ABSTRACT
For a modern sovereign state, one major goal of civic education regarding ethnic minorities is to transfer their loyalty from their individual ethnic groups to an abstract all-encompassing state. For the Chinese state, there was no such civic education before its establishment in 1911. “Minority” was not a concept and loyalty was a non-issue. There were aliens, not minorities. Facing aliens, the Chinese dynastic court was mainly concerned with the system of “propriety,” or proper relationship between the court and the aliens, with the former possessing an image of superiority. To achieve minimal respect from aliens, the court resorted to various techniques such as assimilation, separation, suppression, expulsion, annihilation, placation, and bestowal. The choice of technique was merely a matter of capability. Emperors never worried about losing the loyalty of the court officials, even if sanctions failed to bring the aliens back to the system of propriety.
