The Tujia/Bizika people in question were known to Qing officials as turen 土人or tuman 土蠻, and are now officially designated as Tujia 土家. The following is an excerpt from a paper I wrote recently, relating to local religion in a predominantly Tujia village:
QUOTE
the whole mountainous region ... including northwestern Hunan, southwestern Hubei, southeastern Chongqing, and northeastern Guizhou – was divided among numerous autonomous turen chieftaincies (tusi 土司) from the eleventh century to the 1730s. ...
The early inhabitants of the turen areas are variously known as Ba 巴, Wuling barbarians 武陵蠻, Linjun barbarians 廩君蠻, Panhu barbarians 槃瓠蠻, Plank-shield barbarians 板楯蠻, and Five Rivers barbarians 五溪蠻 in sources from the first to sixth centuries AD – most notably Huayang Guozhi and Hou Hanshu. The Ba are officially recognized as the ancestors of the Tujia, but because the Hou Hanshu attributes different origin myths and religious traditions to the Linjun, Panhu, and Plank-shield barbarians – for example, the Linjun barbarians worshipped white tigers, the Plank-shield barbarians were known for slaying white tigers, and the Panhu barbarians supposedly claimed descent from a dog called Panhu – Chinese ethnographers and historians remain in disagreement over which of these groups the Tujia sprang from. The main weakness of their approach is the intention (following the lead of Qing ethnography) to establish a mythological and religious continuity for the Tujia over a period of more than two millennia, so as to provide them with a sense of historical and cultural identity that is now noticeably lacking. In reality, it is obvious that whatever myths or religious practices the original Ba or ‘barbarians’ saw as their own had already undergone significant change even by early Qing times. The real nucleus of turen identity by this time lay in the chieftaincies’ effective independence from, and occasional clashes with, the counties of southeastern Sichuan (now Chongqing) and northern and western Hunan; this, however, could not be a politically correct basis for Tujia history in a state that repeatedly stresses ‘the unity of nationalities’ and its long history as a ‘unitary multi-ethnic country’.
The Tujia nationality/ethnicity was officially recognized in 1956, but about half of all present-day Tujia families were only classified as such after 1982 because of disruption to the ethnic classification project by the Anti-Rightist campaign and the Cultural Revolution. Before this, they were classified as ethnically Han 漢. As recent studies by Shih Chih-yu and Melissa Brown have shown, much of the Tujia population in Hunan and Hubei remains indifferent to its ‘non-Han’ ethnic identity despite the fact that it lives within prefectures or counties designated as ‘Autonomous Tujia and Miao’, and this is likely to be true also of the Tujia in Chongqing and Guizhou. Estimates of the proportion of the Tujia population (which numbered just over eight million in 2000) that can still speak the distinctive Tujia language range from below 1% to 20%, but the general consensus is that the language survives only in northwestern Hunan and will become extinct within a century if its popularity continues to decline. These aspects of identity change are primarily consequences of the replacement of tusi chieftains in the late 1720s and 1730s by Qing imperial officials from other regions of China, under the policy known as gaitu guiliu 改土歸流 - ‘changing the tusi into centrally-appointed frontier officials (liuguan 流官)’. Through a combination of coercion and persuasion, the autonomous chieftains of the turen, as well as those of other peoples like the Miao 苗in Guizhou 貴州 and Yunnan 雲南, were made to relinquish their power and hand their lands and subjects over to direct rule by the Qing government. Unlike many of the Miao chieftaincies, the turen chieftaincies did not resist the gaitu guiliu policy with armed force. The policy not only removed a core element of turen identity – the various tusi dynasties - but also opened up the former tusi areas to immigrants drawn to the rich local deposits of coal and mercury. The first prefectural gazetteer for Youyang 酉陽 [in southeastern Chongqing], written by the prefect Shao Lu 邵陸 in 1774, observed – probably with some exaggeration - that natives (tuzhu 土著) were now a small minority of the population, the rest being newcomers from Guizhou (‘Qian’ 黔), Hubei and Hunan (‘Chu’ 楚), and Jiangxi (‘Jiangyou’ 江右).
However, this was by no means the first wave of migration into the turen world, just the first after gaitu guiliu. From 1644 to 1703, amidst the chaos of the Ming-Qing transition, the tusi of Youyang and southwestern Hubei launched regular slaving raids into Pengshui and Qianjiang counties, which lay on the frontier between Sichuan province and the various tusi. These raids were often carried out with the collaboration of rebel warlords in Pengshui and Qianjiang, and sometimes captured a thousand or more peasants in one day. These captives were presumably put to work on the farms of the tusi, and would gradually have intermarried with turen. While Brown assumes that the Tujia people in a southwestern Hubei village who told her their ancestors arrived “with their hands tied behind their backs” were referring to forced migrations initiated by the Ming and Qing governments, it is far more likely that these families are descended from the slaves captured in 1644-1703. The 1711 gazetteer of Pengshui county also mentions that escaped slaves from the county sometimes sought refuge in the tusi. Thus, despite the frequent emphasis in modern historiography on the official policy of “no Han are allowed to cross the border, and no barbarians are allowed to leave their caves” (Han bu rujing, Man bu chudong 漢不入境，蠻不出洞) before gaitu guiliu, it is clear that many ‘Han’ did settle in the tusi in the seventeenth century, often against their will. However, the turen apparently only referred to the post-1730s immigrants as kejia 客家 (‘guest people’) as distinct from themselves as tujia 土家 (‘native people’), implying that the captured slaves or escaped slaves were either considered as natives or fell into an ethnic grey area. Chinese local officials perpetuated this practice in the 1980s, by classifying as Tujia those people whose ancestors were already living in the tusi areas before gaitu guiliu, and classifying all descendants of later arrivals as Han, or as Miao if they came from Guizhou.