gansu, Shaanxi and Xinjiang.
Getting to one of the key aspects of your question, the Qing did not attempt to really create an imperial constituency out of the indigenous peoples of southern and southwestern China (and Taiwan). Part of this was that it took quite a while for these peoples to really enter the inner orbit of the Qing – it is notable that on the 1721 Kangxi Atlas, two large chunks of Guizhou Province are literally uncharted territory, enclaves of hereditary indigenous lands that had gone undisrupted for seven decades. The Yongzheng Emperor's pet project of gaitu guiliu, which attempted to regularise the administration of these regions, led to the erosion of indigenous sovereignty, the reaction to which was an immense revolt that, after its military suppression, saw the Yongzheng Emperor's successor, the Qianlong Emperor, concede immunity from taxation and the restoration of indigenous law. Ultimately, both approaches were not conducive to the recognition of any of the indigenous peoples as a distinct core imperial constituent – the Yongzheng policy had been to subsume them into the Han, the Qianlong policy to live-and-let-live.
The effects of this when the revolution struck in 1911 are noticeable: Tibet and Mongolia declared independence; Manchuria had its own – broadly unsuccessful – separatist movements, and while Xinjiang would remain under at least nominal control from Beijing for the next two decades or so, developed its own independence movement that played a significant part in the politics of the region. However, no major movement for indigenous autonomy is known to have occurred. In other words, the five groups recognised as major imperial constituent peoples were those that came to develop distinct senses of self-identity.
But there were reasons from a pragmatic standpoint that the inclusion of the Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, and Hui might be seen as important, while the inclusion of the Miao, Zhuang, or Yao was not. And that was that a Han Chinese nation-state might not be able to legitimately inherit the territorial claims of the multiethnic Qing Empire. 'China proper' – the 'eighteen provinces' that made up the recognised homeland of the Han – accounted for only 45% of the Qing Empire's land area. Claiming to be a principally Han nation-state meant relinquishing any sense of a legitimate claim to Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet, or Xinjiang, which could be perceived as a disastrous blow to national pride (though the fact that self-determination wasn't being considered is, to say the least, rather telling as to whose national pride was at stake). Pushing for the so-called 'five-nationality republic' was basically a power play as part of the nascent Nationalist Party's (KMT) attempt to present itself as being willing to take a hard stance on the matter of the liminal regions of the former Qing Empire by ensuring their status as Chinese dominions, to eventually be tied to China through a programme of 'racial assimilation'. When the KMT finally gained power during the 'Nanjing Decade' of 1927-37, among other acts the KMT government erased most of the traditional privileges of the Inner Mongolian aristocracy (which had been preserved under the Beiyang Republic), while Chiang Kai-Shek consistently pushed for an eventual reconquest of Tibet – which would not transpire, at least not under KMT rule. Even before then, the simple reality of Han Chinese supremacy over a nominally multiethnic state had been hammered home by the Beiyang republican regimes, who retained the Five Races symbolism on flags, medals, cap badges and so on, and who also progressively eroded the unique privileges that had been conceded to the Manchus and the old imperial family. But southern indigenous peoples, who did not live in frontier regions which, should they break away, might prove irrecoverable, were of relatively peripheral concern to the fractious Beiyang republic, and did not need to be appealed to as part of the KMT's programme of frontier retention.
Basically, the decision to include the peoples that were included in the conception of the 'Five Races' can be chalked down in part to a genuine development of ethnic or even national identity among those five peoples. But it also is reflective of the much more cynical politics of many in the Han Chinese revolutionary factions, who sought to establish not simply Han self-rule, but indeed a sort of republican empire, where the former territorial integrity of the Qing would be maintained, but under strictly Han Chinese dominion. While the new republic was to be one of many nations, it was to be patently clear who was in charge. This is actually quite evident from some of the later symbols of the republic. That the saltire on the flag of Yuan Shikai's short-lived empire is red (for the Han) is no coincidence – the design specifically evokes the notion that the Han were the literal binding force of the 'multinational nation'. It can also be seen on certain Warlord medals where the flag's colours are present along the outer portions – the red sections are the ones in the middle, and larger and more prominent.
Sources, Notes and References
