李普曼對新疆議題的看法。從訪問中,可以看出他對人為建構的「民族主義」並不感興趣。
Thursday, July 16, 2009 - 12:00pm
Questioning Authority asked Jonathan Lipman, Felicia
Gressitt Bock Professor of Asian Studies and professor of history, to explain
the recent violence against the Uyghur people in China. Author of Familiar
Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (1998), he has studied this
subject for many years. It’s a long and fascinating tale…
QA: Who are the Uyghur and Han people of China?
JL: To start with, "the Han
people" and "the Uyghur people" do not really exist. They are
constructions that we (and the Chinese state and the folks in
question) all use to try and make generalizations about groups of
people who are actually quite diverse and internally contradictory.
Uyghurs range from intellectuals with Ph.D. degrees to
illiterate farmers, from engineers to chefs to stall keepers in the bazaar.
Would you expect all those folks to agree about anything? Probably not. How
much less so "the Han people," supposedly a "unified ethnic
group,” living from Siberia to the tropics, from dire poverty to ostentatious
wealth? All news stories using these constructions contain, by
definition, serious falsehood and overgeneralization.