Critical Han Studies Through the Lens of Internal Colonialism: China, Guangdong, and Hong Kong

When the concept of ‘internal colonialism’ has been applied to China, it has often been focused on the plight of ethnic minorities. The political and cultural subordination of non-Mandarin Han groups, however, has drawn little attention. We argue that critical Han studies, by posing a challenge to the state ideology of Han ethnic unitarism, provides a theoretical arsenal capable of broadening the application of the internal colonialism framework to the study of non-Mandarin Han groups and regions in China. To provide empirical support for our argument, we examine ethno-geographic representation among Chinese political elites. We find an internal heterogeneity and ethnic hierarchy between different Han groups who have integrated into the political ruling class of China, which is dominated by the Mandarins, to various extents: the Wu people of Shanghai and Zhejiang represent the top layer of the hierarchy; the Xiang of Hunan, the Hokkien of Fujian, and the Gan of Jiangxi constitute the intermediate layer; and the Cantonese and the Teochew of Guangdong belong to the bottom layer. These findings provide the basis for our discussion of internal colonization in China with a specific focus on Guangdong and Hong Kong.


Introduction
The ethnopolitical landscape of China has been changing rapidly in recent years.Most notably, China has adopted more aggressive Mandarin language policies and stricter social control mechanisms over its people, especially ethnic minorities living in the fringes of the country.In 2020, Inner Mongolia witnessed mass protests against the Beijing government's plan to replace Mongolian with Mandarin as the language of instruction in Inner Mongolian schools (The Guardian, 2020).Tashi Wangchuk, an advocate for Tibetan language education in local schools, was detained in 2016, charged with inciting separatism, and sentenced to 5 years in prison (The New York Times, 2021).These measures, however, pale in comparison to those levied against the Uyghurs of Xinjiang who have garnered the most attention from international media.In addition to experiencing similarly aggressive Mandarin language policies in the ethnic minority schools of Xinjiang (Schluessel, 2007), the Uyghurs have been the primary target of China's Strike Hard Campaignsinitiatives originally aimed at combatting so-called terrorist activities by separatists, but which soon morphed into an overarching system for oppressing racial minority groups as manifested in the recent expansion of political re-education and labor camps facilitated by a rapidly built up, regional-specific, militarized police state in Xinjiang (Raza, 2019).It is therefore not surprising that scholars have applied the notion of internal colonialism to the study of ethnic minorities in China (Chung, 2018;Gladney, 1998Gladney, , 2004;;Herman, 2007).
However, this application has hitherto focused on the ethnic minority groups affected.The political and cultural subordination of non-Mandarin Han groups, by contrast, has drawn little attention.The recent political deterioration in Hong Kong has opened an opportunity to broaden the application of the internal colonialism framework to the study of non-Mandarin Han groups and regions in China, such as Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong and Guangdong.We argue here that the scholarship of critical Han studies, perhaps best articulated in an edited collection of essays derived from a 2008 conference at Stanford University (Mullaney et al., 2012), provides a powerful counter to the official ideology of the Chinese state-which tends to treat the Han people(s) as a homogeneous ethnicity and the Chinese language(s) as a unitary whole.Despite its strong theoretical appeal, critical Han studies have primarily taken a cultural-linguistic approach, rarely interpreting empirical research on the internal heterogeneity of Han Chinese groups and the ethnolinguistic hierarchies that exist therein.Another related problem in critical Han studies is an extreme voluntarism grounded in the Austro-Marxist/post-Marxist tradition, which is shared by many other studies on nationalism that tend to reduce the national question to matters of individual cultural identity (Hobsbawm, 1990: 7-8; see also Blaut, 1987: 57-72).
The internal colonialism framework, however, given the strength of its structural approach to power relations and solid grounding in an established critical Marxist tradition, is helpful for piloting the scholarship of critical Han studies in a more structural leftist direction.This is not to suggest that the two scholarships have hitherto developed in parallel.Anthropologist Dru Gladney, for example, is an important figure in bridging the two fields together, whose works our study builds upon.Our study also aligns with the project of a group of leftist intellectuals of Hong Kong (Ip, 2020;Liu et al., 2022), who endeavor to reclaim Hong Kong's local resistance movements from the dominating narratives of the political right.Nonetheless, we aim to mitigate the excessive voluntarism found in extant critical leftist scholarship by conducting a structural analysis of ethnopolitical power in China.
For the structural power analysis, we map ethnic and geographic (or simply ethno-geographic) representation among Chinese political elites, asking two questions regarding its ethnopolitical implications: (1) is ethno-geographic origin a significant factor in determining whether an elite gets promoted to the top levels of political leadership (and thus inducted into the political ruling class of China)?; (2) is ethno-geographic origin associated with the geographic locations of jobs the elite has held?The answer to the first question is important for understanding which ethnogeographic groups are politically overrepresented or underrepresented among Chinese political elites.The second question invites us to assess the broader ethnopolitical landscape of China, examining such matters as regional autonomy and self-governance by natives.Taken together, they provide the basis for our discussion of internal colonial power mechanisms within the Han Chinese.

Critical Han Studies and Internal Colonialism
Internal or domestic colonialism, as the name suggests, refers to the idea that colonial mechanisms are not restricted to use in an imperial power's overseas possessions, but may also function within its national borders.The term was first coined by classical Marxist theorists attempting to understand the uneven regional development of capitalism as manifested in a form of urban-rural conflict and surplus value transfer from underdeveloped (predominantly agrarian) to industrialized regions within a country, which constituted the base of a system of racial and cultural discrimination (Gramsci, 1978: 441-462;Lenin, 1977: 252-596; see also Mandel, 1975: 85-92).This concept is not a simple analogy to traditional imperial colonialism but, instead, is based upon Marxist analysis of historical expansion of the capitalist system from the center to periphery, within and across countries, which, in turn, has interacted with precapitalist social and power relations (Williams, 1983;Wolpe, 1975).
The concept was later utilized by theorists in South Africa and Latin America for the study of post-colonial societies.Some, such as Harold Wolpe (1975), highlighted the role of non-/precapitalist modes of production in South African society in a dynamic of economic super-exploitation along racial lines: White capitalists, beyond enjoying the privilege of expropriating natural resources from the land, were also able to take advantage of cheap labor performed by indigenous peoples at a wage lower than its cost of reproduction, resulting in power relations that resembled traditional colonial rule.Theorists like Andre Gunder Frank (1967) focused more on the world system and international political economy, introducing the metropolis-satellite model that linked internal colonial power relations between the Latinos and the indigenous peoples within individual Latin American societies with the uneven development of global capitalist political economy at large.
Michael Hechter (1975), applying internal colonialism to the study of the Celtic peoples of the United Kingdom, attended more to the cultural dimension and so-called cultural division of labor between different cultural-ethnic groups-an approach that resembled Stavenhagen's (1965) andBlauner's (1969) culturalist-oriented conception of internal colonialism.By contrast, African American scholar Robert Allen (1969) took a more dialectical position when illustrating the concept of neocolonialism: the discussion of political subjugation and cultural degeneracy always went hand in hand with a nuanced analysis of class divisions within the Black race.It was also this group of scholars who, trying to make sense of Black ghettos through the internal colonialism framework, highlighted the important role of political dependency: as a colonized people living within America, African Americans are politically dependent on the dominant racial group and their appointed administrators and representatives (Allen, 1969;Blauner, 1969;Tabb, 1970; see also Pinderhughes, 2011).Colonization, according to Fanon (1952Fanon ( , 1963)), is an essentially spatial form of domination; while colonizers and/or their representatives may share spaces with the colonized physically, there is always an inside/outside, exclusionary dynamic at play, including, one may well argue, in state governance and political elite composition in terms of ethno-geographic origins.This political dimension of internal colonial power mechanisms is the chief focus of our empirical study, wherein the internal heterogeneity and ethnic hierarchy of Han Chinese groups are examined in terms of ethno-geographic representation at the level of state elites.One may argue that ethnopolitical representation is less relevant in the context of China, given that China, as a unitary state-and indeed a party-state-is highly politically centralized.As such, its political elites appear to exist purely to represent Beijing and implement Beijing's wishes regardless of their ethnicity and indigeneity.This politicist argument, not without merits, is rather ahistorical, as it runs the risk of reducing material history and society to the single plane of the political, thus ignoring the complex dialectical process of centralization-decentralization-recentralization occurring throughout the history of the People's Republic of China (Cheung, 2018;Zhao, 2018).In doing so, it overlooks the fact that native leadership did act in a way that was more accommodating and considerate of local interests than non-native leaders when taking orders and implementing policies from Beijing, as is well discussed in Ezra Vogel's (1980) classic study, Canton Under Communism.We will return to this later.
The application of internal colonialism to China came relatively late, with Xinjiang and Tibet being the most cited cases.Dru Gladney (1998) has noted that China rules over Xinjiang as its internal colony through a number of intersecting colonial practices: (1) the expropriation of natural resources (e.g.oils, natural gases, minerals, and agricultural products); ( 2) massive state-sponsored migration of Han Chinese into the region; (3) growing Han chauvinism linked to a rapid rise of nationalism in China since the turn of the 21st century; (4) growing state oppression through the Strike Hard Campaigns and rapid build-up of a regional-specific police state; (5) the increasingly aggressive promotion of Mandarin Chinese as the language of instruction in ethnic minority schools (Schluessel, 2007); and (6) the recent expansion of Chinese political re-education and labor camps to incarcerate the Uyghurs (Raza, 2019).
For his part, Chien-peng Chung (2018) provides a comparative analysis of Xinjiang and Tibet along economic, political, and cultural lines, arguing that while Xinjiang and Tibet both fit into the model of internal colonialism, they differ in terms of how, and to what extent, they are colonized.The author suggests that Xinjiang has suffered more economic colonial imposition than Tibet due to its relative wealth of natural resources and exploitable labor.Culturally and demographically, Xinjiang has traditionally experienced a massive state-sponsored migration of Han Chinese whereas in Tibet, the population remains mostly comprised of Tibetans (despite similar state-orchestrated efforts).This has pushed indigenous culture and language in Xinjiang into an endangered state, while the situation in Tibet is less extreme.Within the political dimension, municipal-level Party Secretary positions in Xinjiang-which are more powerful than the administrative heads (mayors)-are held predominantly by Han Chinese, while a more balanced representation exists in Tibet, indicating that the region has a higher level of political autonomy and self-governance than Xinjiang.Chung offers one of the first attempts to empirically study internal colonization through ethnopolitical representation, finding the lack of self-governance by natives, or political dependency of the colonized on the dominant racial group and their appointed administrators, to be definitive of colonial mechanisms.
While Tibet and Xinjiang are most cited for internal colonialization in China, other cases may also fit the framework.The changing political landscape of Hong Kong in recent years has instigated a discussion regarding whether its 1997 handover was in fact a transition from a British to a Chinese colony (Luk, 2017).Most notably, the city has faced increasing pressure from Beijing to curtail its political autonomy, deny the universal suffrage promised in the Basic Law (Hong Kong's de facto constitution put into effect since the city's handover in 1997), and forcefully impose the National Security Law in the city to quell dissent.Parallel to the chilling political climate are rising concerns over Beijing's growing ambition to hasten the process of Mandarinization of Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong, as advocated for in a recent report published by China's Ministry of Education (Nikkei Asia, 2021)-a predicament already present in Guangdong (another Cantonese-speaking region) under Beijing's chauvinist Mandarin policies to obliterate local languages (Hansen Edwards, 2021).
The idea that Hong Kong, and indeed, Guangdong and the larger Lingnan region, are internal colonies of China is not a new idea, particularly for those familiar with the scholarship of critical Han studies.Kevin Carrico (2012), a long-time researcher on Cantonese ethnicity, has rightly questioned the Chinese state ideology that attempts to homogenize a singular Han Chinese identity (and which has often been uncritically taken as a self-evident fact in the field of Chinese studies).He argues that, by linguistic and cultural standards, Han Chinese cannot be more diverse and heterogeneous: 'there is probably as much difference between the dialects of Peking and Chaozhou as there is between Italian and French; the Hainan Min dialects are as different from the Xi'an dialect as Spanish is from Rumanian' (Norman, 1988: 187; see also Gladney, 2004: 16).
Guangdong is the most notable example in support of this observation.Historically, Guangdong was conquered and incorporated by China during the Qin-Han dynasties.The region later gained and lost independence multiple times, first achieving it with the fall of the Qin dynasty (from 203 to 111 BC under the regime of Southern Yue), and secondarily with the collapse of the Tang dynasty (from 917 to 971 AD under the regime of Southern Han).In both cases, efforts to maintain independence failed and the region was again absorbed by China-unlike its Vietnamese counterpart who did successfully separate from China.
Guangdong was often treated by its rulers in the Central Plains (power center of the Chinese empire) as a barbarous land of miasma and fierce beasts, located at the edge of the empire and most suitable for banished government officials and political exiles.This image of cultural backwardness often accompanied a typical stereotype the center held toward peoples of the periphery as naturally inferior.The economy of Guangdong started to develop in the Tang-Song period but still largely remained a marshland economy; it was only under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644 AD) when Guangdong, or at least its Pearl River Delta, was transformed into an economically productive and heavily populated region, and became politically and culturally incorporated into the imperial state of China (Faure, 1996).Guangdong's historical marginalization and distance from the imperial center made the region a perfect setting for rebellious activities aimed at challenging the status quo social order and central government, exemplified by the region's revolutionary role in overthrowing the Manchu regime of the Qing dynasty and standing up to Beijing, and later, to the Nanjing government, in the Republican Era (Carrico, 2012;Chan, 2018).
The subordination of Guangdong has continued under the polity of the People's Republic of China.Starting from the Mao era, the region had been a major target of Beijing's assimilation policies.These included the swift launch of a Mandarin study campaign (as opposed to local 'dialects') in post-'liberation' Guangdong, with Mandarin being used as an important measure for political promotion and career advancement; the 1952 northern takeover of provincial government positions during the land reform movement, which involved replacing local-born officials, such as Ye Jianying, Fang Fang, Gu Dacun, and Feng Baiju, with northerners and central-southerners, such as Tao Zhu and Zhao Ziyang; and the fallout from the 1957 localist armed uprising in Hainan (then part of Guangdong Province), which 'resulted in the final removal from the Guangdong leadership of almost all remaining pre-1949 local CCP [Chinese Communist Party] leaders' (Goodman and Feng, 1994: 180;Vogel, 1980: 41-124).Thereafter, Guangdong became a battlefield of contending political leaders in Beijing-most notably, the Mao, Lin Biao, and Deng Xiaoping cliques-who sought to make the province their own power base by installing their respective delegates as heads of the province, thus overriding local interests (Cheung, 2018).
Mao's nationalist politics, including his preference for centralized over local control, was somewhat alleviated in post-Mao China, as Deng Xiaoping, the new leader, introduced his signature economic reform and granted a large degree of economic autonomy to two coastal provinces, Guangdong and Fujian, which served as the trial fields for reintroducing the market economy to the country.Economic autonomy and administrative decentralization also led to the rise of native leadership in key positions of the provincial government of Guangdong: 'the Party Secretary (Lin Ruo [a Teochew]) and all three Deputy Secretaries as well as the Governor (Ye Xuanping [a Hakka]) and one third of the Vice Governors were natives in 1988' (Cheung, 2018: 230).The run of native leadership in the Provincial Party Secretary role ended in 1998-which surprisingly coincided with Deng's death in 1997-when Xie Fei (a Guangdong Hakka) was replaced by Li Changchun (a northerner), since when the position has always been occupied by northerners.Native leadership in the Provincial Governor role ceased at a later time when Huang Huahua (also a Guangdong Hakka) finished his term in 2011.Zhu Xiaodan, who succeeded Huang, was of Wu origin from Zhejiang and a Cantonese speaker.Successors to Zhu, again, have been northerners.The Cantonese, despite having the largest population in the province, have never occupied the seat of Provincial Party Secretary or Governor.This demonstrates that in addition to direct control, China's rule over Guangdong is also grounded in the act of balancing by putting the minorities into ruling positions, thereby setting the minorities against the ethnic majority of the Cantonese.
While a certain degree of economic and administrative autonomy was granted to Guangdong in this period, Deng retained control over provincial leader appointment: 'In particular, to ensure the implementation of reform and open policies, the appointment of provincial level officials remain a key control mechanism manipulated by the Center' (Cheung, 2018: 224).Indeed, in the eyes of Deng Xiaoping, the pragmatic leader, economic reform and political control are complementary, not contradictory.Deng's approach toward decentralization was quite instrumental: he needed competent proxies in the provincial government of Guangdong (regardless of whether or not they were native to the region) to propel his project of economic reform despite pushback from his conservative counterparts in Beijing.This was a reflection of fractional struggle within the Communist Party, not a genuine institutional change in central-local relations.After the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, and in the face of a serious crisis of legitimacy, Deng managed to mobilize a new wave of nationalism as the official ideology of the country, which replaced deteriorating Maoist socialism to complement his economic pragmatism (Tang and Darr, 2012;Zhao, 1998).
Amid this growing nationalism, Mandarin, the national language, became an important instrument for 'upholding national unity and ethnic solidarity', as was written in the 2000 Law of the People's Republic of China on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language (National People's Congress of China, 2000).Before the nationwide promotion of Mandarin was cemented in state law, the Guangdong government had already, in 1992, issued a 'Decision to Vigorously Promote Mandarin', specifying that 'by the end of 1995, Mandarin should become the only language used in primary and middle schools and that kindergarten teachers should just use Mandarin so as to develop students' habit of speaking Mandarin earlier in childhood' (Ho and Lu, 2019: 82).The results were disastrous for local language: a 2004 survey found that Mandarin had become the prime language of younger generations (aged 39 years or below) living in Guangzhou (capital city of Guangdong) for most formal and informal occasions, except in family settings (Ho and Lu, 2019).The situation has further deteriorated in recent years, as an increasing number of children born to Cantonese-speaking parents are unable or unwilling to speak Cantonese even at home (South China Morning Post, 2018).
Following Mao and Deng, President Xi Jinping has also exploited nationalism to centralize power into his hands, which has further squeezed out local languages and cultures.The increasingly aggressive (and indeed jingoistic) Mandarin policies being implemented in schools throughout China in recent years seem an inseparable part of Xi's Chinese Dream and national rejuvenation project.The once held optimism for greater autonomy of Guangdong from Beijing, either through establishing a Greater Hong Kong region in the province (Goodman and Feng, 1994) or re-/multi-centering China in the South (Carrico, 2012), is now dead.Instead of making Guangdong part of a Greater Hong Kong region, Xi has done the opposite-transforming Hong Kong into another Guangdong through his signature National Security Law.
We argue that the scholarship of critical Han studies (in both broad and narrow senses), as discussed above, can provide a powerful arsenal to confront the unitary nationalist ideology of the Chinese state, laying a solid foundation for expanding the theory of internal colonialism to the study of internal heterogeneity and ethnic-linguistic hierarchy within the Han Chinese.However, critical Han studies have to this point largely focused on the cultural-linguistic domain and been rooted in an excessive voluntarism that overemphasizes individual identity and subjective experiences.They often reflect a postmodern/post-structural deconstructionist relativism like that expressed in the following passage: Although the state often takes the lead in constructing the dominant forms of ethnicity and identity, people on the ground also engage in similar state-like constructions of the identities of multiple selves and others for their own fantasies of power.Identification is thus a multilayered act of distinction across multiple axes, either through positive self-identification or negative othering, in a process that is neither solely topdown nor bottom-up but always relational, dynamic, and laden with the shifting imagining and exercise of power.(Carrico, 2012: 26) Here, objective structural power relations are reduced to mere identity imagination, which is problematic in that it fails to acknowledge or reckon with ideological hegemony and what has at times been referred to as false consciousness (Gramsci, 1978; see also Althusser, 2001).Widening this theoretical pitfall is the empirical difficulty of conducting surveys and interviews that would capture ethnic identity and ethnicity-based experience in an authoritarian context like China, given the political sensitivity of the issue.
Our empirical research aims to fill this gap in critical Han studies by reasserting a systemstructural approach to studying interethnic power relations between different Han Chinese groups.To do so, we build upon the internal colonialism framework, deepening its notion of political dependency between racial/ethnic minorities and the dominant racial/ethnic groups, in particular.We bring Chung's (2018) study of ethnopolitical representation in Xinjiang and Tibet to the national level, examining the ethno-geographic representation among Chinese political elites as a whole.We also map a network of connections between each elite's ethnicity and the geographic locations of positions they have held over their career, which allows us to examine such matters as regional autonomy and self-governance by natives.This approach toward mapping elite power relations and networks focuses more on the structural reality being (re)produced under China's current political system, and less on individual self-identity or interpersonal relations.

Data and Method
Political elites and their geo-social networks have long been a major focus in Chinese studies.Cheng Li (2014) found that following Xi's rise to power in 2012, the number of top-ranking Chinese government officials who either were born or worked in the province of Shaanxi (Xi's ancestral home) rose substantially.This finding provides a basic example of how the geographic or provincial background of political elites can facilitate interpersonal relations and influence patterns of governmental promotion.Other types of interpersonal connections, such as alumni networks (Tsai and Liao, 2019), co-worker relations (Keller, 2016), patron-client linkages (Jiang, 2018), factional ties (Nathan, 1973), and princeling status (Zhang, 2019), are also found to be important contributors to elite network formation.
While most Chinese elite studies have focused on interpersonal connections, none, to our knowledge, has attempted to map the whole ethnopolitical landscape of China, except for some partial efforts such as Zang's (1991) research on provincial party secretaries and governors in post-Mao China, Li and Bachman's (1989) analysis of city mayors, and most recently, Bulman and Jaros' (2021) study of provincial party standing committees over a period of 20 years, which examines the changing dynamics of different varieties of political and economic localism.Our study takes a similar structural-systemic approach toward mapping elite power in China with a specific focus on the ethno-geographic origins of Chinese political elites (their cultural/linguistic ethnicity, place of birth, and ancestral home) as well as the geographic regions in which they have worked as a top government official over the course of their careers.
In total, the geographic origin variable has 33 categories: 22 provinces, 4 centrally administered municipalities, 5 autonomous regions, and 2 special administrative regions.The ethnic-cultural origin variable includes 18 categories: the Mandarin-speaking Han, the Wu-speaking people of Shanghai and Zhejiang, the Hokkien of Fujian, the Gan of Jiangxi, the Xiang of Hunan, the Cantonese and the Teochew of Guangdong, the Hakka, the Uyghur, the Tibetan, the Mongolian, the Manchu, the Hui, the Kazakh, the Bai, the Zhuang, the Tujia, and the Miao.We use the principle of mutual intelligibility-the key linguistic criterion distinguishing languages from dialects-for the distinction and categorization of Han Chinese languages and cultural ethnicities.If two speech forms are mutually intelligible, it means they are different dialects of the same language, such as the different varieties of Mandarin (Northern, Southern, Southwestern, Northwestern, and Northeastern).However, if two speech forms are not mutually intelligible, it means they are different languages, such as Mandarin and the Southern languages (not dialects) in China (e.g.Wu, Xiang, Hokkien, Gan, Cantonese, and Teochew). 1  Our network analysis uses publicly available data found on government websites. 2The target population of our study are top Chinese government officials.Regarding filtering criteria, Huiquan Zhang (2019) suggests that vice-ministerial and vice-provincial level government officials represent the threshold for being considered a senior cadre or top government official, with their children considered 'princelings' (descendants of senior officials).We begin from Zhang's definition but restrict our study to include only ministerial and provincial level government officials.This is done to focus on the very inner core of Chinese political elites and to control the size of data, making it plausible to conduct a thorough biographical search of selected individuals.Nevertheless, to capture the career trajectories of these elites, we found it helpful to also include their lower-ranking positions in the past-specifically, vice-ministerial and vice-provincial positions-which is more in line with Zhang's (2019) definitive criterion of senior government officials.
We have segmented the elite population into three categories by positional rank: the national level, the vice-national level, and the ministerial and provincial level.The national level leaders include seven standing members of the Politburo plus Wang Qishan, who is a former standing member of the Politburo and a current vice president, for a sum of eight individuals.The vicenational level leaders consist of 18 non-standing members of the Politburo, 13 vice chairs of the National People's Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC) (Wang Chen is first-ranked vice chair of the NPCSC and an ex officio member of the Politburo who is counted only once in the data), 23 vice chairs of the CPPCC (Ms Su Hui, chair of the Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League, is of Taiwanese origin and not included), 5 members of the State Council, 1 member of the Central Secretariat who is not in the Politburo (You Quan), 1 chief justice of the Supreme People's Court, and 1 chief prosecutor of the Supreme People's Procuratorate: for a total of 62 people.
The ministerial and provincial level leaders comprise: the heads of the ministerial-level offices and departments of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party; ministers and ministerial-level directors of the State Council; the secretary-general, and heads of various committees, of the NPCSC; the deputy secretary-general, and heads of 10 special committees, of the CPPCC; members of the Central Military Commission; party secretaries of the All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives, All-China Federation of Trade Unions, and All-China Women's Federation; executive vice chair of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce; first secretary of the Secretariat of the Communist Youth League; chief editor of People's Daily; chair of the Chinese Writers' Association; executive deputy justice of the Supreme People's Court; executive deputy procurator of the Supreme People's Procuratorate; chair of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps; the party secretaries and government heads of all provinces, centrally administered municipalities, autonomous regions, and special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau; provincial and regional chairs of the CPPCC; and, finally, regional directors of the Standing Committee of the People's Congress in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing, Guangdong, Xinjiang, and Tibet.In total, 193 ministerial and provincial level officials are included.
Once a total of 263 Chinese political elites were identified, we collected biographical information on those elites through government websites.Data were collected in late March 2021.Our biographical data reflect both current and past positions held by the elites: for past positions, we included vice-ministerial and vice-provincial government posts.Non-government positions with a vice-ministerial rank, such as board chairs of major state-owned enterprises or party secretaries and presidents of the 31 top national universities under the administration of the Ministry of Education, are also included in the data.For those who have held different positions in the same geographic region, the linkage is counted only once.Biographical information about the ethno-geographic origins of the elites (their ethnicity, place of birth, and ancestral home) was also collected.

Findings
In this section, we first present a description of the data before discussing the ethno-geographic network.Table 1 shows the number and percentage of elites by geographic origin, as well as the population figures for every region.The province of Shandong has the largest number of top government officials (35 people or 13.31% of the total number), which is followed by Zhejiang (10.08%),Jiangsu (7.60%), Hubei (6.46%), Liaoning (5.89%), Hebei (5.70%), Henan (4.94%), Beijing (4.56%), Shanghai (4.56%), Shaanxi (3.42%), and Anhui (3.42%).Most of these provinces are located in Mandarin-speaking regions, except for Shanghai and Zhejiang, where Wu is the primary local language.These provinces with the most representatives also tend to be those that are politically overrepresented, meaning that the percentages of top government officials from these provinces are higher than the percentages of their populations, as indicated by an elite-population ratio of greater than one, or the national average.We have also grouped provinces (and cities) into larger geographic categories, which show that Northern, Northeastern, and Southeastern regions of China tend to have the highest elite-population ratios and are thus most overrepresented. 3 Provinces in Central and Northwestern China tend to have a rather balanced representation of political leadership with an elite-population ratio of around one.Within this area, there are some Mandarin-speaking regions (Anhui, Hubei, and Gansu), some non-Mandarin Han regions (Hunan and Jiangxi), and several ethnic minority regions (Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, and Qinghai).It is interesting to note that most of the ethnic minority regions have a fair number of top-level political representatives.This finding suggests that the Chinese state does not rule the ethnic minorities directly (at least not all the time), but does so through cooperating with an intermediary class within the minority groups.Also visible in Table 1 is the fact that Southern and Southwestern China are the most underrepresented.This group of regions is also ethnically diverse, including Mandarin-speaking regions (Chongqing, Sichuan, and Guizhou), ethnic minority regions (Tibet, Guangxi, and Yunnan), and the non-Mandarin Han regions (Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau, and Hainan).Guangdong, in particular, is the most underrepresented province.It averages 2.5 representatives, which is the same as Inner Mongolia.As the most populous province (8.08% of the total), however, Guangdong's elite-population ratio is only 0.12, the lowest among all provinces and cities (except for Hainan). 4  In total, 568 job affiliations were found among the 263 political elites, averaging slightly over two affiliations for each individual.Beijing, where the central government of China is located, accounts for 199 cases of job affiliation (35% of the total), meaning that 199 out of the 263 political elites hold or had held a job at the vice-ministerial and vice-provincial level or above in Beijing.The other top regions where elites work or had worked are Shanghai (24), Zhejiang (22), Fujian (16), Hebei (16), Hubei (15), Jiangsu (15), Qinghai (15), Henan (14), Liaoning (14), and Tibet (14).
Figure 1 shows a stacked bar chart of birthplace and geographic location of position, while Figure 2 displays a stacked bar chart of ancestral home and location of position.The first relationship shows a chi-square value of 222.046 and a contingency coefficient of 0.510, p = 0.000, revealing a statistically significant and strong association.For the second correlation, the chi-square value is 142.860, and the contingency coefficient is 0.448, p = 0.000, also indicating a statistically significant and modest-to-strong association.
It is evident from Figures 1 and 2 that North China dominates the political terrain not only in its own region but across all regions, except for Southeast China.Southeast China is the second most powerful bloc, which not only has a high degree of self-governance, but also has the second largest number of representatives in North China and a moderate presence across other regions.Central China and Northeast China also have a moderate presence across different regions.However, the political elites from Northwest and Southwest China, largely ethnic minority regions, tend to have worked mostly in Beijing, the capital, and in their home region.What is surprising is the case of South China, which, despite being a Han region, follows the same pattern found in the ethnic minority regions but with even lower political representation.Again, this fact is attributable to the political underrepresentation of Guangdong.We now turn our attention to ethnicity.As explained in the 'Data and Method' section, we use political elites' ancestral homes as the measure of their cultural-linguistic ethnicities for the various Han groups-meaning, the ethnic categories are largely a reworking of the ancestral home categories.However, unlike the ancestral home categories, which are measured at the provincial level, ethnicity requires looking beneath the provincial level, given that many provinces have a variety of cultural-linguistic groups living in different areas within the province.As displayed in Table 2, the absolute majority of Chinese political elites (177 people or 67.3% of the total) are Mandarinspeaking Han, which is followed by the Wu of Shanghai, Zhejiang, and Southern Jiangsu (39 people or 14.8% of the total).Other ethnic groups that have a fair number of representatives are the Xiang of Hunan ( 8), the Hokkien of Fujian ( 7), the Tibetans (6), and the Gan of Jiangxi (5).The most underrepresented groups are mostly ethnic minorities, with the exception of three Han groups: the Hakka ( 2), the Teochew ( 2), and the Cantonese (1).Table 2 also displays the most common geographic locations of positions held by political elites for each ethnic group.
Figure 3   Chair of the Political Consultative Conference of Shanghai (Mr Dong Yunhu), and current Chair of the Standing Committee of the People's Congress of Shanghai (Mr Jiang Zhuoqing).The Wu ethnic group also has a fair political presence in other regions beyond their homeland, which is consistent with previous findings regarding the geopolitical importance of Southeast China.The Xiang of Hunan is another non-Mandarin Han ethnic group that enjoys a high degree of autonomy: four out of the 11 top-tier government positions there are or had been held by people of Xiang origin, including the current Provincial Party Secretary (Mr Xu Dazhe) and current Chair of the Political Consultative Conference (Ms Li Weiwei).Other non-Mandarin Han regions, including Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangdong, Hainan, Hong Kong, and Macau, have been largely governed by outsiders from the Mandarin regions (Shandong, Jiangsu, Anhui, Henan, and Hubei, in particular) and, to some extent, by the Wu of Zhejiang.
Having described the data, we now map the network of ethno-geographic backgrounds of the 263 political elites and the geographic regions of top government posts they have held.Before mapping a complete network, we first focus on the 25 current members of the Politburo and Wang Qishan, former standing member of the Politburo and current vice president.Figure 4 shows a network graph of the 26 individuals, detailing their ancestral homes and the locations of positions   they have held over their careers.Circle symbols in the graph mark the names of the individuals; squares indicate locations where they have worked; and squares with frames refer to the locations of their ancestral homes (some ancestral home locations may also be locations of positions).Symbols colored in red represent individuals of Mandarin origin and the Mandarin regions; orange marks individuals of Wu origin and the regions of Shanghai and Zhejiang; blue designates the Cantonese people and regions; purple stands for other non-Mandarin Han people and regions; and green indicates the peripheral regions of ethnic minorities.Each line represents a tie or a connection between an elite and a geographic location.The ethno-geographic network above shows how the 26 elites are organized around the political center of Beijing.Most have worked in the Beijing central government, while the remainders are Party Secretaries of the centrally administered municipalities of Beijing (Cai Qi), Tianjin (Li Hongzhong), Shanghai (Li Qiang), and Chongqing (Chen Miner), the province of Guangdong (Li Xi), and the autonomous region of Xinjiang (Chen Quanguo).The individuals in the network are all interconnected through the sharing of mutual locations of positions and provincial origins, forming a cohesive elite network without any isolates.17 of the elites are of Mandarin Han origin (Shandong, Hebei, and Shaanxi each contribute three people); five of them are of Wu origin; three are Hokkiens of Fujian; and one is Hakka of Jiangxi.
As one can see, Xi Jinping's ethnopolitical network is linked to the province of Shaanxi (where his ancestral home is found), to the city of Beijing (where Xi was born and grew up, and currently serves as President of China), to the province of Fujian (where Xi worked for more than a decade, and was promoted to the position of Provincial Governor in 2000), to the province of Zhejiang (where Xi worked as the Party Secretary, the most powerful position of the provincial government), and to the city of Shanghai (where Xi also worked as the Party Secretary).The geographic regions to which Xi is affiliated also tend to be the most connected in the network.Fujian and Shaanxi, in particular, were not traditionally central to China's political elite network until Xi promoted a number of his protégés, including Cai Qi, Chen Xi, Huang Kunming, Zhao Leji, and Zhang Youxia, to the Politburo.Chen Xi (a Hokkien of Fujian) is linked to Xi Jinping through Tsinghua's alumni network while Huang Kunming and Cai Qi (both Hokkiens of Fujian) were Xi's former co-workers in Fujian and Zhejiang.Zhao Leji and Zhang Youxia, additionally, have Shaanxi ancestral ties to Xi.
Figure 5 maps a complete ethno-geographic network of the 263 political elites based on ethnicity and location of position.It shows the names of regions and ethnicities but omits the names of elites due to their much larger number.The 18 circle symbols in the network represent ethnic groups while the 33 square symbols represent geographic locations.The same color scheme from Figure 4 applies: squares colored in red refer to the Mandarin-speaking regions; those colored in orange are the regions of Shanghai and Zhejiang; blue designates Cantonese regions; purple stands for other non-Mandarin Han regions; and green indicates peripheral regions.The intensity of ties (or number of ties, each attached to an individual) is indicated by the lines' thickness.
The network graph illustrates that the Mandarins and the Wu act as hubs that connect all provinces and cities together.The ethnic minority regions are mostly dominated by the Mandarins, and yet they also maintain a slight degree of self-autonomy through their simultaneous governance by a group of ethnic natives who have multiple ties to their regional governments, as indicated by the thicker lines.The autonomous regions of China and their peoples-Xinjiang and the Uyghurs, Inner Mongolia and the Mongolians, Tibet and the Tibetans, Ningxia and the Hui, and Guangxi and the Zhuang-are exemplars of this kind.The Wu regions of Zhejiang and Shanghai and the Xiang region of Hunan, however, exemplify self-governance by non-Mandarin Han groups.
By contrast, the regions governed by outsiders include the non-Mandarin Han regions of Fujian, Jiangxi, Hainan, Guangdong, and Hong Kong, as well as several peripheral regions of ethnic minorities which are not officially considered to be autonomous regions, such as Qinghai and Yunnan.Fujian, Jiangxi, and Qinghai are hybrid cases of unequal political representation, meaning that they have a fair or even excessive number of representatives at the central government in Beijing while lacking native representation at the regional level.Guangdong, Hong Kong, Hainan, and Yunnan are the most extreme cases of political underrepresentation in that political elites from these regions are underrepresented at both levels of government.

Discussion
In this section, major findings from our data analysis are considered through the dual lens of critical Han studies and internal colonialism.The absolute majority of Chinese political elites (67.3%) are Mandarins who constitute the center of the network.The hierarchical structure of political representation among non-Mandarin Han groups exists as follows: the Wu of Shanghai and Zhejiang (14.83% of the elite population) constitute the top layer of the hierarchy.They are not only most integrated into the power center of China but also have a high degree of regional selfgovernance.In addition, the Wu of Shanghai and Zhejiang are the only non-Mandarin Han group that are considerably overrepresented with an elite-population ratio of 2.64 and 2.47, respectively-meaning that they have a rate of representation 2.64 and 2.47 times higher than the national average (see Table 1).The Xiang of Hunan (3.04%), the Hokkien of Fujian (2.66%), and the Gan of Jiangxi (1.9%) constitute the intermediate layer of this hierarchy as ethnicities that are fairly represented with an elite-population ratio of 0.66, 1.15, and 0.86, respectively, indicating a substantial degree of integration.By contrast, the Cantonese (0.38%) and the Teochew (0.76%) of Guangdong have an elitepopulation ratio of just 0.12.Hong Kong also belongs to the bottom layer given that none of its political elites in the central and local governments is of Hong Kong (or Guangdong Cantonese) ancestral origin: Carrie Lam, current Chief Executive of Hong Kong, was born in Hong Kong but is of Zhejiang origin; Leung Chun-ying, former Chief Executive of Hong Kong and current Vice Chair of the CPPCC, was also born in Hong Kong but has ancestral roots in Shandong; and Tung Chee-hwa, first Chief Executive of Hong Kong and current Vice Chair of the CPPCC, also has ancestral ties to Zhejiang and was born in Shanghai before his family fled to Hong Kong in 1949.This reveals the significant role played by the Wu in Hong Kong politics in addition to, and inextricably intermeshed with, their equally significant role in the business sector.
Based on the internal colonialism framework, and in particular the concept of political dependency of racial/ethnic minorities on the dominant racial/ethnic group and their appointed administrators and representatives (Allen, 1969;Blauner, 1969;Tabb, 1970; see also Chung, 2018), the lack of fair political representation in Chinese state governance suggests that the Cantonese and the Teochew, like their ethnic minority counterparts, are also subject to internal colonialization by the Chinese regime.The political and cultural subordination of Guangdong, Hong Kong, and the larger Lingnan region to China seems to have persisted into the present, despite the economic dynamism of those areas in recent decades.
Unlike Lingnan, Jiangnan, the Wu-speaking region, has a long history of socio-economic and cultural-political integration into China.Jiangnan started becoming an important economic (as well as political and cultural) center of China in the early third to the late 6th century, when waves of migrants and refugees moved from the North to the South en masse to escape wars.This process was further intensified as a result of the An Lushan rebellion of 755 and the establishment of the imperial capital in Hangzhou (now the capital city of Zhejiang Province) by the Southern Song dynasty in 1138 (Von Glahn, 2016).Just as Guangdong's dearth of political representation can be traced to its historical marginalization, history also plays an important role in explaining the Wu's outsized integration into the political ruling class of China.
Notwithstanding their political subjugation under the unitary state of China, economically developed regions such as Guangdong and Hong Kong differ from the more peripheral Tibet and Xinjiang in several ways.The latter fit more neatly with the traditional definition of an internal colony, which suffers from the triadic colonial mechanisms of economic exploitation, political subjugation, and cultural subordination.Instead, the former group, and Hong Kong in particular, finds more suitable comparisons in the regions of Québec in Canada, Catalonia in Spain, and Lower Scotland in the United Kingdom-distinct societies that are economically robust and yet politically and culturally subjugated to another dominant ethnic and/or linguistic group within their own national borders.We posit the concept of semi-peripheral internal colony as a useful descriptor for this group of regions.
While the semi-periphery, like the satellite or periphery, faces similar political and cultural subordination to the center, the former has certain advantages that the latter is deprived of.Such advantages may include economic resources, strength of civil society, and geoeconomic or geopolitical importance.Hong Kong, for example, is surely seeing its political autonomy eroded, civil society weakened, and local culture and language endangered under Beijing's National Security Law, recently implemented in the city; yet it is hard to imagine Hong Kong being transformed into another Xinjiang or Tibet, given the city's geoeconomic and geopolitical significance to China as a financial center for capital flows-especially against the background of growing China-US conflict (Chen, 2021(Chen, , 2022)).
The concept of the semi-peripheral internal colony builds upon the extant notion of the semiperiphery by utilizing several insights provided by world systems theory.World systems theory is ultimately a relational conception of social reality, which sees the status and conditions of nations as resulting from their relations to one other, and their positions within those relationships (Snyder and Kick, 1979).World systems theorists generally view these positions and resulting conditions and statuses as defined through economic, political, and military relationships, though culture is also recognized as playing a supporting role (Chase-Dunn and Grimes, 1995).Indeed, modern colonies (in the traditional sense of the term) originated through the economic expansion of the capitalist world system, and colonizers fostered the birth of nation-states in such colonies to secure control over the land they laid claim to Wallerstein (2004).The establishment of new nations has not put an end to colonial relations, however, as ideas surrounding racial and ethnic difference have historically been used not only to reinforce conventional colonial domination but also the domination of semi/peripheral nations by core ones that stem from pre-existing colonial dynamics (Fanon, 1952;Horne, 2017).A primary critique of world systems theory is that it focuses too exclusively on relations and distributions of power and resources at the international level, and fails to adequately attend to these phenomena on smaller scales (Derudder, 2003).Conceptions of internal colonialism can help address this deficiency by facilitating the exploration of similar dynamics to those dealt with by world systems theory, but which operate within national borders.
Regarding the political economy aspect of internal colonialism in China and its relations to Mandarin hegemony, Hong Kong may be somewhat different from Guangdong: the former fits more neatly with the notion of semi-periphery in a sense that while Hong Kong is politically and culturally subordinated to Beijing and Mandarin China, economically, it, just like the center, is well-equipped to extract various sources of surplus value (e.g.capital investments) and of surplus labor force, from mainland China (as well as from Southeast Asian and other countries).This is due to its role as a global financial center for capital flows between China and the rest of the world (US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, 2018; see also Pun et al., 2022;Siu and Jin, 2022).
The case of Guangdong, however, is more complicated.It is not an autonomous administrative region like Hong Kong, which means that it is more vulnerable politically and culturally to Beijing's rule and language policies.Economically, Guangdong is also more geographically polarized: it has its own local center-the Pearl River Delta region near Hong Kong-as well as its own peripheral, rural/semi-rural, regions.Natives living in the local center region may have a better living standard, even similar to that of Hong Kong people in many cases, and just like Hong Kong, the local center in Guangdong also extracts various forms of surplus value and surplus laborers (e.g.peasants) from peripheral areas of other provinces and within its own province.
Laborers from other provinces may be exploited by local capitalists but also by Mandarin capitalists from the North who have made their fortune in Guangdong-in addition to capitalists of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other nationalities, of course, who have dominated the manufacturing sector by relocating their factories to the Pearl River Delta region of the province ever since China reintroduced the market economy in 1978 and used Guangdong as an experimental trial field.Some notable examples of Northern capitalists based in Guangdong include Ren Zhengfei, founder and chairman of Huawei; Hui Ka Yan, founder and chairman of China Evergrande; and Ma Mingzhe, founder and chairman of Ping An Insurance.Laborers from peripheral, rural/semi-rural, areas within the province, however, have experienced a double exploitation/dispossession, economically and culturally, as they are forced to learn and use Mandarin in their daily lives and taught to disdain their native tongues to survive in an increasingly Mandarinized Guangdong.
The internal colonial mechanisms of double exploitation/dispossession can also be observed in tax revenue transfers from Guangdong to Beijing, which is one of the most significant forms of surplus value extraction in contemporary China.Indeed, given Guangdong's economic dynamism in recent decades, the province has been the largest contributor of tax revenues to Beijing since the early 1990s.As a result of this heavy taxation, Guangdong lacks the economic resources to develop the poor and rural regions within its own province, prolonging the regional urban-rural divide.
The case of Guangdong highlights the ways in which contemporary internal colonial mechanisms have become more complex since Gramsci's (1978) and Lenin's (1977) early diagnosis of internal colonialism as plain surplus value transfer from agrarian to industrialized regions within a country.First, in an advanced capitalist world system with different industrialized regions that are culturally and linguistically heterogeneous, tensions arise when particular regions and groups are subordinated to others under the existing political establishment-as seen in the examples of Québec in Canada, Catalonia in Spain, and Lower Scotland in the United Kingdom.What is needed, therefore, is a more sophisticated and dialectical theory of internal colonialism, such as that found in Robert Allen's (1969) neocolonial analysis of America's Black urban ghettos, that goes beyond simple urban-rural dichotomy.Second, in a centralized regime like China (e.g. in contrast to a federation), heavy tax transfers from economically developed regions like Guangdong to the central government have become an important form of surplus value extraction, which constitutes an essential feature of internal colonialization in China.Third, agency over the design and implementation of such economic policies may be withheld from particular groups on the basis of language and ethnicity, among other extra-geographical factors.This is illustrated by our study of political elite formation and ethno-geographic hierarchy in China's state governance, which demonstrates the degree to which seats of power are dominated by the Mandarins based in Beijing while Southerners, such as the Cantonese and the Teochew, have been largely excluded.
Our study also makes a contribution to critical Han studies by pairing it with the theory of internal colonialism for the examination of ethnic hierarchy and political dependency within the political ruling class of China.It expands the application of critical Han studies beyond cultural-linguistic and ethnographic fields, addressing ways in which the internal heterogeneity of various Han Chinese groups is structured through ethnic-linguistic hierarchy in political elite formation and state governance.Our initiating attempt to combine the two scholarships for a critical leftist approach toward ethnic studies in China has, we believe, yielded fruitful results.
With the increasingly centralized power of Xi Jinping's nationalistic government, local languages and cultures are under unprecedented threat.Growing ethnopolitical suppression, however, also tends to foster local resistance and alternative nationalisms-something we have witnessed in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inter Mongolia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.If central-local tensions in China continue to rise, more sites of resistance will likely emerge.Like the leftist intellectuals of Hong Kong (Ip, 2020;Liu et al., 2022), we do not want to see these nativist movements fall into the hands of the political right.To this end, we have endeavored to work out a theory of ethnic studies grounded in the critical Marxist tradition by stressing the importance of structural power analysis as a complement to the voluntarist approach toward ethnicity.
We are not so politically naïve to claim that Mandarin hegemony and internal colonial mechanisms would simply fade away if political representation among various Han ethnic groups became even.But much of Mandarin hegemony is in fact a product of uneven ethnopolitical power relations in China and Beijing's chauvinist language policies in particular.To lay claim to any 'pure autonomy' from hegemony, of course, misses the point and results in a state of reactionary passivity.As Ezra Vogel (1980) discussed in his study, native leadership was in fact more likely to accommodate local interests despite being constrained by the domestic hegemon.To fight against Mandarin hegemony and call for diverse leadership set some concrete agenda to begin with.For long-term goals, it would require an institutional change in central-local relations if the regime was to avoid serious ethnopolitical backlash.We should also add that, in regards to questions of centralization and localism, a vanguard party does not have to be a chauvinist party.Lenin's more nuanced and dialectical approach toward the national (and ethnic) question can provide a useful roadmap for rebuilding a more balanced central-local relation (Lewin, 2005).

Conclusion
In this article, we take a system-structural approach toward mapping ethno-geographic representation among Chinese political elites in state governance.The absolute majority of Chinese political elites are Mandarins who constitute the center of the ruling class.For the non-Mandarin Han groups, a hierarchical structure of political representation exists: the Wu of Shanghai and Zhejiang sit atop the hierarchy, as they are not only most integrated into the power center but also have a high degree of regional self-governance.The Cantonese and the Teochew of Guangdong and Hong Kong, however, belong to the bottom layer, despite the robust economies of these regions.The findings provide justification for broadening the application of the internal colonialism framework to include Guangdong and Hong Kong.Studying ethnicity through the examination of elite power structure represents an important step toward expanding critical Han studies beyond its traditional fields.
Our work also briefly introduced the concept of the semi-peripheral internal colony as a means of capturing power relations between different non-Mandarin Han groups and regions in China, and explaining how they come to shape political elite formation.This contribution points toward the potential of expanding on key insights of world systems theory by applying them to colonial situations within individual nation-states.To further develop the concept of the semi-peripheral internal colony, future work could explore how semi-peripheral actors relate to core and peripheral actors in different other ways.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Correlation between elites' birthplace and geographic location of position.
illustrates that the Mandarins have occupied most of the top-tier government positions in every geographic region with the exception of Shanghai and Zhejiang (the Wu regions), where half of top-tier government posts (23 out of 46) are or had been occupied by Wu natives-including the current Chair of the Political Consultative Conference of Zhejiang (Ms Ge Huijun), current

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Correlation between elites' ancestral home and geographic location of position.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Correlation between elites' ethnicity and geographic location of position.

Figure 4 .
Figure 4. Ethno-geographic network of the 25 Politburo members and Wang Qishan.

Figure 5 .
Figure 5. Ethno-geographic network of the 263 political elites by ethnicity.

Table 1 .
Geographic origins of Chinese political elites and population demography.The population figures are from the 2018 Yearbooks of Statistics published by China, Hong Kong, and Macau.All percentage figures are rounded to the second decimal place.

Table 2 .
Ethnic composition of Chinese political elites.