Fulbright Hays China Seminar 2005
CURRENT EVENTS ARTICLES ABOUT CHINA'S ETHNIC MINORITIES
One Million Xinjiang Herdsmen Say Goodbye to Nomadic Life
The longtime primitive and unsettled life of about one million herdsmen in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region come to an end as they have moved into brand-new residential areas with the aid of local governments.
"This marks a dramatic change of their traditional nomadic life pattern, passing from one generation to another," said Hubetolla Hasayin, director of the animal husbandry department of the region.
For thousands of years, Xinjiang is a region where the northern nomadic nationalities live and procreate.
The winter in Xinjiang usually lasts for about half a year with frequent hitting of blizzards so herdsmen there were forced to migrate from one place to another all the year round to search for fodder and water for their livestock.
To sooth or end their difficult life, the regional government has helped the herdsmen improve fodder with mixed ingredients and gather the livestock to uniformly feed.
The government also has built new residential areas for herdsmen to dwell in. According to local government statistics, 78 percent of the 1.29 million herdsmen in Xinjiang have moved into new houses to start a settle-down life at the end of 2004.
A 35-year-old Kazak herdsman named Jeanspeeke has recently moved into a new brick house in the county of Burqin in Altay Prefecture. The shabby adobe house where he lived in the past becomes a sheep pen now.
The government equips solar or wind electric generator for nearly every household of the herdsmen, Jeanspeeke said. He can watch television every day and ride a motorcycle or take a car instead of riding a horse, he said.
Taypark Quhaive, Kazak herdsman, said he sold some of his livestock and built a brick house in Qinghe County of Altay Prefecture. With the help of the local government, he has access to tap water and power supply and his house was equipped with cable television.
"The life was very difficult in the past," said the 65-year-oldKazak herdsman. "We used to live in yurt and wander with 30 sheep and two cows. The cold weather left me a serious lumbago," said the old man, recalling the hard life.
The resettled life is much easier, Taypark said. And their ways of life have also changed. His two sons do not live on herding andthey have held jobs in the nearby Takshiken Port, he said.
According to a local official named Hubetolla, the resettled life has made more than one million herdsmen discard the primitive production mode. The official said the herdsmen now have their own houses, livestock pens and a large stretch of fodder field. The death rate of the livestock also has reduced from 8 percent in the1970s to less than 1 percent today.
In addition, governments of all levels have built schools in the herdsmen residential areas, ending the long history of "horseback schooling."
(Xinhua News Agency August 8, 2005)
Dongba culture at crossroads
www.chinaview.cn 2005-08-04
BEIJING, Aug. 4 -- He Xiudong, 21, dreams of being a real Dongba a spiritual leader of the Naxi ethnic minority to revive his culture and win the respect of his people.
"Both my father and grandfather were Dongbas. When I was five, I could read three old Dongba manuscripts," recalls He, who is studying Dongba religion at the Lijiang Dongba Cultural Research Institute in Lijiang, Yunnan Province.
He was a shepherd for eight years before coming to the institute to study a few years ago.
At the institute, He and his fellow students recite and transcribe hieroglyphics from century-old Dongba manuscripts, recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as Memory of the World in 2003.
At the same time, the pupils learn how to become a genuine Dongba, which involves conducting sacrificial rituals, setting up altars, properly using religious tools and performing Dongba dances.
In 2003, the young man, as a new student, performed Dongba rituals at Whitman College in the United States, at the invitation of the Freeman Foundation.
He says the journey was a complete success.
"Thousands of people were out there waiting," he says, adding that someone even asked for his autograph.
At Whitman College, He displayed the art of hieroglyphics and enthralled his audience with Dongba songs.
"I performed a traditional Dongba religious ritual, which reflects the relationship between humans and nature," He says.
In the performance, humans and nature live in harmony, but a conflict erupts due to human greed. But in the end, the two resume their peaceful co-existence.
While He works hard to get to the heart of Dongba culture, researchers feel his dreams of reviving the ancient ethnic culture might be in vain.
"The number of young Dongbas in training is gradually on the rise, but Dongba culture remains on the brink of extinction," says Yang Fuquan, an expert with the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences.
Living fossil
At the top of Jade Dragon Mountain, novelty-seekers gather to take photos, ride sledges and enjoy themselves while vendors hawk souvenirs.
The jovial atmosphere belies the sacred respect the Naxi people have for this mountain - an important part of their unique culture famed for its mysterious hieroglyphics and religion.
The Naxi number roughly 300,000 and live in Southwest China's Yunnan Province. They are descendants of an ancient tribe called the Qiang that moved to the juncture of Yunnan and Sichuan provinces and the Tibet Autonomous Region from the Yellow River valley in Northwest China.
Like the Maya in South America, the Naxi developed a culture closely tied to religion, known as Dongba, and passed down a system of hieroglyphics by word-of-mouth.
Naxi people are proud of their mother tongue, which is the only hieroglyphic language still being used in the world.
To write the word "snatch," Naxi people draw a bird falling prey to an eagle's claw. For "absorb," they depict a man sucking from a bowl with a straw pipe.
Ancient Naxi also used seashells to read divinations from heaven. In a translated manuscript, one divination reads:
If you throw away one white seashell from thirteen;
The divination resembles the sun rising from one slope of the mountain
In another:
A Vulture spreads its wings upon craggy and soaring mountains;
You will know loss or the recovery of things;
Warfare and disaster or bliss lie ahead.
To experts, the Dongba manuscripts are "living fossils."
Behind the bloom
Today, Dongba culture is nothing more than a fad, with sacrificial rituals, clothing, tapestries and vaudeville shows available at tourist resorts.
Experts are concerned with this cultural facade.
"Behind the bloom is hedonism, commercialism and consumerism," Yang says.
Nowhere is this more prevalent than in Lijiang, home of the Naxi and where Dongba culture clings to life.
Located about 600 kilometres northwest of Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, Lijiang is home to three UNESCO World Heritages - Three Rivers Flowing Abreast, Lijiang Ancient Town, and the Dongba Manuscripts.
Take a walk in the cobbled streets and you'll see a feast of Dongba culture, at least that's what it looks like at first. In reality this "culture" is limited to ostentatious Dongba icons: slogans, tourist souvenirs that say "I love you," newfangled Dongba theme parks and imitation Dongba manuscripts.
"Dongba culture is rooted here, but presented only as a commodity rather than an enriched history and culture," says Yang.
"Of course, there have been a lot of preservation efforts. The local government made it a priority and experts are dedicated to protecting the culture by collecting manuscripts and translating them," says Yang, pointing to the 100-volume "Dongba Manuscripts Translations and Studies" sitting on his bookshelf.
But native Dongba speakers are now few and far between. "Nowadays, only one in 10,000 Naxi can decipher the original manuscripts," says Bai Gengsheng, a Naxi and vice president of the Chinese Folk Literature and Art Society.
Dongbas, omniscient gurus in Naxi culture, number even less. According to tradition, Dongbas are supposed to preside over sacrificial, marital and burial ceremonies and provide offerings to the gods.
"The 11 veteran Dongbas at our research centre all passed away," sighs Zhao Shihong, head of the Dongba Cultural Research Institute.
The Dongba manuscripts, the core of the culture, are in peril. "Mistranslations of Dongba manuscripts abound and researchers are rare," says Zhao.
Globalization has also dealt a deadly blow to Dongba culture, says Bai. Every year, about three million visitors swarm into Lijiang. They bring different values that are a threat to traditional Naxi lifestyles.
"They can't resist outside changes and remain what they used to be," he says.
Revival or survival
Some local experts have realized the importance of preserving Dongba culture and taken action.
Starting in the 1980s, elderly Dongbas living in villages were recruited to decipher old manuscripts. Dongba apprenticeships were resumed in tandem.
"Back in the old days, Dongba culture was exclusive and strictly passed down within Dongba families, following a kindred and male-heir line," says Yang of the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences.
Under the ongoing educational programme, talented students are selected and sent to elderly Dongbas, who teach them to read manuscripts, write hieroglyphics, hold ceremonies and make religious gadgets.
There are now 14 Dongba culture educational institutions in Lijiang.
"It's imperative for us to cultivate new Dongbas. Otherwise, we will not understand what the hieroglyphics say decades from now," says Zhao of the Dongba research institute.
For the moment, seven young men, including He Xiudong, are studying Dongba culture at the centre.
Performing rituals for the public is considered by the centre an effective way to protect Dongba culture at the grassroots level. However, "except in a very few villages, many Dongba activities are just commodities," Yang points out.
Bai of the Chinese Folk Literature and Art Society is also fairly pessimistic.
"The impact of globalization is irresistible. Like many other ethnic minority cultures, Dongba culture is facing imminent extinction. What we can do is record as many of the original manuscripts as possible."
(Source: China Daily)
Farmers in Kashgar Get Quake-proof Homes
Ethnic Uygur farmer Mehesumu Abduleyimu had no plan to build a new house.
Although he has lived in a shabby mud house for decades, building a new one was so far out of his financial reach that he didn't give building a new one a second thought.
The 40-year-old farmer, who lives in Kadimujaryi Village in the suburbs of Kashgar city, in southern Xinjiang, has three children, the oldest aged 15.
The annual income of the five-member family is less than 3,500 yuan (US$425), most of which comes from growing cotton and maize.
The minimum cost of building a brick house in his village is estimated at 8,000 yuan (US$960).
But Abduleyimu started building his brick house a month ago. He is a beneficiary of a project launched by the autonomous regional government to help all residents, mainly farmers, live in safer dwellings.
As Xinjiang is in an earthquake-prone zone, many places in the region bear the scars of earth tremors. Kashgar is one of them.
A devastating earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale shook the Jiashi and Bachu counties in the region in February 2003, killing 268 people and seriously injuring 2,000.
"The tragedy has prodded the region's government to help all farmers make their houses safe," said Ismail Tiliwaldi, chairman of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
He said the local government will spend 1 billion yuan (US$120 million) over five years to strengthen all residential homes in rural areas.
Families now living in mud houses can expect subsidies to help them build new brick houses, Ismail said.
Destitute families who earn less than 670 yuan (US$80) a year per head will get 4,300 yuan (US$520) towards their new house, according to Wei Zhangyu, an official in Kashgar in charge of the project.
All subsidies will be given to them in the form of building materials, Wei said.
Mehesumu was given 13,000 bricks, four tons of cement and 300 kilograms of reinforced steel bars.
"I am quite satisfied with the materials, and in fact they were a great surprise for me," said Mehesumu.
He expects the three-room house will take four months to complete. As well as safety improvements in the home, farmers will also improve sanitation conditions.
Separate toilets must be built in all new houses and tap water will also be available, according to Wei.
In Kashgar's five-year plan, which started last year, more than 40,000 families will be given subsidies in the project, Wei said.
As well as subsidies from the autonomous region, the local government will spend 5 million yuan (US$600,000) a year to help local farmers finish their homes, said Wei.
(China Daily July 21, 2005)
Ethnic minorities benefit from fiscal subsidy
www.chinaview.cn 2005-05-27 09:42:17
BEIJING, May 27 (Xinhuanet) -- A total of 117 million yuan or 14.15 million US dollars have been channeled between 2002 and 2004 to the regions where the 22 Chinese ethnic minorities with a population less than 100,000 live.
The money was mainly used on the construction of infrastructure, such as water conservation equipment, power grids and roads, and other public undertakings, such as education, sanitation and culture, sources with the State Ethnic Affairs Commission said Thursday.
In mountainous Xishuangbanna Prefecture of southwest China's Yunnan Province, the people of Jino and Blang nationalities received fiscal input of 73 million yuan or 8.83 million US dollars from both central and local governments and found their living conditions completely changed.
In North China's Inner Mongolia, an aggregated investment of 285 million yuan or 34.46 million US dollars were used on 233 projects aiming to better the infrastructure facilities in habitats of the Ewenki and Oroqen peoples.
Last Wednesday, a development plan (2006-2010) designed to support ethnic minorities with small populations was adopted by the State Council who said that poverty remained an "outstanding issue" for those ethnic minorities, despite the progress made since the China's reform and opening up in the late 1970s.
The State Council, China's Cabinet, also announced four special substantial measures including improving the infrastructure for these ethnic minorities, optimizing their economic structure, promoting science and technology and training more qualified professionals.
China has 56 ethnic groups including Han nationality, which accounts for 93.3 percent of it 1.3 billion people. Most of the ethnic minority people live in the country's northwest, southwest and northeast areas, which are less developed compared to the coastal regions.
China protects old books, manuscripts of ethnic groups
www.chinaview.cn 2005-05-26 23:08:23
BEIJING, May 26 (Xinhuanet) -- China has rescued and repaired about 300,000 old books and manuscripts from minority ethnic groups and published more than 5,000 of these during the past two decades, according to the State Ethnic Affairs Commission
(SEAC).
A large number of these books are very old and broken ones in different ethnic languages, said SEAC sources.
These books include epigraphs on stones and manuscripts writtenon different kinds of articles including silk, bamboo plate and paper. Many of the books are myths about heroes of different ethnic groups, including Mongolian, Tibetan and Kirghiz.
According to the sources, 25 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities as well as some prefecture- and county-level areas have set up special institutions to protect old ethnic books.
Xinjiang: On the new frontier
By Joe Havely for CNN
Thursday, May 5, 2005
(CNN) -- "I can't talk about that," he said, his mood suddenly changing. "Bad things. If I talk about bad things, then there will be trouble. I hope you understand."
The sense of nervousness was obvious. For the native Muslim Uighur population in the city of Kashgar, talking about "bad things" to foreign visitors can be dangerous.
Geographically closer to Moscow than to Beijing, Kashgar first came to fame as a desert oasis stop for camel trains traveling the old Silk Road between Europe and China.
Marco Polo reputedly stopped off here on his epic journey to the Chinese imperial court. Much as it was then, the city is still one of the most important trading centers in Central Asia.
But today the old Kashgar is disappearing fast.
Uighurs in Kashgar and across the vast province of Xinjiang say they are being squeezed culturally and economically by a steady influx of migrants from China's overcrowded east.
It is part, they say, of a deliberate effort by the Beijing government to dilute and repress their society -- a program that involves tight controls on their religion, widespread surveillance, detention and executions.
The adobe Uighur homes that once encircled Kashgar's central mosque and other parts of the city are being demolished and replaced by shopping centers that few of the native Uighur people can afford to shop in, let alone rent retail space.
Human rights groups refer to the situation as China's "other Tibet". Openly talking about "bad things", they say, can land you in jail -- or worse.
In the same way that Buddhism is seen as the greatest challenge to Chinese rule in Tibet and therefore tightly regulated, so too is Islam in Xinjiang.
"Uighur Islam is under wholesale assault from the Chinese state," says Nicholas Becquelin, a specialist on Xinjiang at Human Rights in China (HRIC), based in Hong Kong. "Because Islam is a vehicle to separate Uighur identity it is viewed as a threat."
In the name of anti-separatism and, more recently, China's own self-styled war on terrorism, rights groups say thousands of Uighurs have been jailed, and unknown numbers executed.
Official figures are hard to come by, but says Becquelin, even those that are available paint a bleak picture.
"In 2001, 9 percent of the prison population in Xinjiang were being held under state security charges," he says. "For the whole of China, the official figure is just 0.005 percent."
"Bad things", of course, are not the face of Kashgar or Xinjiang that the Chinese government wants visitors to see.
Technicolor tourist posters show smiling locals in ethnic costumes, standing amid lush green pastures and soaring snow-capped mountain peaks.
Except, more often that not, the faces of these "locals" aren't Uighur, Kyrgyz, Kazakh or any of the other Central Asian ethnic groups -- they are Han Chinese, until recently a tiny minority here in the far west of the country.
At more than three times the size of France, Xinjiang is China's largest province. It is also rich in oil, gas and other natural resources in demand by China's booming economy.
That makes Xinjiang a valuable asset to the Chinese state.
The name Xinjiang translates as 'new frontier' -- and in many ways the province is seen by the Chinese government in the same way California and the Wild West was viewed in the early days of the United States.
Wu Xiaobin, deputy director general of the Xinjiang Foreign Trade and Economy Department, says that as well as being "China's energy storehouse," Xinjiang is also the country's new gateway to the emerging economies and oil resources of Central Asia.
As a result, government-backed programs and new rail lines have brought thousands of internal migrants to resettle and develop Xinjiang's resources.
From Beijing's perspective and that of the migrants, they are bringing money and progress to an underdeveloped region.
Certainly, as Wu argues, education standards have increased, as have literacy levels -- but critics say it is literacy in Mandarin Chinese, rather than the Turkic-based Uighur language that is on the rise.
The province's economy has also begun to flourish - but again few Uighurs say they see much benefit.
Billions of dollars have been spent on new highways, rail lines and airports, but critics say the only aim is to exploit Xinjiang's resources and feed China's manufacturing centers further east.
Ethnic Uighurs say the only way to progress is to assimilate with Han Chinese culture, despite its contradictions with their own beliefs.
"We don't like them," says one Kashgar taxi driver. "They eat pork and that's forbidden in Islam. But they don't like us either."
It's a sentiment that only fuels this clash of cultures.
On the surface China's policies toward Xinjiang are overtly accommodating to the native Uighur population.
The provincial governor is a Uighur, the road and street signs give precedence to the Arabic script of the Uighur language, and the province is officially known as the "Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region."
But in reality, say critics like HRIC's Nick Becquelin, there is a covert and deliberate "architecture of surveillance, control and repression."
At the same time the central government in Beijing justifies its actions by pointing to the constant threat of terrorist attacks from religious extremists seeking to create an independent state known as East Turkestan.
The evidence for that is scant, says Becquelin.
"There have been no attacks since 1998, and the government publicly acknowledges that," he says. "So by erasing the distinctions between dissent, separatism, extremism and terrorism, they're undermining their own arguments."
In fact, he argues, under the banner of tackling the terrorist threat, Beijing's policies are only fueling Uighur resentment.
Meanwhile across Xinjiang, he says, the tools of development are entirely in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, which is overwhelmingly Han Chinese.
"For most Uighurs that means a stark choice: You either become Chinese or you become marginalized."
National Review Online
May 11, 2005
http://nationalreview.com/comment/turkel200505110748.asp
Saving the Uyghurs
China has intensified repression under the guise of a war on terror.
By Nury Turkel
Over the past few weeks, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice traveled to Europe, Asia, and Latin America, in large part to promote President Bush's vision of democracy and freedom. During her trip, she met with local dissidents from Belarus and Brazil. Not so during her trip to China.
Yet that trip was possibly the most fruitful — or at least eventful — with regard to democracy and human rights, for it yielded the release of Rebiya Kadeer, a nominee for this year's Nobel Peace Prize, who has been in prison since 1999. As Muslims face tyranny across the globe, President Bush's vision of freedom and democracy has a special resonance.
Like Rebiya Kadeer, I am a Uyghur. We are a Turkic Muslim people who live in what is now northwest China. China calls our homeland the "New Frontier," but we call it East Turkistan. As the protectors of the fabled Silk Road, my people have known and honored a diversity of ideas. Indeed, before converting to Islam, Uyghurs were Buddhists, Shaman, and Nestorian Christians. In addition to material goods, our central location led to an exchange of religions and cultures; we benefited from interactions with those from the West as well as the East.
Now we know only darkness. My homeland has been under Chinese Communist rule for the past 56 years. Uyghurs, like Buddhists in Tibet, are forbidden to pray or speak freely. When Western reporters talk about how China's political situation is improving alongside rapid economic growth, I know they have not visited East Turkistan. Where I grew up, people today are still being executed for speaking out against injustice. East Turkistan is the only province in the People's Republic of China where people are still being executed for political reasons. Of course, China no longer labels us "counter-revolutionaries" or "American running dogs." Now Beijing calls us terrorists, hoping to legitimize their oppression by describing it as part of China's war on terror.
President Bush is a man whose strongly held personal views are reflected in his policies. He knows about the plight of Uyghur Muslims in East Turkistan, and Tibetan Buddhists in Tibet, and his own religious beliefs lead us to believe that he is particularly sensitive to religious repression everywhere. It was significant that in October 2001, just a month after 9/11, he specifically warned China not to use the fight against terrorism as an excuse to persecute its minorities.
But China's ruling elite wasn't listening. Instead, the government seized the opportunity to advance its campaign to assimilate forcefully Uyghurs into the Chinese culture. Uyghur books were burned, and now we Uyghurs can no longer speak our language in universities (and an increasing number of high schools). It is hard to describe to someone who lives in a free society, particularly in America, which has never been occupied, how it feels not to be able to own and speak your language. Our freedom to practice religion has turned into a privilege regulated by the CCP. Chinese officials recently bragged that three million births in East Turkistan were avoided, meaning that that unborn Uyghur children have been forcibly aborted. In short, the Chinese Communist Party's assault on the existence of the Uyghur nation has been intensified under the banner of China's own war on terror.
Uyghurs who peacefully oppose this injustice are labeled as terrorists. Many who escaped to neighboring countries like Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan were returned to China and executed. Uyghurs want peace, freedom, democracy, and human rights, including the right to be Muslim. That is why President Bush's message strikes a chord with Uyghurs.
There are a few glimmers of hope for Uyghurs. In early 2004, the National Endowment for Democracy, the American lifeline for dissidents worldwide, gave my organization, the Uyghur American Association, a grant to begin human-rights research to document human-rights abuses against Uyghurs. In November 2004, Rebiya Kadeer, a Uyghur businesswoman, was awarded the Rafto prize, a prestigious human-rights award. Kadeer was arrested in 1997 while on her way to brief a U.S. congressional delegation on Uyghur human rights. She was finally released by the Chinese authorities on March 17, 2005, on "medical parole," but it was the continued pressure exerted on the Chinese government by the United States and international human-rights organizations — culminating in Secretary of State Rice's visit to Beijing — that truly led to Kadeer's release.
In the past few weeks, the resignation of Kyrgyzstan President Askar Akayev — one of China's main allies in the persecution of Uyghurs — in the "Tulip Revolution" became the most significant source of hope in recent years for Uyghurs suffering under the oppression of the PRC.
These developments send a message not only to China, but also to Uyghurs. As news of these developments, including the Bush's approach to spreading democracy and freedom around the world, reach Uyghurs in East Turkistan through the congressionally-funded Radio Free Asia, my fellow Uyghurs are offered not only hope, but a connection to the free world.
— Nury Turkel is president of the Uyghur American Association.
The Natural and the Sacred in China
Leaping Tiger Gorge, in Yunnan Province, is threatened by a proposed dam.
Matt Darby/Lonely Planet Images
Leaping Tiger Gorge, in Yunnan Province, is threatened by a proposed dam.
By CONNIE ROGERS
Published: April 24, 2005
The New York Times
Ma Jianzhong/The Nature Conservancy
A waterfall near Yubeng is sacred to Tibetan Buddhists.
Juliet Coombe/Lonely Planet Images
Naxi women in Yunnan Province.
AT Tiger Leaping Gorge in the Yunnan Province of China, you can hear two forces of nature collide. The Yangtse, with the accumulated might of a 16,000-foot drop from its start on the Tibetan Plateau, hurls millions of tons of water from hundreds of tributaries between the Jade Dragon and Haba Snow Mountains. Squeezing through a geological weak point just 100 feet wide, it produces an ominous, bone-chilling roar.
This is the doorway to northwestern Yunnan and the Three Parallel Rivers National Park, a World Heritage Site created by Unesco in 2003. The headwaters of the Yangtse, the Mekong and the Salween run side by side in deep canyons coming within 55 miles of one another. With its abrupt changes in altitude and unique mix of climates, the park has an astonishing 7,000 plant species and is among the most diverse temperate regions on earth, according to the Nature Conservancy. Near the region's center is Kawagebo, one of the most sacred mountains of Tibetan Buddhism in China and the place I was headed to on a recent visit.
Originally I had planned to trek in Tiger Leaping Gorge, a spectacular two-mile-deep canyon with an old miners' trail clinging to one of its nearly vertical slopes. The trail was temporarily closed last August when a trekker was swept away in a landslide. So I drove to a different entrance and walked to the rapids on a paved road that the government had recently built. I was far from alone. Crowds of urban Chinese, many dressed in business suits, walked alongside me. They were among the tens of thousands of visitors, mainly Chinese, coming to see the gorge. Like me, they were keenly aware that the view may disappear in the relatively near future.
A dam is under development in the Tiger Leaping Gorge area - one of dozens of hydroelectric projects planned in the power-starved region. Construction may start as early as 2007. According to the Chinese government, 100,000 Naxi and other minority peoples will be displaced from their farms in the valley behind the dam if it is built.
"We worshiped the river when I was growing up," said Angela Cun, the young Naxi woman who accompanied me on the two-day drive from the gorge north to Deqin, the jumping-off point for Mount Kawagebo. While we chatted, we passed mud brick villages and Yi women in the fields wearing bright yellow pleated skirts and black headdresses as big as kites.
News accounts about the dam have called the valley behind the gorge Shangri-La, after the fictional paradise in James Hilton's 1933 novel, "Lost Horizon," but it was in another place, two hours farther along that we drove past a sign announcing Shangri-La County. In 1997, the Yunnan Economy and Technology Research Center declared that definitive proof had been found that Deqin County, where I would spend a week, was the real location of Shangri-La. The booming tourism this campaign encouraged is bringing eddies of change all the way to the foot of Mount Kawagebo.
We met up with Ma Jianzhong, a powerfully built Tibetan who heads the Nature Conservancy's office in Deqin. Ma is working with the Yubeng villagers on managing the growing number of visitors - 20,000 Buddhist pilgrims and several hundred backpackers this year - and on buttressing the ethic of land conservation.
The road to Yubeng is narrow and steep, and at least one bus a year comes to grief in a landslide. We rose to the top of one of the five parallel mountain ranges that crest like giant limestone waves created when India collided with Asia 50 million years ago. I got out at the pass to burn cedar branches with Ma at the flag-clad stupas and to steal a look north into the luminous Tibetan Plateau. More than a mile beneath us, the thin Mekong River created a silver seam. The valley was stony gray except for a few green patches of Tibetan villages glued to its vertical slopes.
As we headed into the valley, Baima, our Tibetan driver, removed his hat and said a prayer for safe travel. He slowed only once to squeeze by a large, blue truck that had missed a turn on the road above and had rolled down to lie on its side in our path.
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I kept my eyes firmly fixed on the far side of the valley. The Meili Snow Mountains, which surround Kawagebo, are wrapped in clouds most of the year, but the day was stunningly clear and the peak of Kawagebo shone like a beacon. The Mingyong Glacier hung from it like a frostbitten hand reaching toward the verdant banks of the river where the temperature reaches 90 degrees in the summer.
An hour later the river flashed by, lined with vineyards, orange trees, walnut groves and farmhouses swathed in magenta bougainvillea, red geraniums and yellow sunflowers. We didn't stop until the road ended at the pilgrims' path halfway up the other side.
At the beginning of our hike, the path seemed to go straight up, climbing 5,000 feet to a high mountain pass, from which it drops 2,000 feet into a valley at the foot of Kawagebo. By way of encouragement, Ma told me that pilgrims take this trip to earn a better life when they are reborn.
When we arrived at the pass, masses of colorful Tibetan prayer flags flapped in communal celebration. Several Chinese backpackers were resting in a primitive teahouse drinking yak butter tea around the fire. We fell naturally into a group.
I couldn't understand a word of the lively chatter as we began the descent. But we fell into a communal quiet with an occasional appreciative whistle at the dizzying diversity of plants as the path led us from arid scrub to evergreen oak forest to pine groves draped in lime green lichen, through towering rhododendron and fir trees and ending in a chaotic mix of hemlock, bamboo and fern.
Thirty families live in this valley, where they grow barley, herd yaks and gather a highly prized mushroom for export. They used to sell wood as well until logging was outlawed by the government after catastrophic floods in 1998. Today they look to tourism for replacement income.
WE stayed at a farmhouse where the owner and his wife were urging their yaks and pigs into the basement for the night. They showed us to the newly built dorm room in their attic, where barley and root vegetables used to be stored. The sun set and the temperature dropped into the 30's. I offered to trade film and cashews for blankets, which broke the ice between me and the young Chinese. I learned the next day that they were suspicious of a Westerner who would come to a place so poverty-stricken.
It didn't feel poor as we walked to the sacred waterfall the next morning. The song of a yak herder filled every nook in the valley. We walked past cities of miniature houses built out of pebbles by pilgrims so their souls would have homes in the next world. Ma stopped to splash water from a stream on his head, eyes and mouth. This would ensure bright thought, clear sight and fluent speech, he told us, and we all followed suit.
The path ended in an alpine meadow at the foot of Kawagebo. A glacier in front of us released a diamond shower full of rainbows into the air. It was noon, and the light reflecting off the snow was blinding.
By now, we had all become pilgrims. When Ma began to walk clockwise through the frigid spray, I followed. I wasn't alone in courting pneumonia. Nina Jin, a software specialist, and her physics professor boyfriend from Beijing were drenched while retrieving pebbles from the base of the waterfall. Two Shanghai teachers circled through the downpour the requisite three times wearing their yellow rain jackets.
Ma told us a cable car has been proposed to bring visitors here and the government was planning to build a road to the village. But then he turned to the mountain and said it has never been climbed. Some geologists think that the glaciers here, influenced by warm air currents from the Bay of Bengal, are constantly shifting. The treacherous surface and bad weather they suggest may be the reason why Kawagebo, at more than 22,241 feet, is one of the highest unclimbed peaks in the world. Or maybe, as Tibetans believe, it's because man shouldn't walk in the house of a god.
If You Go
There are direct flights to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, from Beijing, Shanghai, Bangkok and other Asian cities. The round-trip fare from Bangkok to Kunming on Thai Airways starts at $303.
Wild China, (86-10) 6465-6602, www.wildchina.com, has frequent weeklong tours of northwest Yunnan leaving from Kunming for $1,290, including meals and lodging. A three-day trek to Yubeng Valley, starting in Deqin, with a guide from the Nature Conservancy, costs around $900 a person, also including meals and lodging.
The weather in Yunnan is clear and warm year round except in the mountains, where it is rainy in July and August and snowy in winter.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Minorities Help Run Inner Mongolia
Ethnic minorities are playing an important role in local political affairs in northern China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, according to local minority affairs authorities.
Members of ethnic minorities hold a substantial proportion of official positions, and many hold important posts in local government departments, according to Baren, director of the Committee of Minority and Foreign Affairs of the regional People's Congress Standing Committee.
China's population is made up of 56 ethnic groups, with the Hans accounting for about 93 percent of the nation's total population. Approximately 5 million of Inner Mongolia's 23.8 million residents are members of ethnic minorities, about 80 percent of them Mongolians.
In Inner Mongolia there are currently nearly 190,000 government officials of non-Han ethnic origin, including Manchu, Hui, Daur, Ewenki and Oroqen as well as Mongolian. Baren said that this is more than 25 percent of all officials in the region.
The heads of local governments of the Daur, Ewenki and Oroqen autonomous banners (counties), are members of minorities. Incumbent regional chairman Yang Jing is a Mongolian.
"All this signifies that China's policies for autonomy in the regions have been carried out successfully, and that these people enjoy full rights to participate in managing the affairs of their own ethnic groups," said Baren.
Baren indicates that the number of minority officials is rising, largely as a result of enforcement of China's policies for regional autonomy and a growing awareness of the importance of participation in managing regional affairs.
Improved education is doubtless playing a role, as the central government has vigorously promoted education since the establishment of the PRC more than 50 years ago.
A Mongolian-language-based education system ranging from preschool to college has been set up in Inner Mongolia. At present, there are 1,600 primary schools and 300 high schools for the minorities. Approximately 30,000 minority undergraduates are enrolled in the region's 20 colleges, accounting for nearly 30 percent of total undergraduate enrollment.
(China.org.cn, China Daily January 5, 2005)
Thursday, 4 November, 2004
BBC NEWS WORLD EDITION
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China's minority fears
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 Five days of pitched battles between thousands of Hui Muslims and Han Chinese villagers in Henan province left at least seven people dead, the latest in a series of large-scale confrontations that have come to light in recent weeks.
Adding race and religion to an already explosive mixture of economic and social grievances, the Henan violence was also a stark reminder of the potential for chaos and fragmentation underlying China's seemingly unstoppable economic rise. Relations between the majority Han community, who make up 93% of the population, and as many as 55 officially listed "national minorities" have always been sensitive. For the ruling Communist Party, they are a potential source of danger to social stability, national unity and ultimately the very existence of the regime. Often hidden in the past, these tensions are now bubbling to the surface, exacerbated by new problems associated with economic growth, such as the country's widening wealth gap and increased competition for scarce resources.
"China is a very fractured and complex place and these are the kinds of local conflicts that can easily erupt into region-wide conflagrations," said Dru Gladney, Professor of Asian Studies and Anthropology at the University of Hawaii. The Chinese government played down the ethnic dimension of last week's clashes, saying it was a problem "between villages", and was of no interest to foreigners. "China is a country with many minorities," a foreign ministry spokeswoman said, "but we have a healthy and good policy towards them." But what was particularly interesting about the latest incident was that it occurred right in the heart of China, Mr Gladney said. Most of the country's ethnic groups live in the huge, resource-rich but sparsely populated border regions like Tibet and Xinjiang. Resentment
The only exposure many Chinese have had to them in the past has been in the official media's carefully-posed pictures of exotically dressed tribal people attending the annual meeting of the National People's Congress in Beijing. But the economic and social reforms of recent years have changed the
whole context of ethnic relations, according to Peter Ferdinand, an East
Asia specialist at Warwick University.
The reforms have included a major loosening of controls on people's movements, leading to the creation of a 200 million-strong army of migrant workers. "The migrant worker issue means that what used to be a local issue has now become a national one," Dr Ferdinand said. As well as sending delegates to China's rubber-stamp parliament, minority groups in many areas are offered preferential treatment in the form of less restrictive birth control policies and easier access to university and employment. But decentralisation means a lessening of Beijing's power to ensure these rights are honoured.
These privileges, originally designed to ensure compliance with Chinese rule, also cause resentment among ordinary Han Chinese. An angry contributor to a Chinese website recently complained that police in the southern city of Shenzhen were afraid to arrest pickpockets belonging to the Uighur national group from Xinjiang - who look and sound more Turkish than Chinese - because it could cause "political trouble". Ethnic minorities are often the victims of deep-seated prejudice, according to Wils Cheng, a student in Sweden of Chinese birth. "There is a Uighur student here in my university, and she regards herself as East Turkish rather than Chinese. When I talked to other Chinese students about her, they expressed hostility and contempt towards her," he said. Han Chinese generally associate racial diversity with chaos, he explained.
"Han is basically synonymous with unity and national integrity, while non-Han is automatically associated with barbarianism and a threat to China's territorial integrity," he said. Another recent problem is that indigenous groups are increasingly being marginalised by Han migration. This is especially the case in areas such as Tibet and Xinjiang, where religious and racial tensions are highest and Chinese troops guard constantly against separatist activities. Minorities are obliged to learn Chinese if they want better jobs, and are invariably shut out of positions of real power. The central government's biggest fear is that these restive regions could tear away at the country's edges, much as the former Soviet Union was sundered apart, and as imperial China was divided in the past. The People's Republic of China has been called the world's "last great multiethnic empire", raising questions about whether it will follow the Soviet example. But the Han Chinese do have the advantage of being much more dominant in terms of overall numbers than were the Russians. And China's minorities are thinly scattered over a very wide area. Unity and strength also become increasingly important as China grows more assertive about its position in the world. "Increasing Chinese nationalism is unlikely to encourage a more generous policy towards whingeing minorities," said Warwick University's Dr Ferdinand.
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October 18, 2004
New historical chapter of China national solidarity
People's Daily Online
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200410/18/eng20041018_160550.html
Building socialism with Chinese characters needs the participation of all Chinese nationalities. Only by arousing the enthusiasm and creativeness of all Chinese nationalities to the fullest can we add new strength to the building of socialist cause with Chinese characters and achieve national rejuvenation.
During the 13 years from the Fourth Plenary Session of the Thirteenth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China to the 16th Congress of the Communist Party of China the third generation of the Party's central collective leadership with Comrade Jiang Zemin at the leading position adhered to the combination of Marxist basic principle with the contemporary practical work of Chinese nation and raised high the banner of national solidarity and progress. As a result, a new situation of national work of China has been opened up and a new historical chapter of China national solidarity and struggle has been written.
Pay high attention to the issue and work of nationalities
China is a unified country with many nationalities. Doing national work and settling national issues have a bearing on national solidarity, economic development, social stability and national unification of China. In the 13 years, the third generation of the Party's central collective leadership with Comrade Jiang Zemin at the leading position always paid high attention to the national issue and work and the development in ethnic areas while pushing ahead with reforms, opening up and modernization drive. The third generation leadership worked out a series of important decisions and planning, enriching the theory and practice for the Party's national work.
From late 1980s to early 1990s profound changes took place in the international situation and the national issue became more predominant. Comrade Jiang Zemin grasped the development of the national issue at home and abroad. He stressed that under the new historical conditions the national issue and work should be put on an important position. He pointed out national unification and solidarity is the basic interests of all the nationalities. National cohesive force is an important marker for measuring a country's comprehensive strength. Economic strength or strength of science and technology or national defense, they cannot form composition of forces if without national cohesive force and cannot form strong national strength. Jiang pointed out maintaining national unification and solidarity is the basic principle for settling national issue and for doing national work. We should adhere to this at any time and at any condition. We will consolidate and develop the socialist relations of nationalities based on equality, mutual assistance and solidarity in order to achieve common development and prosperity of all nationalities.
Jiang Zemin has summarized the practical experience of China's national work and absorbed the experiences and lessons of other countries in handling the national issues. Based on this he has expounded a series of important ideological viewpoints. He pointed out the contemporary national issue consisted of five basic features: universality, long term nature, complexity, internationalism and essentiality. The key to quicken the economic development is the settlement of the national issue at the present stage of China. All the nationalities are equal. Han nationality cannot be separated from ethnic nationalities and vice versa. And it is also true among minorities. All nationalities must feel with each other, cast their lot with each other and make hearts beat with each other. The system of national autonomous region must be adhered to and perfected. The "Law on National Autonomous Region" must be implemented seriously. Cadres of minorities must be trained. Maintaining the unification of the mother and national solidarity is the highest interests for all nationalities and a key to doing national work well. The Party's religious policies must be implemented when handling the national issues. The Party's leadership should be strengthened and perfected in the national work in order to promote all-round progress and common prosperity of all nationalities. A series of ideological viewpoints of Comrade Jiang Zemin have enriched and developed the Marxist theory on nationality, upbringing the acquaintance upon the Party's national issue and work to a new level. It is of important guiding significance to the cause of the national solidarity and progress in China.
In the 13 years, the central committee of the Party with Jiang Zemin at the leading position has always had the economic and social development in the areas of minorities on its mind. Comrade Jiang Zemin has been to the Xizang (Tibet) plateau and Xinjiang and all other ethnic areas and brought the Party's care and greetings to the ethnic people there. The central committee of the Party convened twice the Central National Working Conference and the Honoring Conference of All-China National Solidarity and Progress. Comrade Jiang Zemin delivered important speeches at the conferences and put forward explicit demands for doing national work. In setting up socialist market economic system and the China's western development strategy the central committee of the Party has paid attention to settling the special difficulties and problems of ethnic minorities, made a series of preferential policies to bring about all-round development to ethnic areas and cemented the unity of all nationalities. The 13 years is a period in which the regions inhabited by ethnic groups have been developed in a big way, a period of the great unity of Chinese nation, and an another golden age for national work. This is the great victory for the socialist cause with Chinese characters, and the great success of the Party's and state's national policy.
Withholding and perfecting the system of regional autonomy of ethnic minorities
The Communist Party of China has created the regional autonomy of ethnic minorities. It is a basic policy to solve the national issue in China and a basic state political system. Comrade Jiang Zemin pointed out that the system proved to be suitable for the realities of the country through several decades' test with strong vitality. In a new historical condition, the system of regional autonomy of ethnic minorities must be abided by and perfected unswervingly.
Jiang Zemin stressed that to adhere to and perfect the system of regional autonomy of ethnic minorities a comparatively perfect national law and legislation system must be formed as soon as possible. In 2001, he signed president order issuing the new revised "Law on the regional autonomy of ethnic minorities". The law embodies the Party's national policy and the common will of all nationalities. He pointed out enforcement regulations and ordinances will be worked out according to the actual conditions for perfecting the law. According to the spirit, the State Council worked out "Notice on some issues concerning the implementation of the law on the regional autonomy of ethnic minorities of the People's Republic of China" and authorized the State Ethnic Affairs Commission to work out and enact the "administrative working ordinance of ethnic villages" and the "working ordinance of urban nationalities". By the end of 2003, The 155 ethnic minority areas across the country have worked out 133 autonomous ordinances, 384 specific ordinances and 68 limber ordinances. A law system on regional autonomy of ethnic minorities has been formed.
Jiang Zemin pointed out cultivating cadres of ethnic minorities is the key to adhering to and perfecting the system of regional autonomy of ethnic minorities. In the 13 years, the number of ethnic cadres was up to more than 2.8 million from 2 million. The main leaders of the five autonomous regions, 30 autonomous prefectures and 120 autonomous counties are cadres from ethnic minorities. The national solidarity should be maintained in a big way to perfect regional autonomy of ethnic minorities.
Boosting common prosperity and progress of all nationalities
Jiang Zemin pointed out it is a basic demand for the socialist cause of China to speed up the development of all undertakings including economy and culture in the ethnic minority areas and to improve common prosperity and progress of all nationalities. It is also a starting point for the Party's national policies. He stressed there is no national stability if without the stability in the ethnic minority areas. All comrades must pay high attention to the national work.
In the 13 years, a series of strategic decisions were made to speed up the development of ethnic minority areas. In 1992, the central committee convened national working conference and put forward major tasks of national work in 1990s. In 1999 the central committee put forward a western development strategy to promote the development of ethnic areas.
During the 13-year period, the economy in ethnic areas was developed rapidly. Tibet has entered into a new development stage. From 1989 to 2003 the gross product value of Tibet was raised to 18.46 billion yuan from 2.19 billion yuan.
Xinjiang also saw rapid development in economy. From 1989 to 2003 the gross product value reached 187.5 billion yuan from 21.7 billion yuan.
The Inner Mongolian, Guangxi and Ningxia national autonomous regions also made outstanding achievements in the reforms, opening up and the modernization drive. From 1989 to 2003 the gross product value of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region reached 209.3 billion yuan from 29.3 billion yuan, Guangxi 273.3 billion yuan from 38.3 billion yuan, Ningxia 38.5 billion yuan from 5.9 billion yuan.
In the 13 years, brilliant achievements were made in national work, which has laid a solid foundation for the cause of national solidarity and progress. In the new stage of the new century Hu Jintao, general secretary of the Party, pointed out the prosperity and development of all nationalities should be achieved by realizing all the tasks set by the Sixteenth National Congress of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. We firmly believe under the leadership of the central committee with Hu Jintao as the general secretary all the nationalities in China will be able to hold high the banner of Deng Xiaoping Theory and carry out the important thoughts of "Three Represents" so as to push ahead with the cause of the national solidarity and progress continuously.
By People's Daily Online
October 16, 2004
China spells out five-point policy to preserve folk, ethnic culture
China spells out a five-point policy to preserve folk and ethnic culture, said Chinese Cultural Minister Sun Jiazheng in Shanghai on October 15.
Sun addressed the unveiling ceremony of the seventh annual ministerial meeting of the International Network on Cultural Policy (INCP), which is being held from Oct. 15-16. Sun said China has done five task for the preservation of traditional and folk culture.
China will make efforts to enhance the legislation of folk and ethnic culture protection. The National People's Congress has drafted out law on the protection of traditional and folk culture, which currently is under adjustment, Sun said.
China has launched a new project to protect folk and ethnic culture this year, and plans to establish a matured preservation system by 2020.
Sun said efforts will be redoubled to enhance collection, conservation and compilation of folk and ethnic culture.
Efforts will be made to support and salvage relics and endangered sites with great cultural value, he said.
China will also formulate an overall program to enlarge budget on cultural protection, stressing reservation of important data on cultural resources and use of modern technologies in this regard, Sun added.
The two-day meeting will focus on the subject of "traditional culture and modernization". Participants from 38 countries and eight international organizations will discuss the impact of modernization on traditional culture, and share experience on the protection of traditional and folk cultures.
Founded in 1998, the INCP is an informal international ministerial forum for countries to discuss cultural policies and affairs. At present, it has 63 member states.
August 10, 2004
Folk culture expo held in Yunnan
Girls in traditional costumes of the Yi Nationality perform folk dance of the Yi Nationality in Chuxiong, southwest China's Yunnan Province, Aug. 9, 2004. The First Folk Culture Exposition of Yunnan Province and the Flambeau Festival of the Yi Nationality in Chuxiong began on Aug. 9. Folk artists from across Yunnan Province attended the event.
Girls perform folk dance of the Miao Nationality in Chuxiong, southwest China's Yunnan Province, Aug. 9, 2004. The First Folk Culture Exposition of Yunnan Province and the Flambeau Festival of the Yi Nationality in Chuxiong began on Aug. 9. Folk artists from across Yunnan Province attended the event.
August 09, 2004
Folk Culture Festival of Yi Nationality
People's Daily
Folk performers of Yi nationality perform a traditional Yi dance in Liupanshui, southwest China's Guizhou province, August 8, 2004. The two-day Folk Culture Festival of Yi Nationality opened on August 8 in Liupanshui, one of the main regions where Yi people live. Apart from performance, during the festival local Yi people will also celebrate their traditional Torch Festival.
Two folk performers of Yi nationality perform traditional acrobatics in Liupanshui, southwest China's Guizhou province, August 8, 2004. The two-day Folk Culture Festival of Yi Nationality opened on August 8 in Liupanshui, one of the main regions where Yi people live. Apart from performance, during the festival local Yi people will also celebrate their traditional Torch Festival.
Folk performers of Yi nationality perform yueqin, a four-stringed plucked instrument with a full-moon-shaped sound box, in Liupanshui, southwest China's Guizhou province, August 8, 2004. The two-day Folk Culture Festival of Yi Nationality opened on August 8 in Liupanshui, one of the main regions where Yi people live. Apart from performance, during the festival local Yi people will also celebrate their traditional Torch Festival.
June 25, 2004
People's Daily Online
Ethnic groups in SW happy about forest protection program
China's massive natural forest conservation program has not only had positive environmental effects, but also helped improve the livelihoods of large groups of forest dwellers, especially those ethnic groups in southwest China region.
About three years ago, Bai'ma Soinam, a farmer in Nyingchi Prefecture of the Tibet Autonomous Region, used to be content with a meager earning of several thousand yuan from tree cutting and lumber sale.
When a government regulations banning on logging took effect for conserving natural forests, the Tibetan farmer was initially reluctant to change his business and contract a 6.67-hectare nursery.
But now sales of saplings alone earns him an annual income of more than 600,000 yuan (72,289 US dollars).
"In the past I could only make both ends meet by logging, but now I live a well-to-do life through tree planting," Bai'ma Soinamsaid with satisfaction.
"The natural forest protection program is not only really benefiting us, but will also leave a good ecological environment for our future generations," he added.
Bai'ma Soinam was one of millions of ethnic people in southwest China region.
China started the natural forest protection program, dubbed "Tianbao" in Chinese, in 1998, which has broadened forest conservation from natural forest areas alone to the big river valleys. The program areas were defined in 17 provinces and autonomous regions, covering almost all the inhabited areas for ethnic groups in southwest China.
The program encourages local forest dwellers to consume electricity instead of firewood, plant trees for eco-conservation purposes and move out of mountainous areas where forests are densely distributed and living conditions are harsh for humans.
Thanks to the program, ethnic groups in southwest China are nowliving a new life and, more and more people in underdeveloped areas there have gradually established awareness of sustainable development.
Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province has had 12,000 poor households move to areas with better living conditions,whereas Tibet has resettled 3,560 people Tibetan farmers and herdsmen from remote mountainous to prosperous areas.
Three years ago, Anyang barely supported his family with gains from grazing and hunting in a mountainous area of Tibet's Qamdo Prefecture. Nowadays, he, together with his villagers, has moved to a plain area in Nyingchi County, and learned how to grow grain and vegetables. He has even bought a truck with bank loans and begun to do transport business. Only four months after his resettlement, he has earned 15,000 yuan (1,807 US dollars).
Most people from the ethnic groups in southwest China live in frigid zones and used to burn cow dung and firewood. On the basis of the "Tianbiao" program, the people have fired marsh gas and consumed electricity provided by hydro and solar power projects.
In the past, it took three hours a day for Zhoi'ma, a Tibetan farmer in Diqing prefecture of Yunnan, to cut firewood. Now she uses methane-generating pit and an energy-efficient kitchen range that were provided by the local government. And she has arranged aplastic-film-covered shed to grow strawberries and vegetables withpit residues and earned herself 3,000 yuan (361.5 US dollars) every year.
The "Tianbao" program has also helped the ethnic groups realizecomprehensive development of their forest resources.
After the "Tianbao" started in Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Region, more edible mushrooms grew in forests there and local dwellers have been able to annually garner more than 200 million yuan (24.1million US dollars) from only picking the mushrooms.
In other ethnic group inhabited areas in Yunnan, including Dali,Lincang, Baoshan and Lijiang, the local residents earn over 500 million yuan (60.2 million US dollars) a year from growing walnuts.
Meanwhile, as "Tianbao" has effectively conserved forest landscapes and ecological environment in southwestern China, the sightseeing resources have been explored to develop tourism in theregion.
Statistics show that in 2001, Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou provinces, Tibet and Guangxi Zhuang autonomous regions and Chongqing municipality in southwest China received 240 million tourists from home and from abroad and earned 13.52 billion US dollars from tourism.
The "Tianbao" program has ended a pure subsidy-based approach and turned to a new way that provides diversified development options for forest dwellers, according to Lei Jiafu, deputy director of the State Forest Administration.
Source: Xinhua
July 15, 2004
Young artists add their own inspiration to tradition
People's Daily Online http://english.people.com.cn/200407/15/eng20040715_149680.html
Long Yizhen, 11, wearing a traditional Miao dress with a flower embroidery pattern, sits besides a small wooden desk and works on a paper-cut.
The sunshine is radiant and minutes later, drops of sweat run down her forehead. However, Long does not seem to take notice. Her earnest expression makes visitors hesitant to disturb her.
It is a luxury to own a colour pencil for the children living in the remote deep mountains in the Xiangxi Tujia/Miao Autonomous Prefecture in the west of Central China's Hunan Province.
However, the children of the Miao ethnic group in the La'ershan Hope Primary School in Fenghuang County are getting the chance to enjoy an entirely new sort of fine art class.
Mud, straw, bark, stones and bits of cloth have been turned into imaginative works by their nimble, little hands.
The children have decorated the playground of their old, shabby school building, turning it into a garden of art with their instinctive creations.
Here, the folk fine art of the Xiangxi, or Western Hunan region has been expressed by the hands of children with their special perspective.
Straw dragonflies fly around the big trees, on whose branches baby dolls made from colourful cloth are attached.
Below the trees are all sorts of utensils made of straw, such as brooms, baskets and bowls.
The visitors are most fascinated by the different stories being told by the straw figures.
Folk fairy tales and traditional holiday celebration are also the favourites of the young artists.
Traditionally, paper-cuts made by Miao women are used for embroidery patterns. But nowadays, the handicraft is in danger of extinction.
Fortunately, Long cherishes the art - it is her favorite subject.
"The teacher does not have any particular requirement for us at all," she says.
"I just cut whatever patterns I like, though sometimes he will give us a helping hand when we have difficulties."
Long uses pencils to draw a Miao girl holding straws on a piece of paper, which she claims will bring a significant harvest.
She wants to make her picture more beautiful, so a butterfly is added next to the girl.
The paper-cut patterns created by Long and her classmates clearly reflect the Xiangxi Miao embroidery tradition, which features flowers and grasses.
When looking at his students enjoying their fine art class, Long Junjia, a village teacher, recalls that two years ago, it was a great headache for him to follow textbooks to teach the class.
The students could not pay for water-colour paintbrushes, which the text required. Thus, interest in the fine art class dwindled quickly.
Last July, the school became one of seven in Xiangxi to be covered by the "Dandelion Action" programme, part of a three-year project for after-school fine art education.
Launched by the Commission for Children's Art under the Chinese Artists' Association, the project aims at merging folk art essence and the most creative fine art education, while protecting and rescuing intangible cultural heritage.
Rich tradition
Xiangxi is an ancient and still very mysterious place. Ancestors of the Miao and Tujia ethnic groups settled in the region thousands of years ago.
In their long history, they have created colourful folk culture and art, featuring paper-cuts, embroidery, batik, and brocade and carving.
However, like almost all intangible cultural heritage products in the world, they have been eroded by modern and foreign cultures and the market economy.
Wu Xiangying, a paper-cut folk artist, used to travel to Japan in the 1980s to show his craft. But nowadays, Wu is only able to survive by selling shoes at a fair.
In Xiangxi, more ageing folk artists pass away each year. Others, like Wu, have to give up their beloved art for economic reasons and their children fail to pick up the skills.
"If they are not rescued in time, Xiangxi's folk fine art will be lost forever," said Liu Yuxin, a researcher with the prefecture's education research institute.
With the rich cultural legacy of various ethnic minorities in Xiangxi, Xie Lifang, the veteran art educator in charge of "Dandelion Action," is exploring with her colleagues a sustainable way of integrating ethnic folk art with children's fine art education.
Her enlightening concept of a feasible, sustainable and practical education mode won backing from the Ford Foundation last July, which so far has 17 programmes in China focusing on rescuing intangible cultural heritage.
"While emphasizing that learning fine art is deeply rooted with local culture, we enable the children to gradually attain a basic knowledge of fine art, and we try to consolidate their love of the culture of their own ethnic groups," said Xie.
"Our ultimate aim is to encourage them to protect their own art and culture."
Xie said she believed that only when the new generation develops a sense of protection will Chinese folk art be salvaged from the brink of extinction.
She also stressed that the innovative spirit of the children must be fully encouraged during their art education.
"There must be something new in the class. We are not training paper-cut craftsmen who can only strictly following traditions," said Xie.
Curriculum development
During last year's summer vacation, Xie joined teachers from selected experimental schools to visit the folk handicraft people in Xiangxi. This has helped enrich the fine art curriculum, she said.
Xie is a tough-minded woman who impresses others with her persistence in preserving folk art.
In classes, teachers only chose the types of folk fine arts that require simple tools, materials and techniques.
The paper-cut, as the most influential folk art in the region, has been adopted as the elementary course for the experimental schools.
At the primary school attached to the Normal College of Jishou University, located in the prefecture, the teachers found that some students had difficulty using knives and scissors in their fine art classes, preferring to tear the paper with their fingers.
It was a great inspiration for the teachers, who believed that the children had made an innovation in the traditional paper-cutting art. While preserving the original characteristics, it adds a new form of expression.
"The unusual patterns fully depict their (the children's) innocence, simplicity and primitiveness," said Chen Wei, a fine art teacher at the school.
The children appear to be tearing the paper at will, but the process reflects their imagination.
The experimental schools are able to select and develop their own curriculums according to local conditions.
The pottery making class at Beisha Hope Primary School in Luxi County and the learning of brocade at Longshan County's Min'an No 2 Primary School are typical examples of effective utilization of local cultural and natural resources.
Long Yizhen and her schoolmates have made several field trips with their teacher, Long Junjia, to find new sources of artistic inspiration.
With mud they dug from the fields, the students displayed their talent in making pottery.
They also went to paddy fields to collect straw, to a sawmill to collect bark and to a river to gather pebbles.
"In my class, I just hope that they can develop their instinctive love for fine art and let their originality flow. I just watch them and give them some guidance when necessary," Long says.
All the children are happy when it is time for the fine art class. For them, it is time to play and create.
But traditional folk fine art also plays a role in class.
In some cases, Long has taken his students to visit the families of old Miao women, to learn their paper-cut and embroidery skills.
The children's works also impress their teachers.
"As a painter, I feel quite ashamed and astonished when seeing their works," said Zhu Fan, who is employed by the art commission under the Chinese Artists' Association.
"I am sometimes at a loss over what to draw. But the children have helped me regain my inspiration, my creativity."
He Yunlan, director of the Commission for Children's Art, says it is depressing to see that many of the fine art works being produced by adult artists have already lost the most basic elements of truth.
"In the children's works, I can see innocence again," He said. "The innocence and simplicity of the children are in great harmony with those of folk art."
Xie Lifang compared preserving folk fine art to protecting a rare species of fish.
They could be turned into specimens and stored in a museum. But they could also be allowed to swim freely in rivers.
"The second is a much better option," Xie said.
Source: China Daily
Beijing’s Development Policy and Tibetans
By Tendar
Cultural Survival Quarterly
http://www.culturalsurvival.org
Issue 28.1
March 15, 2004
As the juggernaut of China’s Western Development Program rolls on, the worst fears of the Tibetan people are coming true. Not only has the Chinese government moved Tibetans from their homelands, but it has also brought Chinese migrants to Tibetan areas, drastically changing the economic and physical landscape, and threatening ethnic conflict.
Foreign journalists who visited the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) this year were almost unanimous in their observations that China’s development policy in Tibet was serving the interests of Chinese migrants rather than those of Tibetans. Encapsulating the journalists’ findings, Rupert Wingfeld-Hayes of the British Broadcast Corporation said the Chinese government had invited them “to see economic development” in Tibet, but “what we found was a Tibet … where Chinese immigrants and economic imperialism nurtures growing resentment from a Native population that feels increasingly marginalized in its own land.”
Ever since Deng Xiaoping unveiled the fabled economic liberalization policy in the early 1980s, socio-economic development in Tibet has bypassed rural areas, where the vast majority of Tibetans live: 97 of the population of TAR is Tibetan and 87 percent of the population in the contiguous Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Yunnan, Sichuan, and Gansu is Tibetan. Official connivance and rampant corruption have made Chinese settlers advantaged over their Tibetan counterparts in higher education and professional training opportunities. One would be hard-pressed to find even a single Tibetan among the hundreds of thousands of Chinese students sent to Western countries for higher education.
In tandem, Beijing has encouraged China’s teeming masses to move to Tibet, a so-called land of opportunity. The migrants now dominate the local economy while a pervasive sense of despair prevails among Tibetans, who see their homeland slipping away to the Chinese settlers.
“In Lhasa, the Chinese immigrants take most of the construction jobs, run most of the grocery stores and drive most of the pedicabs,” Philip P. Pan of The Washington Post reported in September 2003. Even in the Barkhor, the traditional stronghold of Tibetans, Chinese and Hui Muslims now own most of the shops.
In the nearby town of Tsethang, Wingfeld-Hayes noticed that every single shop was run by migrants. A fruit seller from Henan said she had come to Tibet because “it’s easier to do business here.” But the Tibetans Hayes spoke to said it was not easy to find work. Journalists have reported that even the railway project, which will link Lhasa (the heart of Tibet) to China and has been touted as the engine of Tibet’s development, does not have a single Tibetan among its 27,000 skilled and semi-skilled workers. Following strong international criticism, the Chinese Railway Ministry last year took on only 6,000 Tibetans as unskilled manual laborers, a surprisingly small number given that the project employs a total of 38,000 people and is being undertaken in Tibet, as the government often states in the press, “for the benefit of the Tibetan people.”
David J. Lynch of USA Today found that Tibetans work on the project as laborers, making no more than $235 a month. “That’s good by local standards, but is a fraction of the $725 to $2,400 Chinese technicians make,” Lynch reported. When he asked construction boss Huang Difu how many skilled jobs Tibetans held on the rail line, Difu replied “none.”
Although part of the reason for the imbalance may be that the migrants were better skilled and had better business acumen than Tibetans, as Chinese economist Zhang Keyun echoed the Chinese government in an interview with Dexter Roberts of Business Week, this excuse is not the whole story. For decades, the Chinese government has pursued a policy of naked colonialism in Tibet that has done nothing to empower the Tibetan people. Beijing has consistently made a drive to impose a new majority in Tibet, the policy implemented by luring Chinese settlers onto the plateau through such incentives as preferential treatments in education, jobs, and business licensing practices. The latest and biggest step toward this end is the Western Development Program.
According to Chinese official statements, the program is aimed at bringing the economies of Tibet and other minority areas on par with the rest of China. But Tibetans believe that the program’s hidden agenda envisions Chinese immigrants as its target beneficiaries. On September 30, 2003, Xinhuanet, an online news service, reported that a group of 800 officials from China, known as “personnel aid officials,” will be sent to Tibet in the summer of 2004, and that most of them will serve as leading officials of local committee of the Communist Party of China and of government departments at different levels. “Some of them are experts in enterprise management, and technicians.” This is the fourth group of Chinese officials to be sent to Tibet as part of the Western Development Program.
To make life easier for these new officials, the TAR government has reformed the residency registration policy, by which the Chinese workers can register as residents in Tibetan areas and keep their residencies in their home areas. While the move makes it easier for Chinese workers to seize job opportunities in Tibet, Tibetans continue to be subjected to the old residency registration law, which means they cannot legally move to other areas of Tibet, for livelihood or any other reason.
The new officials are more likely to concern themselves with implementing Beijing’s policy of Sinicizing the Tibetan plateau than with helping in the development of local Tibetans.
Appointed directly from Beijing, these personnel aid officials are answerable directly to Beijing and make decisions over the heads of their Tibetan “superiors” in the TAR government. Arrogant and insensitive to the problem of Tibet, they are resented with equal determination by the Tibetan cadres and public, many of whom believe that the Chinese officials’ sole function is to “invite Chinese settlers” and wipe out even the semblance of autonomy that Tibet enjoys today.
Still another component of China’s Western Development Program envisages urbanizing rural Tibet, which involves merging villages together and joining them with the nearest town, and renaming them as one administrative unit. Tibetans living in the more remote areas will be ordered to move nearer the administrative towns. This resettlement, according to the authorities, will allow the government to concentrate resources in administrative centers, thus making health and education facilities more easily accessible to adjoining rural populations. Such reasoning, according to Tibetans in Tibet, is flawed—or the policy is actually a deliberate strategy to retain more direct control on the lives of Tibetans. In a land as vast and as unyielding as Tibet, survival depends on the ability of the population to spread themselves thinly and extensively. As for health care and education facilities, they are no longer free in Tibet. If anything, they are prohibitively expensive to the rural Tibetans, the vast majority of whom live below the poverty line. So, who is going to benefit from the urbanization program?
One trend Tibetans in Tibet have told visitors they have noticed is that the Chinese migrants hate to live in sparsely populated rural areas, and tend to live together in areas where there are fairly high population concentrations. As the government invests heavily in creating employment opportunities in the administrative centers of urbanized villages, Tibetan areas will become more attractive to new settlers.
Andrew Fischer, a development economist who specializes in Tibet, reported in August 2003 in London's Tibet Information Network News Update: “This radical restructuring of the TAR economy, which has been accelerated since the beginning of the Western Development Strategy in 1999, has been away from productive activities such as agriculture and small-scale industry and into urban services and large-scale construction projects. This is despite the fact that the TAR, along with Yunnan, is the most agrarian and rural province of China.” Because the Tibetans remain “unskilled” despite more than four decades of “socio-economic development,” Beijing will once again find itself constrained to invite “voluntary skilled personnel” from China to man the service and construction projects in the newly urbanized areas of Tibet.
Although it is not possible to obtain authoritative counts of the size the Chinese population in Tibet, the presence of Chinese migrants is well-pronounced in all the towns and cities. Chinese leaders from Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping are on record as having suggested that Beijing has a deliberate policy to send Chinese settlers to the sparsely populated region of Tibet. A number of international government agencies have also testified to the existence of such a policy. A CNN report in 2001 quoted U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell: “It’s a very difficult situation right now with the Chinese sending more and more Han Chinese in to settle Tibet. That seems to be a policy that might well destroy that society.”
As well as destroying the Tibetan society, China will also one day find itself grappling with full-blown ethnic conflicts. From the Middle East to Bosnia to Northern Ireland, the common variable of ethnic tension is the transplantation of dominant groups to minority regions. These conflicts have become so intractable that political analysts grimly predict that the prospect of world peace and stability will become ever more elusive as the combatants acquire deadlier weapons.
The leaders in Beijing would do well to learn from the painful experiences of other countries and rethink their own policy of population transfer. Thus far, whenever Tibetans and non-Tibetans have voiced concerns over this policy, Beijing has reacted unrealistically by understating the Chinese population in Tibet and denying the existence of such a policy. This tactic is not surprising given that China has never shown willingness to recognize its failings as far as the issue of Tibet is concerned. What is perplexing, however, is that Beijing went out of its way to invite foreign journalists to Tibet. In August 2003, 63 journalists and camerapersons from 43 media companies participated in a government-arranged tour that visited Tsetang, Shigatse, Gyantse, and Lhasa. Certainly the Chinese leaders cannot be so simpleminded as to believe that the journalists would accept the official line at face value. But why else did the government invite them? Possibly the leaders in Beijing had allowed themselves to be completely deluded by their own propaganda about prosperous and happy Tibetans. Or perhaps, as some policy experts suggest, Beijing is not getting true reports about the conditions in Tibet from the local authorities.
By now it should be apparent to Beijing that Tibetans are not the happy and prosperous lot the smiling faces depict on government propaganda material. This realization should warrant willingness on Beijing’s part to consider at least the possibility that there may after all be something in His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s suggestion that China must look realistically at the issue of Tibet. Such a move would be a big step toward resolving the problem of Tibet, following China’s recent positive gesture to host two visits by representatives of the Dalai Lama.
As the Tibetan leadership and international Tibet experts, including Chinese scholars, have repeatedly said, lasting peace and stability in Tibet will become possible only if Beijing works with the Dalai Lama to address the real problems of Tibetans in Tibet, rather than pretending that the issue of Tibet is about the personal status of the Dalai Lama and members of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile.
Tendar is the first secretary of the Office of Tibet in New York City.
People's Daily Online http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200312/19/eng20031219_130782.shtml
The Chinese language proficiency test for ethnic minorities in China (MHK) was staged for the first time in Jilin Dec.17. Over 6200 students from China's Korean ethnic group were the first examinees.
The Chinese language proficiency test for ethnic minorities in China (MHK) was staged for the first time in Jilin Dec.17. Over 6200 students from China's Korean ethnic group were the first examinees.
Under the guidance of the theories of the second language learning MHK is a national standardized test of the Chinese language level for ethnic minorities in China for whom the Chinese is not their mother tongue in consideration of the special features in the Chinese learning. The purpose of the test is to meet the needs for Chinese language teaching in the settlement regions for ethnic minorities in China so as to set up an appraisal system for scientific evaluation in their Chinese language learning. In this way it is push forward the reform of Chinese language teaching and improve the ability in the use of Chinese language using for the ethnic minorities in their life, study, and social communications.
Ethnic minorities are an integral part of China's education system. The Chinese language teaching in schools for ethnic minorities generally follows the pattern in schools mainly for the ethnic Han group of students. Although achievements have been made in a way, the result is still not satisfactory because the teaching failed in somewhat way to cater to the particular law for second language learning. Students of ethnic minorities are relatively weak in their application of Chinese language.
From the preliminary to the advanced level there are four scales in MHK. The first is for primary school pupils. For ethnic minorities, examinees who succeeded in passing the second level will have no difficulty in the Chinese language learning in full-time secondary schools or secondary technical schools. The third level can be used in ordinary colleges with the Chinese as the language teaching media when they enroll the ethnic minority students. The fourth level is to evaluate the Chinese language literacy of college graduates of ethnic minorities. A corresponding certificate will be issued to those who pass a particular level. The certificates can be used as a reference for departments concerned to evaluate the Chinese language proficiency of the applicant for enrollment and human resource recruitment. They can also help schools to decide whether an ethnic minority student can be exempt from Chinese language learning or a teacher is qualified for his/her job with the Chinese language as the teaching media. What's more is that the certificates can serve to evaluate the performance of Chinese language teaching in institutes.
According to the relevant provisions, students holding the Grade-3 MHK certificate are eligible for studying directly in Chinese-teaching colleges, skipping the preparatory course. This qualification tells the holder's graduation from the preparatory school for ethnic minorities. Students of graduating grade in senior middle schools who've passed Grade-3 can be exempt from the Chinese test for the university entrance examination and their scores of MHK will be added into their total marks of the entrance examination. MHK score accounts for 50 percent of the Chinese test in the entrance examination and another 50 percent is for the test of their own languages. Their MHK scores remain valid for two years.
As learned that from the next year, MHK will by and by spread to Xinjiang, Qinghai, Gansu, Inner-Mongolia, Liaoning, Heilongjiang, Tibet, and Sichuan. All are autonomous regions or inhabiting regions of Chinese ethnic minorities.
By People's Daily Online
November 27, 2003
Hunan to establish 506 boarding schools for minorities
People's Daily Online
Central China's Hunan Province plans to invest 200 million yuan (24 million US dollars) to build 506 boarding junior middle schools for ethnic minorities in five years.
Thousands of minority youngsters who live in the province's 17 autonomous counties and 87 scattered towns will benefit from the plan.
For many years, the provincial government has attached great importance to the education of the minorities and adopted a policy favoring them for school admission and financial assistance.
The local government has helped the minority regions to set up 315 primary schools and raise 40 million yuan (4.8 million US dollars) for the Hope Project Fund to help poor students finance their school work.
Over the past five years, the province has set up 96 boarding junior middle schools in such areas so as to guarantee the teaching level in the nine-year compulsory education stage.
The investment in school construction will be from the provincial, regional and county levels in the ratio of 2:1:1, withthe province to offer 200,000 yuan (24,000 US dollars) for each school.
The provincial government will also arrange 35 million yuan (4.2 million US dollars) to aid the poor minority students and take new measures in the teacher training and housing.
ADB okays pioneer
plan to protect China's minority culture
( 2003-10-10 21:06) (Xinhua)
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has approved a 840,000 -US-dollar technical
assistance (TA) grant to China to develop an innovative plan to reduce poverty
and protect the unique cultures of 22 of its smallest ethnic minority groups.
The plan will target 600,000 people living in western, border, mountainous, grassland and forest areas that include some of the poorest regions in China, the ADB said Friday in a statement.
As well as examining the situation of each minority group and building a strategy to tackle the main poverty problems, the TA will formulate activities to be funded and implemented by the Government. It also includes training for villagers, local government officials, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
This is the first time that the ADB is involved in a significant planning exercise for poor minorities that addresses cultural protection.
Note: See section of the Asian Development Bank's Operations Manual with policy and procedures in addressing indigenous peoples' issues
China’s Tribal Farmers Face the Global Market
By Rod Harbinson
Cultural Survival Quarterly
http://www.culturalsurvival.org
Issue 27.3
September 15, 2003
“I arrived at the market at 2 a.m. this morning,” said Mrs. Liu as she spread out her precious produce on the floor next to her friends. Her exotic fruit, vegetables, and fungi freshly gathered the day before were selling quickly.
Not everything had been gathered from the forest this time. Solarlum leaves were a favorite among shoppers, prized for their aromatic flavor when eaten raw as a salad. Seizing this opportunity, Mrs. Liu and other Jinuo and Dai peoples of China’s Southwest district of Xishuangbanna in Yunnan province had gathered seeds in the forest and cultivated the plant in their kitchen gardens.
At the dawn of agriculture thousands of years ago, the simple act of cultivating wild seeds was a massive technological leap that overshadows any advances we have witnessed in the 20th century and became a defining moment for modern humanity. Now Mrs. Liu’s cultivation of wild seeds are all but lost in a world obsessed with the next big agricultural techno-fix to land a big profit.
The word among foreign venture capital firms in the corridors of the Landmark Towers Hotel in Beijing, far from Mrs. Liu’s market, is that the clever money is in genetic engineering—especially now when access to the vast potential of the Chinese market is accelerating due to China’s recent entrance to the World Trade Organization. Thomas Dyrberg, representative of Danish company Novo AS venture capital, says that interest in the Chinese sector has increased in recent years and his company has placed 15 investments in the past year. Sister company Novozymes employs 420 people in its quest for new enzymes found by screening plants and fungi from China’s rich biodiversity.
Situated on an island carved out by the twisting current of a tributary of the mighty Mekong River, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Gardens is regarded as a national treasure. It contains 6,000 plant and tree species, including 3,000 collected from the surrounding rainforest. Director Guo Huijun explains that the disappearance of traditional agricultural varieties will hinder development of promising new ones. So his priority is conserving the region’s threatened forest and agricultural biodiversity. “The Jinuo used to grow around 13 varieties of upland rice in any one village,” he said. Now the Jinuo have moved down from the hills and instead grow hybrid paddy rice varieties requiring subsidized fertilizers and pesticides. Guo pioneered the now widely accepted concept of agricultural biodiversity conservation. “People and their knowledge create agricultural plant varieties and so are part of a holistic system that depends on each other,” he said.
Back in the Village
At the Dai village of Mandajui, a village elder proudly showed off the new spirit shrine in the center of the village. As a keeper of the Buddhist temple in the village he saw no contradiction in mixing two faiths. “I remember when the new road divided the village 20 years ago,” he said. It brought new marketing possibilities for the Dai and increased their contact with outsiders. The village elder explained that “by 1990 our 12 home-bred rice varieties had been replaced by just one hybrid variety requiring fertilizers and pesticides provided by the government.”
Samples of over 200 rice varieties gathered from Jinuo and Dai are locked in the seedbank at the botanical gardens, but Guo knows full well that storage can only be an interim measure. Sooner or later the seeds must be cultivated in the field or they will go the way of 90 percent of agricultural varieties worldwide that have disappeared from farmers’ fields over the past 100 years. The urgency to conserve rare seeds is all very well to the Jinuo and Dai people, but after being forced down from the hills by Chairman Mao Tse-tung and being banned from hunting in the dwindling forests in 1998, their traditional way of life is not the viable option it once was.
Many people now desire cash crops, preferably of a variety that mixes well with the traditional mix of rice, maize, and tea. The researchers at the botanical gardens have tried to help by suggesting options for lucrative plants and providing the initial seeds. Recently the Jinuo tried to produce passion fruit because the juice is popular in China. But the year after the planting season the price halved due to oversupply and just collecting the fruit was too much work for the return, so the crop rotted on the vine. While the advice of the botanical garden may have failed in this case, its suggestions regarding the pomelo, a favorite with the lowland Dai tribe, have been more successful. Gardens and roadside stalls are full of the fruit, which look like giant grapefruit. Another favorite crop is rubber, and towering tropical rainforest has been replaced by row upon row of rubber trees, posing a dramatic change to the landscape and ecosystem.
Worrying about market prices for crops is a new concern for the Jinuo and Dai peoples. Children learn quickly—prices for butterflies, popular among tourists, have doubled this year, so they all carry a net.
The Jinuos’ experiences with China’s internal price fluctuations have already been hard, and now the Jinuo will have to deal with a completely new animal—the global marketplace. The implications of China’s entry into the WTO are far-reaching as the country relaxes trade restrictions against foreign companies operating inside the country. The new liberal mood has already tempted transnational companies, who are positioning themselves fast. The shelves in Beijing’s supermarkets are stacked high with Kellogg’s, Nestle, Nabisco, and Coca-Cola products.
In turn Chinese companies must compete on the global stage to stay afloat. While some of the larger ones with a competitive edge may survive, the fate of Mrs. Liu and her tribe are questionable as they try to make ends meet.
Since 1990 Rod Harbinson has been working to expose and stop destructive abuses of the environment and the people inhabiting it. During this period he has travelled throughout Europe and Asia. He has produced several books and documentaries and has worked as editor of a number of magazines and journals. His photos and articles have been widely published in books, newspapers, and magazines around the world.
Although not a Chinese minority culture, this group in Thailand is closely related to the minority cultures in Southwest China
and there are many parallels.
Southeast Asia
Christian conversion threatens hill tribe culture
By Marwaan Macan-Markar , 29 August 2003
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/EH29Ae01.html
MAE YAO, Thailand - The hill tribes of northern Thailand have survived centuries of displacement, hardship and discrimination. But now their uniquely colorful culture is under a new threat, albeit a well-meaning one: Christian evangelism.
Ake Chermu has a pivotal role in this village, where faith in animism runs deep. Ake, 67, is the shaman, the religious leader who keeps alive the ceremonies associated with the rice harvest or when new homes of bamboo are built.
For the moment, this community of the Akha hill tribe in northern Thailand's Chiang Rai province still honors Ake. They let him lead them in the close to 20 religious rituals, some of them including animal sacrifices, that they have across the year.
Yet the shaman turns melancholy as he ponders on how long this essential feature of Akha life will be around. "I am worried about the change. Because to be Akha, you have to follow all the rituals," said Ake, who cuts a quiet figure with his small build, his watery brown eyes and his soft voice.
The source of his worry lies in a neighboring Akha village - Christianity has made its presence felt there, causing the community to trade the shaman and animism for the Bible and monotheism.
On Sundays, this village exudes an air of enthusiasm toward this new faith as people sing hymns to the accompaniment of guitars in two churches and listen to young preachers deliver passionate sermons.
For women such as Mi Pa, 41, a recent convert to the Baptist Church, her Akha village has put a stop to events that marked the Akha culture - the annual swing ceremony, building the wooden spirit gate and the harvest festivals.
"The priest asked us to stop the old traditions, which included worshipping spirits," she said. "Now we have Christmas. The entire village celebrates."
But now, it is not only the likes of Ake who are troubled by this shift to Christianity among the Akha, one of the six main tribal communities that have carved out a colorful niche in this mountainous part of the country along the Myanmar border.
Concern is increasingly being expressed also from an unlikely quarter - tour guides who operate in Chiang Rai.
After all, the hill tribes are the main draw that attracts tourists in the thousands to northern Thailand - a fact amplified by the posters and postcards of the hill-tribe people that are visible in the local airport and in the shop windows along Chiang Rai's narrow streets.
"Tourists come here expecting to see a village that is very authentic and typical of the hill tribe culture. So they are not happy when they find churches in the villages," said Charlie Keereekhamsuk, a tourist guide for more than six years.
An increasing number of guides and tour companies are opting against taking tourists to villages where the people have converted to Christianity, he said. "There is a big difference in the village culture after the churches have come in. In Akha villages, it is very clear."
An Akha cultural-rights activist is hardly surprised by such growing concern, given the inroads that church groups, largely from the United States, have made over past 40 years.
"They have succeeded in converting close to 50 percent of the Akha villages in Thailand, and they are aggressively going after the rest," said Mathew McDaniel of the Akha Heritage Foundation, based in the Thai town of Mae Sai.
"Tourists don't want to see these tribal people with a church foisted on them," he said. "They are offended by what is happening: people being made clones of groups like the Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, other Protestant churches and Catholics from Italy."
One day, McDaniel argues, the Akha identity in this part of Thailand may well cease to exist. "Their rituals, the spirit healing, belief in animism is what makes them Akha. It gives them their cultural identity, their unique place in the world."
Pastor Kenu Chalermliamthong, however, sees it differently. The hill-tribe people can still retain their culture even after converting, since it is "only one aspect of their lives - religion", said Kenu, a Baptist minister who belongs to the Karen hill tribe.
The churches are not asking the hill tribes to change their clothes or the way they live, he added. "But when they convert, the people have to give up their old customs and habits, superstitions and faith in animism."
Currently, there are more than 70,000 Akha living in close to 300 villages spread across the forested parts of northern Thailand. Besides the Akha, the other ethnic groups who make up the nearly 1 million hill-tribe population in this Southeast Asian country are the Lahu, Lisu, Yao, Hmong and Karen.
The majority of Thailand's 62 million people are Buddhists and the country respects the individual's right to religious freedom. Consequently, the local media, government officials and the Buddhist clergy have treated as a non-issue the spread of Christianity among the hill-tribe people reputed for their belief in animism.
"Thai governments have shown little attention to the hill-tribe communities," Chayan Vaddhanaphuti, an anthropologist at Chiang Mai University, said in an interview. "They have also ignored them on economic and social matters."
Studies done by Chayan have revealed that the hill-tribe people often convert because of the perceived benefits church groups offer. "They are assured education, scholarships and health services," he said. "It is these benefits and not religious passion that have attracted more hill-tribe people to convert."
In this new religious environment, "the shamans and the spirit and cultural leaders have no place", Chayan said. "The old, traditional knowledge that has been passed down to the community comes to an end."
According to Budsaba Maiwong of the Chiang Rai-based Mae Salong Tour Co, visits to the hill-tribe villages and overnight stays are what 70 percent of the tourists arriving in Chiang Rai request. "It is so popular because it is unique, the way the hill-tribe people live, the way they dress. It is different from the rest of the country."
These semi-nomadic people migrated to Thailand from Burma (now Myanmar), southern China and Tibet a long time ago, and have lived on mountain slopes in villages that appear untouched by the many advances in modernity. An Akha house, for instance, is made of bamboo and has no windows and food is prepared over an open fire.
It is shamans such as Ake who helped give these semi-nomadic communities their unique character by keeping alive the flame of animism. "You cannot be a proper Akha person, relate to our history, ancestors, if you give up spirit worship," he said.
(Inter Press Service)
Chinese Dual-Ownership System Remains a Hopeful Model Despite Evenkis' Forced Relocation from Olguya
By Hugh Beach
Cultural Survival Quarterly
www.culturalsurvival.org
Issue 27.1
March 31, 2003
Until fall 2002, some 30 Evenki families lived in the village of Ôlguya at the northern tip of China’s Inner Mongolia province. While they were not the only Evenki in China, these few Evenki families centered around Ôlguya were China’s only reindeer-herding people. Out of this unusual confluence of lifestyle and administrative regime emerged a unique management system of dual ownership based on milk and antlers: The milk, or subsistence aspect, accrued to the Evenki herding families; the antler crop was owned by the state, which shared its profits with the herders; and the system as a whole came under an over-arching policy of support for a small minority people.
In other regions such as Fennoscandia (the region encompassing Scandinavia and Finland) and Alaska, reindeer milk and antlers are each associated with historically very different reindeer-management systems which were never practiced concurrently. Among the Saami of Sweden, reindeer-milking harkens to a period when the reindeer were utilized mainly as living resources for subsistence. This practice faded, however, as meat gained prominence with increased integration into the market economy and Saami reindeer herds became widely spread and loosely attended. In such an extensive herding system, milking the deer was hardly practical. Goat milk and later powdered milk compensated.
On the other hand, in Alaska, antler cropping—the cutting of fresh antler from live deer, usually for the highly lucrative Asian market—integrates well with extensive herding. The deer can be rounded up once a year to crop the antlers, and then left to roam extensively; the only herding investment necessary being to keep the deer from getting swept away by encroaching caribou herds. In fact, without the sizable profits from antler cropping, reindeer herding in Alaska would probably not have continued at all, as reindeer meat came to be of negligible economic significance with readily available meat supplied by the resurgence of the Western Arctic caribou herd.
Based on these trends in other parts of the world, reindeer milking is unexpected in a management system whose production is dominated by market-oriented antler cropping. Yet this is what occurred among the Evenki.
Recent History
Four main family- or clan-based herding camps resided within Ôlguya's orbit, ranging as far as 73 kilometers from the settlement. The camps were named after the heads of the families involved in herding. In 1997, these camps were named Malisu (formerly Ledimi, after the deceased husband of Malisu), Damala, Gushulan, and Galishka. This handful of reindeer-herding Evenki were the surviving members of what had been a larger Evenki population of hunters moving freely across the Russian-Chinese border, and, in fact, a number of older Evenki could still speak Russian. Historically, they practiced a form of reindeer herding consistent with the other south-Siberian reindeer-herding groups: small numbers of clan-owned reindeer were milked and used for transport. The deer were highly prized and never slaughtered for meat.
When Russian-Chinese hostilities erupted along the border in the 1960s, this group of Evenki happened to be in Chinese territory. Intent on curtailing their free roaming across the border and settling the families permanently in one locality, the Chinese authorities gradually relocated them farther inland from the border, first quartering them in Alonson, then Manqui and finally building the settlement of Ôlguya with housing, a school, an antler-processing factory, administrative offices, and eventually even a small museum devoted to their history and culture.
Collectivization and Reform
Regarding the history of China's policies regulating reindeer herding in the Ôlguya area, in 1997 residents invariably referred to two major milestones: the collectivization of 1967 and the reform of 1984.1
In 1967 the Chinese state "collectivized" approximately 1,000 head of reindeer. It purchased all reindeer from the herders and provided a salary to them for their labor, much along the lines of the Soviet sovkhoz (state farm) model. The reindeer, however, remained under the care of their previous owners and herders, so the forced sale could not be readily distinguished from a form of development aid. Evenki agreed that the state embarked on this apparently disadvantageous transaction for ideological reasons, both because it believed all property in a socialist system should be owned collectively, and as part of its effort to raise China's minority peoples to a more "advanced" stage of development. During the initial stages of collectivization, profits from antler cropping were minimal. However, recognizing the income-generating potential of the antler trade, the Chinese government promoted the development of the antler industry under state control.
In an effort to increase antler profits by inducing private initiative, the state introduced a major reform in 1984. Formal ownership of the reindeer was returned to the approximately 20 herding families, who could use the reindeer as mounts and pack animals, and who had full control over the subsistence resources provided by reindeer. These resources consisted of mostly milk but also on rare occasions required the slaughter of a deer for the meat and hides. But the antler crop, which had by 1984 become lucrative, remained under state ownership. A specified household head from each family signed a contract, renewed annually, with the newly established antler company, agreeing to care for the deer and to supply the entire antler crop to the company. The contract herder would receive a subsidy of 30 yuan per reindeer per year and an additional sum for each newborn calf.2 This arrangement, heralded as stemming from a socialized market economy, demonstrated a remarkable dual ownership system of the reindeer.
Each year the herding contractors and others involved with herding work convened with administrators from the antler company and the local government in a Herding Council. The Herding Council was a particularly important institution in the arrangement, as it allowed for the active participation of the herders in management decisions. It is there that herding-related issues were negotiated: the split of antler profits, payment per head of livestock, provision costs, service needs, inheritance issues involving reindeer, applications for new contracts, and reassignment of reindeer to create new herds or to remove deer from a herder who was not able to meet the obligations of his contract.
By the early 1990s, the herders had lobbied successfully in the Herding Council to increase their profits by exchanging with the company some of the set subsidy per reindeer for a split of the antler profits. The initial arrangement called for 60 percent of the antler profits to go to the herders, and 40 percent to the state. This division was later adjusted in the herders' favor to a 70/30 percent split, but the herders were required to forego their salaries. From the company's perspective, this change was desirable, as it provided contractors with incentive to crop the antlers of all of their deer. It was also consistent with the national policy trend toward a so-called "socialized market" economy, whereby the means of production (in this case, the antlers) would remain in collective state hands, but profits for the workers would depend on their individual initiative and capacity for work. In 1997, approximately 350 kilograms of antler were produced, yielding a net average income for the herders of somewhere between 9,000 and 11,000 yuan per contractor per year (approximately US$1,000), a substantial income in this context. To maintain a high incentive for the herders to guard their animals diligently against predators and poachers, and to foster herd increase, the state herding company continued to pay set amounts per deer per year, now 15 yuan per deer and 40 yuan for each newborn calf. It was up to the contract herder to determine how much of his profit would trickle down to family members who helped with the herding work.
The reform of 1984 brought with it the most radical changes and improvements in the lives of the herders. With the establishment of the antler company and the local forest factory to provide financial support and infrastructure to the herding enterprise, living conditions for the herding families were enhanced. Movement between the settlement of Ôlguya and the camps, which previously could take a week by reindeer transport, became fast and easy by company motor vehicle. With settlement, money, and access to outside supply lines, the Evenki economy became enmeshed in that of the market. Salaries, a share in the antler profits, and numerous benefits to the herders and their families put the Ôlguya Evenki in an enviable position. The state likewise benefited. In addition to revenues generated by the antler trade, herders, from their dispersed vantage points, watched for and reported forest fires.
Problems With the Dual-Ownership System
This system was not, of course, without its share of problems. The privileged status of the Evenki had caused some resentment among the majority Han population. As an officially recognized ethnic minority, the Evenki were accorded special benefits, including prioritized positions of employment in a local timber factory, supplemental hardship pay to compensate for uncomfortable working conditions, government-subsidized prices for firearms and certain food staples, free education and boarding for children of reindeer herders, free housing, and exemption from stringent Chinese family-planning regulations. Only Evenki were permitted to hold reindeer under contract with the antler company. A few non-Evenki who had married into the group and who had dedicated themselves to the profession were also granted conditional rights to herd reindeer, but they could not become householders with company contracts.
In addition to ethnic tension and resentment, some non-Evenki argued that the overly pampered position of those in the Ôlguya settlement proved detrimental to the Evenki themselves. The benefits granted to reindeer-herding Evenki locked many Evenki youngsters into a situation whereby their best hope of employment was within the limited domain of the herding/company structure, hence they lacked the incentive to develop other skills. Problems with alcohol and violence in the settlement and surrounding camps stemmed, many non-Evenki claimed, from policies that ensured privileged treatment and priority employment despite poor performance. Herders had become prone to alleviate weeks of isolated and sometimes solitary surveillance of the reindeer in the forest with over-consumption of alcohol. Before, alcohol consumption was strictly regulated, but after the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) the regulations were not enforced, and the growing road network spread alcohol everywhere. Now, paradoxically, alcohol is at times considered to be one of the perks of the herding profession and is brought to the camps, often in large quantities as gifts. Some Evenkis considered alcohol-related problems and violence to be prime reasons for what they claimed to be a reduction of the Ôlguya Evenki population.
Other problems were related to the distribution of profits among the Evenki themselves. The contract holders, who were not necessarily those performing the actual herding work, stood to benefit most from the contract arrangement. Some non-contract herders felt they did most of the work—especially the most strenuous and least desirable jobs, which kept them isolated for long periods of time—and that money that trickled down to them from the respective family contractors was, indeed, barely a trickle. With alternative employment opportunities scarce and camp life relatively well provisioned by the company, these dissatisfied non-contract herders would seek their own contracts rather than abandon herding altogether. Application to the Herding Board for a new contract stood no chance of success unless the company felt confident the antlers would still be efficiently cropped and the existing corps of contractors was willing to part with some deer in order to assemble at least a minimal start-up herd for the new contractor candidate. These conditions rarely prevailed. Furthermore, from the company's perspective, success as a contractor was predicated upon the contractor's ability to ensure the necessary labor force, usually with reliance on family members. This achievement was hardly possible for a young unmarried man and even less so for an unmarried woman.
Finally, an increase in poaching, spurred by improved processing and marketing of antlers and a greater profit margin, caused losses to both herders and the company. Constant surveillance of the prized and vulnerable reindeer herds was required to curtail poaching, but such intensive management was costly and demanding of high labor investment.
Market-Based Herding
The collectivization in 1967 affected the lives of the Evenki only to a minor degree and meant nothing with respect to how the deer were distributed, herded, or utilized. It was primarily an exercise of ideological principle. Even the reform of 1984 brought no immediate or necessary changes in the actual placement of reindeer in the clan- and family-based camps. During neither collectivization nor the ensuing reform did the state see reason to squash clan or family relations if ideological and economic goals could still be met.
The reform did bring, however, profound changes in other aspects of the herders' lives, principally the establishment of the antler company. While clan ties were not extinguished, they no longer fully determined property relations with respect to reindeer, as they had done in the past. Mobile nuclear families were elevated to the status of independent owners of reindeer and contractors to the antler company. Various services, state subsidies and aid, and the sharing of profits from the antler trade significantly raised the standard of living of the herding families. The reform also promoted the careful guarding of the entire herd to prevent deer poaching. Yet despite all the changes occasioned by the reform and subsequent initiatives, certain basic forms of reindeer subsistence use, actual herding practices, relations of inheritance and control of reindeer, and herder-to-herder relations of power and authority remained much the same.
In 1997, the livelihood of the Ôlguya Evenki had been transformed from a hunting base, with small-scale herding for milk and transport, to a dual-ownership system of market-based herding to supply the antler market, supplemented by continued milking and hunting, and buttressed by minority policies and accompanying aid initiatives. The cooperative and symbiotic nature of this arrangement between the reindeer-herding Evenki and the Chinese state that existed in 1997, while not without its problems, proved beneficial to both sides and could suggest possible solutions to problems confronting all south-Siberian reindeer herders. Unfortunately, as the reindeer-herding Evenki of China are moved by the Chinese government from the mountains into the Mangui township settlement being built for them at the end of a railroad line (see page 32 this issue), it is all the more questionable whether they will survive as a socially and culturally distinct entity. Authorities say they will benefit from closer links to modern infrastructure. But in the end, these closer ties may well end this group's unique story.
1. From 1984 until 1997, revisions were made with respect to sizes of salaries or proportions of profit shared by the herders and the state, but the main principles of ownership established by that reform continue.
2. Evenki in Ôlguya in 1997 provided a few variable sums for these amounts, and it is difficult to discern whether this inconsistency reflected memory lapses or the confusion of minor historical periods in which adjustments in the amounts were negotiated by the Herding Council.
Hugh Beach is professor of cultural anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden. His research among Saami reindeer pastoralists has been long-standing, but he has also researched other reindeer-herding peoples from Russia to Alaska. His research is funded by the EU, the Swedish Research Council, and The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.
First Volume of Encyclopedia of Chinese Ethnic Minorities Published
The first volume of Encyclopedia of Chinese Ethnic Minorities -- the Naxi Ethnic Group Volume -- has been published recently by the Guangxi Nationalities Publishing House.
The Naxi Volume of the Encyclopedia of Chinese Ethnic Minorities, containing 1.3 million words, is a comprehensive reference book about this ethnic group. With nearly 3,000 entries, the book systematically introduces the Naxi people living in southwest China, including their history, culture and current situation. The contents are divided into 19 categories: society, nature & geography, history, economy, science & technology, thoughts, education, religions, languages and words, literature, culture & art, cultural relics, scenic spots, medical care and sanitation, press and publication, sports and entertainment, folk customs, people, and ancient books and records. At the end of the book, relevant materials are enclosed for readers’ convenience.
Fei Xiaotong, a world-renowned sociologist, is the editor-in-chief of the encyclopedia series. The huge series of books, with wide coverage of the economy, society, history and culture of the 55 Chinese ethnic minorities, draw attention from both domestic and overseas readers.
The Encyclopedia of Chinese Ethnic Minorities opens a new page in China’s history of dictionary compilation and is of great significance. It will help people of the ethnic minorities know more about themselves so as to confirm their self-confidence. Meanwhile, it helps promote unity of all ethnic groups in China. The encyclopedia will serve as a reference book for decision-making on the economic and cultural development in those areas, as well as for studies on Chinese ethnic groups.
The Encyclopedia of Chinese Ethnic Minorities will come out in 55 volumes, each focusing on one of the country’s 55 ethnic minority groups.
(China.org.cn translated by Li Jinhui, January 10, 2003)
November 12, 2001, updated at 15:54(GMT+8) People's Daily Online
West China Boosts Tourism Featuring Ethnic Culture
The culture of ethnic groups has brought an increasing number of tourists to the vast western China, greatly benefiting local tourism.
Zhang Xiqin, deputy director of the China National Tourism Administration, said, the development of tourism with distinctive folk customs will help not only the popularization of various ethnic cultures, but also the economic development of China's western region.
The culture of ethnic groups has brought an increasing number of tourists to the vast western China, greatly benefiting local tourism.
After the launching of the Central Government's western region development strategy, a majority of the west provinces and autonomous regions began to make tourism their pillar industry.
The western region, rich in natural resources, has 84 percent of China's 55 ethnic minorities living in compact communities. These diverse cultures illustrates the age-old histories of the ethnic groups.
Although the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in north China has made a late start in tourism, the program of "traveling through vast grasslands, enjoying characteristic folk customs" developed in recent years has brought about rapid improvement, netting a revenue of 4.24 billion yuan (about 511 million U.S. dollars) last year, twice that of the previous year.
According to Lu Ting, an official from the local tourism bureau, tourists there can participate in the Nadam Festival, a traditional festival practiced for over 700 years. During the event, many sports activities, such as horse racing, archery and Mongolian wrestling, take place.
Mongolian singing and dancing, traditional table delicacies and historical cultural relics left over from the ancient northern minorities are all highlights fascinating tourists, said Lu.
In addition, visitors have the opportunity to witness the modern lives and activities of the Oroqens, one of China's smallest ethnic groups which used to makes living on hunting.
Many autonomous prefectures within northwest China's Gansu Province, such as Gannan and Linxia, have also held tourism festivals featuring minority cultures since July of this year.
An official with Gansu tourism bureau Hao Hua says, Gannan has received over 400,000 domestic and foreign visitors in the first half of this year due to its "mysterious", "magical" and "sacred" Tibetan folk customs, gaining an income of more than 20 million yuan (about 2.4 million U.S. dollars).
It is crucial for Gannan's success in tourism to infuse local ethnic cultures into the natural landscape, said Hao.
The Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in northwest China is trying to attract more visitors through its strong Islamic culture and Hui customs.
Currently, Ningxia has three Hui folk parks, displaying clothes and adornments, handicrafts, food, singing and dancing of the Hui for visitors.
Qinghai Province has now established many reception centers, which help visitors design tour programs with diverse characteristics of different ethnic groups, such as campfire parties and viewing the countryside on horseback.
Over 60 percent of the centers are founded by local farmers and herdsmen.
Cering Ma, a grandmother, said that by October this year, her grandson had earned some 6,000 yuan in about four months through performing Tibetan dances for tourists.
Zhang Xiqin, deputy director of the China National Tourism Administration, said, the development of tourism with distinctive folk customs will help not only the popularization of various ethnic cultures, but also the economic development of China's western region.
The Growing Shadow Of The Oroqen Language And Culture
By Whaley, Lindsay
Cultural Survival Quarterly (www.culturalsurival.org)
Issue 25.2
July 31, 2001
Tucked away in the foothills of the Greater Hinggan mountains in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia lies Alihe, a city of quite modest size by Chinese standards, with a population of around fifty thousand. Alihe's main street, one of four paved roads in the city, stretches for about a mile and is flanked by the mounuments of communist China -- gray and white concrete buildings in varying states of disrepair. Ten of fifteen smaller roads intersect the main thoroughfare, all of them eventually leading to what seem endless rows of brick, wood, and packed earth houses. To reach the residential areas, one must first pass a host of shops and restaurants, barely distinguishable from one another save for signs out front identifying their wares. If there is even a trace of daylight, the town's fixed structures are given life by the constant flow of bicycles and taxis, the occasional motorcycle, farmers peddling their produce, teenagers playing billiards at the outdoor tables, the pulsing sounds of radios, and the relatively new addition of SUVs, vehicles of choice for government officials in this area. The city is altogether unremarkable, except for one thing. It is the administrative center for one of China's smallest ethnic minorities, the Oroqens (pronounced "Orochen" with stress on the last syllable).
The Oroqens have left no enduring mark on world history, and perhaps for this reason they are little known outside their tiny sphere of influence in northeastern China. Even within this realm, they have been overshadowed by a linguistically related group, the Manchus, who effected one of the greatest imperial dynasties ever to arise. And yet it is their very obscurity that makes the Oroqens a rich source of information about the nature of human communities and intergroup relations.
Over the past fifty years, the Oroqen world has been completely transformed. As late as the 1950s, the people lived as hunter-gatherers, practiced shamanism, and spoke their own language (also called Oroqen), a tongue completely unrelated to and unlike the Mandarin Chinese used today by most ethnic Oroqen. In the 21st century, they are primarily farmers, and while hunting remains an important marker of their identity, this activity can only be carried out clandestinely, since a ban on hunting has been in effect for many years in this part of China. It seems the shamans are all dead, many of them reportedly killed during the persecutions of Mao's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The Oroqen language is spoken fluently by only one out of six Oroqen, almost all of whom are in the later stages of life. No one learns Oroqen as a first language. This is a society living in the shadow of its own imminent death.
Given the demographics of Oroqen speakers and the fact that Oroqen is not being transmitted to children, it is clear that the language will cease to be spoken in twenty to fifty years barring extraordinary measures by members of the community. Even though there is interest in undertaking such an effort, so many factors weigh against the possibility of Oroqen revitalization that even language activists concede that it may be a lost cause. There are practically no financial resources available; Oroqen has no written form; no dialect is accepted as standard; Oroqen is not used as the dominant language in any social context, including family life; and fluent speakers of Oroqen are not geographically concentrated. Rather, they are dispersed in a number of towns and villages in two different provinces. In every region where the Oroqen live, they are dominated by Han Chinese, and at times by other minorities. The political climate in China, which places a high premium on national unity, does not promote language and culture revival, both of which are often considered acts of political separatism. Such forces all but guarantee that the shadow of Oroqen language and culture grows bigger each year.
While the loss of the Oroqen language has massive implications for the Oroqen themselves, it also represents an intellectual loss to the field of linguistics, since the language contains many unusual, if not unique, features. For example, Oroqen possesses an impressive inventory of suffixes that permit its speakers to derive one word from another (like the English derivational suffix -ish, which creates "fiendish" from "fiend"). Consider the following instances of suffixes being added to the numeral three (ilan) to create a variety of new words: ila-...na (three animals), ila-la (three days), ila-na (a group consisting of three animals), ila-tal (three each), ila-ra (three times), ila-kan (only three), and ila-ki (third). Other atypical aspects of Oroqen that will be lost before they have been adequately studied include:
- a system of vowel harmony in which all vowels in a word must share certain features of their pronunciation;
- extensive use of case inflections on nouns;
- a set of particles that can be used at the end of sentences to indicate a speaker's attitude toward what he or she is saying; and
- converbs, which are a special kind of participle.
From a global perspective, of course, the decline of the Oroqen language can be seen as just one more example among thousands of cases in which a small speech community is shifting away from the language of its heritage. We must be careful, however, not to let the ubiquity of these shifts blind us to the fact that each case was brought about by a specific set of historical and social factors. In the case of Oroqen, these are well worth exploring, since they have brought the shift about so quickly. In the course of just one generation, the Oroqen community has gone from a state in which everyone was speaking Oroqen and almost no one speaking Chinese, to just the opposite.
In 1958, Chairman Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, an attempt at economic revitalization in China which, among other things, involved the rapid expansion of infrastructure and increased exploitation of natural resources. As the railways pushed northward, the Oroqen were brought into sustained contact with industrial China for the first time. Observing the primitive lifestyle of these nomads, Mao's regime conceived of a better way of life for the Oroqen, one which would literally take them out of the woods and give them access to a series of promised material and social benefits -- economic opportunity, free health care, and education. In the name of modernization, the Oroqen were compelled to denounce their traditional hunter-gathering activities in favor of communal living with other minorities and the Han majority. Diseases brought north by the massive migration of Han people reduced the already small Oroqen population. Their hunting grounds were turned over to a swelling forestry industry and to collective farming. They quickly became persecuted and socially marginalized.
During the Cultural Revolution, consistent with events occurring around China, many of the prominent Oroqens -- shamans, clan leaders, teachers, and low-level government officials -- were persecuted and tortured. Many Oroqen were considered members of the Inner Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, hence, enemies of the people. They were harassed, arrested, and imprisoned. They underwent incessant interrogation. Whenever a public rally was held, they were paraded around wearing placards announcing their counter-revolutionary status. The physical abuse and psychological torture were overbearing; some committed suicide.
After the end of the Cultural Revolution and Deng Xiaoping's ascension to power, the government's policies toward minorities were recognized as having created, not an improved way of life, but alienation, poverty, and suffering. Interest in providing better living accommodations, education, and opportunities for minorities was renewed. Special dispensations were offered to minority groups: they were exempted from the "one child per family" limit imposed on the Han majority; they were given money to school their children; some were appointed to local ruling bodies; and so on. The impulse behind the policy shift appeared pure, but the expected response did not occur, at least for the Oroqen. Rather than bolstering Oroqen culture, the government action led to an explosion in the number of Han who married Oroqen in order to gain the privileges of their minority status. The dramatic increase in inter-marriage meant an even more rapid dissipation of traditional Oroqen ways. Rather than undergoing any sort of natural transformation, the culture was simply eliminated.
While Mao's China and more recent government policy represent the most obvious causes of the decline of Oroqen traditional culture, it is overly simplistic to understand the decline in only these terms. Earlier episodes in the region's history had a role to play. It is the Oroqen's unfortunate lot to have set up hunting grounds on real estate that has served as a corridor for a succession of military powers. The Russian Tsars, the Manchu Qing dynasty, the Japanese, and the Chinese Republican Army have all controlled Manchuria in the past 200 years. The Oroqen's subjugation and use by each of these groups so disrupted their lives, ensured their political marginality, and decimated their numbers (the population of Oroqen was reduced by half in the first part of the 20th century alone) that the Oroqen communities were highly vulnerable long before the formation of the People's Republic of China.
Are the Oroqen culture and language destined to become historical artifacts? Probably -- but the social, political, and economic changes occurring in China present a glimmer of hope. Individual prosperity opens the possibility that financial resources for Oroqen revitalization will be made available by concerned citizens. Increased political freedoms might remove some of the obstacles that now prevent the practice of traditional religion and the use of Oroqen in the schools. No one who has had the chance to observe the changes in China over the last twenty years would be so foolish as to make strong predictions about what the next two decades will hold. The right mix of shifting circumstances just might redirect the trajectory of Oroqen decline. The Oroqen might push back the shadow.
In the end, what is most notable about the Oroqen is that they represent the "typical" story of a vast majority of cultures, both past and present. The great civilizations of the Greeks, Romans, Mongols, Egyptians, Persians, and Incas, to name a few, demand attention because they are atypical. In their successes and failures, they disrupted the patterns that normally hold sway in human society. For this very reason, however, they do not reveal the full genius of human culture, nor can they provide a comprehensive notion of the dynamics of culture formation, development, and decline. For this, we look toward groups like the Oroqen, a civilization whose existence comes and goes, as T. S. Eliot would say, not with a bang, but a whimper.
Article copyright Cultural Survival, Inc.
Wednesday, March 08, 2000, updated at 21:09(GMT+8)
People's Daily Online
Development of West to Bring Great Changes to Ethnic Minorities
Ma Xiangmei, a woman farmer of Bao'an ethnic group from the northwest, said one of her best wishes was to see improvement in transportation and communication conditions at her home village so that she could arrive in Beijing for the coming sessions of the National People's Congress
(NPC) within the matter of a day.
Ma, a NPC deputy on the on-going 3rd session of 9th NPC, said it took her five full days to go to
Lanzhou, capital of northwest Gansu Province, from her home village of Meipo Village in Jishan County, and to proceed to reach Beijing by plane.
"The means of transportation and communications are vital to economic development in our remote west region," she said.
Ma's wish will come true with the implementation of China's strategy of large-scale development of western China region. Of the strategy, a program is aimed at building highways to link more than 40,000 villages in west China region, including Ma's home village.
Meanwhile, Li Bo, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that west China region hosts a large ethnic population and is home to three of the five ethnic autonomous regions in China. To some extent, the growth of west China means the development of ethnic people-inhabited areas and an opportunity for accelerated development of the west.
China's Ministry of Railways and State Administration of Forestry have publicized their investment blueprint in the western region, including 100 million yuan (12 billion US dollars) to be invested in afforestation program. The investment will lay a solid foundation for economic revitalization in the ethnic-inhabited area.
Today, the provinces, autonomous region and municipality in the west region are adjusting their growth strategy in line with the strategy of great development of west China region.
While Gansu Province is beefing up its infrastructure construction, it will open itself wider still to foreign investors and encourage drawing more funds and technology into the development of emerging industries like new materials and bio- medicines.
Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, which is adjacent to Russia, and seven other countries in central and south Asia, has decided to do away with its traditional economic pattern encompassing mainly agriculture and livestock as major parts. It aims to take development opportunity to transform itself into an international trade center in west China.
Another NPC Deputy Legqog, chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region, said Tibet is going into to foster tourism as a new pillar industry by taking advantages of its unique highland scenery and colorful, vivid local ethnical customs.
According to Chinese economist analysts, China's ethnic groups in the west will gradually lead a modern-day life when the strategy for growth of western region comes into effect.
Natives Feel Left Out of China's New West
Government Encourages Migration of Han Chinese to Frontier Provinces
A government initiative to bring development to China's vast Xinjiang province has had mixed success -- bringing millions of new people and investment to the region but failing to transfer economic gains to most of the province's native ethnic population.
By Peter S. Goodman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, June 5, 2006; Page A01
SHANSHAN, China -- Before the highway arrived last year, threading a strip of black pavement across a moonscape of pale sand, this town in central Xinjiang province was among the lonelier places on earth.
Now, trucks rumble across the desert, hauling watermelons from irrigated plantations to cities thousands of miles away. Caravans ferry supplies to workers at state-owned oil fields on the fringes of town, where drilling rigs extract crude for China's industrial coast. Freighters carry electronics and clothing from coastal factories to Han Chinese merchants who have flocked here from other parts of the country to capitalize on an economic boom.
Yet just off the highway in Mazha village, life is little changed. Most people spend their days under the tyranny of sun and windblown dust, tending trellises of green grapes. Nearly all the villagers are Uighur, the Muslim ethnic minority that was the majority in Xinjiang before the arrival of Han Chinese, the dominant group in China. The highways funded by the government's Develop the West initiative have brought little benefit here, the villagers complain.
"We Uighur people are all farmers," said Gulijanat Tayir, a 17-year-old student. "The Han people are running all the businesses."
In the six years since China's central government began its well-financed campaign to spread the benefits of economic growth beyond coastal provinces, the effort has exacerbated the extreme inequality that characterizes the national economy. Gaps have grown between urban and rural China and between the less-developed west and the frenetic east.
The Develop the West program was conceived in part to stem separatist inclinations in Xinjiang and other western provinces, where ethnic minority communities resent the continued influx of Han-- a migration actively encouraged by the central government.
Though sporadic and sometimes violent protests have persisted in Xinjiang since the advent of the program, observers say they are happening less frequently -- a fact that Uighur groups attribute more to an aggressive crackdown by Chinese authorities than to the success of the campaign in spreading development.
"Among the key projects of the Develop the West program, the majority only benefit the east," said Zhao Baotong, who heads the economics institute at the Shaanxi Academy of Social Sciences in the western city of Xian. "These projects are transporting electricity, natural gas and other resources from the west to the east to fuel development there. Almost none of these projects are aiming at developing local manufacturing industry in the west."
Since the initiative began in January 2000, the central government has set aside $106 billion for 60 major projects, such as rail and road expansions, hydroelectric dams, and oil pipelines. Thirty-nine projects have been completed, costing $56 billion, according to state figures.
Studies have shown that the investment has contributed to economic growth in the west, but the pace has fallen behind development in the east, where China's nouveau riche and a growing middle class occupy increasingly glitzy cities. From 2000 to 2004, the overall growth of China's 12 western provinces was behind that of 11 provinces and municipalities in the east by more than 12 percent, according to a study by the China Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.
Extreme income gaps now separate Xinjiang from booming enclaves on the coast. In 1980, for example, the average annual income of people in Xinjiang was roughly equal to those in Zhejiang, a coastal province south of Shanghai. Last year, annual incomes in Xinjiang lagged behind those in Zhejiang by more than $1,000.
More than twice the size of Texas, Xinjiang has long occupied the fringes of Chinese domain, its inhospitable deserts once navigated by traders crossing the Silk Road from Europe to Asia. Today, a trip across the province reveals how the benefits of development are being spread unequally, even inside Xinjiang itself.
The great build-out of highways and the expansion of energy production encouraged by Beijing's largesse have attracted millions of Han, who have come in a Gold Rush-like frenzy to capture some of the spoils of China's modern-day frontier. The Han are now a slim majority among Xinjiang's 19 million people. That has exacerbated tensions with the Turkic-speaking Uighurs, who have long regarded the Han as invaders.
Neon-lit shopping malls fill downtown Urumqi, the provincial capital, where Han Chinese merchants opened stores. In Kashgar (known as Kashi in Mandarin Chinese), Xinjiang's westernmost city -- an overgrown oasis that was a key stop on the Silk Road and remains famous for its raucous bazaar -- Han entrepreneurs have established trading houses aimed at central Asian countries to the west, selling plumbing supplies to Kyrgyzstan and roofing materials to Tajikistan. The featureless rectangular office buildings of the Han merchants tower over the labyrinthine streets where Uighurs live in ancient brick homes.
Han Chinese road crews from Sichuan province camp in rough canvas tents along the Karakoram Highway, the road through blank desert expanses, past mountain lakes ringed by tents, and finally on to Pakistan, paving the last remaining stretches of dirt in anticipation of more traffic.
Even in Tashgurkan, a cluster of low buildings beneath snow-capped peaks in the desolate country near the Pakistan border, pioneering Han Chinese have established restaurants and supermarkets to cater to road workers.
In Shanshan, in the low-lying Turpan Valley, Feng Meng, 28, successfully made the jump to the white-collar ranks, aided in part by the government's Develop the West program.
Feng's parents, Han Chinese, were dispatched from coastal Jiangsu province during the Cultural Revolution to improve grape-growing techniques. Their college-educated son is now a technical manager at Xinjiang Loulan Wine Co., perhaps the world's most unusually situated chateau: Cabernet sauvignon and Riesling grapes spring from desert sands, destined for Italian-made steel tanks and French oak barrels resting in the cool of the basement. The highway improvements of recent years have allowed the winery to ship its products all over China and to Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia. Over the past decade, production has nearly doubled.
"Before, even if we had the product, it was hard to ship it out," Feng said. Feng earns almost $400 a month, roughly 10 times his parents' former wages. He has saved almost $12,000, enough to buy a house. "The future looks better and better," he said.
A mile down the road, Uighur villagers sat on stools in front of half-built brick homes as the wind blew trash down unpaved streets. Men used donkey carts to carry farm tools into the fields. "We don't have enough land," complained Alim Pulat, the vice chief of Lianmuqing village. Families are dependent on middlemen traders to get their crops to customers in big cities.
With fields expanding and middlemen able to reach more areas, boosting supply, prices have dropped by as much as half since 2003. But the expansion of the roads and the electricity grid has produced several local factories -- a heating plant, a copper smelter -- and they have provided jobs for local people, boosting incomes.
"It's a little better than years past," Alim said. "We can eat. We have clothes to wear."
He shrugged when asked about the fairness of the Han getting more benefits from development. "It is more convenient for Han to do business with one another," he said.
But many Uighurs complain that even when they strive to transcend rural confines, they are denied the benefits, because they lack fluency in Mandarin Chinese, the national language. "If I'm looking for a job, the first thing they want to know is what's my Chinese level, and if it's not up to par, they say, 'Go away,' " said Rayila, a 20-year-old university student in Urumqi.
Kuche, a town whose red soils hold some of China's largest reserves of oil and natural gas, has become a hub for giant state energy firms. Service trucks navigate a network of recently built roads. The West-East pipeline carries natural gas more than 2,000 miles across the country to Shanghai. On the edge of the city, a network of refineries has sprung up, turning crude oil into gasoline.
"Yes, there's oil here, but the money doesn't reach ordinary people," said a man near the crumbling walls of the ancient city, as two men squatted in the dirt, tinkering with the innards of a weathered car. "This is all we've got," he said, holding out empty palms.
Special correspondent Eva Woo contributed to this report.
Activists hail UN resolution on indigenous rights
http://english.www.gov.tw/TaiwanHeadlines/index.jsp?categid=10&recordid=96520
Taiwan's aborigine rights activists on Sunday hailed a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution on June 29 calling for the adoption of the "Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples" by international delegates. Local indigenous rights observers felt the resolution would help protect aboriginal rights and preserve the threatened cultures and languages of all local aboriginal groups, and could also help them make claims on traditional lands and natural resources.
One group in particular, the marginalized Ping Pu, or plains aborigines, said the adoption of the declaration would provide a major boost in its struggle for recognition and indigenous rights.
"We see this as a positive step forward for our people," said Ying Jin-tiong, chairman of the Ping Pu Plains Aborigine Peoples Association of Taiwan. "The U.N. resolution will strengthen our struggle, giving us the faith that what we are doing is right. This new set of international rights can help to save our people from extinction and help to protect our language and cultural rights."
Ying argued that the plains aborigines, who have yet to be recognized as an indigenous people by the government, were fighting for their survival.
"The Ping Pus have suffered the most since colonial times. Right now, we are also suffering from pervasive discrimination and racist treatment in this country. Our indigenous identity is being wiped out, and our land taken away," said Ying, an elder of the Ketagalan people from Taoyuan County.
The U.N. council passed the declaration by a vote of 30 in favor to 2 against, and 12 abstentions, and it will be submitted to the U.N. General Assembly later this year for a final vote on its adoption.
Ying told reporters that to capitalize on the momentum of the human rights council's decision, Ping Pu groups will send representatives to U.N. forums later this year and next to tell the world of the emergency their people face and seek support to combat what they describe as human rights abuse in Taiwan.
Other activists from the association said they are upset about the inaction by the government -- from the past KMT to the current DPP administrations, saying it amounted to a national policy of human rights abuse and genocide against Ping Pu ethnic minorities.
These include the Ketagalan, Taokas, Pazeh, Papora, Kahabu, Babuza, Hoanya, Makatao, and Siraya plains aborigine communities.
Ping Pu activists have fought over the past two decades for recognition of their indigenous identity, which twelve other Austronesian tribal peoples have already received. They are the Amis, Atayal, Bunun, Kavalan, Paiwan, Puyuma, Rukai, Saisiyat, Tao, Thao, Truku, and Tsou.
Local activists claim the government has resisted all requests to set up an agency to deal with Ping Pu peoples' issues, pursuing in fact a "policy of genocide" against them.
"Because most Ping Pus are poor downtrodden rural farmers, the government and state agencies have tried many times to get rid of us and told us to go away by shutting the door on our demands," said Chia Tek-khiam, from the Makatao community of Kaohsiung County. "We are politically marginalized and at the bottom of the socio-economic class, so the government thinks they can get away with the genocide policy."
Chia added: "Ministers and politicians have used empty promises and delaying tactics to keep us waiting for nothing, so that within another 10 years, maybe the Ping Pu people culture will disappear altogether and it will no longer be an issue."
Chia indicated U.N. council's vote gives the Ping Pu "moral support" in their struggle for their natural rights as indigenous inhabitants of Taiwan.
Indigenous leaders from around the world, including Taiwan and other Asian countries, have participated in the indigenous forums at the U.N., including the two decades-long working processes that culminated in the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Even though Taiwan is not a member of the U.N., the country's NGO representatives from both mountain and plains aboriginal groups have grown increasingly involved in the worldwide indigenous rights movement at U.N. meetings and other international forums.
For example, both Taiwan's mountain aborigine and Ping Pu plains aborigine NGO groups have participated at the U.N. Permanent Forum for Indigenous Issues in New York since its inception in 2002 and the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Population in Geneva since 1988, as well as the working group on the draft declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
The U.N. indigenous peoples declaration upholds that indigenous peoples have the right to the full enjoyment, as a collective group or as individuals, of all human rights and fundamental freedoms as recognized in the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law.
It went on to say: "Indigenous peoples and individuals are free and equal to all other peoples and individuals and have the right to be free from any kind of discrimination."
Also the declaration asserted that Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinct political, legal, economic, social and cultural institutions, while retaining their rights to participate fully, if they so choose, in the political, economic, social and cultural life of the state government.
Source: Taiwan News (2006/07/03 13:14:46)
http://www.taiwannews.com.tw/
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The migrant worker issue means that what used to be a
local issue has now become a national one 
