Chapter 4 Tribal People 117

The Hmong retain their ethnic identity as Hmong despite the very different
societies in which they now live. In the Western nations where many have set-
tled since the late 1970s, many Hmong have acquired university degrees and
become successful middle-class professionals and businessmen. They have not
had similar opportunities in Vietnam, where they are among the very poorest
of the 53 national minorities (Taylor 2008; Luong and Nieke 2013), or in Laos,
where the few thousand remaining Hmong are hiding in jungle camps from a
Communist government still trying to dislodge them (Fuller 2007; Unrepre-
sented Nations and Peoples Organization 2016).
In this section, we look at the Hmong/Miao from the perspective of their
different situations in five Asian nations: China, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos,
and Vietnam. Inevitably we will have most to say about the Hmong in Thai-
land. This is because they are best known to scholars, who have been allowed
access to the Thai uplands for decades. Other nations have been secretive and
closed. The Communist governments of China, Laos, and Vietnam do not
want outsiders learning about their minority populations; in the Myanmar hills,
chronic rebellion by hill tribes such as the Chin, Kachin, and Karen have kept
these areas out of bounds as well. But the story starts with the Miao in China.

Who Are the Miao?

The story of the Hmong really begins in China. Hmong have not lived in
the hills of Southeast Asia longer than a few hundred years at most, but in
southern China there are at present some ten million people classified as Miao.
Older books on the Hmong of Thailand refer to them as Miao or Meo. “Miao”
is not an ethnonym (the term that a people use for themselves), but the term
that the Chinese have used for several thousand years to refer to the many non-
Han groups in Southwest China belonging to the linguistic subfamily (Miao-
Yao). The Miao comprise a large number of smaller ethnic groups, including
the Hmong. These languages are not mutually intelligible, and even among the
Hmong there are dialect differences.
The Chinese character that is
read as “Miao” is a compound of
the character for “plants” and for
“fields” (see figure 4.1). This sug-
gests a meaning of “sprouts” or
“seedlings” or even “weeds,” sug-
gesting “wild uncultivated tribes.”
Indeed, miao was an ancient cate-
gory appearing in very early Chinese histories compiled by Sima Qian (145–190
B.C.E.). These refer to a Miao kingdom existing around the third century B.C.E.,
which sounds specific enough, although miao was used more generically, along
with man and yi, to mean “barbarians,” especially with reference to peoples liv-
ing in the southwestern frontier of the expanding Chinese Empire. (What the
“barbarians” called themselves at that time we have no way of knowing.)

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Figure 4.1 Miao—The upper radical

means plant, the lower means field.