Outlander Survival Strategy and Culture Among China’s Hakka
Creators: name: Hu, Chao
name: Talhelm, Thomas
name: Wu, Wu
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022

description: Abstract The Hakka are a cultural group in China that were survivors and escapers. They moved away from mainstream Han areas, farmed and hunted in ways that were more suited to these outlying areas, and have a cohesive group identity separate from mainstream Han culture. We test whether the Hakka differ from nearby Han in individual self-identity, self-inflation, cultural thought style, friend/stranger distinction, situated wise reasoning for interacting friends vs. strangers, and inclination toward manipulating the environment. We theorize that the Hakka’s history as a minority group that often moved to the fringes of control of the central state may be connected to cultural tendencies toward a tight in-group/out-group distinction. We hypothesize that the Hakka participants will think more analytically and show more self-inflation than the Han Chinese. Moreover, we hypothesize that the Hakka may show a greater friend/stranger distinction and wiser reasoning about conflicts with friends (vs. with strangers). Finally, the Hakka may have a stronger inclination for manipulating environment, consistent with their history of independent movement and settling in less-densely-populated areas. Keywords: Hakka; outlanders; Introduction The Hakka (客家人) are a cultural group in China who have lived in areas that are apart from the mainstream Han Chinese. Hakka Chinese speak their own language (or dialects) and have unique food traditions. The Hakka people have been researched in sociology and anthropology (e.g., Cohen, 1968; Zhou, 2007). However, few studies in the field of social psychology have focused on the Hakka. In this study, we test people in Hakka and mainstream Han areas to test whether there are cultural differences that might traced back to their unique survival strategy as escapers and cultural outsiders. We derive our hypotheses for the Hakka from their survival strategies. Until quite recently, the Hakka have pursued a very different survival strategy from the dominant Han Chinese. The key elements of the Hakka survival strategy appear to have been: • Avoiding the yoke of centralized government: To accomplish this the Hakka often moved into mountainous areas farther from centralized control and from the fertile river valleys (Cohen, 1968; Contable, 1996). • Group solidarity: The Hakka were an identifiable and separate group from the mainstream Han. Thus, the Hakka had a clear identity, a distinct dialect, and distinct group boundaries. This group was smaller and more contained than the mainstream Han people. • More diverse farming and other subsistence styles: Because the Hakka were living in more marginal hill areas and because they were often on the run, they practiced types of subsistence styles that were different from the mainstream Han. For example, they probably practiced foraging for wild foods and hunting wild game further into the modern era than mainstream Han. Hunting and foraging were probably a bigger source of calories for the Hakka than nearby Han living in lowland areas. Rather than focusing on cereal grains like rice and wheat, the Hakka practiced more mixed farming including crops like yams, bamboo shoots, persimmon, tea, and various “wild” vegetables (wild in the sense of being less domesticated than vegetables like carrots and onions). Hakka have historically farmed major grain crops like wheat and rice, but these were much less dominant in the diet than in the diet of nearby mainstream Han. Scott (2017) argues that crops like yams are more suited to escaping central control because they require less labor, do not need to be harvested at a particular time (allowing farmers to run away and come back later to harvest), stay edible underground for long periods of time, and are harder to confiscate. Cultural Differences That May Be Traced to Survival Strategies One question that pervades this study is the question of causation versus selection. Did these survival strategies influence Hakka culture, or did the Hakka pursue these survival strategies because their culture was like this to begin with? Settling the question of cause and effect is beyond the scope of this study. However, regardless of cause and effect, it is interesting to note which types of cultural traits are linked to particular survival strategies, whether through self-selection or causation (or both). Therefore, we will compare two neighboring social groups (Hakka and mainstream Han) whose ancestors had different survival strategies until one or two generations ago (after the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949), but are currently living under similar conditions (e.g., subsistence style, genetics, natural environment, economic status, political environment) during the modern era in China (Figure 1). Another question is whether these historical differences affect culture in the modern era. Since few Hakka today are pursuing a traditional survival strategy (and since they are increasingly integrated into mainstream Chinese society), will there still be cultural differences between Hakka and mainstream Han Chinese? We believe differences rooted in historical survival strategies might persist even after a social group replaces their old subsistence strategy with a new one, at least within the time span of one generation. Hypotheses We hypothesize that the Hakka may not fit neatly into the East-West cultural categories of (a) interdependent, strong in-group/out-group distinction, holistic thinking versus (b) independent, smaller in-group/out-group distinction, analytic thinking. On the one hand, the Hakka’s history of immigration (from central China) and conflicts (with the local Chinese) may make the Hakka more individualistic (Cohen, 1968; Contable, 1996). Their more mixed farming, gathering, and hunting may also lead to more flexible social ties, since studies have found that intensive farming communities are usually more interdependent than hunting communities (Berry, 1967; Henrich et al., 2001). This individualism may make the Hakka participants more likely to describe their personality in terms of individual traits, rather than social group identifiers on the Twenty Statements Test. The Hakka were also “escapers” from the central government, which may have promoted individualism. They also settled areas that were less densely populated, and frontier settlement has been linked to individualism and analytic thought (Kitayama et al., 2006). Besides, the Hakka may have a stronger inclination for manipulating the environment, consistent with their history of independent movement and need to settle in less densely populated areas. Under most circumstances, individualistic societies have a smaller friend-stranger distinction (Talhelm et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2011). However, we suspect that Hakka may have a larger friend-stranger distinction than the mainstream Han. This is because the Hakka’s history as a minority group of conflicts with neighbors of non-Hakka Han Chinese groups may have led them to have to band together with friends in times of difficulty. One factor that might be particularly important is that they tended to move as a group, not as separate individuals, which would have been more common among mainstream Han. Likewise, we hypothesize that the Hakka will display wiser reasoning about conflicts with friends than non-Hakka because the Hakka’s history as a marginal and vulnerable group may have made it more important to band together. Yet this would not have led to a need to suppress conflict with strangers, so we predict no differences between Hakka and non-Hakka about reasoning in conflicts with strangers. Method All procedures used in the current study will be approved by the University Ethics Committee. Written consent will be obtained from all participants. Moreover, we will explain the nature of our study and ensure the participants that their personal information will be kept confidential. Participants Participants will be recruited in Nanjing County, one of the most well-known Hakka counties, in which there are about 40,000 Hakka and 300,000 non-Hakka. The village leaders will inform the local people of this study. And the participants will voluntarily participant in our study in quiet meeting rooms. Participants will be paid about 100 RMB for agreeing to participate. Participants must be at least 18 years old. Research personnel who interact directly with the participants will not be aware of the assigned treatments and our hypothesis. Our target sample size is 174 participants (72 participants per group). We will attempt to recruit up to 200 (100 participants per group), assuming that not all will complete the total task. We used the software program G*Power to conduct a power analysis. Our goal was to obtain .80 power to detect an average effect size in social psychology (r = 0.21) at the standard .05 alpha error probability (Richard, Bond, &amp; Stokes-Zoota, 2003). Data collection will stop when the specified number of participants is reached. Procedure Based on a prior study of chair moving (Talhelm, Zhang, &amp; Oishi, 2018), there will be a set of chairs partially blocking the aisle to the interviewer (see Figure 2). The participants will have to squeeze through the chairs or move the chairs before they reach the desk where the materials are placed. After the participants go through the aisle and sit besides the interviewer at a table. They will undergo the following tests: 1. Individualistic self-identity The participants will introduce themselves with ten sentences begin with “ I am”. The number of the sentences related to the participants’ personal aspects will be counted as the index of individualism, while that related to their social aspects counted as the index of collectivism. 2. Self-inflation Sociogram task: the participants will draw on an A4 size white paper a picture of their friends’ relationship to them, and to each other. The longest diameter of each circle will be measured. The ratio of the diameter representing self to the averaged diameter of the circles representing their friends will be calculated as an index of their self-inflation and an index of individualism. 3. Cultural thought style. The participants will complete the Chinese version of triad task as used before (Talhelm, 2018) measuring analytic/holistic thinking style. Participants see three items and choose “which two of the three are most closely related.” The task includes eight key items and 12 distracter items. Because the triad task is essentially a series of binary choices (relational versus categorical), it will be analyzed as a series of binomials with the GLMER function with a binomial link the program R. 4. Friend/stranger distinction In this task, participants imagine going into business with a friend or stranger; then they discover the friend or stranger was honest or dishonest; and they can choose to punish or reward the friend and stranger (Wang, Leung, See, &amp; Gao, 2011). The ratio of their amount of punishment and reward for friends to those for strangers will be calculated. 5. Situated Wise reasoning for interacting friends vs. strangers We will measure the participants’ reasoning about conflict with friends and strangers using Chinese version of Situated Wise reasoning scale, measuring their taking others’ perspectives; consideration of change and multiple ways situation may unfold; intellectual humility/recognition of limits of knowledge; search for a compromise/conflict resolution; view of the event through the vantage point of an outsider. Each participant will fulfil the questionnaire twice, once for a conflict with a friend, once for a conflict with a stranger. Data Analysis Because participants are local residents mostly unfamiliar with academic research, we will take care to verify that each participant understand the experimental procedure and follow the experimenter’s instruction correctly. If a participant does not understand the experiment procedure, follow the experimenter’s instruction correctly, or finish all the required steps, that participant will not be included in the analysis. Outliers (beyond three standard deviations) will be excluded in the analysis. We will also ask participants questions about their identity (Hakka versus non-Hakka Chinese), and we will analyze only Hakka versus non-Hakka Han. We will not include other minority groups. We will also analyze where participants were born and if they’ve lived for long periods of time in other areas, testing whether this factor influences the results. Linear/ordinary logistic regressions will be conducted choosing cohort (Hakka, non-Hakka), gender, age, and education level as predictors with the cultural variables listed above. Analyses will use the standard p &lt; 0.05 criteria. Two two-way mixed ANOVA tests will be conducted on friend/stranger distinction and wisdom for interacting friend vs. stranger. 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