China's Ethnic Minorities and Globalisation

China’s Ethnic Minorities and Globalisation

China’s fifty-five officially recognised ethnic minorities form over 8 per cent of the Chinese population, with over 100 million people, and occupy some 60 per cent of China’s territory. They are very diverse, and the degree of modernisation among them varies greatly. This book examines the current state of China’s ethnic minorities at a time when ethnic affairs and globalisation are key forces affecting the contemporary world. It considers the fields of policy, economy, society and international relations, including the impact of globalisation and outside influences. Colin Mackerras is Foundation Professor in the School of International Business and Asian Studies, Griffith University, Australia. A leading China specialist, his research work focuses on two main areas: China’s ethnic minorities, and its regional theatre, especially Peking Opera.

China’s Ethnic Minorities and Globalisation

Colin Mackerras

First published 2003 by RoutledgeCurzon 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeCurzon 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2003 Colin Mackerras All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Mackerras, Colin China’s ethnic minorities and globalisation / Colin Mackerras. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Minorities – China. 2. China – Ethnic relations – Political aspects. I. Title. DS730 .M33335 2003 305.8⬘00951–dc21 ISBN 0-203-18046-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-34420-0 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0– 415–30901–8 (Print Edition)

2002036713

Contents

Preface Abbreviations 1 Introduction

vii viii 1

2 Historical background, 1949–1989

19

3 Minorities politics, 1989–2002

37

4 The economies of the minorities

56

5 The realm of the mind, religion and education

113

6 Population, women and family

134

7 International relations

152

8 Conclusion

176

Appendix: China’s ethnic minorities Notes References Index

182 196 199 209

Preface

It is a truism to say that changes in the world at large, and in China in particular, have been enormous since the early 1990s. These changes have affected China’s ethnic minorities and necessitated a reconsideration of many matters relating to them. Some of the particular aspects of China’s minorities are covered in two earlier works that I completed in the early 1990s. These aspects are also treated in the present book, such as policy, international relations, economy and population. The material and interpretations come from a time period reflecting these recent changes. The term ‘globalisation’ was already in widespread use, yet it had not yet assumed the status of ‘grand narrative’ for interpreting the state of the world that it has come to occupy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although I take full responsibility for any weaknesses or errors this book may contain, I should like to offer thanks to the many people who have helped me write it. The first to mention are the members of the minorities themselves, who have offered me friendship and cooperation in giving me the material that forms the basis of the book. Several Chinese organisations have made it possible for me to visit the ethnic areas of China, some of which are situated in places that are difficult to access, by making travel arrangements and offering necessary assistance. The Australian Research Council has given me several research grants that have enabled me to spend time in China and its ethnic areas, to buy books and other materials about China’s minorities, and to undertake other research activities necessary for writing this book. My own university has been generous in granting me necessary leave and providing excellent research conditions, and my colleagues have always been supportive of my research and shared their ideas generously. In the last few years I have taught a course at Griffith University entitled ‘Minorities Questions in Asia’, which has included quite a lot of material on China. I would like to thank the students who have taken this course; quite a few of them over the years. They have helped me frame my ideas on minorities’ issues, commented on lectures, taken part in discussions and given me insights of value to formulating and thinking through ideas and interpreting information. Finally, I should like to thank my family, who have offered criticisms and comments, given unstinting assistance and shared many ideas with me. Colin Mackerras Brisbane June 2002

Abbreviations

ADB BJP CCP CND GDI HDI IMAR MPR NATO NBS NCNA NPC PLA PRC SDPC SSB TAR UNDP WTO XUAR

Asian Development Bank Bharatiya Janata Party Chinese Communist Party China News Digest gender-related development index human development index Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region Mongolian People’s Republic North Atlantic Treaty Organisation National Bureau of Statistics New China News Agency National People’s Congress People’s Liberation Army People’s Republic of China State Development Planning Commission State Statistical Bureau Tibetan Autonomous Region United Nations Development Programme World Trade Organisation Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region

1

Introduction

Among issues with the greatest impact on the world as a whole at the turn of the twenty-first century two of particular importance are ethnic relations and globalisation. The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 produced a spectacular flow-on effect all over the world. Among many other factors, it saw a dramatic increase in ethnic wars and conflicts in many parts of the globe, while ethnic tensions intensified in a range of other countries. Globalisation, or at least the less total form we might call internationalisation, has been important for a very long time. However, it gathered momentum greatly towards the end of the twentieth century. Its increasingly controversial nature became crystal clear at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting in Seattle in November 1999, when demonstrators protesting against unchecked globalisation forced a postponement of a new trade round. The reasons for the protests will be taken up later in this chapter. At the time China was in the late stages of active negotiations to join the WTO, having signed an agreement on entry with the United States earlier the same month. Negotiations had been lengthy and at times acrimonious. For China this success seemed a crowning achievement, since the United States was by far the most important and powerful of those countries with a say in whether China could join. There was considerable irony in the fact that China, which on many issues had once stood alongside ordinary people and against the power of governments, should now find itself aligned with powerful states against protestors. Quite a few hurdles stood in China’s way to WTO membership, but its efforts were eventually crowned with success in December 2001. China is a country with fifty-five state-recognised minority nationalities, plus a majority nationality called the Han, the ethnic group whom we associate most closely with China and ‘the Chinese’. Although the 2000 census put the proportion of the minority population in China’s total at 8.41 per cent, the areas where they reside take up about 60 per cent of the territory of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and many live near sensitive borders. For this and other reasons, China’s minorities are actually considerably more important for China than their population would suggest. This book aims to describe developments among China’s minorities between the end of the 1980s and 2002. Several significant events took place in 1989,

2

Introduction

marking it out as very significant. A large-scale crisis rocked China, followed by the appointment of Jiang Zemin as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in June 1989. Later the same year crises erupted in Eastern Europe, leading to the overthrow of the great majority of ruling Marxist–Leninist parties there, and 2 years later the Soviet Union itself collapsed. The second date is when the typescript of this book was completed. It also saw the retirement of Jiang Zemin as CCP General Secretary, and his replacement by Hu Jintao. The book aims to take up the minorities’ economies, their politics, their education, and their societies, including gender and population issues and in some cases religion. It also aims at preliminary explorations on how globalisation and its concomitant modernisation have affected China’s ethnic minorities during that time. In addition, the book considers the ramifications of secessionist activities at the turn of the century, and their implications for China as an integrated state. No account of globalisation can avoid international relations, and the book aims to cast further light on the way in which China’s minorities affect the international relations of the country as a whole. Finally, I am aiming through this book to contribute to theoretical discussions about the nature of globalisation in the contemporary world and its effects on ethnic groups, especially minorities.

Some background What is a minority nationality? Just who are we discussing when we talk of China’s ethnic minorities or minority nationalities? The answer is those fifty-five ethnic groups the Chinese state recognises as its ‘minority nationalities’. The Chinese state follows a definition of nationality laid down by Stalin in 1913 (1953: 307). It runs that a nationality (Chinese minzu) is ‘a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture’. There are problems in applying any definition involved in anything so controversial as ethnic matters, including this one. The Chinese Muslims who are termed Hui do not have their own language nowadays and their territory is so dispersed throughout the country that it is very difficult to claim that they have a common territory. Hardly any Manchus still speak Manchu. And there are other anomolies. However, the reality is that the Chinese state and its scholars have given a great deal of attention to ethnic identification based on this definition, especially in the 1950s. There was a substantial break owing to the Cultural Revolution of 1966– 1976, but the work of identification then began again. By 1979, the number of fifty-five had been reached. For various reasons, all other claims to being classified as a ‘nationality’ since then have been rejected. By far the largest group who could be, but is not in fact, considered a ‘nationality’ is the Hakkas. These are a south Chinese people who, although culturally, linguistically and socially quite distinct in the late imperial period of Chinese history, nevertheless played a significant role in twentieth-century Chinese nationalism,

Introduction

3

especially in the early period. Among smaller groups, one people that stands out is the Mosuo, a matrilinear people still living near the Lugu Lake which straddles the Yunnan-Sichuan border in the southwest of China. For various reasons, mainly political, the state does not recognise either of these peoples as a ‘nationality’. It still considers the Hakkas as part of the majority Han, and the Mosuo as a branch of the Naxi, and is unlikely to change its mind. This is despite the fact that there is still some ethnic pride in both peoples, including those who are quite convinced that they are indeed separate peoples. The Chinese state has published numerous official statistics based on its classifications. They cover a great many of the fields of relevance to this book. Moreover, Chinese scholars and officials have put out enormous amounts of information and insight, virtually all of it using the state-recognised classifications of the minority nationalities. Although the official figures can be subjected to criticism, they are on the whole the best available, and international bodies use them. Moreover, although some of the classifications are open to question, most are reasonably valid. Ethnic boundaries are rubbery at the best of times, and the fact remains that every Chinese has a ‘nationality’, which is included in a registration card using the official classifications. It is my overwhelming impression that the great majority of members of the minorities agree with, or at any rate accept, the classification in which they are placed. For these reasons, it is sensible and appropriate to adopt the Chinese state classifications for the purposes of this book. This does not mean that they should never be questioned. In the West many scholars have challenged the Chinese state categories and terminology. One eminent scholar of the Hui, or Chinese Muslims, argues that ‘Marxist–Stalinist nationality theory’ has placed limitations on official Chinese portrayals of the Hui (Gladney 1991: ix–x), and he is not alone in offering criticisms of this kind (e.g. Tapp 1995: especially 195–9). In the West there has been an enormous amount of thought and literature on questions relating to ethnic minorities terminology. The term ‘race’, which was once the most fashionable, has gone out of date because of its popularity with people now regarded as racists, such as nineteenth-century imperialists. A much more recent term than race is ‘ethnicity’, the first dictionary appearance of which was in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1972 (Eriksen 1993: 3). This term is preferable, since it lacks the judgemental overtones of ‘race’ and implies more cultural than biological concerns. Despite the relative novelty of the term, the corresponding adjective ‘ethnic’ has a much longer pedigree. One authority has written that ‘the term ethnic group is now widely used both within and without academic discourse’ (Fenton 1999: 58). A definition of an ‘ethnic group’ would appeal to ancestry, a shared history, and a common language and culture, possibly including religion. Schermerhorn (1970: 12) claims that ‘A necessary accompaniment is some consciousness of kind among members of the group’. This need places this definition on a much more subjective level than that of Stalin, who took no account at all of consciousness. The definition offered avoids the issue of whether ethnicity is primordial or socially derived, a debate over which much controversy has raged. On the other hand, Stalin’s definition, by

4

Introduction

calling a nationality ‘historically constituted’, suggests that it is socially based, an impression confirmed by the trend of Marxist thinking generally. One of the advantages of the term ‘ethnic group’ over ‘ethnic minority’ is that in some countries, such as Indonesia, there are no ethnic groups with populations making up the majority of the people, meaning that all groups belong to minorities. However, that is certainly not the case in China. The aim of this section is to clarify precisely who is the subject of this book. The theory of ethnicity is an enormous topic and well outside my scope. But given these background comments, it seems to me legitimate to refer to the peoples of concern to this book as ‘ethnic groups’, ‘ethnic minorities’, ‘minority nationalities’ or simply ‘minorities’. I intend to use those terms more or less interchangeably, making it clear if there is a reason for avoiding one or the other. The sources There has been a considerable amount of work carried out over the last 20 years or so on China’s minorities in contemporary times, both in Chinese and European languages. Chinese works are too numerous to mention here, but many are cited in the notes and bibliography. Works in English are much more limited in number, although not necessarily in distinction. Some particularly deserving mention are Dru Gladney’s work on the Hui (1991), Stevan Harrell’s on the Yi,1 Louisa Schein’s on the Miao (2000), Ralph Litzinger’s on the Yao (2000), Katherine Kaup’s on the Zhuang (2000) and Tsering Shakya’s history of modern Tibet (1999). Obviously it is appropriate that this book should base itself at least in part on what others have written. I note that one issue separating the present book from the great bulk of other work, either in Chinese or a European language, is that it attempts consideration of the minorities as a whole, rather than approaching one only. The advantage of this approach is that it allows for global coverage and draws attention to differences, comparisons and contrasts between and among ethnic groups. It allows for consideration of how the Chinese state and the minorities who live within its territory impact upon each other. In addition to written sources, I have made use of numerous visits to minority areas, especially in the 1990s, and these have formed my main material for this book. Minority areas visited include Tibet in 1985, 1990, 1997 and 2002, Xinjiang in 1982, 1994 and 1999, Guizhou in 1990, western Sichuan in December 1996 and January 1997, the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in 1986 and 1990, Inner Mongolia and Ningxia in 1990, Qinghai in 1995, and minority areas of Yunnan in 1996, 2000 and on other occasions. With but few exceptions, visits to these minority areas have involved going to see schools and other educational institutions, families, factories, farms, performances and art troupes, and monasteries, temples, mosques and/or other religious sites, among other places of interest. In all places I have tried to interview relevant people, finding out not only details of their lives and work but also their views about what matters to them, their role as members of an ethnic minority and their attitude

Introduction

5

towards life in contemporary China. The great majority of these interviews have been conducted in Chinese, but with a few in English or through interpreters familiar with minority languages such as Uygur and Tibetan. History Some background history of the period of focus in this book is necessary to make sense of developments among China’s ethnic minorities, and the mutual impact of globalisation on China and its minority nationalities. Since there is a considerable amount in other chapters about the history and conditions of individual minorities, it is Chinese background history that is of concern here. After a period of radical revolution known as the Cultural Revolution (1966 –1976) and led by Mao Zedong (1893–1976), China entered a period of reform, in which the principal goal was economic development under the continued leadership of the CCP. The main architect of this policy was Deng Xiaoping (1904 –1997), a towering figure in modern Chinese history who, though never the formal leader either of the Chinese government or CCP, in fact wielded gigantic power during the last quarter of the twentieth century, far more than any other single individual. The influence of Mao Zedong was so strongly eclipsed and the evaluation of his role so severely negated at that time that one eminent authority on Chinese politics has entitled his book on the age of Deng Xiaoping ‘burying Mao’ (Baum 1994). The period of reform was introduced by the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh CCP Central Committee, which lasted from 18 to 22 December 1978. What this full session of China’s top Party body did was to set the parameters of a new revolution based not on radical ideology but on a quest for modernisation, economic development, national strengthening and a drastic rise in the standard of living. More than any other it was at this meeting that Deng Xiaoping asserted himself and laid the groundwork for his future power. Openness to the outside world was a primary aim of the reform policies. Overseas trade boomed and foreign expertise poured into the country. Chinese students went overseas in large numbers and, although many never returned, enough did so that their training and expertise made a difference to the economy and society. China changed from an isolated country to one that was highly susceptible and open to world influences. China’s joining the WTO in 2001 was a major spur to globalisation, but in fact the country had been subject to those good and bad trends we associate with globalisation somewhat before then. This incipient globalisation had profound implications for China. Finding out about what was happening outside the country, people began to demand far more in the way of freedoms and outside knowledge and techniques. Western, especially American, influence became incomparably more widespread than had been the case under Mao Zedong. One result was a rapid decline in the impact of Marxism–Leninism among ordinary people, and a concomitant growth in that of Western liberalism.

6

Introduction

During the 1980s there were several major student movements, the main ones being at the end of 1986 and in the middle of 1989. The first of these brought about the downfall of the CCP General Secretary Hu Yaobang, appointed to that position in the middle of 1981 and, after a break, the appointment of Zhao Ziyang to the position. The second developed a momentum so powerful on behalf of democracy that Deng Xiaoping came to believe that the CCP was about to be overthrown. He reacted by suppressing the student movement brutally through a military action on the night of 3– 4 June, with substantial casualties among the students and others. Later the same month a CCP Central Committee Plenum dismissed CCP General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, replacing him with Jiang Zemin, who also became state president in March 1993. The period following the suppression of the student demonstrations of 1989 was much more stable politically than most Western observers had expected. Jiang Zemin remained the CCP General Secretary until the Sixteenth CCP Congress towards the end of 2002. On the other hand, the plague of corruption, which had worsened significantly in the 1980s by comparison with the earlier period, continued to intensify its attack on China’s body politic. To be fair to him, Jiang Zemin appears to have done his best to counter this corruption, and authorities tracked down some extremely high-ranking corrupt officials. These even included former Guangxi Governor Cheng Kejie, executed on 14 September 2000. For a former provincial governor to be executed for corruption was completely unprecedented in the history of the PRC. Despite the efforts of authorities to stamp out corruption, they are most unlikely to solve the problem and are unlikely to do better than contain it. The opening up, indeed globalisation, of China has brought tremendous changes to its society and culture. There is very much more freedom than there used to be. There has been a religious revival, which has affected virtually all parts of the country, especially the minority areas. On the other hand, the authorities did not hesitate to suppress religious activities they thought were a threat to the state, the most important example being the Falungong, a quasi-religious sect drawing on martial arts, meditation and healing. On 25 April 1999 this body suddenly and unexpectedly announced its presence in society with a large-scale demonstration outside the residences of the top leadership. The authorities took fright and banned the Falungong in July 1999. This did not prevent further demonstrations by the Falungong, with authorities arresting practitioners. In 2001 the Falungong leader Li Hongzhi, who had lived in the United States since 1992, was actually nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize but made no headway. Mao Zedong’s regime laid considerably more weight on gender equality than Deng Xiaoping’s, with the slogan that ‘women hold up half the sky’. This was never reality under Mao, but observers generally saw a decline in the status of women in the period of reform. Certainly, the Fourth United Nations Conference on Women held in Beijing in September 1995 brought forward some very negative Western images of the fate of women under Deng, with emphasis laid on the abduction and sale of girls and the poor treatment of female orphans (see Mackerras 1999: 160–3). On the other hand, there was a brighter side to the story.

Introduction

7

The United Nations 1998 Human Development Report (cited ‘Monitor’ 1999: 12) ranked 174 countries according to such criteria as the number of women in parliament and the percentage of female administrators and professional and technical workers in the workforce. In general Asian countries fared very badly, but China came in the first in Asia and number 33 in the world. Women’s share of earned income was 38 per cent. This compared with 45 per cent in Sweden (the highest ranked country in the world for all criteria combined), 37 per cent in Thailand and 34 per cent in Japan. Economically, China went ahead spectacularly in the last quarter of the twentieth century. It was, for a start, not affected nearly as severely by the financial and economic crisis that afflicted much of East and Southeast Asia in 1997 and following years; so that the balance between China and its neighbours shifted in its favour. China’s economic growth over the entire period from 1979 to 2000 was officially given as 9.6 per cent per year, the highest of any major economy over those years; while between 1990 and 1996 the average real growth rate per person in the gross national product was 11 per cent, the highest in the world after Equatorial Guinea (Turner 2000: 434). The result was that China changed from an extremely backward country to one in the early stages of modernity in an astonishingly short time for so huge a country. In the eastern seaboard and in some other urban centres there were places that could definitely be called ‘modern’, even by world standards. It is true that poverty remained, being very serious in many places, but the number of people regarded as ‘impoverished’ was drastically reduced. An official Chinese white paper claimed that, in the rural areas, the number of people under the poverty line had fallen from about 250 million in the late 1970s to 34 million at the end of 1999, with even those impoverished people having ‘basically achieved adequate feeding and clothing’ (Information Office 2000a: para. 7).2 Western observers tend to be sceptical of the Chinese figures, arguing that the boundary of precisely what constitutes absolute poverty is set too low, but accept that poverty has been greatly reduced. On the other hand, some parts of the country developed much more quickly than others, while some people did much better than others in all regions. The result was that inequalities were far more serious at the beginning of the twenty-first century than they had been in 1978. The economic growth of China was accompanied by a spectacular political rise. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the rise of China internationally was one of the most important developments in the history of the world of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Moreover, by the end of the century it was actually getting on better both with its neighbours and the world as a whole than had been the case for a long time. The very poisonous Sino-Soviet relations of the 1960s to mid-1980s gave place to quite a warm friendship valued by both sides. Relations with Vietnam, which had been very bad during the 1980s, were more or less repaired in the 1990s. Although China’s relationships with Japan and the United States were rather unstable by the end of the century, they could hardly be described as bad, both countries maintaining cordiality with China strong enough for cooperation in a great many international endeavours.

8

Introduction

Globalisation We now turn to a much more detailed discussion of the concept that is one of the cores of this book: globalisation. What is globalisation? Since the 1980s a substantial literature has developed on this concept and scholars are not in full agreement over just what globalisation means and entails. Afshar and Barrientos (1999: 1) write that the term has come into use ‘to define various aspects of global expansion in the past decade’. It is certainly true that the term gained considerable currency in the last decade of the twentieth century by comparison with the preceding period. Yet, it was as early as 1960 that the eminent theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase the ‘global village’.3 Moreover, there is nothing new about global expansion or internationalisation. One thinks of the dramatic expansion of religions in the distant past, for example, the rapid and spectacular spread of Islam over much of the Eurasian continent and North Africa in the decade or so before the death of Muhammad in 632 and the century or so following it. Nineteenth-century colonialism spread modernising influences, ideas and Western economic patterns through much of the world and led on to expanded global penetration from the main Western powers to countries elsewhere. Yet despite these earlier movements, globalisation has gathered momentum since the end of the Second World War, and especially since the ongoing computer revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. It has become more and more difficult for any of the world’s regions to escape influence from elsewhere, so that internationalisation has become more genuinely global. The ability of people to move around the world in very large numbers and extremely quickly through air travel, and above all the instantaneous transfer of news, information and ideas through radio, television and the Internet have transformed world society and culture in a way, at a speed, and to an extent which previous generations could hardly have imagined. Anthony McGrew has put forward a definition that to me seems very appropriate to the contemporary era. He writes (1992: 65–6):4 Globalization refers to the mutiplicity of linkages and interconnections that transcend the nation-states (and by implication the societies) which make up the modern world system. It defines a process through which events, decisions, and activities in one part of the world can come to have significant consequences for individuals and communities in quite distant parts of the globe. Nowadays, goods, capital, people, knowledge, images, communications, crime, culture, pollutants, drugs, fashions, and beliefs all readily flow across territorial boundaries. Transnational networks, social movements and relationships are extensive in virtually all areas of human activity from the academic to the sexual.

Introduction

9

There is clearly a tight connection between modernisation and globalisation. In his now famous essay on ‘the consequences of modernity’, British New Labour ideologue Anthony Giddens (1990: 63, 177) rightly stresses that modernity ‘is inherently globalising’. It was the Industrial Revolution that led to colonialism, a factor which spread modernising economies, cultures and ideas throughout the globe. The advance of technologies of various kinds has been of crucial importance in the development both of modernisation and globalisation. One thinks of the advances from the sailing ship to the steamship, from propellor-driven aeroplanes to jet aircraft, from telegraph to the digital telephone, from radio to satellite television, and above all the development of the computer. On the other hand, there are aspects in which the modernisation and globalisation point in opposite directions. Probably the main one is the role of the nationstate. Giddens (1990: 1) associates modernity with ‘modes of social life or organisation which emerged in Europe from about the seventeeth century onwards’, obviously including the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which saw the beginnings of the rise of the nation-state. But by ignoring borders globalisation is in some ways inherently hostile to the nation-state and challenges the way it operates at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As it happens, many of China’s minorities live near borders which globalisation appears to undermine. Globalisation seems to reduce the control most governments exert over the economies of their own countries, and it allows influences from outside which may damage the independence of societies. One specialist (Beck 2000: 21) believes that globalisation implies ‘the breakdown of the basic assumptions whereby societies and states have been conceived, organised and experienced as territorial units separated from one another’ (italics in original). The term ‘modernisation’ appears to emphasise time, while ‘globalisation’ puts the stress on space. But it may be features that define both. Arif Dirlik’s summary of the process from the discourse of modernisation to that of globalisation appears to me apt and worth quoting. He writes (2000: 248): What we may describe as the replacement of the paradigm of modernization by a paradigm of globalization has many dimensions that range from the recognition of new groups, the empowerment of others, and questions about the nation-state as an appropriate political, economic, and cultural unit, to the disappearance of socialist alternatives to capitalism accompanied by, ironically, an erosion of a Eurocentric teleology of modernity. In McGrew’s list of items which can so easily cross borders in the contemporary world some are clearly good, notably knowledge, and some can be either good, bad or indifferent, such as goods, culture or people, though an optimist would expect that all three are predominantly good. But some are quite clearly bad, such as crime, pollutants and drugs. Certainly, criminals take major advantage of globalisation, among them drug-traffickers being prominent. And drugs are among factors that imply the spread of disease. Although there is absolutely nothing new about global epidemics – indeed, what is remarkable is the extent to

10

Introduction

which globalisation has spread the prevention and curing of disease – the spread of the HIV virus and AIDS since the 1980s has been among the most disastrous developments of our time. Environmentalists have often pointed out that ecosystems, wild animals and pollutants attach absolutely no importance whatever to national borders. Globalisation, democracy and human rights The example of Islam mentioned above emphasises the importance of beliefs and ideas in globalisation. To this writer two related ideas appear to have been pre-eminent in the globalisation processes accelerating in the late years of the twentieth century. These are democracy and human rights. Both are relevant to the topic of this book, especially since one of the most important forms of human rights is ethnic rights. As one globalisation theorist has put it (Scholte 1997: 26 –7), ‘there is a broad and fairly solid consensus in today’s world that good governance means democratic governance’, and many people see globalisation and democratisation ‘as two sides of the same coin’. Liberal theorists, among others, have drawn attention to the large-scale spread of democracy across the globe in recent times, from the fall of the Soviet bloc like a row of dominoes late in 1989 to that of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in October 2000, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the apartheid regime in South Africa during the 1990s. And meanwhile in East Asia, South Korea and Taiwan saw the expansion of democratic values, with Taiwan holding its first elections for president in March 1996. There are of course many remaining undemocratic factors in the world. Few people are consulted when world bodies make decisions that affect populations all over the world in the most direct ways. The protestors in Seattle in November 1999 and in Prague in August 2000 were very vocal in demanding greater popular participation in bodies such as the WTO, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. And one does not have to look far to find places where democracy actually retreated, a prominent example being the military takeover in Pakistan in October 1999. China was the most important among the world’s countries that failed to overthrow its communist party, nor did it introduce popular elections for its top leaders. However, this did not mean that there was no progress towards democratic governance. In November 1987 the government introduced a law allowing for village elections. By the end of the twentieth century more than a million village elections had taken place throughout the country, only about 60 per cent of them resulting in village heads who were members of the CCP. At the end of 1998 an open election took place to elect the head of a township, a level higher than the village. Although it is most unlikely that the election of non-CCP members will lead quickly to a multi-party system, the long-term trend appears to be in the direction of greater democratic participation. The democracy movement of 1989 had not revived by the middle of 2002, but there does not appear to be any fundamental reason why China should not eventually adopt a more democratic system of government.5

Introduction

11

The fact that Taiwan holds regular democratic elections suggests most strongly that democracy is not inherently contrary to Chinese culture. Issues of human rights have become a focus for considering globalisation because, whereas law concerning individual rights once belonged to the national arena, it became definitely international after the Second World War. The main starting point was the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. But since then a whole series of international laws and conventions has developed, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1965. One of the central debates over human rights has revolved around the issue of whether they are universal or communitarian. The former position holds that human beings have rights simply by being human; and that they are given by nature or God and cannot be taken away. The communitarian view emphasises ‘the formative role of the community in constituting individuality’ (Brown 1997: 480); rights did not exist before societies and it is particular societies that bestow rights on individual people. Since the 1990s, the international community has focused far more on human rights than it ever did before, which means that they are much more a global issue than in earlier times. On the other hand, some scholars claim that the end of the Cold War meant a challenge to the universalist view of human rights ‘by critics who stress the western, masculine, intolerant nature of this universalism’ (Brown 1997: 471). In this view, human rights theory is based largely on Western notions of rights, ignoring other civilisations’ contributions to humanitarian values; and the articles both in the Universal Declaration and the various covenants assume traditional gender roles. As far as China is concerned, however, the year promoting human rights in world consciousness was most certainly 1989, and the debate over universalist and communitarian values has raged ever since. Following the crackdown of mid1989, China came under severe criticism, especially from the United States and other Western countries, for its abuse of human rights in suppressing protestors peacefully demonstrating on behalf of democracy and democratic values. The Chinese state, on the other hand, saw things quite differently. In its view, it was merely suppressing a rebellion which, had it succeeded, would have brought down the CCP and thrown the country into chaos, as has happened in the Soviet Union. This would have meant far more suffering for far more people than in fact happened. Based on the communitarian view of human rights, to suppress this movement with so much potential for instability was a far better course of action than simply standing by and waiting to be overthrown, which is what the West seemed to be asking for. Or so argued the Chinese authorities.6 For Western countries, the issue of human rights in developing policy towards China has remained a crucial one since 1989. They have consistently criticised China for human rights abuses, even while taking steps to deal with China both in commercial and strategic matters. The Chinese state has been more than willing to deal with the West, but has been clear that relations in the area of human

12

Introduction

rights must be between equals, not the West as teacher lecturing the naughty boy. On 1 November 1991, the Chinese government issued a document on human rights in China (Information Office 1991: 8–45), which was the first of a series in what marked a major push in human rights diplomacy. Focusing on the right to subsistence as the primary right, the paper argued that China had done very well in this realm, and also covered such diverse topics as the rights of ethnic minorities and the disabled, religious freedom, and cultural and social rights. Later papers followed similar themes, with some focusing on such individual items as women and minority nationalities. By the end of the century, Western governments seemed less enthusiastic about acting as international police on human rights in the case of China, and many had developed a human rights dialogue with the Chinese government. They had decided that this was a far better, more productive and less dangerous and provocative way of tackling the human rights issue with China than direct confrontation. Authorities are generally quite happy to leave the main running in the field of human rights to self-appointed, non-governmental activists. Why is globalisation so controversial? The proponents of globalisation include most of the world’s main power-holders. The reason for this is that the globalised world has allowed a faster and more widespread expansion of wealth than ever experienced before in history. More food and other life necessities are produced, housing is better, more people are able to travel, lifestyles have become more varied, news travels faster, more people have the opportunity to watch television, more are hooked up to the Internet, and freedoms have spread to include more people than has ever been the case before. Why then should anybody complain about globalisation? Some observers charge globalisation with being too set on a single course of action and ideas, despite its show of freedom and liberalism. In an avowedly radical critique Ulrich Beck (2000: 129) denounces globalisation for ‘its economic one-dimensionalism, its one-way-street linear thinking, its world-market authoritarianism’. Critics of globalisation accuse it of promoting inequalities and even of increasing poverty, at the same time as it expands wealth. The ‘world-market authoritarianism’ of which Beck speaks is central here. The critics believe that the emphasis of the WTO on free trade and reduction of tariffs is a factor spreading inequalities in economic and social terms, because it allows the products of the richer countries to flood the markets of the poorer. Certainly the late years of the twentieth century saw a rise in economic inequalities throughout most of East and Southeast Asia, being worst in Thailand and China (Islam 2000: 322). The latter country had come out of a period in which economic equality was touted as one of the major benefits of a radical revolution. And although the realities belied the ideology, most people saw the slide towards inequality as one of the prices that had to be paid for the greater wealth of the reform period, especially since the overwhelming majority of people benefited from the new policies introduced from 1978 (see also Wang 2000: 378–9).

Introduction

13

One point about globalisation is that influences can move in any direction. They can move either from the developed countries to the developing, or the other way around. In the West, Tibetan Buddhism has become very fashionable in the ‘new spirituality’ popular among young Westerns since the late years of the twentieth century. However, influences do not move equally in all directions. Western, and especially American, influence all over the world is incomparably greater and more deep-seated than is Asian influence in the Western countries. The domination of the world economy by that of the United States and other major Western powers, and the concomitant impact on ideas and culture make the United States look still very hegemonic among the world’s countries. Indeed, some observers have even regarded globalisation as equivalent to Americanisation, with the advance of global capitalism destroying communities everywhere. The November 1999 protests at the WTO meetings in Seattle and later demonstrations against globalisation in other parts of the world addressed a range of issues, including labour standards, environmental norms, women’s and ethnic rights, and the tendency, as they saw it, for globalisation to undermine local and ethnic cultures. On the subject of labour and the environment, Asian governments have on the whole been keen to prevent the WTO from interfering, arguing that it is precisely the low cost of labour in their own countries which makes them competetive. Then United States President Bill Clinton supported the view of protestors that the WTO had an obligation to consider the connection between trade and labour standards, and take a stand against child labour and bad labour conditions found in some Asian countries. And on the environment, Asian governments have wanted the WTO to keep out, because too great an emphasis on the environment risks holding back their economic growth, while protesters and many Western authorities see a direct relationship between trade and the environment. In all these matters, China has come over as one of the targets of protestors, because it stands on the side opposite to them on so many globalising issues. Exiled labour activists have painted an extremely grim picture of labour conditions in China, trying to argue that trade with China should depend on attempts to improve such conditions radically. And China’s environment is recognised by virtually all people as shockingly bad. It is true that progressive and stringent laws have been introduced to improve the situation, and the Chinese authorities should, in my opinion, be given credit for them. Yet the improvements are not nearly enough to counter the impression that in any competition between economic growth and environmental protection it is the former that will prevail. One of the most controversial features of globalisation lies in the perception that it eliminates cultural difference and cultural identities. One hears a great deal in the contemporary world about big developers who destroy the habitat not only of wild animals but even of small ethnic communities, eradicating their culture in the process. There is of course some truth in this charge. Globalisation does tend to spread a global culture everywhere, and indigenous cultures frequently suffer, or even go under, as a result. Yet it is important not to exaggerate the destructive effects of globalisation on cultural identities. Indeed, in some ways it can even strengthen cultural

14

Introduction

consciousness. Two specialists have expressed this tension between globalisation and identity as follows (Meyer and Geschiere 1999: 2): There is much empirical evidence that people’s awareness of being involved in open-ended global flows seems to trigger a search for fixed orientation points and action frames, as well as determined efforts to affirm old and construct new boundaries. For students of globalization it is therefore important to develop an understanding of globalization that not only takes into account the rapid increase in mobility of people, goods and images, but also the fact that, in many places, flow goes hand in hand with a closure of identities which often used to be much more fuzzy and permeable. Nick Knight (2000: 242) is, in my opinion, quite right to point out that ‘the technologies that make a global culture possible also facilitate the dissemination and hence revival of distinctive local cultures’. His emphasis on technology in the context both of creating the global culture and maintaining or reviving the local ones is well placed. In his thoughtful essay on cultural identity in the contemporary world, Stuart Hall (1992: 304) draws attention to the fact that ‘globalization is very unevenly distributed around the globe’. And in a country like China, it is ‘very unevenly distributed’ even within a single nation-state, being already highly influential in the large cities of the eastern seaboard but very much less so in the unmodern villages of the west, including in the minority areas. Hall (1992: 304) also comments on ‘a fascination with difference and the marketing of ethnicity and “otherness” ’, which coexist with globalisation. He continues: There is a new interest in ‘the local’ together with the impact of ‘the global’. Globalization (in the form of flexible specialization and ‘niche marketing’) actually exploits local differentiation. Thus, instead of thinking of the global replacing the local, it would be more accurate to think of a new articulation between ‘the global’ and ‘the local’. … [I]t seems unlikely that globalization will simply destroy national identities. It is more likely to produce, simultaneously, new ‘global’ and new ‘local’ identifications. Hall is quite right to suggest that globalisation can actually assist cultural identities through its emphasis on the local. The dichotomy between the global and the local has even led to the adoption of a new term: glocalisation. In the 1980s the word had been used in Japanese business jargon for ‘global localisation’ but in the 1990s entered the sociological lexicon in a very different sense (for instance Robertson 1995: 28–32). China has clearly been a site of this ‘glocalisation’. One writer argues that, especially since the early to mid-1990s, Chinese preference for local consumer products has involved resistance to foreign or global counterparts. She claims (Hooper 2000: 441) that ‘an alliance of Chinese commercial interests, the government and media’ has appropriated both nationalism and culture, ‘alleging

Introduction

15

the greater “suitability” of their products for Chinese consumers’ in a largely successful bid to secure a good share of the market against foreign competition. One excellent example of this lust for otherness is in tourism. Although not new to the second half of the twentieth century, it certainly accelerated and grew exponentially at that time, to become one of the largest and most important spinners of wealth in the world economy. Millions of people came to enjoy both prosperity through higher standards of living and the opportunity through better and faster means of transport and more holidays to travel all over the world. Backpacking became extremely fashionable among younger people, while older ones joined organised tourist groups to visit places ordinary people in previous generations could hardly have dreamed about. At the height of the tourist season many cities of Europe have as many visitors as residents, and a few even more. And of course tourism is a vital component of the economy well beyond Europe. The number of international tourists visiting China, including those from Hong Kong and Macao, rose from 5.7 million in 1980 to 17.83 million in 1985, and then from 43.68 million in 1994 to 63.48 million in 1998. Earnings from international tourism grew enormously over the same period. In American dollars the rise was from $617 million in 1980, to $1.25 billion in 1985, and from $7.2 billion in 1994 to $12.6 billion in 1998.7 Although North America and Europe provide the greatest numbers of tourists, the people of Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan have entered the tourist market in a very big way, travelling not only in their own and other Asian countries but in Europe, America and elsewhere. Domestic Chinese tourism also grew during the 1990s, with 5.24 million in 1994 and 6.94 in 1998 (NBS 1999: 609). And for the first time, significant numbers of Chinese began to go abroad for the purposes of tourism in the 1990s. Globalisation, sovereignty and the state It was earlier pointed out that one of the respects in which modernisation and globalisation differ in their effects is in the power of the nation-state and in the concept of sovereignty, both of them central to the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. And the rise of the nation-state and the demands of sovereignty have made for clearer and more sharply demarcated borders throughout the world. But the acceleration of globalisation has reversed this trend, with borders becoming challenged and in some cases more porous. Migrations of people in significant numbers to distant countries have become common, with authorities finding great difficulty in controlling them. One writer (Scholte 1997: 21) goes so far as to say that ‘the core Westphalian norm of sovereignty is no longer operative; nor can it be retrieved in the present globalizing world’. This is a very strong statement with which some would not agree, especially governments striving to control their own territories. Crucial among such governments is that of China, which has made very clear its insistence that it has the right to exercise sovereignty over all those territories it claims as within the PRC, including the minority areas of Tibet and Xinjiang. Indeed, numerous accusations

16

Introduction

of human rights abuses from Western organisations have been ritually and uniformly greeted by requests to keep out of China’s internal affairs, implying that China intends to maintain its rights of sovereignty in those areas. The controversy over sovereignty came to a head in March 1999, when the countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) began a major bombing campaign against Serbia, mainly on the grounds that it had been carrying out ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. For China this bombing campaign was outrageous, because the NATO powers had, without reference to the United Nations, taken the matter into their own hands and intervened in the sovereign affairs of an independent nation-state against the wishes of its government. For the Chinese leadership, the whole episode suggested that the Western powers or some other regional grouping might bomb China’s own capital if they decided that the human rights situation in Tibet or Xinjiang had descended into a situation of ethnic cleansing. If, against the wishes of such states as China and Russia, sovereignty is in decline, then what of the nation-state itself. According to McGrew (1992: 92), ‘A powerful argument can be made that globalization is compromising the authority, the autonomy, the nature and the competence of the modern nation-state’. When one considers the growing influences of transnational bodies and the declining authority which many governments command within their own countries one can see the point of this contention. However, there are differing points of view. One of them, challenging the theory of the decline of the state, argues that ‘the generic “state” persists as a crucial actor in the world economy’ (Smith et al. 1999: 1), but in changing contexts and with new functions. The point is made in the political realm through the terrorist attack that brought about the total collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001. While the terrorists who hijacked and flew the planes into the towers had no obvious state allegiance, it was a coalition of American-led states that retaliated with war, and against a state, Afghanistan. It is also striking that by the growth and improvement of computer and other technology, states are able to intervene in the affairs of their citizens more effectively than ever. Moreover, states are able to cooperate with each other to serve common interests. Examples include the NATO intervention over Kosovo. In my opinion, the nation-state may have declined in some ways, but in others it is stronger than ever, albeit with different functions. I do not expect its demise in the foreseeable future. China as one of the world’s more statist countries will be struggling to maintain this institution for a long time. Of all the countries around the globe it is among the oldest to have a recognisable state power exercising effective control over a significant territory. Specialists argue over when China first saw the emergence of ‘the state’, but it was certainly no later that the first unification of China in the third century BCE under the Qin dynasty led by the powerful tyrant Qin Shihuang. The Qin state certainly had a powerful army, and a powerful bureaucratic apparatus exercising control over the people. It controlled a significant territory and, perhaps most important of all, it laid down the idea of the unity of the Chinese nation which proved so effective that it has lasted ever since. Of course China’s territory has not always been the same as it is at present, but the ideal of

Introduction

17

a single China governing all Chinese territory has, on the whole, held sway more or less since that time. In recent years the power of the CCP and the Chinese government has become more dispersed. They are much less able to exercise full control over the activities of the citizens of China than they were during the reign of Mao Zedong. Outside influences, especially those from the United States and other Western countries, were able to create a greater impact on what people knew, on their fashions and lifestyle, and on the arts they enjoyed than had once been the case. Since joining the WTO in 2001, China has had to take much more notice of international laws governing trade, investment and the environment, and even such social matters as human rights. This process is likely to accelerate in the coming years, further increasing international influence on China and inevitably reducing the control the Chinese state can exert in its own territory. Yet it is important not to exaggerate this claim. The state, as one specialist has pointed out, was closely involved in the rise of the Chinese economy that was one of the most important processes characterising the last decades of the twentieth century (Friedman 1999: especially 252–62). The CCP, or whichever group dominates the government of China, will hardly give up all its authority. And it is most unlikely that external governments or international bodies will require the authorities in China to give up more than a modicum of its power. Bodies such as the International Monetary Fund have on occasion made extreme demands on governments in return for loans. But the Chinese economy will have to decline enormously before it gets remotely near such a position. The relevance of globalisation for China and her ethnic minorities So what has globalisation to do with China and her minorities? In essence, globalisation is relevant because of its implications for the state and because minorities are a kind of case study of ‘the local culture’ threatened by globalisation. Clifford Geertz (1963: 108) puts the contradiction very well in his discussion of new states. He writes of ‘two powerful, thoroughly interdependent, yet distinct and often actually opposed motives – the desire to be recognized as responsible agents whose wishes, acts, hopes, and opinions “matter”, and the desire to build an efficient, dynamic modern state’. For China to function as an efficient, dynamic and modern state, it is of crucial importance that the country should be integrated well enough to act as a single and coherent whole, and at least to avoid national disintegration. This fate which did so much damage to the economy, politics and society of the once powerful Soviet Union is one the Chinese leaders wish at all costs to avoid following. Globalisation has the potential to weaken or even undermine the Chinese state. It certainly has the potential to effect the overthrow of the CCP. The way in which the Chinese state relates to its ethnic minorities carries implications of the most enormous importance for China, because at least two of China’s most populous minorities, the Uygurs of Xinjiang and the Tibetans of Tibet, have already undertaken secessionist movements. As will be shown in later

18

Introduction

chapters, at least the first of these two grew more confident in the last decade of the twentieth century, as the Chinese state strove harder to check and suppress them, being sharply criticised for human rights abuses in the process. On the other hand, concepts like that of nation-state, globalisation and modernisation look very different to ethnic minorities within large states. Some of China’s minorities value their identities very deeply and are willing to struggle, or even fight against heavy odds, to keep them thriving. The issue of how the cultures of China’s ethnic minorities have fared under the impact of the thrust towards modernisation and the trend towards globalisation since the late 1970s is of great significance, globalisation having affected virtually all the minorities to a greater or lesser extent. Many of the minorities have diasporas able and prepared to wield influence outside China on behalf of their co-nationals at home. The most outstanding example is of course the Tibetans, who have a leader in the form of the Dalai Lama with a status and reputation high enough to win the Nobel Peace Prize (1989). There are, however, others with diasporas which, if they are not particularly influential as the twenty-first century dawns, are certainly doing their best to become so. Although the diasporas are not the subject of this book, they have a relevance for their impact, or potential impact, on foreign images of China and on China’s foreign relations. In Western countries it has become fashionable to support ethnonationalist movements, even including independence and the founding of new nation-states. The Basques of Spain are among the few counter-examples, but among others with strong popular sympathy in the West one thinks of the Tamils in Sri Lanka, the Chechens, the Kurds and several peoples in Indonesia. And of course before its foundation as an independent state in May 2002, the aspirations of East Timor enjoyed enormous popular support in Australia and elsewhere. A range of factors has created this sympathy for ethnonationalists, including the oppression states have forced on them. But ironically, globalisation has assisted greatly, because it has quickened awareness in all countries of what is happening elsewhere. The relevance of globalisation is wide-ranging in the contemporary world. It certainly matters greatly both for China and for its ethnic minorities. And it matters for people outside China as well. With this ‘big picture’ in mind, some details should become clear in the following chapters.

2

Historical background, 1949–1989

The government of Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), which lasted from 1927 to 1949, cared a great deal about China’s national unity, and was aware how important minorities could be in border affairs. However, he was not particularly concerned about minority affairs from any other point of view. The Japanese had attempted to woo over the Mongolians to their side and part of the Mongolian population, as well as other ethnic groups of northeast China or Manchuria, had belonged to the Japanese puppet state of Manchukoku in the 1930s and down to their defeat in 1945. The succeeding civil war had done nothing to improve the situation in the country as a whole either economically or socially, either for the majority Han people or the minorities.

The minorities, 1949–1976 Given China’s recent history it was not surprising that ethnic issues imposed themselves on the CCP right from the moment it established itself in power at the head of the PRC on 1 October 1949. Mao Zedong and his CCP had already had occasion to develop ideas about the minorities during their time as revolutionary opponents of the government, and they had gained some support from the ethnic areas through which they passed during their famous Long March of 1934–1935. But actually being the government of the whole country raised different problems the CCP had never really had to face. Early policy on minorities The PRC laid down its policy on minorities in Articles 50 –3 of its interim constitution called the ‘Common Programme’, adopted on 29 September 1949. Article 50 ran: All nationalities within the boundaries of the People’s Republic of China are equal. They shall establish unity and mutual aid among themselves and shall oppose imperialism and their own public enemies, so that the People’s Republic of China will become a big fraternal and cooperative family composed of all its nationalities. Greater nationalism and chauvinism shall

20

Historical background be opposed. Acts involving discrimination, oppression, and splitting of the unity of the various nationalities shall be prohibited.1

The CCP summed up its policy on minorities as ‘unity and equality’. The Common Program also included a degree of regional autonomy for minorities in areas where they were concentrated. In addition, it stipulated the ‘freedom to develop their dialects and languages, and to preserve or reform their traditions, customs, and religious beliefs’ (Article 53). For the CCP, the first priority was to carry out a social revolution among the minorities, as indeed it was doing among the Han. At the time, the social systems prevailing among the minorities were extremely diverse. However, the majority of them involved fairly extreme social and economic inequalities. Most had landowning aristocracies, and many featured clergies with very great power among the people. These clergies themselves were unequal: among some ethnic groups monks resident in monasteries were themselves ranked according to a strict hierarchy, while monastic estates concentrated wealth in very few hands. One of the most uneven societies of the minorities was that of the Nuosu, a people living in Liangshan (literally ‘cool mountains’) in the southwest of China straddling the border between Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces. The Nuosu were – and still are – regarded as a branch of the Yi nationality, formerly called Lolos. Nuosu society featured a rigid hierarchy of slaves, in which slaves could themselves own slaves of an even more wretched order. One reporter, Alan Winnington, actually visited Liangshan in the late 1950s, the first European to do so under the PRC, at a time when the suppression of slavery was nearing its conclusion. He interviewed numerous former slaves and had the following to say about what he found: House-slaves are the most abject of all humans in the Cool Mountains and maybe anywhere in the world. They possess nothing at all, not even the tatters they wear. Unable to ‘cheat’ to any greater extent than growing a little opium secretly, they live at bedrock subsistence level, eating only what they are given by the master and that is very little indeed. Their normal diet is the coarse siftings of the grains they have ground for the master’s family, mixed with swill from his table and wild vegetables collected by themselves, served in a wooden trough on the floor. While they remain in their master’s home, generally until they are able to produce children, they are treated like animals – actually rather worse than animals – work all available hours, tend the fire at night and are beaten for the least hint of fault or at the whim of their ill-tempered and opium-sodden master or mistress. They are unimaginably ignorant. (Winnington 1959: 35–6) Winnington gained a very good impression of the ways in which the CCP had wiped out slavery among the Nuosu. He knew that social change was frequently violent, including in China in the 1950s, but marvelled at the fact that in the case of the Nuosu it had been peaceful. The Nuosu slave-owners had actually agreed

Historical background

21

to the abolition of slavery, even though it meant the loss of their wealth and privileges (Winnington 1959: 210). During the 1950s, the government began the process of identifying ethnic groups. The central government sent out social scientists to determine which groups were nationalities according to the Stalin’s definition, mentioned in Chapter 1. The 1964 census recognised fifty-three minorities, with two more being added later, the last being the Juno of Yunnan in 1979. The establishment of autonomous places was an early priority of the CCP’s government. They had already set up the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region (IMAR) in May 1947, and during the 1950s many others followed. By the year 1990 there were 157, with several levels (listed Mackerras 2001a: 254–6). The largest was the autonomous region, equivalent in status to a province. There were five of these: the IMAR, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR, set up in 1955), the Guangxi Zhuang and Ningxia Hui Autonomous Regions (1958), and the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR 1965). In addition, there were 30 autonomous prefectures, the earliest set up being the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in Jilin Province in 1952, and a series of autonomous counties and banners. The principal aim of autonomy at this stage was nationalisation, ‘defined as “national in form of autonomous organs, languages, and cadres” ’ (Dreyer 1976: 105). What this meant was that members of the minority groups should take over their own administration as far as possible, using their own languages. Another implication was that the state should train as many cadres as possible belonging to the minorities themselves. The term ‘cadres’ in the PRC means administrators, CCP members and professionals. In the specific case of Xinjiang the leadership was more cautious, no doubt because of the history of violent secessionism from the 1920s to the 1940s. One author states that ‘Han predominance and authority’ were sought throughout the 1949–1956 period, but with Han cadres instructed to cooperate with minority counterparts (McMillen 1979: 89). In addition, they were asked to respect minority customs and beliefs, ‘implement Party policies according to local conditions’, and promote a mood of tolerance. This training of national cadres was initially a very slow process, because most of the minorities were not interested in the CCP or its ideology. There were exceptions, of course. Minorities relatively responsive to the CCP were mainly those that had been directly affected by Japanese aggression before 1949, especially the Koreans, Mongolians and Manchus. To effect more central control of the training of minority cadres, the government approved the establishment of a Central Nationalities Institute in November 1950. By 1957 there were about 700,000 CCP members among the minorities, that being about 5.5 per cent of the total of 12.72 million (Mackerras 1994: 157). Relations between government and minorities deteriorated in 1958, largely due to the more radical policies of the Great Leap Forward, including the establishment of people’s communes. ‘Local nationalism’, that is the wish to promote the nationalism of the local ethnic groups not that of China as a whole, came to the fore as a serious crime, replacing the policy of denouncing great Han chauvinism.

22

Historical background

In Xinjiang several high-ranking minority cadres were publicly denounced as ‘local nationalists’ (McMillen 1979: 94), and there were similar developments in other minority regions. Territorial unity and Tibet Right from the start of its rule, the issue of China’s territorial integrity and unity loomed extremely large, just as it had done for the Nationalist Party government of Chiang Kai-shek. Although the CCP had allowed for the possibility that certain minorities would secede from China in the early 1930s, the need to deal with the Japanese invasion forced Mao Zedong and the other CCP leaders to renege on this concession. From the beginning, the CCP was clear that almost all those territories which had formed part of China under the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) were also part of the PRC, and that included the ethnic areas of Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. There was one exception, namely the territory known to the Chinese as Outer Mongolia, which had declared independence with a Constitution calling itself the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR) in 1924. The Soviet Union had been heavily involved in MPR affairs, and as a result the CCP had recognised its independence. The new PRC Premier Zhou Enlai (1898–1976) cabled agreement to establish diplomatic relations with the MPR on 16 December 1949, in other words hardly more than two weeks after the CCP came to power. Although relations between the PRC and Mongolia have been unstable, the CCP has never gone back on its recognition of the MPR as an independent territory. The policy of autonomy was definitely a significant advance on what the minorities had experienced under the previous Republican government of Chiang Kai-shek. However, at no stage did autonomy make any pretence to being remotely equivalent to independence. An editorial in the main official newspaper on 2 October 1951 (cited Dreyer 1976: 94) dubbed any minority movement wishing to secede from the PRC as ‘reactionary since, objectively considered, it would undermine the interests of the various nationalities, and hence would work to the advantage of imperialism’. The 1954 Constitution declared that ‘National autonomous areas are inalienable parts of the People’s Republic of China’.2 Inner Mongolia was controlled by the CCP even before the PRC was established. Although separatist movements had wracked Xinjiang during much of the first half of the twentieth century, it fell quite easily to the CCP, with the provincial head Burhan cabling his surrender on 26 September 1949 and being appointed as Chairman of the Xinjiang Provincial Government on 17 December. There was resistance to CCP rule in some ethnic areas in the 1950s, but on the whole the process of communist takeover of relatively peaceful. The major exception to this pattern was Tibet. The Nationalist Party government of Chiang Kai-shek considered Tibet to be a ‘special territory’ within China, but the local Tibetan authorities did not accept Chinese rule. In fact, the extent of Chinese influence in Tibet during the period 1912–1950 was minimal. The CCP was clear right from the start that Tibet was part of China. Troops of the People’s

Historical background

23

Liberation Army (PLA), led by General Zhang Guohua, advanced towards Tibet in 1950, the first skirmishes taking place in May. After a fierce battle, they captured the eastern Tibetan city of Chamdo, then in Xikang Province, on 19 October 1950. The Chinese government demanded that the Tibetan local authorities negotiate, the bottom line being that they should recognise Tibet as an integral part of China. After an unsuccessful appeal for help to the United Nations, a Tibetan delegation signed an agreement in Beijing on 23 May 1951. Among the seventeen points of the agreement, two stand out as most important. ●

●

In Clause 1, it is stated that ‘the Tibetan people shall return to the family of the motherland – the People’s Republic of China’. Clause 4 declares that ‘The central authorities will not alter the existing political system in Tibet’.3

Intensive debate ensued within the Tibetan government itself and there were discussions with the Americans. Then, on 24 October 1951, the young Dalai Lama cabled his acceptance of the seventeen-point agreement. It was only after the central government received the cable that General Zhang Guohua arrived in Lhasa on 26 October, with PLA troops following shortly afterwards. Yet the period from the Dalai Lama’s acceptance of the 1951 agreement to the late 1950s was a relatively good one for the minorities in China, with the standard of living rising significantly. In 1955, the central government established a committee to prepare to set up the Tibetan Autonomous Region, and placed the Dalai Lama at its head, with the Panchen Lama, the second most influential of the Tibetan lamas, and Zhang Guohua as deputies. On the whole, the Chinese allowed the old system of government and society to remain in Tibet, even though it was extremely unequal and featured a kind of serf system with extreme clerical influence and large monastic estates. In March 1959 full-scale rebellion against Chinese rule broke out in the Tibetan capital Lhasa. The Tibetans blamed Chinese oppression and cultural suppression, but the Chinese saw things differently, castigating American intervention and the old ruling clerical and serf-owning classes for provoking the uprising. Chinese troops suppressed the rebellion very quickly but with considerable bloodshed. The Dalai Lama fled to India, taking up residence in Dharamsala, where he has remained ever since as the head of a government-in-exile. Meanwhile in Tibet itself, the Chinese carried out a ‘democratic reform’, which in effect uprooted the old political system and replaced it with the socialist one prevailing in the rest of China. Both sides appeared to recognise that the two main planks of the seventeenpoint agreement were no longer relevant. The Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976 Although the early 1960s saw a relaxation of policy towards the minorities, this was but a prelude to a period most commentators and minorities have seen as the most repressive and destructive in the PRC, namely the Cultural Revolution,

24

Historical background

lasting from 1966 to 1976. In the latter year Mao Zedong, the architect of the Cultural Revolution, died on 9 September and within a month his main supporters had been overthrown and his political legacy was on the way out. The most important feature of the Cultural Revolution was an ideological narrowness of almost unbelievable dimensions. Only Mao Zedong’s thought was allowed currency, and his works were the almost exclusive reading diet of the Chinese people from August 1966 until the end of the 1960s. On 25 December 1967, China’s official New China News Agency (NCNA) reported that the number of published copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, which contained the gems of Mao’s sayings, had reached no less than 350 million. For ethnic affairs, a particularly vicious part of the ideology of the Cultural Revolution was the obsession with class struggle, which was dubbed ‘the key link’ on which all else depended. The implication was that ethnic struggle simply did not matter and was only a reflection of class struggle anyway. It was during the Cultural Revolution that Jiang Qing (1914–1991), Mao’s wife and leader of the radical faction known as the ‘gang of four’, reportedly asked her infamous question, ‘Why do we need national minorities anyway?’, answering by stating flatly: ‘National identity should be done away with!’ (See Gladney 1991: 138) Although the Constitution of January 1975 retained the concept of autonomy for minorities, a far lower status was accorded it, and in practice it meant nothing.4 The Cultural Revolution saw severe instability in many parts of China and periods of localised civil war, such as in Hubei province in August and September 1967. A case of full-scale, though brief, rebellion in the ethnic areas was the Shadian Incident. Following years of repression during the Cultural Revolution, the Hui (Chinese Muslims) of Shadian, a village in Mengzi County of southern Yunnan Province near the border with Vietnam, had wished to reopen a mosque closed due to Cultural Revolution persecution, but had been refused permission. As a result the local Hui established a militia group, leading authorities to accuse them of trying to found an independent Islamic republic. Late in July 1975, PLA troops moved into the village, razing it to the ground. Fierce fighting over the next week in Shadian and surrounding areas left over 1,600 Chinese Muslims dead, as well as several hundred PLA troops. In terms of casualties, this was certainly among the worst single incidents involving minorities in the history of the PRC. Not until February 1979, by which time the Cultural Revolution was over, were reparations and apologies made to the relatives of the dead, with the government building seven new mosques in the Shadian area.5 The Shadian Incident is a good illustration showing two related features of the Cultural Revolution: religious persecution and cultural destruction. In most minority areas religion was banned, with clerics being forced to return to lay life, harmed or even killed, and religious buildings closed, damaged or destroyed. With many minorities religion and culture are tightly linked. For instance, Tibetan Buddhist monasteries are also major repositories of Tibetan traditional arts, paintings, masks for dancing, and religious statues. Many were damaged and some destroyed. The great Ganden Monastery outside Lhasa sustained damage that has to be seen to be believed. My visit to the great Muli Monastery in western Sichuan Province at the beginning of 1997 revealed ruined buildings alongside

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25

the restored ones. In addition, the traditional dramas of the Tibetans, Miao, Koreans, Dong and others were banned, as were their classical literature and poetry, with many books damaged or destroyed. It is not surprising that minorities look back on the Cultural Revolution as a nightmare. Moreover, it is hardly a consolation to know that the Han also suffered similar cultural destruction and religious persecution.

The period of reform No sooner had Mao died than his main followers, termed the ‘gang of four’ and including his widow Jiang Qing, were overthrown on 6 October 1976 and China began the long process of dismantling the system of government and society that Mao had installed. At the end of 1978, the CCP determined to lead China towards modernisation and economic prosperity in place of the revolutionary society to which Mao had aspired. The years since 1978 are generally known as ‘the period of reform’. The brief interregnum from 1976 to the end of 1978 was led by a nonentity called Hua Guofeng, but the man regarded as the chief architect of the reform policies was Deng Xiaoping, a towering figure who had been disgraced several times under Mao, but whose role in China’s twentieth-century history is probably equal to Mao’s. The revival of minority concerns, 1976–1990 It was not long after the fall of the ‘gang of four’ that moves began away from the extremist policies that quartet had instigated. In his speech to the Fifth National People’s Congress (NPC) in March 1978 Hua Guofeng laid some stress on equality and autonomy for minorities, and even called for Han cadres who worked in ethnic areas to learn the local language. Although few followed this prescription, the fact that he saw fit to make it showed a positive attitude towards minorities’ rights in their own areas. In 1980, progress towards a new policy gathered momentum. There were several signs of this, one of them specifically concerning Tibet and discussed below in the relevant section. What they all had in common was a thrust towards a much better deal for minorities. In March the highest-ranking member of a minority published an article in the CCP’s principal ideological journal. The author was Ulanhu (1906–1988), a Mongolian revolutionary of long standing who had joined the CCP as early as 1925 and become a member of that extremely powerful CCP body the Politburo in 1977, in other words somebody who could hardly be ignored. He denounced Cultural Revolutionary policies as reactionary coercive assimilation and likened them to the benighted practices followed under the feudal rulers. He called for immediate change in minority policy, including the strengthening of autonomy, far more expenditure of public money on the ethnic areas and increased training of minority scientific and technical cadres and skilled workers (Ulanhu 1980: 12–16). On 15 July 1980, China’s main newspaper People’s Daily published a long article on issues concerned with nationalities. It accused the ‘gang of four’ and

26

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others of having inflicted a ‘feudal fascist dictatorship’ in the ethnic areas (People’s Daily Special Commentator 1980: 17). However, its main point was to denounce the notion, which Mao and his followers had espoused during the Cultural Revolution, that ethnic issues boiled down fundamentally not to ethnicity but to class. ‘The existence of classes is of much shorter duration than that of nationalities’, it argued. ‘After the withering away of the former, the latter will remain in existence for a long time’ (People’s Daily Special Commentator 1980: 18). The special commentator argued instead (1980: 21) that ethnic problems in China should be solved by strengthening regional autonomy and by ‘gradually eliminating the political, economic and cultural inequalities among the nationalities’. One of the features of the 1980s was its revival of a legal system. Whereas the 1950s saw the introduction of a few formal laws, and the Cultural Revolution downgraded law almost entirely in favour of Maoist administration based on mass participation, the 1980s strove to encode numerous rules and regulations into law. One of the aspects covered was that of the minorities. The Constitution of December 1982 was quite a bit more expansive on the minorities than its 1975 counterpart had been. Article 4 outlawed discrimination against the minorities, and also any acts which might undermine ethnic unity or incite secession. It re-emphasised autonomy for the minorities, but also declared all minority area ‘inalienable parts’ of the PRC (National People’s Congress 1982: 12). The whole of Section VI (Articles 112–22) is devoted to the organs of selfgovernment in the autonomous areas. Among other provisions it declares that the administrative head of an autonomous place must belong to the ethnic group that exercises autonomy in the area concerned (Article 114). Another provision (Article 116) is that congresses in autonomous areas have the right to pass laws applying to the places under their jurisdiction. In such cases the Standing Committee of the NPC has the right to reject the law. But my explorations among minority officials and leaders suggest that it is actually very unusual for that to happen. Much more likely is that the autonomous places negotiate beforehand with the central authorities and make sure that the law is acceptable to the higher level before it is passed at the lower. Just as important as including ethnic affairs in the State Constitution was the fact that it was followed up by the Law of Regional Autonomy, which went into effect in October 1984. This is actually very similar in style and content to the relevant passages of the Constitution, in some places word for word. However, the 1984 Law expands considerably on the various specific aspects of autonomy, in such areas as administration, law, the economy, finance and budgeting, culture and education.6 Despite the very clear advantages of autonomy, it is very important to note major restrictions applying to the policy. The most important is that these autonomy provisions apply only to the government, not to the CCP. In other words, there is no provision that the Party secretary must belong to a relevant minority ethnic group nor that the CCP branch of the autonomous places may adopt rules different from the PRC’s law. The fact that the CCP is actually a much more powerful body in China than is the Chinese government diminishes the extent of autonomy enjoyed by the minority areas.

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27

Yet at both CCP and state level, policy was to increase minority representation in those bodies exercising influence. Success in implementing this policy during the 1980s was mixed. In 1990, minority membership of the CCP was 2.8 million, that is 5.7 per cent of the total of just over 49 million. Although the number was considerably higher than the 700,000 members in 1957, the proportion had gone up only marginally from 5.5 per cent (Mackerras 1994: 157). In terms of total numbers of cadres, however, the figures show a distinct rise. In 1980, less than 3 per cent of cadres belonged to a minority, but by 1990 the proportion had more than doubled to over 6 per cent, with absolute figures doubling from 1.03 million in 1982 to 2.06 million in 1990 (Sautman 1998: 116). It is to be expected that the ethnic groups vary from one another in the representation of cadres. In the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, the proportion of Korean cadres (51.2 per cent) outstripped the percentage of Koreans in the total population in the late 1980s (41 per cent). In 1990, more than half the police and judges and most unit leaders throughout the prefecture were Korean (Mackerras 1994: 158–9). In Xinjiang in the 1980s the proportion of cadres belonging to the minorities fluctuated slightly around 45 per cent (Sautman 1998: 117), although the minority ethnic groups constituted well over half the total population throughout the decade. The policy of training cadres belonging to the minorities is one of a series of ‘preferential policies’ (youhui zhengce) introduced in the 1980s. They included quotas for higher education, preference for certain kinds of employment, economic investments in ethnic areas and special measures taken to alleviate poverty there. One of the best known, and most important, ‘preferential policies’ is exemption from the requirement introduced at the end of the 1970s that each couple have no more than one child. In almost all areas restrictions developed in the 1980s affecting minority areas. But, with but few exceptions, they were considerably more lenient than among the Han. The policies of affirmative action do appear to have made quite a bit of difference. In many schools and universities I visited in the 1980s or in 1990 in ethnic areas, I heard that minorities found access easier than Han. The rise in the proportion of China’s minority population was less than 1 per cent between the 1964 and 1982 censuses (5.76 –6.7 per cent). However, it was considerably more than 1 per cent over the much shorter period between the 1982 and 1990 censuses (6.7–8.04 per cent) (Mackerras 1994: 237). The impact of the policies was notable also in the particularly difficult region of Xinjiang which, as noted above, was among those areas where the minority cadres failed to reflect population as a whole. The veteran observer A. Doak Barnett (1993: 377), who had explored China’s far western regions in the late 1940s and revisited the area 40 years later, was impressed by the ‘much larger role than in the past’ that Xinjiang’s minorities were playing both in the leadership and bureaucracies, and even in the intellectual scientific elite. He also quoted a particularly knowledgeable Han Chinese friend as saying to him that the Uygurs in high positions ‘are by no means mere figureheads now; they do have real influence’.

28

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The greater autonomy for minorities and the generally better deal for them in the 1980s brought about massive revivals in traditional culture. Books started to be published in the local languages. Famous traditional buildings were restored and properly maintained. The old performing arts, theatre, dances and music, came back like a flood, not only in their modernised and professionalised forms, but even as part of the old rituals which had sustained them in the old days. And most important of all for many of the minorities, the old religious beliefs, practices and clergies revived very strongly, so that by the end of the 1980s Islam and Tibetan Buddhism had regained a great deal of the social influence they had lost due to the CCP’s revolution. Tibet revisited This last comment brings us to the controversial issue of Tibet. No minority area had suffered more severely due to Chinese rule than this one. The 1959 rebellion had already shown the difficulties China would face in integrating Tibet into China. The Cultural Revolution had been particularly devastating for Tibetan culture. The commitment of its people to religion had made Tibet among the principal targets of the fanatical zealots of the Cultural Revolution, both Han and Tibetan. One of the principal events marking a change in policy towards China’s minorities as a whole was a visit a group led by Hu Yaobang (1915–1989) made to Tibet in the last week of May 1980. At the time Hu was General Secretary of the CCP and second in command after Hua Guofeng, whom he was to replace as CCP chief in the middle of the following year. Hu was shocked by what he found in Tibet and determined to bring about radical change. His ideas were outlined in a major speech he made to 5,000 cadres in Lhasa on 29 May 1980. There were two main thrusts in the content. One was a strategy for improving the situation. He outlined six main tasks, including: ●

●

● ●

implementing autonomy in Tibet fully and letting the Tibetans be the real masters of their own lives; a commitment to relieving the people of taxation, by exempting them from agricultural and animal husbandry taxes over the following three to five years; the adoption of a special policy to revive the Tibetan economy; and an undertaking to increase the number of Tibetan cadres, sending many of the Chinese cadres back east, and to try to improve relations between the Tibetan and Han cadres.

The other main content of Hu’s speech was tantamount to an apology for past actions and policies. ‘We feel that our party has let the Tibetan people down’, he said, adding ‘We feel very bad!’ ‘We have worked nearly thirty years, but the life of the Tibetan people has not been notably improved. Are we not to blame?’ (quoted Wang 1994: 287–8). Many of the Han cadres were privately furious that they were being asked to take some responsibility for policies they had supported, though not devised. But the fact of the matter was that the CCP as a body was admitting that its policies had failed and that it must shoulder the main part of the blame.

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The situation certainly did improve in Tibet after Hu’s visit, though probably not as much as he had hoped. The economy was bullish, especially in the countryside that had been the focus of Hu Yaobang’s policy. In the autumn of 1984 the government approved over forty major construction projects in the TAR, designed further to raise economic production and to broaden the scope of development. One problem with this new policy was that it required the introduction of more Han technicians and economic experts, who did not necessarily get on well with the Tibetans or like life in Tibet. Population issues in Tibet and among the Tibetans have been clouded with controversy, with accusations including forced birth control being levelled against the Chinese authorities. These have been discredited in a highly scholarly study (Yan 2000: 11–36), and there seems little reason to doubt that during the 1980s the Tibetans and other minorities of the TAR were generally exempt from the onechild-per-couple policy, which prevailed among the Han almost everywhere in China from the beginning of the 1980s. Two scholars concluded from on-the-spot surveys in the TAR from 1986 to 1988 that the region was ‘actually experiencing high population growth rates rather than suffering a policy of coercive and restrictive birth control’ that was ‘causing population decline and threatening the continued existence of Tibetans’ (Goldstein and Beall 1991: 300). The population of Tibet and of Tibetans in the TAR rose sharply during the 1980s. The 1982 census, taken in the middle of the year, showed the total population of Tibet at 1,892,224, of whom Tibetans numbered 1,786,544, or 94.4 per cent. Another national census, in 1990 and also taken in the middle of the year, showed that the total TAR population had risen to 2,196,010, an average of 1.45 per cent growth per year, much higher than the average annual 0.84 per cent rise between the 1964 and 1982 censuses. In 1990 Tibetans were 2,096,346, or 95.5 per cent of the total, their population rising at an average annual 1.47 per cent since the 1982 census. The Han population sank over the 1982–1990 period from 91,551 to 81,217 with quite a few returning east and only a portion being replaced. In addition, both censuses counted small numbers of other minorities, such as the Moinba and Hui.7 Following Hu Yaobang’s speech, social life became much more relaxed in Tibet. Religion revived very quickly and to a remarkable extent, with the TAR government investing money in the rehabilitation of monasteries. Former monks who had left the monasteries for the laity during the Cultural Revolution resumed their clerical life and even took on disciples to train a younger generation of monks. Another area affected by the more liberal policies of the 1980s was the nationalisation of the Tibetan bureaucracy. Figures suggest a quite dramatic rise in the number of Tibetan cadres, from 29,406 or 54.4 per cent of the total in the TAR in 1981, to 33,000 or 61.35 per cent of the total in 1989.8 However, Shakya (1999: 390) is quite right to point out that the Tibetanisation of the bureaucracy was focused more on the lower than the upper levels. The Chinese government had no intention of relaxing its grip on CCP power in Tibet, nor of letting Tibetans be masters of their own lives to the extent of trying to secede from China. In contrast to the 1950s, they were not prepared to countenance a separate and non-CCP government in Tibet. Still the fact that it was Tibetans who were exercising power at the lower levels definitely made a difference to the way people felt and

30

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gave the impression that the improvements in living standards were due to their own efforts. In 1985 a man who was a member of China’s minorities and not a PLA leader took up the position of CCP Party Secretary in Tibet. This was Wu Jinghua, an Yi, who went out of his way to adopt Tibetan habits and took a liberal line on encouraging Tibetan language and culture to flourish. Moreover, shortly after arriving in Lhasa, he appointed many Tibetans to senior CCP posts. There seemed a good possibility that a Tibetan might become Party Secretary at some stage. A small number of tourists began to visit Tibet in the 1980s, with numbers of overseas tourists controlled within the range of 1,500 to 2,000. After much discussion, authorities decided that more tourism would benefit the region, and in December 1984 the TAR government established a tourist company. Numbers expanded dramatically, with 15,402 in 1985, 30,000 in 1986 and 43,500 in 1987, the highest in history to that point (Duojie and Jiangcun 1995: 534–5). One point of great importance is that the new tourists were very different in kind from those who had gone before. Many were young backpackers from Europe, North America, Japan, Hong Kong and Australia who wanted to taste the Tibetan spirituality that had for long been famous in the West. These young tourists wandered around completely freely, especially in Lhasa and its surroundings, and found no difficulty in hiring bicycles. There were a limited number of hotels, and they were not particularly clean or comfortable. But they were perfectly adequate for the backpackers. Most of the backpackers were solid supporters of Tibetan independence, and a few I met while in Tibet in September and October 1985 told me proudly of their view that it was quite proper to make things difficult for the Chinese. One told me that stirring up trouble was the reason he had come to Tibet. By 1986 the situation was much better in TAR than it had ever been before. ‘This was still China’, writes one authority, ‘but great strides had been made in permitting Tibetan culture and religion to flourish in a region that was still overwhelmingly Tibetan in demographic composition’ (Goldstein 1997: 74). Moreover, policy did not change when Hu Yaobang himself was disgraced and demoted at the beginning of 1987. This was despite the fact that there was a strong faction within the Chinese government that remained suspicious of Hu Yaobang’s and Wu Jinghua’s liberal policies and was very nervous indeed of giving too much freedom to the Tibetans. In the autumn of 1987 events in Lhasa gave reinforcement to the hardline view. On 27 September monks demonstrated in favour of independence for Tibet, leading to some arrests. On 1 October, further demonstrations occurred on behalf of independence but also for the release of the monks arrested 4 days earlier. This time the demonstrations led to a full-scale riot. Police, including Tibetans, fired at the crowd, and casualties resulted. Further unrest followed in Tibet. On 5 March, the last day of a large-scale ceremony for the Great Prayer Festival, a violent riot erupted, which the police forcibly suppressed. However, the riot had two results of long-lasting significance. One was that the clampdown ‘further drew the mass of people to the side of the radical nationalists’ (Goldstein 1997: 83). The other was that film footage

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31

was secretly taken of police beating monks in Lhasa; this was smuggled out of China and has been frequently shown on Western televisions since. From 5 to 7 March 1989 anti-Chinese demonstrations again took place in Lhasa in preparation for a celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1959 uprising. Serious violence erupted between police and demonstrators, with looting of Han Chinese houses and shops and quite a few casualties, making the trouble the worst since 1959. The Chinese authorities in Beijing declared martial law on 7 March, to take effect from midnight the same day. Martial Law Decree 1 (reproduced in Harris and Jones 2000: 55) commanded that ‘assemblies, demonstrations, strikes by workers, students and other people, petitions, and other get-togethers are strictly forbidden’ during the time martial law remained in force. This was the first time in the PRC’s history that the government had declared martial law anywhere in China.9 Observing these events from 1987 to 1989 the hardliners on Tibet within the Chinese government were feeling themselves more and more vindicated. Already in December 1988 the Han leader Hu Jintao, destined for leadership of the whole country in 2002, replaced Wu Jinghua as CCP secretary, and his line had proved more decisive in suppressing disorder. Meanwhile, Beijing was itself wracked by demonstrations from April to June 1989. Martial law was again declared, this time in the capital of China itself, and the demonstrations were forcibly suppressed in the terrible Beijing Massacre of the night of 3–4 June 1989. The result was that the central government rethought its attitudes, including on Tibet. Late in 1989 the Politburo formalised the new policy, which was based on an attempt to step up modernisation under the clear political assumption that separatism would be totally banned. Strands of policy included sending better educated Han to Tibet, educating young Tibetan cadres better with focus on loyalty to the PRC, strengthening the CCP structure at all levels in Tibet, and stepping up the security apparatus significantly with enhanced surveillance equipment (see Goldstein 1997: 92–3). There was no hint of a return to the Cultural Revolution days, and Tibetans could continue to practise their religion and culture and speak their own language. But the proviso was clear that anybody who used religion to destabilise the political situation or urge independence for Tibet would be trodden on immediately and firmly. Martial law was lifted in Lhasa on 1 May 1990.

The minorities in China’s foreign relations, 1949–1990 In the 40 years or so from the establishment of the PRC, minorities contributed to improving or worsening relations between China and foreign countries, especially with the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. However, except in the case of Tibet and the Tibetans, minorities were not actually causal factors in China’s foreign relations. The Koreans were a factor in China’s participation in the Korean War (1950–1953), but not the reason why China sent troops to Korea. China’s relations with the MPR in the PRC’s first four decades were largely a function of relations with the Soviet Union, and the Mongolians in China were hardly a primary factor. The fact that relations deteriorated rapidly in 1963–1964, not long after China

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and the MPR signed their Treaty of Friendship and Mutual Assistance in May 1960, was due mainly to the state of Sino-Soviet relations at the time, and although the Mongolians of Inner Mongolia were involved in the dispute they were a peripheral factor in a relationship which would have deteriorated anyway. The recovery of relations with the MPR in the 1980s was also linked with the mainly simultaneous improvement in those with the Soviet Union. Xinjiang’s border with the Soviet Union made the region important for SinoSoviet relations. The fact that minorities on the Chinese side of the border were co-nationals with those on the Soviet side affected the relationship, but not usually centrally. The most important incident involving minorities and contributing towards a worsening Sino-Soviet relationship took place in 1962. From April to late summer a crisis erupted in Yining (which the Uygurs call Gulja), very close to the border with the Soviet Union. About 50,000 people, mostly Kazaks and Uygurs, fled across the borders to the Soviet Union. Chinese attempts to prevent them resulted in serious riots which troops were finally despatched to suppress, with casualties and arrests following. These events certainly worsened SinoSoviet relations, especially since each side was moved to make hostile statements about the other’s motives and actions. But the crisis took place at a time when other factors had, since the late 1950s, made the relationship take a decisive turn for the worse anyway. They were as much a result as a cause of bad relations. Sino-Soviet relations remained very bad indeed until the mid-1980s. But the factors making them so hostile had more to do with the Cultural Revolution, the role of Mao Zedong, and the general world geopolitical balance of power than with Xinjiang’s minorities. It is true that Xinjiang’s border with the Soviet Union was an extremely sensitive one, and even on occasion the site of armed clashes (notably on 10 June and 13 August 1969). However, these had nothing to do with the minorities. The minorities of Xinjiang were relatively quiescent during the 1970s and 1980s, even though there was quite a bit of instability there due to factors such as Han youths sent from the east during the Cultural Revolution. The point to emphasise is that by 1989 both China and the Soviet Union wanted better bilateral relations. In sharp contrast to the situation in the early 1960s, neither wished to take advantage of the other’s woes for its own benefit. If anything ethnic issues added to an already improving relationship, but they were not focal in determining the direction it would take. Tibet and the Tibetans, 1949–1989 Alone among the ethnic areas of China, Tibet was a primary cause for disintegration of relations in two instances: with India in the late 1950s and early 1960s; and with the United States in the late 1980s. The Indians were never happy with the Chinese takeover of Tibet in the early 1950s. Indeed, as Dawa Norbu (2001: 291–2) notes, India remained emotionally and culturally involved in Tibet throughout this period. However, India was the first non-communist country to recognise the PRC, at the end of 1949, and from then until the end of the 1950s the two countries enjoyed very good relations indeed. They shared important interests in terms of a shared resistance to imperialism

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and colonialism, among other matters. Both were keen exponents of the ‘five principles of coexistence’ and were proud to take part in the Conference of Afro-Asian states held in Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955. Indian Prime Minister Nehru visited China in October 1954, while China’s Premier Zhou Enlai had been to India earlier the same year and made further trips there in 1956 and 1957. On the debit side was a border dispute left over from the days of the British Raj in India. While relations were so good, this dispute did not matter, though it tended to worsen from 1956 on. It was the flight of the Dalai Lama to India following the rebellion of March 1959 which gave the border dispute ‘a new dimension and therefore qualitatively a new character’ (Ojha 1969: 160) at a time when both sides were still trying to maintain friendly relations. Following the rebellion, the Dalai Lama fled Lhasa on 17 March 1959, entering India 2 weeks later. His representatives immediately began interceding with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on his behalf. On 16 April the Dalai Lama issued a statement very condemnatory of China and met Nehru himself later the same month. Nehru was caught in a no-win situation. He was under serious pressure from most political forces in India to turn against China. He issued a statement in which he tried to show sympathy both for the Tibetans and the Chinese. China was in no doubt about its position. It denounced various forces for the rebellion, including Nehru’s India, and condemned Nehru himself as counter-revolutionary. Later developments are well known and need no recapitulation here. The Dalai Lama was granted asylum in India and set up a government-in-exile there. SinoIndian relations deteriorated to the point where the two countries fought a bitter border war in October and November 1962. Their relations showed but very little improvement until the 1980s, the Dalai Lama’s residence in India being one of the causes of the deep freeze. Great improvements in bilateral relations were signalled when, in December 1988, Rajiv Gandhi became the first Indian prime minister to visit China for 34 years, even meeting with Deng Xiaoping. However, the Tibetan issue and the Dalai Lama’s continuing residence in India remained a thorn in the side of the two countries’ mutual relations. Tibet has also played a role in China’s relations with the United States. One book, devoting a full chapter to Tibet in Sino-American relations over the period 1948 to 1998, adds the subtitle ‘from secret service to public pressure’ (Norbu 2001: 263–82). In the 1950s and 1960s, when Sino-American relations were at their worst point in history, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) actively supplied training, money and weaponry in support of a guerilla war against the Chinese, with many thousands of casualties (Sarin and Sonam 1998). A report in the Los Angeles Times of 16 July 1998 claimed that the CIA provided the Tibetan independence movement with US$ 1.7 annually from the early 1960s, reducing to $1.2 million in 1968, the Dalai Lama receiving $180,000 per year. China held the United States partly responsible for the uprising of 1959 in Lhasa. Hardly anybody other than the United States President and the CIA Director knew what was going on at the time, certainly not the public (Norbu 2001: 271). The end of the 1960s and early 1970s saw a spectacular improvement in SinoAmerican relations, leading to the formal establishment of diplomatic relations at the beginning of 1979. In response, the CIA reduced its support for Tibetan

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resistance, stopping it completely in 1974. The period from then until 1987 represented the acme of bilateral relations under the PRC. However, it was the issue of Tibet that marked the first major point of deterioration. Before dealing with this subject in detail, it is necessary to note that the Dalai Lama’s government-in-exile took the cue from the beginnings of reform in China to launch its own diplomacy aimed at reconsidering the status of Tibet and effecting the Dalai Lama’s return home. From August 1979 onwards several delegations visited Tibet from Dharamsala and, to the surprise and dismay of the Chinese authorities, received a rapturous welcome from the people there. There were also two delegations sent to China in 1982 and 1984 representing the Dalai Lama, which held formal negotiations with the Chinese over Tibet. The main demand of the Tibetan side, at least at the second meeting, was the ‘creation of a demilitarized Greater Tibet with complete internal political autonomy’ (Goldstein 1997: 73), with Greater Tibet meaning not just the TAR, but also all Tibetan areas in China.10 The Chinese negotiators were not interested in such demands, and the negotiations got nowhere. Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama began travelling more actively throughout the world. In 1973 he had made his first visit to the West and in 1979 went to the Soviet Union and the MPR for the first time. In the second half of the 1980s, the Dalai Lama strove quite consciously to step up the pressure in what one author (Shakya 1999: 412) has termed the ‘internationalisation of the Tibet issue’. Western countries, including governments, were quite receptive to this campaign because moral issues like human rights, the environment and the rights of indigenous peoples were starting to take priority over the ideological divide between Marxism–Leninism and liberal capitalism. In June 1987 the American Congress passed a bill declaring Tibet an occupied country and endorsing many of the claims about Tibet’s history and the situation there made by the Dalai Lama’s followers. Even more provocative, the Dalai Lama himself made his first political speech in the United States on 21 September 1987. Speaking before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, he called for Tibet, including not just the TAR but all Tibetan areas, to be transformed into a ‘zone of peace’, from which all Chinese troops and military installations should be withdrawn. He also asked for earnest negotiations on the future status of Tibet and of relations between the Tibetan and Chinese peoples (Goldstein 1997: 77). It is not surprising that when the pro-independence demonstrations began in Lhasa just 6 days later, the Chinese blamed them directly on the Dalai Lama and American interference in their affairs. One Tibetan account alleges that it was ‘the Chinese denigration’ of the speech, rather than the speech itself, which sparked off the demonstrations (Wangyal 1994: 202). In my opinion, this formulation shifts blame but does not change the fact that the speech was the primary immediate cause of the demonstrations. When the Dalai Lama was stirring up trouble for them in Washington, it was simply not an option for the Chinese to do nothing, or to do other than forcefully disagree with him. Sino-American relations declined further after the riots, with the American Administration under President Ronald Reagan taking the side of the Tibetans

Historical background

35

against the Chinese on human rights grounds, but nevertheless stopping short of withdrawing recognition of Tibet as part of China. At the end of the year Reagan endorsed the view from Congress that the treatment of the Tibetans should be an important factor in American relations with the PRC; and that the United States should urge the PRC to establish constructive dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the future of Tibet. American attitudes towards developments in Tibet continued to remain condemnatory as the disturbances of 1988 and 1989 unfolded. The crisis and crackdown in Beijing itself in 1989 brought human rights even more decisively to centre stage in China’s relations with the West, especially the United States, and greatly hardened feeling in the West against China. But Tibet had preceded it and, in any case, retained an indefinite and high priority as a determinant in relations. The Dalai Lama continued his attempts to internationalise the Tibet issue in the late 1980s and may have thought that continued pressure at this stage would yield concrete results in terms of his wish for a change in the status of Tibet. His next major move was a speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg on 15 June 1988. He proposed that the whole of the TAR and all other Tibetan areas should become a self-governing democratic political entity in association with the PRC, with the Chinese government retaining responsibility for Tibet’s foreign policy. This was not exactly independence, but much closer than the Chinese were prepared to accept. After some deliberation, they rejected the proposal as an indirect form of independence. The Dalai Lama’s Strasbourg proposals also came up against strong resistance from among his own supporters and in 1991 he withdrew them. In January 1989, the Panchen Lama died of a heart attack in Tibet. This was a considerable blow to the Chinese, since he had been generally supportive of Chinese policy and, as the most authoritative of Tibetan lamas after the Dalai Lama, he had played a role extremely useful for Chinese policy. The Chinese Buddhist Association invited the Dalai Lama to Beijing for the funeral, ‘letting it be known that this would be a good time for him to discuss the political situation informally with top Chinese officials’ (Goldstein 1997: 90). However, on the advice of the exiled Tibetan leadership, he declined the invitation. Events over the rest of 1989 spelled the end of dialogue with the Chinese authorities, at least for the time being. The riots in Lhasa and imposition of martial law hardly pointed to an atmosphere in which constructive dialogue would be possible. Finally, it may have been a triumph for Tibetans in exile that the Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize at the end of the year. But for China it was a humiliation and major setback of the kind that foreclosed dialogue.

Conclusion The Cultural Revolution was politically the worst period the minorities suffered in the twentieth century. Yet economically it was certainly no worse than the years 1958–1962. Other years of the PRC down to 1989 were definite improvements on the first half of the century politically, socially and economically, and, even in

36

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Tibet, the first years of the reform period witnessed unprecedented prosperity and social and political promise. It seems to me fair to argue that domestically the PRC was overall an advance on the period that preceded it. In terms of the difficulties the minorities occasioned for China in its foreign relations, the first 40 years of the PRC were far from easy ones. Many of the border areas were quite unstable. The most serious problems were along the borders with the Soviet Union and in Tibet. The obsession with the Soviet threat from the 1960s to the early 1980s made Xinjiang a very sensitive area for China. And of course the problems in Tibet and the perception of American and Indian involvement could not but be very damaging to China’s relations with Western countries. Yet if we compare the PRC with the first half of the twentieth century in the way minorities impacted on China’s foreign relations we again see improvement. In Xinjiang Soviet intervention was more serious during the 1930s and 1940s than at any time in the second half of the twentieth century. And at least none of China was occupied by a foreign power under the PRC. This was in contrast with the preceding period when Japanese troops occupied many of the Mongolian regions and the Korean areas, not to mention those of the Manchus and other minorities of the northeastern regions of China. Globalisation is certainly not a word we can associate with the minorities in China during the period 1949 –1990. It is true we see strong Soviet influence in the 1950s. On the other hand, what is most striking is local isolation, the precise opposite of globalisation. Moreover, the Cultural Revolution decade probably saw the minority areas more tightly cut off from the rest of the world, and in some cases even the rest of China, than any other period in the twentieth century. In other words, if globalisation is the measure there was scope for immense expansion from 1989 on. Yet the last few years of this period definitely see some signs that a process of globalisation was beginning. There was reference in this chapter to the ‘internationalisation’ of the Tibet issue in the second half of the 1980s. In addition, I have suggested above that the Dalai Lama’s speech before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in Washington in September 1987 was a major spark for the independence demonstrations occurring shortly afterwards. The influx of tourism into Tibet in the mid-1980s certainly exercised some influence on developments in Tibet itself. And at the same time the beginnings of tourism into minority areas elsewhere, not to mention scholarly visits there, both features of the 1980s, can be seen as representing an early stage of internationalisation after the isolation of the Cultural Revolution. So when does ‘internationalisation’ become globalisation. The latter can be understood as a more extreme and widespread, a later and more highly developed form of internationalisation. Already in the late 1980s the West and India were both involved in Tibet, as well as several other countries. However, on the whole, international involvement was still at a fairly low level and very patchy in its impact. Certainly it was to gather momentum enormously over the following years. It was ‘internationalisation’, but it was not yet globalisation.

3

Minorities politics, 1989–2002

China has become noticeably more nationalist since the early 1990s. This trend is both reactive and proactive. The reactive process has developed in response to outside pressures, especially from the United States. From the point of view of ethnic minorities, the most important source of this nationalism is the constant criticism over China’s human rights record, notably that over Tibet and other minority areas. However, the growth in nationalism results also from internal factors like the continuing growth in the Chinese economy, its resumption of sovereignty over Hong Kong in mid-1997 and Macau at the end of 1999, and its strategic power in the world. It seems evident that Chinese nationalism is in tension with any rise in minority identities. This is because the state will give even less space than formerly to any form of ethnonationalism, such as is quite likely to flow from ethnic consciousness. One scholar has even coined the phrase ‘essentializing the Han’ (Gladney 1994: 98), highlighting how the majority Han have represented China’s minorities as exotic as a means of marking out their own identity and promoting their own nationalism. The tension between ethnic identities and Chinese nationalism may mirror that between globalisation and localisation. Chinese markets will open further because the country has joined the WTO, and China will be even more subject to ideas and social trends from outside than it was beforehand. But Chinese nationalism is likely to remain strong, and could even strengthen. The increased globalising influences that have followed China’s entry into the WTO could inspire a strengthening of a wish among the ethnic minorities to maintain their own differences in political, economic, social and cultural terms.

Overall policies and realities China underwent a major crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The main event for the country as a whole was the suppression of the student movement early in June 1989; but for the minorities the independence movements in Tibet from 1987 to 1989 and the Muslim uprising in Akto County, Xinjiang, in April 1990. These disturbances inevitably produced some effect on policy, and there is some discussion of these changes for Tibet and Xinjiang in later sections of this chapter.

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However, what is most striking for the country as a whole is not how great the policy changes but how little. For a tense period of over 18 months from June 1989, many people wondered if the reform policies might be reversed, despite disclaimers to the contrary. Then in February 1992 Deng Xiaoping came out of retirement to make his ‘southern journey’ to Shanghai and various places in Guangdong, including the successful first ‘special economic zone’ Shenzhen, just over the border from Hong Kong. During his visits he emphasised his support for the open economy and pushed reform as hard as he could. The message was crystal clear. There could be no further doubt that, despite the crisis of 1989, reform in the direction of free enterprise was not only to continue but accelerate. Just before Deng made his pronouncements affecting the country as a whole, CCP General Secretary Jiang Zemin gave a major speech on ethnic affairs. His forum was the opening session, on 14 January 1992, of the First National Conference on Ethnic Affairs, co-sponsored by the CCP Central Committee and the State Council, in other words an occasion with a great deal of political clout. Jiang made it quite clear that the CCP and government were determined to maintain national unity and had no intention of yielding to any demands for independence from any minority area. On the other hand, he intended to keep to the policies of ethnic autonomy and helping all minorities to develop themselves. He also emphasised the importance of economic development in the ethnic areas, so that they could keep pace with the rest of the country, and social welfare for minority peoples (‘Party Chief’ 1992: 5). In essence, Jiang Zemin was telling the minorities that they would get preferential policies and treatment if they opted to stay within China, with plenty of economic and other incentives and an improving standard of living. However, the government would not tolerate separatism and would immediately suppress any attempt at secession on the part of any ethnic group. This set of policies has remained essentially unchanged into the twenty-first century. In his last report to the Ninth National People’s Congress, delivered on 5 March 1998 just before stepping down as premier in favour of Zhu Jongji, Li Peng claimed that ethnic unity and social stability had been consolidated throughout the country. Despite the troubles that had occurred only about a year before in Xinjiang, which he did not mention, Li went on to assert (1998:12) that ‘socialist ethnic relations’ had improved due to the guaranteeing of equal rights for ethnic groups and autonomy for ethnic minority areas. Notwithstanding his relatively optimistic assessment, it seems that in 1999, the Chinese government decided to upgrade ethnic issues, by focusing more strongly on improvements both in the economy and in the social life of the people of a kind that would make them more content with life in the PRC and hence less prone to rebellious movements. One major sign of this upgrading of ethnic affairs was the reconvening of the irregular Central Ethnic Work Conference late in September and early in October 1999. Both CCP General Secretary Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji attended, and both called for better handling of ethnic issues. The media highlighted Jiang Zemin’s mention of other countries as warnings that poor treatment of ethnic issues can lead to war and foreign intervention. He was referring

Minorities politics 39 of course to Kosovo and East Timor, both of which had exploded on the world earlier in the year, East Timor only a matter of weeks before the meeting (Sautman 2002: 98–9). In both cases, brutal oppression by the current sovereign power had led to foreign intervention. Serbian ‘ethnic cleansing’ provoked NATO intervention in Kosovo, while an Australian-led United Nations force moved to restore order in East Timor following rampages by pro-Indonesian militia. Within a few months of this Conference, the government decided to shift the focus of economic construction from the eastern coastal provinces to the western regions. This will be considered in Chapter 4. Because most of the ethnic areas, including especially Tibet and Xinjiang, lie in the western areas, and because it is so important to policy, it requires at least a mention here. Another result of the Central Ethnic Work Conference of autumn 1999 was the Chinese government’s February 2001 adoption of an amended version of the Law on Regional National Autonomy, originally passed in 1984 (see Chapter 2) (Sautman 2002: 99). The amended version is slightly longer than the original, with 74 articles in the new as against 67 in the old and clauses added to several of the existing articles. There are no differences in substance, and in particular Article 2 of both versions is equally insistent that ‘all national autonomous areas are integral parts of the People’s Republic of China’. Still, it is worth noting that the additions in the new version are all in the direction of strengthened autonomy. Some examples are noted elsewhere in this book. One illustration relevant here is in Article 20, which concerns the ability of autonomous governments to deviate from those state instructions that do not suit the conditions of a particular autonomous area. The 1984 version (given Kaup 2000: 188) stipulates that the autonomous government may simply cease implementing such instructions after receiving approval from the higher state organ. The 2001 version (pp. 8–9, 41) imposes a time limit of 60 days on the higher state organ to give such approval. The reason for this addition is that experience showed some state organs simply did nothing, leaving the autonomous government in a bind on how to proceed. Chinese bureaucracy is – and has always been – expert at the technique of delaying and refusing to give answers. The implication of the addition is that delay of more than 60 days is equivalent to approval. Since 1990, the government appears to have strengthened its insistence both that China’s borders shall remain unchanged, and that autonomy for ethnic minorities should become more meaningful. Obviously there is some tension between these two demands, because some ethnic groups prefer outright independence to autonomy, however great its extent. But the two demands in some ways balance each other, because some people do in fact see advantages in remaining part of a comparatively successful state where their lives have indeed greatly improved. Some realities of autonomy The practice of autonomy has led to a strong sense of ethnic identity among many, perhaps most, of the minorities. In later sections of this chapter several prominent examples of the most intense forms of ethnic identity or nationalism will come

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under discussion. However, the expressions of this ethnic identity vary significantly from place to place and from group to group. In very few does it lead to major problems for the state. The privileges extended to minorities under the autonomy policy have resulted in a push for recognition of additional groups by the state, though so far all such attempts have failed, and the number of acknowledged minorities has remained at fifty-five since 1979. A prominent example of a potential extra ethnic group is the Mosuo, who straddle the Yunnan-Sichuan border, most of them on the Yunnan side, and are currently categorised as a branch of the Naxi. During a visit to the Mosuo area in January 1996 I found quite a strong feeling that they were separate from the Naxi. When I interviewed a village head during a visit to their territory in January 1996, he told me that he would be better able to bargain with authorities if he represented a ‘minority nationality’, rather than simply a branch of one. Harrell (2001: 219) reports being asked by a prominent Mosuo member of the Ninglang County CCP Committee, and hence hardly a dissident member of society, to apply foreign pressure on the Chinese government to have the Mosuo recognised as a separate nationality. His argument was that the Mosuo were completely separate from the Naxi, and had ‘mistakenly got lumped in with them’ due to errors in the identification process in the 1950s (Harrell 2001: 218). One example of prominent ethnic identity comes from the Hui, who live scattered over most of China and are recognised mainly through their adherence to Islam. One major work on the Hui has it that ‘the Hui people, once members primarily of religious communities, through interacting with changing social contexts and state policy now very much see themselves as a bona fide ethnic group’ with a pronounced ethnic identity (Gladney 1991: 323). The Hui have all along insisted on their right to practise Islam, including abstaining from pork. Since 1975, the year of the Shadian Incident mentioned in Chapter 2, the Hui have been quite loyal to the Chinese state and serious disturbances involving them have been quite rare. The worst one occurred on 12 December 2000. Somebody placed a pig’s head outside a mosque in Yangxin County, Shandong, intended as and certainly seen as an absolute insult to the Islamic faith, and, when Muslims protested, a clash ensued with police resulting in the deaths of six people. What is important in this context is that the authorities came down on the side of the Hui over this incident. According to People’s Daily (22 August 2001), six local officials were held responsible and investigated for criminal proceedings, having made ‘inappropriate decisions’ in dealing with the protest. Obviously, the state does not see its interests as best served by inciting discontent among the Hui when there is no question of separatism. Some ethnic groups do not care very much about their ethnicity. I have myself interviewed heads of ethnic villages in western Hunan and elsewhere who are quite open about their interest in being counted as ethnic only because of the privileges it brings in terms of such matters as family planning. Another factor is loyalty not so much either to one’s own ethnic group or to China, as to one’s own locality. Based on research among China’s most populous minority in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, one specialist argues that localism still overrides nationalism among the Zhuang. By that she means that ‘villagers tend

Minorities politics 41 to have a stronger sense of loyalty to their locality than to their ethnic group’ (Palmer 1997: 284). She regards this triumph of localism over nationalism as one important factor restricting further Zhuang mobilisation and preventing it from ever leading to a viable secessionist movement, despite the recent growth of Zhuang ethnic consciousness (Kaup 2000: 174). I believe these comments would apply with equal validity to a wide range of ethnic minorities in China. Yunnan’s ethnic groups appear on the whole to be quite happy to remain part of the PRC, even while they are active in maintaining and developing their own ethnic cultures and may have complaints against the Han-dominated society. Based on research among the Dai, Bai and the Muslim Hui of Yunnan Province, Susan McCarthy (2000: 108) has argued that ethnic minority cultural activism, including linguistic promotion and religious education, is quite capable of expressing a belonging to the Chinese nation, not just to minority consciousness. In her words, it can represent ‘claims derived from a Chinese political identity, a conception of minority membership in the Chinese national community’. She argues that such activism can become subversive depending in part on the reception it gets from ordinary people, and on the stance of the state, but it does not necessarily do so (McCarthy 2000: 116). She found extensive cultural activism among the three ethnic minorities, most of it leading more to feelings of being part of China than to any separatist feelings. Ethnic CCP members and cadres One of the issues that bears on a sense of ethnic importance is participation in such bodies as government, Party and the professions. Certainly, the wish to give ethnic minorities or indigenous peoples more power to control their own destiny has become a global trend at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is true that not many countries have realised anything approaching what the ethnic groups themselves regard as ideal. But the effort is recognisably part of globalisation. One of the clauses the February 2001 amended Law on Regional Autonomy added to the original version was to improve recruitment opportunities in the government for members of local ethnic minorities. Although the earlier version had stipulated training cadres at various levels and enjoined preferential treatment for specialised ethnic personnel and professionals in various kinds of construction in the autonomous areas, the requirement of affirmative action for government positions is new.1 The difference may not be great, but the new provision cannot harm the sense of self-empowerment of ethnic minorities. The NPC is the highest level of government in China, though not of the CCP. A new NPC is chosen every fifth year, the Seventh holding its first session in 1988, the Eighth in 1993 and the Ninth in 1998. The percentage of ethnic participation reached its height in 1988, with 15 per cent of membership. In 1993 and 1998 the proportion declined slightly to 14.75 and 14.37 per cent, respectively. The CCP is China’s main power-holding group, and the inclusion of ethnic minorities is therefore important. The record shows that since 1990 ethnic representation has increased, both in absolute numbers and proportionately. In that year there were 2.8 million CCP members among the minorities, accounting

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for 5.7 per cent of the total membership of about 49 million. By 1995 the comparable figures were 3.19 million ethnic members, 5.8 per cent of the total of 55 million CCP members. The figures for mid-2001 were that the CCP had grown to 64.5 million members altogether, among whom 4 million belonged to ethnic minorities, in other words 6.2 per cent of the total.2 Still, given that the census of November 2000 showed the minorities at 8.41 per cent of China’s total population, their membership in the CCP still does not reflect their proportion among the people in the country as a whole. Xinjiang is an ethnic region with particular sensitivities and is worth special mention. Figures from Xinjiang show that in 1997 there were altogether some 958,000 CCP members, among whom about 358,000 were from the minorities, that is 37.37 per cent (XUAR 1998: 49). On the other hand, the percentage of the minorities in the total population of Xinjiang at the same time was about 61.6 per cent (XUAR 1998: 9), meaning that the proportion belonging to the CCP was very much lower than that in the population as a whole. The great majority of the ethnic population is Muslim, and many of them are disaffected with the CCP and its rule in Xinjiang anyway. Under these circumstances, what is surprising is not that the CCP membership is so low, but that it is as high as it is. Turning to all categories of cadres in China, not just the CCP members, we find that the numbers are actually somewhat lower. This is because to become a cadre usually requires more professional qualifications than political reliability, though the latter is always important in China. The number of ethnic cadres in 1990 was 1.02 million, or about 6.6 per cent of the total (see figures in Mackerras 1994: 157). A work conference of June 2000 specifically dedicated to the issue of minority cadres gave further relevant national figures. It claimed that at the end of 1999 there were 2.824 million minority cadres, representing 6.9 per cent of the total national figure of just less than 41 million. The increase in the number of minority cadres since 1993 had been altogether 452,000, that is an average 3 per cent a year (Zhai and Zhang 2000: 1). The proportion of ethnic cadres to the total has thus not risen much over the 1990s, though the absolute number increased significantly. Moreover, it remains lower than their percentage in the total population. In Xinjiang, the reflection of ethnic cadres among the Region’s total rose from 240,000 or 46 per cent in 1990 (Sautman 1998: 117) to 312,000 or 48.83 per cent in 1997 (XUAR 1998: 49). The proportion may have risen but remains well below the 61.6 per cent the ethnic minorities take up of Xinjiang’s total population. The Tibet Autonomous Region shows a more rapidly rising pattern but still with Tibetans not even nearly reflecting their proportion in the total population. The number of Tibetan cadres rose from about two-thirds of the total in the early 1990s (Mackerras 1994: 158) to 74.9 per cent in 1998 (Information Office 1999: 23). In Inner Mongolia in 1996, there were 137,000 Mongolian officials, representing nearly 19 per cent of all officials (Cui 1997: 13), whereas Mongolians were only 3.65 million of the total population of Inner Mongolia of 23 million, or 15.9 per cent (Wuliji 1997: 10). In the late 1990s, the proportion of ethnic cadres in the whole country who were members of the CCP was 37.7 per cent. More than 40 per cent of ethnic cadres were aged below 40, while three-quarters had graduated from senior

Minorities politics 43 middle school or above. About two-thirds were engaged in professional and/or technical work (Chen 1999: 13). What do all these statistics mean? One factor on which these figures are comparatively silent is the locus of political power. Are the cadres and CCP members mainly at the bottom of the heap, simply doing what they are told? Perhaps most of them are, but one could ask precisely the same question about the Han majority. The figures suggest, I believe, that the ethnic minorities have gone some way towards gaining influence within their own communities. There appears to be some kind of self-empowerment process going on, and central authorities seem keen to promote it, as long as they do not have to sacrifice their own power. It is important that the number and proportion of CCP members has grown since 1990. However, there are still serious shortcomings in the extent to which ethnic people truly run the affairs of their own regions, which means that autonomy has a way to go before it can be said to be truly genuine.

The human rights issue Human rights are among the most important of those discourses that we can associate with globalisation. They are also an area of international concern that has already necessitated concessions from China and especially since its accession to the WTO. Though far from new in the early 1990s, human rights concerns have accelerated since then to assume a dominant position in global discussions of the state of the planet. Certainly they remain controversial, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century, few power-holders can ignore issues such as how minorities, women or workers are treated in areas or enterprises under their control. Human rights activists and organisations have grown enormously in the influence they are able to wield, including on governments. As explained in the Introduction, the year 1989 was a very important one for human rights discourse in China, because of worldwide horror over the Beijing massacre of June that year. The document that began China’s human rights diplomacy in 1991 included a section on minorities, presenting a very bright picture of conditions in ethnic minority areas against the background of the misery the CCP found when it came to power (Information Office 1991: 32–6). It was glowing about the success of regional autonomy and the equal rights minorities enjoyed with the Han, adding (p. 33) that ‘the minority nationalities enjoy some special rights accorded to them by law’, a reference to the preferential policies dictated by the government. Some of these preferential policies are covered both in this and other chapters. As in many other countries, minorities have been increasingly prepared to show anger at behaviour showing insensitivity towards their cultures, customs and other aspects of their ethnicity. Chinese society is not short of racists and my own and others’ impressional evidence shows many signs of conduct that minorities find insulting and degrading. On the private level, it is as difficult to cope with such behaviour as in other countries. On the public level, however, the law is in theory prepared to step in to protect the equal rights of minorities. This is a trend that appears well in accord with globalisation processes.

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One area of concern is the media and publications. On 7 June 1994, various senior government bodies, including the State Ethnic Affairs Commission and the Ministry of Culture, issued a notice expressing alarm at the offence given to the minorities through the lack of sensitivity shown in some publications, media outlets and literature and art works. The notice mentioned several specific items, including the book Sexual Customs, which had caused a furore and widespread Muslim protests in 1989 by several comparisons insulting to Muslims, such as likening the structure of a mosque to male genitalia.3 Some of the content in the above books and articles has seriously hurt the feelings of the minority nationalities and aroused righteous indignation and strong protest from the relevant ethnic minorities. It has given rise to serious consequences, and become an untoward factor impacting on current ethnic relations and social stability in our country. Some have had an unfortunate influence outside China, damaging our country’s international reputation. If we do not give such matters our most earnest attention and take necessary preventative measures, similarly serious, or even more serious, phenomena are bound to recur. This could even go to the extent of affecting our country’s reform and opening up to the outside world and the smooth conduct of economic and social construction, and of influencing our country’s social stability. (Economic Department 1995: 45) The notice contains a number of provisions for correcting these harmful trends. It calls for outlets to publish material more likely to improve ethnic relations and forbids the publication of material insensitive or insulting to any ethnic minority. The case of the media and publications raises the very thorny issue of censorship. In Western countries people argue strongly over where it is legitimate to defend minority rights in entertainment, the media and publications by forbidding certain types of material, and where such bans cross the border into unjustifiable censorship; and different countries and territories within them have different laws governing such matters. Comparing the early twenty-first century with the 1960s and 1970s, however, there has been a swing back towards more acceptance of censorship in many parts of the world, and it is partly associated with demands from ethnic minorities for sensitivity for their cultures. In China, this debate is much less pressing than in the West. Censorship is far more pervasive, even to the extent that many people in the West regard it as a human rights abuse. The Chinese state is not reluctant to take measures to suppress publications it believes will harm ethnic unity. If an argument or legal case ensues regarding minority rights, it will normally side with the ethnic party. The case of the Yangxin riots of December 2000 is a good illustrative example. In April 1996 authorities decided against screening the Australian film Babe in China, in which the star is a talking pig, because of fear of upsetting Muslims. The major exception is when there is a question of secession or perceived threats to the state, a matter on which the Chinese authorities have been very concerned, even obsessed, since the late 1980s.

Minorities politics 45 Among the succession of ‘white papers’ the PRC State Council’s Information Office put out on human rights issues was one published in September 1999 dealing exclusively with the treatment of ethnic minorities (Information Office 1999). Covering political, economic, social demographic and cultural issues and full of facts and figures, the document presented a picture of enormous progress and improvements in the livelihood of the ethnic minorities. One of the claims put forward in the document was respect for the ‘folkways and customs’ of the ethnic minorities, and preservation of their cultural heritage (Information Office 1999: 30–3). This account could hardly be more different from the claims put forward by human rights activists, especially those in the West. One of the most striking things about these activist groups is that they take their information and perceptions largely from diasporas, groups of people who have themselves taken refuge from China and are keen to increase their influence in their new homes. Given that worldwide refugee movements and diasporas are among the notable features of globalisation, it is obvious that this process has ordained a selection in favour of particular ethnic groups. Human rights: Tibet and Xinjiang Among the diasporas, by far the most important is the Tibetans’, that ‘steady flow of refugees into Nepal and into a Tibetan diaspora that has rooted exiles in foreign lands around the world’ (Schell 2000: 273). There are other groups, which include the Uygurs, the Mongolians and the Miao, but their influence in human rights terms is minimal by comparison with the Tibetans. The reason is largely to do with the figure of the Dalai Lama, there being no comparable figure among the other ethnic groups, either inside China or outside. I return to this question in Chapter 7, and it requires no further coverage here. Bodies such as Amnesty International, Asia Watch (renamed Human Rights Watch/Asia) and the United States State Department have issued regular reports on human rights in Asia. Accusations of human rights abuses against China’s ethnic minorities since before the early 1990s have focused almost entirely on the Tibetans and, since the late 1990s, the Uygurs as well.4 Human rights activists and bodies such as Amnesty International have issued many criticisms that arbitrary arrests have taken place among both peoples, with condemnations but no fair trials. Other frequent bases for accusations of human rights abuses are excessive Han immigration into Tibet and Xinjiang, as well as religious persecution on the pretext of suppressing separatism. As regards the case of Tibet, human rights activists regarded issues like the Chinese determination on the identity of the Eleventh Panchen Lama in 1995 and the ban on pictures of the Dalai Lama in 1996 (see Chapter 5) as infringements of human rights. The boy the Dalai Lama nominated as the Eleventh Panchen Lama became regarded as the world’s youngest political prisoner. Human Rights Watch (1998: 180) claimed that he ‘was under house arrest or some other form of custody’. It added that Chinese authorities had refused all requests for access to him, even to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary

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Robinson. Basically, human rights activists regarded Chinese actions on these matters as abuses, because they involved infringements on religious freedom. On the other hand, the Chinese authorities saw the same matters as suppression of separatism and hence lying within their legitimate state jurisdiction. Any government would do the same, they argued. Activists regard Chinese claims of separatism merely as a smokescreen masking human rights infringements. One representative of the Tibet Information Network has stated that, at the end of 1998, the average sentence for political prisoners, said to number about 500 –600, was just over 7 years, with many detainees suffering torture, beating and degrading treatment during interrogation (Marshall 2000: 144). Drapchi Prison in Lhasa is the most famous in Tibet. Sometimes shown to foreigners to delude them into a positive image of prison life in Tibet, it has also been the site of many protests against harsh conditions. Despite the claims of cultural preservation in Chinese government publications, the Dalai Lama has been prepared to make a charge of ‘cultural genocide’ (see Chapter 7) and his supporters around the world have shared his view, many demanding guerrilla warfare against the Chinese. My own view on this matter, based on four visits to Tibet since 1985 and several to other Tibetan areas, is somewhat different. It is true that the Cultural Revolution saw massive cultural destruction. However, what strikes me most forcefully about the period since 1980 or so is not how much the Chinese have harmed Tibetan culture, but how much they have allowed, even encouraged it to revive; not how weak it is, but how strong. What is true is that there is a modernisation process going on in Tibet, carried on in the context of Tibet as part of China, which may dilute tradition. But everywhere there are still many signs of Tibetan lifestyle, culture, religion and traditions. Chinese authorities have also found themselves under very strong criticism for human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and against its Uygur population. For instance, Amnesty International (2001: 72) claimed that in 2000 Xinjiang had been ‘the only region of China where political prisoners were known to have been executed in recent years’. Even more serious was the allegation that executions of Uygurs for separatism or terrorism followed ‘secret or summary trials where convictions were based on confessions extracted under torture’. In March 2000, Rebiya Kadeer, whom many had pointed to as an example of a Uygur woman who had got to the very pinnacle of business in Xinjiang, was sentenced to 8 years’ imprisonment for threatening national security, Amnesty International (2001: 72) being among many bodies to issue condemnations.

Inner Mongolia In July 1990 reports appeared in Hong Kong (cited in Kaup 2000: 2) of Mongolian organisations in Inner Mongolia bent on securing Inner Mongolia’s secession from China to form a single Mongolian republic with the then MPR. The reports claimed that clashes between Mongolian activities and the government in May 1990 had led to the deaths of some 200 people. I happened to meet a Mongolian professor in Hohhot within a few months of these alleged clashes. He claimed to be very interested in the history of such Mongolian separatist activities in Inner Mongolia, but

Minorities politics 47 denied absolutely that the reported clashes had taken place, let alone any resulting in deaths. Certainly, however, people in Inner Mongolia were following closely what was happening on the other side of the border, where the MPR collapsed at the end of the next year. There were no doubt some who wished to link up with co-nationals over the border, but how strong their organisations were is very unclear. It is likely that any such activism weakened in the course of the twentieth century’s last decade and into the new century. A study by Uradyn E. Bulag, a partly Western-educated Mongol living in the West, argues that any resistance among the Mongols of China presupposes acceptance of the Chinese state; ‘it has not questioned the state’s legitimacy in ruling the Mongols, only its methods of rule’ (Bulag 2000: 178). Bulag suggests that preferential or affirmative action policies have indeed won over major portions of the Mongol people to accept that they are part of China, while at the same time the firm suppression of any secessionist movements instils fear into them. Many Mongols have taken quite readily to doing business and making money as part of China. The new ideology of ‘opening up and development’ targets the ever-shrinking pastureland in Inner Mongolia. By the end of the twentieth century, this ideology had ‘apparently charmed people into ethnic cooperation’. It is not just Han who conduct agricultural expansion, ‘for Mongols have also become active developers’ (Bulag 2000: 195). The creation of the Handominated multi-ethnic China, according to Bulag, ‘is not just a state project; it is also, in this and many other instances, one that is enthusiastically embraced in diverse ways by the minzu [ethnic] subjects or fractions thereof’ (Bulag 2000: 195). The reasons for this trend are an interesting question. Bulag’s comments imply that the ideology of development is a major cause. I agree with this interpretation. Another factor is that the Inner Mongolian economy has been doing much better since at least the early 1990s than in the Republic of Mongolia over the border, leaving little incentive to join up into a single state with people there, even though they may be co-nationals. I would also add my impression from visits to Inner Mongolia that Mongolian ethnic consciousness there is not particularly strong. It has been, with some variations at particular times, in long-term decline since the early years of the twentieth century.

Tibet This situation contrasts very strongly with that among the Tibetans and certain ethnic groups in Xinjiang. These two cases are by far the most difficult for the Chinese state, illustrating policy since 1990, and require separate treatment. In Tibet the pro-independence riots of 1987–1989 caused a shift towards a harder policy, as explained in Chapter 2, and the new policy remained in place into the twenty-first century. As Shakya (1999: 432) puts it, the new policies ‘meant that the region would no longer be treated as a special case and that the concessions that had been made to the Tibetans would be reined in’. They can be summed up as much greater emphasis on economic development, combined with absolute prohibition on separatism in all forms and under any guise. Though this is actually the overall policy carried out in all the ethnic areas of the PRC, the situation in Tibet is special because of the intensity of Tibetan ethnic and cultural consciousness.

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In political terms one of the main prongs of the policy was a tightening up in attitude towards Tibetan members of the CCP. ‘There were repeated calls for Party members and cadres to demonstrate their loyalty and to eschew nationalistic sentiments’ (Shakya 1999: 433). CCP members were still allowed to attend religious ceremonies, but authorities took much more active steps to ensure that they were not believers in religion. A much firmer attitude was adopted towards displaying pictures of the Dalai Lama at home, as many CCP members had done in the laxer spirit of the 1980s. Demonstrations continued after 1989, but much more infrequently and on a smaller scale. The largest was in Lhasa on 24 May 1993 when up to 3,000 Tibetans took part in attacks on government and public security organs, followed by smaller demonstrations on following days. Authorities had improved their methods of crowd control since 1989. Police were reported to have ‘kept their distance’ until ‘slogans changed into calls for Tibetan independence’ and even then used tear gas, not lethal weapons, to disperse the crowds (‘Clashes in Lhasa’ 1993: 23202). When the riots of the late 1980s were suppressed, not even the Chinese authorities were denying that some people were killed. But in May 1993 authorities acknowledged no deaths, though a later Kyodo report (cited ‘Quarterly Chronicle’ 1993: 638) quoted two Japanese tourists as saying that casualties may have seen up to nine people killed. There have been further disturbances in Tibet since these 1993 demonstrations, and pro-independence feeling is not dead. This is evident from the material on human rights above and suggested strongly by the controversy over the Panchen Lama in 1995 and the banning of pictures of the Dalai Lama in 1996 (see Chapter 5). In April 1996, the authorities again began a ‘strike hard’ campaign to eliminate separatism, which took the form of arrests of dissident political activists and ‘political re-education campaigns’ in the monasteries the authorities most suspected of separatism (see Amnesty International 1997). However, it appears that the Chinese government has indeed succeeded in integrating Tibet more closely into China than was the case in the 1980s. Many of the signs of this are apparent in the economy, and will be considered in Chapter 4. Goldstein notes (1997: 93) that the Chinese authorities accomplished this strengthened control ‘without restricting the day-to-day life’ of the inhabitants of the Tibetan capital Lhasa. Provided Lhasans were not engaging in anti-government political activities, he continues ‘they were free to go where they wished, meet with friends, invite monks for religious services, have parties, and so forth’. These comments accorded with the impressions I have gained in travelling in Tibetan areas of China. Two important anniversaries occurred at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. The first was in March 1999, marking both the fortieth anniversary of the 1959 uprising against Chinese rule and the tenth year since the independence demonstrations that led to the imposition of martial law in 1989. The other was the fiftieth anniversary of the signature of the 1951 agreements, falling in May 2001. Nobody thought the Chinese would mark March 1999, but the Tibetan diaspora and its supporters predicted there could be anti-Chinese incidents within Tibet itself. The fact that nothing untoward occurred signalled that the Chinese had

Minorities politics 49 succeeded in establishing control better than most people expected. On the other hand, the Chinese certainly did hold large-scale celebrations in May 2001 as a mark of half a century since the Dalai Lama’s regime had signed its agreement that Tibet was part of China. Again, the lack of overt opposition to the celebrations showed how tight Chinese control had become. No doubt many Tibetans were unhappy about this, but none was prepared to demonstrate open disapproval.

Xinjiang There are some commonalities between the situations in Tibet and Xinjiang since 1990. Both have been the focus of disturbance against the Chinese government. Both are ethnic areas in which the tradition is profoundly religious. In both cases, the Chinese government has adopted policies of suppression of separatism, combined with economic development and affirmative action towards minorities. In both cases, Chinese harshness towards separatism has made the leadership the target of severe international criticism on human rights grounds. Both are associated with the global trend towards minority rights and in that sense are influenced by the globalisation trend so important in the world today. There are also very important differences. The Islam of Xinjiang is very different from Tibetan Buddhism in doctrine and influence, and in international relations. Islam has its own internationalisation or globalisation process, which is in many ways hostile to the dominant liberal form of globalisation, especially since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center of 11 September 2001. Xinjiang is much more multi-ethnic than Tibet. There is no international leader in Xinjiang corresponding to the Dalai Lama, either inside or outside China. What is striking is that, since 1990, Xinjiang has actually presented far more difficulties to the Chinese central government than Tibet. This is in sharp contrast to the 1980s, when Xinjiang was rather free of disturbance, especially when compared with Tibet. Ethnic clashes and terrorism The first of the troubles occurred in April 1990, the month before martial law was lifted in Tibet. According to Xinjiang Television on 21 April, public security personnel were attacked in a government building in Baren Township, Akto County, Kizilsu Kirgiz Autonomous Prefecture, not far from Kashgar in the southwest of Xinjiang. The following day the authorities sent in troops of the People’s Armed Police and the People’s Liberation Army and successfully inflicted a devastating defeat on the rebels. The number of casualties overall is open to question. The official version acknowledged twenty-one dead, but one account (Dillon 1997: 137) has it that the foreign press quoted over sixty. Precisely who had organised and led this uprising? According to Michael Winchester (1997: 31), who interviewed a participant in the underground group that led the uprising, the leader was Zahideen Yusuf, a strong Muslim from a poor Uygur village south of Kashgar with a long-standing history of anti-Chinese unrest. The Islamic side will be considered in Chapter 5. Winchester claims ( p. 31) to have been told that Zahideen had smuggled and stockpiled weapons and

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it was a police sweep on the village in search of such arms that sparked off the initial attack, which turned out to be premature. Official Chinese sources described it as an ‘armed counter-revolutionary rebellion’, and attributed it to the Islamic Party of East Turkestan. According to the 21 April broadcast, the disturbances were directly separatist in intent, and flowed from the activities of ‘extremely reactionary political forces whose aim was to undermine the motherland’s unification and unity among nationalities and practise splittism of nationalities’ (quoted from ‘Quarterly Chronicle’ 1990: 583). Subsequent official reports also put some of the blame on efforts to revitalise Islam, ‘paralysis’ among local CCP organisations and the indifference of ‘grassroots leading bodies’ towards the interests of the people (‘Quarterly Chronicle’ 1990: 583). In other words, authorities could not heap all the responsibility on their enemy for the disastrous trend that had produced this uprising, but had to take some of the blame themselves. There is actually a good deal in common in these reports. There is general agreement that the aim was separatism, with one side supporting it, but the other strongly in opposition. This was, moreover, the first time since 1949 that anybody had taken serious action on behalf of political independence for Xinjiang as an East Turkestan Republic. The Chinese were quite easily able to produce many leaders and ordinary people who simply hated this renewal of what could be viewed as terrorism. But this may not have been the impact on everybody. A Uygur friend told me in 1994 that he knew of many different reactions from people who had seen the television footage of the defeated Uygur uprising. Some people were full of admiration that anybody should dare to defy the mighty Chinese state, others were terrified or horrified over what might happen to anybody who got involved in such activity. It is also clear that the uprising produced serious flow-on effects. Uygur opposition surfaced outside China itself, as discussed in Chapter 7. Even though Zahideen Yusuf himself was killed, followers fled to the mountains to organise further unrest, and many of them continued their activities, including some whom the Chinese had arrested but then released. The smuggling of weapons continued, despite added official vigilance. A series of bomb blasts began. The first of them took place on 5 February 1992, timed to coincide with the Chinese New Year. It exploded on a parked bus in Ürümqi, killed six people and injured twenty others (Winchester 1997: 34). There were also reports of bomb attacks in widely scattered parts of Xinjiang in March 1992. There appears to have been serious unrest involving up to 150,000 people in rallies and strikes in April 1995 in six towns in the area around Gulja (Yining in Chinese), capital of the Yili Kazak Autonomous Prefecture in the northwest of Xinjiang. Demonstrations included petitions to local officials and demands for an end to Chinese rule. Although the accounts of these disturbances are unconfirmed, and a Chinese official at the Xinjiang Foreign Affairs Bureau in Ürümqi, Liu Yusheng, is reported to have denied that any unrest occurred, most Western scholars accept that there is some basis in the reports (e.g. Dillon 1997: 138–9, 147). The same year a vice-chairman of Xinjiang’s Political Consultative Conference was assassinated.

Minorities politics 51 Further serious disturbances erupted in Gulja on 5 February 1997. Exactly what sparked them off is unclear, but some sources claim that police had entered a mosque to arrest two religious students but met with resistance. However, the incident certainly developed into riots involving demonstrations on behalf of independence, mostly by Uygurs, assaults on Han people and vandalisation of vehicles, and continued into the next day. Although soon quelled, the riots resulted in the deaths of about sixteen people, with nearly 150 wounded. Summary arrests and execution of Muslim separatists, almost all Uygurs, followed over the next days (see Mackerras 1998: 290). Moreover, arrests, trials and executions following from those times have continued into the twenty-first century. On 25 February 1997, terrorists planted four bombs in buses in Ürümqi. Three of them exploded in the evening, an official source (cited by Reuter in Mackerras 1998: 292) giving casualty figures of nine dead and seventy-four wounded, mostly school children on their way home. What added further poison to an already horrific incident was that 25 February 1997 happened to be the day of patriarch Deng Xiaoping’s funeral service. He had died 6 days before and the country was in mourning. Virtually everybody recognised the enormous achievements he had made to China, but what the bomb blasts seemed to be saying was that the separatists cared nothing at all for him and were happy to add insult to injury through a terrorist attack targeting civilians, even children. Yet another bomb exploded on a commuter bus on 7 March 1997, this time in Beijing. Mayor of Beijing Jia Qinglin put the blame on criminal elements, not on Uygur separatists, and called for calm. However, the Organisation for Turkestan Freedom, based in Turkey, claimed responsibility for the incident, arguing through Taiwan’s Central News Agency that such an explosion was the only way the Uygur people could take revenge against China-inflicted oppression. It appeared that, for the first time, Uygur separatist activity was making itself felt outside Xinjiang and in China’s own capital. Terrorist incidents such as the ones discussed continued into the following years. In January 2002, the Chinese government released a long report quoting ‘incomplete statistics’ as showing that terrorist forces fighting for an independent Uygur state had been responsible for over 200 terrorist incidents in Xinjiang. These had resulted in the deaths of 162 people and injuries to over 440 (Information Office 2002: 15). The report divided the incidents into six categories. These were (Information Office 2002: 15–18): ● ● ● ● ●

●

explosions; assassinations; attacks on police and government institutions; crimes of poison and arson; establishing secret training bases and raising money to buy and manufacture arms and ammunitions; and plotting and organising disturbances and riots, and creating an atmosphere of terror.

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The authorities are subject to two counter-pressures, especially since 11 September 2001. On the one hand, they are very keen to be regarded as part of the international war against terrorism. The list of categories, as well as the 1997 bus explosions mentioned earlier, suggests strongly that some terrorists have targeted civilians. At the same time, the reference to secret training bases and purchase and manufacture of arms and ammunitions points towards preparations for open warfare or rebellion. On the other hand, the governments of China and Xinjiang are both very keen to attract investors to Xinjiang. To achieve that purpose, they need to play down the extent of terrorism and disturbance in Xinjiang. On 8 March 2002, in a new conference focusing on attracting investors, Xinjiang Governor Abulahat Abdurixit declared that the preceding year had been free of major violent terrorist activity (Bodeen 2002). It is true that the January 2002 report has only one death from the preceding year, together with an incident in which police uncovered and confiscated explosives and equipment for making arms, so the two accounts are not necessarily in contradiction with each other. But there is certainly a different emphasis. Government reaction The revival of ethnic separatism in Xinjiang, just when it had come under better control in Tibet, obviously caused concern in Beijing. The Marxist–Leninist parties in Eastern Europe had been falling from power like ninepins, adding to the CCP’s worries, and the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 strengthened their belief that the Americans and others would like China to follow the Soviet Union into disintegration. In a speech in September 1995 to honour the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, a senior Xinjiang CCP leader Wang Zhaoguo blamed hostile forces for the revival of separatism in the 1990s and for trying to split China. By suggesting that these forces were hoping that their actions would ‘lead to China “breaking up” and becoming Westernised’ (quoted China Daily, 25 September 1995), Wang seems to have been highlighting the Americans as the main ‘hostile force’. However, it was 1996 that marked the main policy turning point. That year saw two major events on the domestic front, and one on the international, which is considered in more detail in Chapter 7. First was a confidential message from the CCP Central Committee to the authorities in Xinjiang, dated 19 March. This message, which has become known generally simply as ‘Document No. 7’, required the local authorities to take firmer action to stop the burgeoning threat of ethnic separatism and conflict. It charged that ‘Groups are fomenting trouble, assaulting Party and government structures, bombing and committing terrorist attacks. Some organizations have already turned from underground to semi-public, to the point of openly confronting the government’ (quoted from Becquelin 2000: 87). Document No. 7 went on to claim that the chaos and turmoil would, if not checked, affect stability in Xinjiang and eventually in the whole country.

Minorities politics 53 The second event was a major work conference the Xinjiang CCP held in the capital Ürümqi from 3 to 6 May 1996 to discuss the stability of the region. Delegates repeated the arguments that separatists were organising riots, terrorist activities and bombings, and that many were being fomented from outside China (Macartney 1996). The meeting called for several measures to move towards solving the problem, the main ones being to improve the economy and to strengthen CCP control by reorganising ‘weak and lax’ branches, especially those dominated by Muslims, and training cadres better.5 The attempt to oppose separatism and terrorism in Xinjiang has developed into an ongoing campaign. Moreover, the terror attacks of 11 September 2001 gave the Chinese authorities an additional reason for cracking down even more severely. After all, Islamic fundamentalism, which they claimed as one of the roots of Xinjiang’s problems, was now shown to be a source of terrorism. The obvious question is how successful the various initiatives of the Chinese authorities have been. On the situation in 2002, my view is that the policies have been successful in some ways, but not in others. The separatist movement is no nearer its goal of full independence than it was in 1990. Gladney’s view (1997: 288) was as valid in 2002 as when he wrote it: Though many portray the Uyghur [Uygurs] as united around separatist or Islamist causes, they continue to be divided by religious conflicts (Sufi and non-Sufi factors),6 territorial loyalties, linguistic discrepancies, commonerelite alienation, and competing political loyalties. On the other hand, the separatist movement shows no signs at all of giving up. An improved economy does not necessarily weaken opposition to Chinese rule. The fact that the authorities found it necessary to imprison the rich businesswoman Rebiya Kadeer in 2000 even suggests that one could find the rise of a class of ‘rich people who agitate for change’ (Gilley 2001: 27). One study of Xinjiang in the 1990s found widespread Uygur resistance to Chinese rule on the level of complaints about the conditions of their lives, including criticism of the system of autonomy and the Uygurs who implement it and open wishes for independence. While recognising that ‘drastic political gains’ are unlikely under present circumstances, he contends that ‘this record of grumbling, joking, and wishing indicates the depth of feeling and the potential for change’ if the Chinese state were to falter or a new leader were to usher in a period of political openness (Bovingdon 2002: 68). Moreover, relations between Uygurs and Han appear to have worsened noticeably since the early 1990s. A recent study suggests that one of the reasons for this reality lies in the fact that boundaries between the lives of the two nationalities have weakened over this period, making contact commoner between them. For instance, Han have gone to work more in the Xinjiang rural areas than used to be the case. At the same time, the Uygurs ‘have themselves begun to move into Handominated sectors, lured by new opportunities in education, employment, and

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trade’ (Smith 2002: 157). Han immigration has increased and the Han dominate in the cities to the extent that Uygurs often find themselves marginalised. Knowledge of the Chinese language is more necessary than ever. Yet despite actual and perceived discrimination against Uygurs in employment, there are quite a few Uygurs who have done very well from the increased economic prosperity since the early 1980s. Ben-Adam (1999: 205) considers that this ‘has resulted in positive sentiments of the Uighur peasantry towards the Chinese government and Han Chinese in general’. The overall conclusion to flow from this material is that policy may have tightened Chinese rule over Xinjiang against a fragmented opposition. Most people might even accept the current order for the time being, devoting energies more to individual and family matters than to politics. But hatred of the Han and their rule is still very widespread and government policy has not succeeded in deflecting ethno-nationalists from their struggle. The reaction of the authorities since 11 September 2001 may even have exacerbated the tensions. Gladney’s late twentiethcentury view (1997: 290) remains apt at the dawn of the twenty-first: ‘As they have in the past, the Uyghur will support a policy that benefits them even as it contributes to the rest of the country. Few believe, however, that the current two-pronged policy of economic development and political repression will satisfy these demands’.

Conclusion There appears to have been a general process of Chinese national integration going on in the past decades in China. If anything it has accelerated since 1990. There are exceptions to this pattern, of which by far the most important is the situation in Xinjiang. Is this general integration of China since 1990 a product of globalisation? And has it accelerated since China joined the World Trade Organisation in December 2001? I suspect that in fact globalisation promotes a more fragmented society rather than a more integrated one. Its impact is to tie ethnic societies in China more to worldwide trends than to those specific to China. The Chinese government wishes to take advantage of the many benefits that go with further dealings with and influence from world capitalism. But that does not mean it will abstain from doing everything it can to strengthen national integration in China and keep the country together. Diasporas are an important part of globalisation. In world terms, diasporas tend to move towards the Western countries, such as those of North America and Western Europe. There is an increasing number of people belonging to ethnic diasporas who have left China for what they expect to be better conditions in these Western countries. They also bring with them perceptions of ethnic identity. And it is part of the globalisation process that these should find enormous sympathy in the West. The effect they have exercised both in their new and old homes tends to be strongly hostile to the Chinese and their rule. By far the best example is the Tibetan diaspora, but it is not the only one. The impact of such globalisation tendencies in Tibet and several other ethnic areas has promoted that kind of Tibetan ethnic consciousness that wants full independence for Tibet, and has thus been

Minorities politics 55 very hostile to the form of Chinese national integration that insists on the maintenance of the present borders. I expect the dichotomy between a strengthened ethnic identity and an enhanced Chinese national integration to persist, especially in Tibet and Xinjiang. There are two kinds of globalisation at work in China, and especially in Xinjiang. One is the liberal mainstream globalisation that is associated mainly with culture, values and fashions emanating from Western countries, especially the United States, and spreading outward towards China. The other is that contrary, but also important, sub-stream associated with Islam, and above all the radical version that requires the victory of Muslims over the infidel. The Chinese authorities are fiercely hostile to any separatism that appears to them associated with this sub-stream, and the resultant oppression has further exacerbated ethnic feelings, especially among the Uygur Muslim communities of Xinjiang. What some Uygurs, including the majority among the Uygur diasporas, regard as religious persecution and oppression looks very different to authorities. They have even coined the term ‘the three evil forces’ to denote the terrorism, separatism and extremism (that is extreme and fundamentalist Islam) they believe is behind the troubles in Xinjiang (Gao 2001: 8–9). One may ask if there is any room at all for the concept of localisation amid an overall globalisation in the context of the politics of China’s ethnic minorities. In some ways, one could answer positively. The globalisation that is taking phenomena associated with world capitalism – tall buildings, foreign commodities and investments, freeways, consumer tastes – is beginning to spread to the ethnic areas. And in reaction local culture is strengthening in some places, notably in some parts of southern Xinjiang. But it may be that it is not only globalisation that is spawning this reaction but also Chinese attempts to form an integrated multinational state by suppressing separatism and those forms of ethnic consciousness that threaten the state. The ethnic identity growing both in Tibet and Xinjiang may be, at least in part, responses to globalisation, but they are hardly reactions against it. China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation could easily end up promoting the kind of reactions against globalisation that some scholars have termed ‘glocalisation’ (see Chapter 1), but that process had not gone far by 2002. The Introduction flagged the likelihood that globalisation would lead to a diminution of control of Chinese authorities over their own territory. Has this in fact happened since the 1990s? I believe that it most certainly has in parts of China, and that is one of the reasons why the CCP believes it more necessary to fight against separatist movements. It is less able to control the revival of inimical traditional forces and the upsurge of new ideas that could ultimately threaten even its very survival. The fact that it still cracks down on threats to the current Chinese authorities merely shows that it is not prepared to sacrifice power either to alternative internal or external forces and is struggling to retain sovereignty and the control that goes with it.

4

The economies of the minorities

The economy has been among the most successful aspects of China’s development since 1990. Industry, agriculture, pasture and infrastructure have all improved dramatically, and the standard of living of most people has risen very rapidly and significantly, with poverty being greatly reduced. China has been welded far more closely into the world economy than ever before and its accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in December 2001 has not only been a culmination of this process, but a means to accelerate it even faster. These successes have not been without problems, especially in terms of environmental degradation and widening inequalities, but they have radically improved the livelihood of the great majority of China’s people. The minorities have participated in this economic improvement. However, they have tended strongly to be at the poor end of the widening disparities. In the uneven and imbalanced economic growth, the eastern seaboard has advanced far faster than the rest of the country. And almost all the minorities live in the western part of the country, which includes the poorest provinces and autonomous regions. Moreover, the minority areas have not been exempt from the environmental damage the economic growth has inflicted, with Xinjiang hit with special severity.

The background The economic trends since the early 1990s have definitely been in the direction of linking the Chinese economy with world capitalism. Although the suppression of the student movement in 1989 cast doubt on whether the reform policies would remain in operation and introduced a period of political and economic tension, Deng Xiaoping’s ‘southern journey’ of early 1992 removed this uncertainty and set the country on the path of greatly accelerated reform (see Chapter 3). Four further steps pointed towards free enterprise and capitalism. The first was the emphasis on the ‘socialist market economy’. The idea was central to General Secretary Jiang Zemin’s speech opening the Fourteenth CCP Congress on 12 October 1992. In March 1993, the NPC actually changed the Constitution of the PRC to declare that ‘The State has put into practice a socialist market economy’. Though the Constitution still had ‘socialist public

The economies of the minorities 57 ownership’ and economic planning as the basis, it strengthened the role of ‘regulation by the market’ (Constitution of PRC 2000: 22). The importance of the market became very clear with the corporatisation of the state-owned enterprises. Again it was Jiang Zemin who suggested this move, using his report to the Fifteenth CCP Congress on 12 September 1997 for the purpose, the move being confirmed by the NPC early the next year. There were profound implications in this move, since the state-owned enterprises are the bedrock of the planned economy. The state-owned share of gross industrial output value had already fallen from 77.6 per cent in 1978 to 28.2 per cent in 1998 (Mackerras 2001a: 191), and the corporatisation of the state-owned enterprises merely accelerated the power of the market and the trend towards collective and privately owned enterprises. The government took some measures to cushion the effects on the unemployment that resulted from the process, but could not prevent resentment and protests from retrenched workers. One particularly severe case of prolonged protests was in Liaoyang, Liaoning Province in China’s northeast, in March 2002, when workers protested over a range of matters, including the closure of their factories and their retrenchment without compensation. The third step towards capitalism was to allow private business people and entrepreneurs to become members of the CCP. In a speech of 1 July 2001, Jiang Zemin urged this move, praising the honesty and social contribution of the majority of people working in the private sector. The next CCP Plenum, held late in September, duly adopted his suggestion. The importance of the decision, which overturned years of looking down on the entrepreneurs as exploiters, was great enough to make one journalist remark: ‘When the world looks back to the moment when the Chinese Communist Party finally embraced capitalism, this may be it’ (Lawrence 2001: 36). The fourth step is one that was brewing during nearly the whole period under discussion in this book: China’s accession to the WTO. However, the fact is that it actually came to fruition at the end of 2001, which is why it is located after the decision to allow entrepreneurs into the CCP. The total impact of the flow-on effects is not clear as this book goes to print, but is likely to be highly significant and point in the direction of China’s incorporation into global capitalism. Two specialists have aptly observed: ‘Perhaps more than any other industry, tourism is closely associated with globalisation, of which it is both a cause and effect’ (Harrison and Price 1996: 6). However, in the isolationist time under Mao Zedong, the Chinese leadership considered tourism unproductive and was not committed to its growth, even stifling domestic travel to a large extent (Wen and Tisdell 2001: 5). Tourism also struck a major obstacle with the suppression of the student movement in mid-1989. Yet despite this setback, it has still seen unprecedented growth since 1990. I believe a focus on tourism is appropriate here. There is no doubt that tourism is among the top money-spinners in the world today. Just how much money depends precisely on what items one includes in tourism. If the term were taken to encompass all the aviation industry, all international travel and all hotels, then it would be far larger than if only a portion of such enterprises were included. But whatever way one looks at it, tourism

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is extremely significant in the world economy of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Global tourism suffered a serious blow due to the terror attacks on New York’s World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. The Fourteenth General Assembly of the World Tourism Organisation, which concluded in Osaka, Japan, on 1 October 2001, issued a press release on the impact of the disaster (carried by various agencies), ‘reporting that tourists are postponing holidays and switching to destinations that are closer to home’. Many people no longer considered air travel as safe as they used to do, and an atmosphere of fear grew in some parts of the world. The Organisation also reduced its short-term forecast for tourist arrivals in 2001 from 3 per cent growth to 1.5 per cent growth. What is perhaps striking is that it could still predict growth at all, given the enormity of the calamity that had happened and the effect the incidents were all but certain to create on the enormous American market. Tourism is going to remain a major factor in the world economy, despite the war on terrorism. Only recently has China become a major force in international tourism, but its rise in the 1990s has changed all that. The World Tourism Organisation estimated that the number of international tourist arrivals in China in 1999, not including Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan, was 27.047 million, up from 25.073 million the preceding year. The 1999 figure put China fifth in the world behind France, Spain, the United States and Italy, but ahead of the United Kingdom, which it had overtaken between 1998 and 1999 (Wen and Tisdell 2001: 3). The World Tourism Organisation also predicted at the end of the twentieth century that China would overtake France to become the top destination for tourists by 2020 (Turner 2000: 440), a prediction the deputy chief David de Villiers repeated at a one-day Cyprus International Tourism Conference in Nicosia on 19 October 2001, in other words after the 11 September 2001 calamity. Chinese earnings from international tourism rose from US$ 2,218 million in 1990 (SSB 1996: 603) to US$ 14,099 million in 1999 (NBS 2000: 625), thus multiplying more than six times in 9 years. It is also worth noting that Chinese domestic tourism also increased greatly at the end of the twentieth century, the total number of tourists rising from 629 million in 1995 to 719 million in 1999 (NBS 2000: 625).

Basic economic indicators Government policy has been to get the minorities to share in the economic growth that China has experienced since the early 1990s. It is clearly in the interests of political stability that all people should feel some stake in the current order of things. However, there have been two additional prongs to the policy. One is to ensure that economic growth should assist in the political integration of China. The other is to pursue a preferential policy based on the general poverty of minority economies and attempt to give them an economic boost. There have been clear overall successes in both policies, but also some significant failures. Table 4.1 indicates some of the basic economic indicators of China’s ethnic autonomous areas. These figures generally indicate economic growth in the

The economies of the minorities 59 Table 4.1 Major economic indicators 1985

1990

1995

1998

1999

Cultivated area (million hectares) 17.47 17.67 15.08 20.69 21.28 Grain (millions of tons) 40.06 53.73 53.60 72.95 68.62 Cotton (thousands of tons) 190 470 946 1,481 1,361 Large livestock (millions) 47.49 52.86 56.18 56.69 56.89 Sheep and goats (millions) 97.57 113.62 119.06 128.74 130.36 Pigs (millions) 45.33 56.65 72.40 76.15 72.92 Steel (millions of tons) 2.33 3.68 7.00 6.33 6.43 Pig-iron (millions of tons) 2.58 4.17 5.55 7.02 6.96 Raw coal (millions of tons) 85.97 120.77 166.39 175.70 153.61 Crude oil (millions of tons) 18.05 12.65 16.10 20.47 20.58 Electricity (millions of kwh) 38,900 73,880 118,650 132,310 142,890 Timber (million cu. m.) 18.26 17.61 32.57 16.37 12.30 Railways (thousands of km) 12.5 13.1 17.0 17.1 17.5 Roads (thousands of km) 254.1 293.7 332.1 374.1 402.6 Source: NBS 2000: 39.

ethnic autonomous areas, and suggest better integration with the national economy. The increases in grain production and in the numbers of livestock point to a generally better and more varied diet in the ethnic areas. Sheep are animals of particular cultural importance to minorities such as the Mongolians and Kazaks, among whom they play many roles that include providing both food and clothing, the larger numbers suggesting more prosperous life among pastoralists. The great expansion in the production of electricity can only help towards modernisation and a more abundant lifestyle for the mass of people. Industry has never been particularly important among the ethnic minorities of China. Despite efforts to expand industry in the minority areas, only a few of them have given it much attention. One of them is Inner Mongolia, where Baotou is home to a major iron-and-steel works. However, this particular example illustrates a highly significant point about industry in China’s ethnic areas, namely that the state perceives it very definitely as China-wide, not ethnic. Baotou is a new Han city, even though in an ethnic area. There is a certain homogenising effect of industry and industrialisation, wherever they occur, and China is no different from other countries in this respect. The figures given in Table 4.1 on railways and roads are examples showing a great improvement in infrastructure in the ethnic autonomous areas since the early 1990s. In Yunnan, many ethnic areas previously very difficult indeed of access now have airports. The years since 1990 have witnessed the opening of several railways with considerable importance for communications in the ethnic areas. September 1990 saw the opening of the newly constructed railway linking the Xinjiang capital Ürümqi with the Alataw Pass on the border with Kazakhstan in the Soviet Union, opening a complete Eurasian ‘rail bridge’ from Lianyungang on China’s eastern coast to Rotterdam in the Netherlands. In December 1997 communications for the southwestern minorities took a step forward with the

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opening of an electrified single-track line linking the Guangxi capital Nanning with Yunnan’s capital Kunming. And in May 1999 the 1,451-km South Xinjiang railway linking Turpan to Kashgar began taking traffic. Tibet remained the only province-level unit without railways, its topography being considered too difficult to build tracks the benefits of which would in any way make the enormous costs worthwhile. However, in 2001, the government announced its intention to complete a railway in Tibet, despite the cost. Even before this move, communications in Tibet had begun to make impressive progress. During the 1990s, highway mileage greatly increased, as did the length of postal routes and the number of post offices and satellite stations. Telephone services improved enormously, and Tibet started such modern phenomena as mobile phones, the Internet and email. To make previously isolated places more easily accessible is part of globalisation. It allows for domestic and foreign commodities and services to reach these places, meaning that consumption patterns from outside can exert influence. As we shall see below, tourists enter and with them new ideas and lifestyle patterns. A better infrastructure opens the possibility of improved links not only with other parts of China, but also with the world more generally. The expansion of cotton and crude oil production are very important, especially in Xinjiang. Oil has a much longer pedigree there, but the large-scale introduction of cotton dates only from the late years of the twentieth century. There are great political implications in the dual strategy of promoting oil and cotton production in Xinjiang, which is in essence part of a long-term strategy to enrich Xinjiang in order to weld its economy into that of China as a whole, and hence integrate the region more tightly into China. Both the Eighth and Ninth Five-Year Plans, which ran from 1991 to 1995 and 1996 to 2000 respectively, placed weight on cotton production in Xinjiang, declaring that the autonomous region should become a national cotton-producing base. Indeed, cotton produced in the ethnic autonomous areas rose from about 10 per cent of the national total in 1990 to about 35 per cent in 1999 (see national totals in NBS 2000: 24–5). Almost all the expansion of cotton production in the ethnic autonomous areas noted in the figures in Table 4.1 was in Xinjiang. The state opened up new land through reclamation, but took over some land previously devoted to grain for cotton production. However, according to one scholar, grain is more profitable in Xinjiang than cotton for ordinary people. He claims that it is the state that reaps the financial benefits of the cotton industry, while the income of many local farmers actually fell. His research in the dominantly Uygur areas of southern Xinjiang led him to the conclusion that ‘quotas for cotton production are imposed on households in terms of acreage that must be sown’. The reason for this is ‘to ensure that farmers grow cotton even though profits are doubtful’ (Becquelin 2000: 82). It is hardly surprising that this causes resentment among the Uygurs. The Chinese policy of economic enrichment of Xinjiang does benefit many Uygurs and other minorities, though far less so than the Han. Journalist Bruce Gilley (2001: 27) claims that ‘a central aim of the development drive in Xinjiang

The economies of the minorities 61 is to bolster ethnic incomes in order to dilute allegiance to Islam’. But it is far from clear how successful this will be. In my impression, many Uygurs resent the Han Chinese whatever they do and there are some who say they would rather stay poor than accept a prosperity bestowed on them by the Chinese. Gilley (2001: 26) goes as far as to argue that ‘the handful of newly enriched Uighur [Uygur] businessmen could even be a source of new funding for nationalists’. My own view is that the Chinese government deserves some credit for trying to improve Xinjiang’s economy and the alternative of leaving it poor would be much worse than the present policy. However, that does not mean that the Uygurs will respond with gratitude. Policies in many respects similar to those in Xinjiang have also prevailed in Tibet, but it appears to me that they have been somewhat more successful there since the early 1990s. In July 1994, Premier Li Peng convened a Tibet Work Forum in Beijing, which determined to push economic development with far greater vigour than ever before. It also decided to undertake sixty-two major infrastructure and other development projects of various kinds, with considerable government investment and support from the eastern provinces, all of them completed by the beginning of the twenty-first century. There seems little doubt that this emphasis on development in Tibet ‘propelled Tibet further towards the mainstream trends prevailing in the rest of China’ (Shakya 1999: 438). Many activists in the West and elsewhere charged that this process would undermine Tibetan culture, and benefit Han more than Tibetans. In an immensely detailed study of Tibet’s economy at the end of the twentieth century, two scholars conclude that Tibetan culture is indeed weakening. However, this is not because the territory is part of China, but because it is undergoing a modernisation and commercialisation process in the context of globalisation (see Sautman and Eng 2001: 74). What is very clear is the Tibetan economy has grown greatly since the early 1990s, Tibetan standards of living rose and Tibet was increasingly dragged into the modern world. Interethnic resentments persisted, but the relative lack of protest incidents by comparison either with Tibet in the 1980s or Xinjiang in the 1990s suggested that the threat they posed to Chinese rule was on the wane.

Urbanisation The point about the urban bias in Tibet leads us on to one of the most dramatic processes going on in China, namely urbanisation. Official figures show that only 10.6 per cent of the total population lived in towns or cities in 1949. The 1990 census put 26.23 per cent of China’s people in the urban districts, while that of 2000 indicated an increase to 36.09 per cent (see figures in Mackerras 2001a: 209, 211–12). While the notion of precisely what constitutes a city changed significantly with the period of reform, it was roughly constant between 1990 and 2000. It is evident that the nearly 10 per cent jump in just 10 years indicates an accelerating process towards urbanisation in China. While the ethnic areas of the western regions of China are still generally much less urbanised than the eastern seaboard, the process affects the whole country. It is certainly globalising and can only have accelerated still more since China’s

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accession to the WTO. Lifestyle has changed, with very large numbers of people, whether Han or minority, moving into apartment blocks which are the same all over China stylistically, and have strong similarities with similar places in other parts of the world. Ürümqi, capital of Xinjiang, is mainly Han in its architecture, and the 1990s saw the construction of globalised tall buildings and modern roads and freeways. In the 1990s, Lhasa, capital of Tibet, became very much more modern than it had ever been before. Modern hotels expanded in number. Just below the Potala Palace an enormous modern square was built, in a style similar to those found elsewhere in China or other countries. In Jinghong, the capital of the Sipsong panna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, the roads became incomparably more modern, and the number of hotels, shops and commercial and other enterprises housed in buildings with globalised architecture expanded greatly in number. Yet despite this trend, it would be a mistake to claim that the ethnic style has vanished altogether. In Lhasa and Ürümqi there are still areas not much affected by modernisation. In both cities there are still very large numbers of buildings in traditional ethnic architectural style. Traditional buildings have been renovated, including the Potala Palace in Lhasa, rightly regarded as one of the wonders of the world and listed among UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites. Smaller cities, such as Shigaze in Tibet or Kashgar in southern Xinjiang, retain far more ethnic flavour than the biggest ones, even though they also are undergoing modernisation. Han people tend to congregate far more heavily in the cities than in the countryside and Han migration to minority areas focuses on the cities. Consequently, Han migration is part of the urbanisation of society. Its economic effects are profound. The businesses Han people establish provide jobs for local people and expand the range of consumer products available in the ethnic areas. Some have criticised this process on the grounds that it spreads Han culture to minority areas, diluting or even destroying local culture, but it is also arguable that the Han themselves are usually taking part in a globalisation and modernisation that they do not fully control. There seems no doubt at all that this expansion of commerce helps raise the standard of living of the great majority of people in the cities of the ethnic areas, though it is true that the Han are generally better off than the minorities.

Standard of living, poverty, inequalities The standard of living of the great majority of minority members has risen greatly since the early 1990s. Although inequalities have widened, as will be discussed in more detail below, the livelihood of most people has improved enormously. In virtually every minority area I have visited since 1990, I have seen and heard evidence of an improvement in the standard of living and, in the cities, of a modernisation process with the potential to enhance the quality of life. Figures bear out this suggestion. For instance, in the ethnic autonomous areas, the average annual wage of employees rose from 2,040 yuan in 1990 to 6,822 yuan

The economies of the minorities 63 in 1999 (there are about 8 yuan to US$ 1). In the rural areas, the average annual per capital net income of households rose from 402 yuan in 1990 to 1,653 yuan in 1999 (Economic and Development Department 2000: 538, 541). In the two very poor but ethnically important provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou, the average per capita net income of rural households rose, respectively, from 472 yuan and 495 yuan in 1994 (Economic Department 1995: 321) to 1,227.69 yuan and 1,287.96 yuan in 1999 (Economic and Development Department 2000: 542), in both cases well over doubling in 5 years. Although all these figures are extremely low by comparison with industrialised countries, the direction is right and the increases substantial. However, it needs to be pointed out that the figures apply to the ethnic autonomous areas, not specifically to members of ethnic groups. In most ethnic autonomous areas, there are substantial Han populations and they are frequently in the majority. It is in this context that the figures for rural Yunnan and rural Guizhou are most relevant. In the ethnic areas of these two provinces, as opposed to the whole of the two provinces, the concentration of ethnic groups is very substantial and in the countryside they are in the great or even overwhelming majority, because of the way Han people living in ethnic areas tend to concentrate in the cities. The extent to which the figures may show much better conditions among the Han than the minorities is discussed below. Another caution is that the figures may not take account of inflation, which averaged 7.1 per cent per year between 1990 and 1998, but was generally lower in the second half of the 1990s and actually negative in 1998–1999 (Mackerras 2001a: 201–3). The figures are not as impressive as they seem, but they are still significant. One aspect of living standards is ownership of durable consumer goods, and they are interesting in that interpreting the data avoids the problem of inflation. The figures in Table 4.2 show the number of durable consumer goods owned by 100 rural households in Xinjiang. The countryside is more important in measuring ethnic standards of living, because of Han concentration in the cities. They show a very impressive improvement in the livelihood of rural people. Table 4.2 Durable consumer goods per 100 rural households in Xinjiang Commodity

1989

1994

1999

Bicycles Sewing machines Clocks, watches Radio sets Black-and-white televisions Colour televisions Washing machines Cameras Electric refrigerators Motor bikes

100.97 54.27 160.72 26.37 25.0 3.79 10.81 0.73 0.4 1.61

143.03 64.19 179.74 45.29 51.74 12.13 16.17 1.97 1.16 3.42

147.4 66.33 196.13 61.07 62.2 28.27 20.87 2.53 8.53 17.73

Source: Liu et al. 2000: 253.

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The general situation in terms of public health has improved enormously since the CCP came to power. However, if the measure is since 1990, then it has improved in some ways, but in others, such as the numbers of hospitals and doctors, has seen relatively little change. And there are some alarming signs of deterioration. The process of the privatisation of health delivery has accelerated, which has meant that health outlays have grown for ordinary people. This has allowed the return of some diseases once thought eradicated. Only in Tibet do basic medical services remain free as the twenty-first century dawns, and what is available is actually so minimal that it often makes very little difference towards solving health problems. One of the diseases to stage a comeback is tuberculosis. ‘From the polluted, bleak streets of its urban ghettoes to the soft, lush hills that are home to its minorities, 250,000 people a year are dying of TB’ (Jiang 2000: 84). A group from the French-based group Médicins sans Frontières and the World Health Organisation worked in some of the worst affected areas, including some ethnic Miao villages in Gongdong County, Guangxi. They found that many of those afflicted with the disease simply could not afford the necessary medical treatment or sometimes not even the bus fare to get to the nearest hospital. A World Health Organisation adviser on tuberculosis in China reached the conclusion that ‘the key is to get the Chinese government to consider healthcare. … A programme can’t depend on external funds and be viable’ (Jiang 2000: 87). However, there are some signs of improvement in the countryside. In the rural ethnic autonomous areas, the number of rural doctors and other medical personnel rose from 135,424 in 1990 to 169,759 in 1999. Over the same period, the number of village health stations in the ethnic autonomous areas rose from 68,843 to 82,023, while the proportion of villages with such stations increased from 75.6 to 83.3 per cent (Economic and Development Department 2000: 625, 623). The number of rural doctors and other medical personnel in Tibet rose from 3,304 in 1994 to 4,533 in 1999, while the comparable figures in the ethnic autonomous areas of Yunnan were 15,739 and 20,473 (Economic and Development Department 2000: 626 and Economic Department 1995: 405). One area of interest in terms of ethnic health is the extent of the use of traditional ethnic medicines. Figures show that the number of ethnic full-time health care personnel rose from 170,738 in 1990 to 185,458 in 1999 (Economic and Development Department 2000: 621), but only a minority practised their own traditional medicine. In fact, several of the ethnic groups have a distinguished traditional medicine, notably the Tibetans, the Mongolians, the Uygurs and the Dai, and all these are very active in the villages, though less so in the cities. During an interview with specialists on Dai medicine in Jinghong, Sipsong panna, on 25 September 2000, I learned that there are traditional Dai doctors in virtually all Dai villages, and two in some. Some of these doctors are hereditary, but it is also possible for doctors to train people other than their sons. Most Dai doctors are male, and only a small minority female. They are folk practitioners and so practise medicine only part-time, carrying out duties as peasants or monks as well as being doctors. Their services are not free, but payment can be either in

The economies of the minorities 65 the form of money or a gift, such as a chicken. In contrast to the past, when payment was usually through a gift, the trend nowadays is towards monetary fees, reflecting the growing strength of the cash economy in Dai villages. Dai medicine is preventative, rather than curative, and most medicines are actually natural herbs and other such foods. It is based on the idea that good health is best preserved through good foods, especially green vegetables and fruits. However, traditional medicine does not conflict with modern, and my informants told me that the government is taking proactive measures to try and prevent the spread of infectious diseases through improving hygienic facilities and practices. The revival of the old ethnic medicines is not only part of the renewed emphasis placed on Chinese traditional medicines, but also in line with a global appreciation for indigenous medicines. In some places they may prevent the adoption of more modern forms of medicine that came originally from the West, but the example from the Dai suggests that this is not the case in China. Indeed, both forms appear to coexist quite well among China’s ethnic minorities. Both have a contribution to make to good health. Both are part of globalisation, as defined in this book, because they exemplify the spread of global practices alongside the retention of local customs. Concrete medical improvements since 1949 include the control of major diseases such as plague and smallpox in the minority areas in the early years of the PRC. Life expectancy at birth in Ningxia rose from 30 before 1949 to 69 in 1998, the latter figure being just below the national average of about 70. In Tibet, life expectancy rose from 36 in 1959 to about 65 in 1998. Infant mortality in Tibet fell from about 43 per cent in 1959 to 3.7 per cent in 1998 (Information Office 1999: 24). One writer (Kwan 2001: 8) claims that by 2001 life expectancy in Tibet had risen to about 67. In the remote ethnic areas of Guizhou and Yunnan, among other provinces, life expectancy is almost certainly somewhat lower, probably no more than the low sixties. However, there are parts of Yunnan with better health, and I was told in an interview in Luxi, capital of the Dehong Dai and Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture, at the end of September 2000 that life expectancy in the prefecture was 68, with just over half the population members of ethnic minorities. The general reduction in poverty and rise in living standards since 1990 has probably meant that health standards have improved. China as a whole has gradually moved up the scale in the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) measure of overall human development index (HDI), a figure measuring longevity, educational attainment and real gross domestic product per capita. Although the measure gives no specific place to health standards, the inclusion of longevity would suggest that a rise would point towards improved health standards. On the other hand, there seems little doubt that the ethnic minorities’ rate of improvement has been well below that of the country as a whole. Moreover, this section has taken no account of one catastrophic disease that is already spreading in China, including some of the minority areas, as part of a global pandemic, namely HIV/AIDS. There is some discussion of this frightful disease in the ethnic areas of Yunnan in Chapter 7.

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Poverty and poverty alleviation The very broad outline of poverty and its alleviation in China shows the following trends: ●

●

●

●

●

Poverty was greatly reduced between the beginning of the reform period in the late 1970s and the mid-1980s. From the mid-1980s, the adoption of what two scholars term a ‘coastal development strategy’ (Khan and Riskin 2001: 144) led to a fall in the rate at which rural poverty declined and an increase in the rate of urban poverty (Khan and Riskin 2001: 147). From the early 1990s the government was increasingly concerned by the incidence of poverty and in 1994 formalised a plan to eliminate absolute poverty by the year 2000 (UNDP 1997: 50). The result was that by 1998 the number of rural poor had halved by comparison with 1990. Although the official Chinese figures show much lower absolute figures than the World Bank estimates, both agree that the reduction was very substantial.1 Although absolute poverty persists as of 2002, its incidence is very much less than it was in the late 1970s, let alone in 1949.

Because poverty is very much more serious among the minorities than among the Han, the 1994 project to alleviate poverty gave a high priority to members of ethnic groups. This policy was translated into law in the 2001 amendments to the Law of the PRC on Regional National Autonomy. Article 69 stipulates that the state shall provide greater support to poverty-stricken ethnic areas ‘in the financial, monetary, material, technological and trained personnel fields’ with the aim of helping poor people there ‘shake off poverty as soon as possible’ (Zhonghua 2001: 65). There is no corresponding article in the 1984 Law. What this suggests is that, at least in policy terms, there was considerable advance in the 1990s in poverty alleviation among the minorities. Official figures reported to a conference of the State Ethnic Affairs Commission on 21 October 2001 and carried in a front-page article in People’s Daily (23 October 2001) claimed that large government investments and World Bank aid since 1994 had reduced the impoverished population in areas of ethnic poverty from 45 million in 1994 to 14 million in 1999. These figures are based on the Chinese government’s official boundary for what constitutes poverty and would certainly be much larger if the World Bank’s higher borderline were adopted. However, the sharp downward trend of poverty is perfectly credible. On a less positive note Director of the State Council’s Poverty Alleviation Office Lü Feijie revealed in a speech to the conference that among China’s total population suffering from absolute poverty, 36.5 per cent belonged to minority nationalities, who were only 8.41 per cent of China’s total population in 2000 (see Chapter 6).

The economies of the minorities 67 Lü explained the context of poverty among the minorities, including some reasons why it was so much worse than in the general population. He said: Natural disasters are frequent, and the ability to fight natural disasters and the hazards of the market is not very good. The annual rate of reversion to poverty is always above 15 per cent. Because local production and livelihood conditions are poor, outlays for consumption are quite high. Basic facilities are weak and there are still quite a few places without electricity or roads. Culture and education lag behind, and the level of social development is quite low. In some villages, proportions of illiteracy and semi-literacy among laborers go higher than 30 per cent. (People’s Daily, 23 October 2001) Another reason for the high incidence of poverty among the minorities is that many ethnic group members live on very poor land. In some areas they have been more or less hunted over many generations to poor, remote and infertile places deep in the mountains. According to the UNDP (1997: 50), most of the minorities ‘live in areas where the soil is too poor for even subsistence crop production, so they are net buyers of food and have been hit hard by higher prices’. The UNDP’s comment actually elaborates on the issue of what Lü Feijie calls ‘the hazards of the market’. Of course both the government and the World Bank are to be commended for their efforts in reducing poverty in the minority areas, and China’s record stands up well in international terms. However, the impact of globalisation may well leave behind those minority villages without the economic strength to compete. It is hardly surprising that even Lü acknowledges that such villages are net consumers. Poverty is very uneven throughout China, including among the minorities. There are minorities that are actually quite well off, the primary example being the Koreans, most of whom live in Jilin Province. There are also class divisions within the ethnic groups, just as there are among the great majority of peoples. However, the worst poverty in China is in the western regions and there is considerable overlap between the areas with the lowest standards of living and those that are home to minorities. Three province-level units show poverty in different ways. One is Yunnan, which of all China’s provinces had the highest number of rural poor people in 1996 (7.7 million), as well as the largest number of ethnic groups, accounting for over one-third of the total provincial population, according to the 1990 census (Economic and Development Department 2000: 434). Moreover, as many as 22.9 per cent of the total population was living in poverty (ADB and SPDC 2001: 5-4). Topography certainly does not help the elimination of poverty in Yunnan. It is extremely mountainous and many of the villages are very difficult of access, even in days when the infrastructure has greatly improved. Globalisation trends are likely to leave them behind. The province-level unit where the highest proportion of the population was poor in 1996 was Xinjiang (27.4 per cent, ADB and SPDC 2001: 5-4).

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There is, however, great variation in Xinjiang in poverty terms, with conditions being much better in the north than the south, where it is the great Taklamakan Desert that dominates the landscape and many people live in quite small oases. In my explorations in Xinjiang generally in the 1990s, I found housing to be quite good, even among the poor, or at least better than in provinces like Yunnan. On the other hand, the climate is very diverse, with very much wider variations between the cold and hot seasons than one finds in Yunnan. In addition, there is a very real political imperative in overcoming poverty in Xinjiang, because disparities in living standards and income between Han and members of minorities bear very directly and negatively on relations among different ethnic groups. Another area where poverty is potentially explosive politically is Tibet. Here again, poverty has been drastically reduced, but remains a serious problem. Daniel Kwan (2001: 8) cites Bureau of Tibetan Poverty-Relief Leading Group Director Zhao Xianzhong as claiming that there were 480,000 poor people in the TAR in 1994 but only 70,000 in 2001. However, his definition of the poverty line was special to Tibetan circumstances. A farmer who earns less than 600 yuan (about US$ 75) a year, or a herdsman less than 700 yuan a year, is considered poverty stricken. However, Zhao acknowledged that if the boundary were set at 1,300 yuan a year, then there were would be 1.2 million people below the poverty line in Tibet. It is worth pointing out in this context that 1,300 yuan per year works out at about US$ 0.45 per day, as against the US$ 1 per day that the World Bank takes as its boundary mark for poverty. Thus, although the government deserves credit for poverty alleviation since 1994, the fact is that those who have succeeded in escaping what the official line regards as poverty are still very poor. It is hardly surprising that many of those who have ‘shaken off ’ poverty revert to it when the markets shrink or the weather turns bad. Still, the figures do represent improvements. Moreover, other indicators suggest significant rises in the standard of living. As we saw earlier, life expectancy has risen greatly. The government continued to allocate significant funds to poverty alleviation in the early years of the century. Despite controversy over Han immigration, Daniel Kwan (2001: 8) remarks that they do at least show one advantage for Tibetans, because Han migrants ‘have opened businesses and provide job opportunities for locals’ in the towns, especially Lhasa. Income and standard of living inequalities An intensively researched study, based on surveys taken in 1988 and 1995, found that inequalities in China grew significantly over those years. Using the Gini ratio for measuring inequalities, which typically finds industrial economies at 0.30 – 0.40 and developing economies at greater than 0.40, the study found that the ratio rose from 0.34 to 0.42 for rural incomes and from 0.23 to 0.33 for urban incomes over those years (Khan and Riskin 2001: 144 –5). The authors associate both increases with the era of globalisation, adding that by 1995 they had made China ‘one of the more unequal of the Asian developing countries’, with inequality in

The economies of the minorities 69 income distribution greater than in countries like India, Pakistan or Indonesia (Khan and Riskin 2001: 49). In 1997 measurements of China’s HDI by province-level unit showed great inequalities by unit. The top six were Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Guangdong, Liaoning and Zhejiang in that order, the worst six being (from bottom to top) Tibet, Guizhou, Qinghai, Gansu, Yunnan and Ningxia (UNDP 1999: 96). What is striking in these figures is that the top six includes not a single province with a high minority population (despite a small number in Guangdong), whereas the bottom six are, without exception, all places with high or very high numbers of ethnic group members. The inevitable conclusion appears to be that in general the Han are much better off than the minorities. An interesting illustrative example is Xinjiang, which ranks about middle among all China’s province-level units. Unfortunately, the HDI measurements by province do not record differentiations within provinces. However, official figures for household consumption in 1999 show very significant differences between regions, with the centre and north of Xinjiang generally far better off than the south. The two highest districts, in terms of consumption levels in yuan, were Karamai (8,846 yuan) and Ürümqi (6,837 yuan), in the north and centre respectively, while the two lowest were both in the south and far west, Kizilsu Kirgiz Autonomous Prefecture (1,214 yuan) and Kashgar (1,225 yuan) (Liu et al. 2000: 236). What is striking here is that Karamai, a famous petroleum city in central north Xinjiang, and Ürümqi are dominantly Han in population, while Kizilsu’s people are over 90 per cent Uygur or Kirgiz and those of Kashgar are over 90 per cent Uygur.2 What this suggests is extensive disparities between Han and minorities. In other words, the case of Xinjiang bears out, rather than contradicts, the general pattern that economically the Han are doing better than the minorities. In the case of Tibet there are also significant disparities between Han and Tibetan. However, a recent study has shown that this is not primarily an ethnic issue. Rather it is due to a strong ‘urban bias’ operating in Tibet, and elsewhere. This favours Han over Tibetans, simply because in Tibet the Han live overwhelmingly in the cities, whereas Tibetans are predominantly rural. For instance, in 1990, 83.5 per cent of Tibetans in the TAR were peasants or nomads, but the comparable figure for permanently settled Han was only 3.4 per cent (Sautman and Eng 2001: 21–2, 47). There are also inequalities among the various minorities and within each of them. The Manchus, whose homes are mostly in Liaoning, Hebei, Heilongjiang and Jilin, the Mongolians, concentrated mainly in Inner Mongolia, and the Koreans are among the most prosperous of China’s ethnic groups. Figures for the rural parts of the ethnic autonomous areas for 1999 show Jilin with the highest per capita annual net income (2,226.85 yuan) among those provinces with significant minority populations. The main ethnic populations in Jilin are Koreans and Manchus. At the other end are Gansu (1,040.33 yuan) and Yunnan (1,227.69 yuan) (Economic and Development Department 2000: 542). The main minorities in Gansu’s ethnic autonomous places are Hui, Tibetans and Dongxiang, while Yunnan is the most multi-ethnic of all China’s province-level units.

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The main disparities within ethnic groups are still urban versus rural. The findings of Sautman and Eng with regard to the TAR almost certainly apply generally throughout the country, even if not necessarily to the same extent. It is much easier to get a prosperous life in the cities than in the countryside. Many minorities have done quite well in business and in the professions. There are preferential policies favouring the hiring and promotion of minorities that have allowed many members of the ethnic groups to rise in society (for instance, see Sautman 1998: 94–7). The great western development strategy The Chinese government has for a long time been very concerned about the inequalities within society, including those relating to ethnic minorities. Conferences have given thought to how to reduce the disparities, or at least to prevent them widening still further. There are political reasons for this, because the CCP knows full well that social instability could result if inequalities become too wide. These disparities were one of the reasons for a change in economic policy, designed to shift the emphasis of economic growth away from the eastern seaboard, which had been the focus of economic development since the mid1980s, and towards the West, counted as including all five autonomous regions, plus the provinces of Shaanxi, Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, Qinghai and Gansu. In February 2000, the central government took a decision to launch a long-term strategy to overcome the relatively poor economic development of the western regions. The government set up a leading group chaired by Premier Zhu Rongji and consisting of numerous ministries. Called the Great Western Development Strategy, this programme is broad-ranging and ambitious, and aims to reduce the economic disparities by accelerating the rise of the vast areas that were previously backward. The strategy faces many problems. Among the most serious are the shortage of water in the western regions and the need to develop without inflicting further devastation on an already damaged environment. There are labour issues, and the fact that educational levels are lower in the western regions, which may necessitate migration of skilled technical personnel. In the minority areas that are of concern to this book, such immigration could well exacerbate ethnic tensions unless very careful preventative measures are taken. In my opinion, Chinese authorities have given a great deal of thought to how to implement the strategy. However, as this book goes to print, it is far too early to say what its eventual impact will be.

Tourism Since the 1990s, ethnic tourism has expanded enormously in China. For a start the China Folk Culture Villages (Zhongguo minsu wenhua cun) in Shenzhen was opened in October 1991. Although this is actually in a Han area, it illustrates minority customs through showing off real minority people in a large park, together with their villages, clothes and performances. It is a ‘theme park’ based on the minority nationalities, rather like the many theme parks that have sprung up in many parts of China and other countries.

The economies of the minorities 71 What is even more important is the fact that many ethnic areas have opened up to tourism, both foreign and domestic. A large number of cities in ethnic areas that were formerly regarded as completely inaccessible to foreigners no longer require special permits and even those that do are much easier to get to than they used to be. Many members of the minorities have begun to cater for the tourists, both domestic and international. Some ethnic villages have made themselves into ‘theme parks’, hoping to attract tourists and make more money than they had ever been able to accumulate before. Tourism mushroomed in Yunnan and Guizhou. As we have seen in Chapter 3, Tibet was very tense politically as the 1990s dawned, but it still put a great deal of effort into tourism, and the Tibetans responded enthusiastically. Xinjiang has also seen a rapid expanse of tourism, although the political situation has inhibited even faster growth. The growth in tourism is corroborated by various figures. In Tibet the number of foreign tourists reached a peak of about 43,500 in 1987, but then experienced a very significant decline in the following years, owing to the political troubles in Lhasa and elsewhere and the restrictions imposed by authorities on travel to Tibet. However, there was a recovery in the early 1990s (Duojie et al. 1995: 535–6) and by the year 1999 the number of foreign tourists in Tibet had gone up to 100,800 (Economic and Development Department 2000: 528). The total number of tourists in 2000, including domestic travellers, was estimated at about 500,000 (‘Tibet’ 2000: 29). In Xinjiang the number of international and domestic tourists rose, respectively, from 79,833 and 1,672,200 in 1990 to 223,829 and 6,946,000 in 1999, while the cash inflow from international tourists rose from US$ 12,120,000 in 1990 to US$ 85,820,000 in 1999, with every year showing increases despite the political tensions (Liu et al. 2000: 594–5). The main ethnic provinces of China, especially Yunnan, show similar patterns of increase since the early 1990s in the numbers of both foreign and domestic tourists (for instance, see Wen and Tisdell 2001: 213, 231–3). Ethnic areas may have more to offer tourists than ethnic culture. There is spectacularly beautiful scenery in many ethnic areas. Ecotourism has become very fashionable worldwide since the late years of the twentieth century, and in some ethnic areas there are natural phenomena that are worth seeing and preserving. One scholar (Wen in Wen and Tisdell 2001: 229) surveyed over 100 tourists at Jinghong airport in 1995 to find out their rankings of the attractions of Sipsong panna Dai Autonomous Prefecture. She found that ethnic culture was most highly ranked, and that is significant, given that Sipsong panna boasts magnificent nature reserves and tropical forests and gorgeous scenery as well as being home to the Dai ethnic group. The acceleration of tourism since about 1990 has played a variety of roles among China’s ethnic minorities, some of them positive, some negative. It has gone hand in hand with a major development of the infrastructure of the ethnic areas. To take but one example, there may still be bottlenecks in the tourist routes of Yunnan (Wen and Tisdell 2001: 235) but tourism has led to the establishment of airports and air routes throughout Yunnan, so that it is now possible to reach in an hour or two ethnic areas that formerly required days or even weeks of arduous

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travel. Tourism requires reasonably comfortable buses that make it pleasant to visit the ethnic areas. This has been a major factor encouraging the Yunnan authorities to invest money and effort into improving the roads. Hotels have sprung up all over China, far more in the provinces along the eastern seaboard than elsewhere. Yet, the ethnic areas have also seen a mushrooming of tourist hotels. Table 4.3 shows the number of tourist hotels in 3 years in the province-level units where minorities are most important. Based on very extensive experience of staying in hotels of this sort over the years, I add that they have not only increased in number but also improved in quality and standards of service and comfort. What is important about infrastructure and service points like hotels is that they are available not only to tourists but to other people as well. Like counterparts in other countries, the great majority of the hotels provide meeting rooms, shops and restaurants as well as accommodation. People travel not only for leisure and tourist purposes, but also for business and work. More and more, Chinese travellers are demanding comfortable hotels, just like foreigners. It is true that there are still very bad hotels in China, but gone are the days when one assumed that while foreigners needed reasonably comfortable accommodation, Chinese were prepared to slum it. Overall, tourism has undoubtedly contributed to the modernisation and globalisation of the minorities. However, modernisation and globalisation both have their complexities. In his study of selected ethnic areas of Guizhou Province, Tim Oakes (1998: 229) has dubbed what has developed a ‘false modernity’. His basic reason is the serious contradiction between, on the one hand, trying to preserve ethnic cultures and, on the other, undermining them through cultural and economic development (Oakes 1998: 186–7). Oakes hints at a series of important and interesting questions. Is modernity necessarily desirable? What does it do to cultures, especially ethnic cultures? Does it matter if ethnic cultures disappear, as long as the minorities themselves are happy for this to happen? Table 4.3 Tourist hotels in selected provinces Province-level unit

1991

1995

1999

Guangxi Guizhou Yunnan Tibet Qinghai Ningxia Xinjiang

57 13 40 12 7 13 49

95 38 138 23 10 17 79

190 48a 234a 65 15 37 176

Sources: SSB 1992: 649; SSB 1996: 606; NBS 1999: 612; NBS 2000: 628. Note a 1998 Figure.

The economies of the minorities 73 The establishment of ethnic villages as ‘theme parks’ commercialises ethnic culture. I visited an ethnic village of Li and Miao people in the centre of Hainan Province in January 2000. Set up specifically for tourists, one paid to enter and was shown the customs of the Li and Miao, such as their wedding practices, their courtship rituals, their religious ceremonies. Amateurs from the village put on a performance of local ethnic songs and dances. Of course all the people wore their ‘native’ costumes and everything was made to seem ‘authentic’. The people sold their ethnic clothes and commodities in a special shop and on the streets of the village. The ethnic culture demonstrated in such theme parks is false in the sense that it is a deliberate construction for tourists. Probably it has some relation with the authentic cultural practices that once obtained in the village, but it has been torn from its social roots and in that sense is more like a museum than an authentic ethnic village. On the other hand, it may be that the ethnic cultures are going to succumb to modernisation anyway, because they are not in accord with the global processes of development that are sweeping the planet, and especially China. In that case, the display of culture does indeed help it to survive, because it gives it a new reason for existence, namely to make money. And does the fact that it is like a museum make it bad? And one could reasonably ask, is this commercialisation such a bad thing if it helps raise the living standards of the people? There can be no doubt that tourism brings in a great deal of money. But for whom? In my observation, the minority people themselves get some of this money. But there is very little doubt that minority elites get more than ordinary people, that representatives of the Han-dominated state get more than minority elites, that private entrepreneurs in such cities as London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Sydney get much more than the Chinese tourist agents who arrange travel to the ethnic areas. I suspect that almost everybody benefits, but some benefit far more than others. It also has to be remembered that tourism can very readily spread social ills, and is certainly already doing so. Tourism gives opportunities for profit-making through prostitution and drugs, and can contribute to the spread of AIDS and other diseases. The effects such ills create on ethnic societies are obviously harmful and may turn out to be very extensive over the coming decades. On the other hand, the rising prosperity that tourism helps bring may also raise standards of medicine and health and the education that can help prevent AIDS. My own view is that, despite the seriousness of such evils, the positive impact of tourism outweighs the negative. My explorations leave me in no doubt that the minorities want tourism, because they believe – correctly – that it will raise their standard of living. I suspect that it is impossible to reverse the tide of tourism, just as one cannot reverse the globalisation of which tourism is an important part. However, it may be possible to take remedial measures that can reduce the damaging effects of tourism on the ethnic societies of China. I believe, for instance, that the minorities themselves should be given more control over the tourism of their area than is currently the case. And that implies training far more members of minorities in the hospitality industries, itself requiring a significant investment

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in education. Such measures have been tried in other countries. They may not solve all the problems. But they do give the minorities themselves more ‘ownership’ and control over the tourism that affects them most directly.

Foreign trade and Central Asia We turn now to another aspect of the economy with ramifications in foreign relations, namely foreign trade. In terms of value the minority autonomous areas account only for a minute proportion of China’s total foreign trade. However, combined exports and imports from the ethnic autonomous areas have risen very substantially since the early 1990s, reaching US$ 6,219 million in 1999 (Economic and Development Department 2000: 528). Tibet’s foreign trade rose from about US$ 100 million in 1994 (Shakya 1999: 436) to US$ 166.45 million in 1999 (Economic and Development Department 2000: 528). Much of the foreign trade is undertaken across international borders. Examples of this include Guangxi’s trade with northern Vietnam and that of Inner Mongolia with Mongolia. In 1999 Guangxi and Inner Mongolia were among the largest of the ethnic autonomous areas in terms of their trade with foreign countries. The single best-represented province-level unit in the foreign trade of China’s ethnic autonomous areas is Xinjiang, with the value growing from about US$ 1,400 million in 1996 to US$ 1,765 million (or 28.4 per cent of the total) in 1999 (Economic and Development Department 2000: 528). In both years neighbouring Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan were the best represented foreign countries, the former taking up 17.5 per cent of the total and the latter 10.7 per cent (XUAR 1998: 238). By 1999, however, the proportions of the trade had shifted very sharply, with Kazakhstan accounting for 52.4 per cent of Xinjiang’s foreign trade, but Kyrgyzstan only 7.5 per cent. In 1999, the largest single export commodity, in terms of value, was cotton products, while the largest import was steel products (Liu et al. 2000: 58–7). Early in 2002 sources in Kazakhstan reported the beginning of the development of a copper deposit in Xinjiang, signalling competition with Kazakhstan’s copper industry and an increase in China’s already powerful position in the Central Asian economies. One Kazakh observer wrote in April 2002 of expectations that other Xinjiang activities aimed at strengthening China’s economic impact in Central Asia would include ‘laying transport roads and railway routes from Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to China and introducing its financial organizations in the region’ (Serov 2002). Possibly the most important commodities in Xinjiang’s imports from Central Asia in strategic and economic terms are those related to energy, such as gas, petroleum and coal. In the 1990s China began for the first time to play a major role in world energy diplomacy. At the same time the Central Asian region has grown greatly in importance as a world supplier of energy, especially in the oil and gas sectors. China’s economy has long been heavily dependent on coal, and produces most of what it needs itself. On the other hand, its oil and gas reserves ‘are modest by comparison to the potential future domestic demand for these sources of energy’ (Andrews-Speed and Vinogradov 2000: 385).

The economies of the minorities 75 As discussed in more detail in Chapter 7, China has already moved to strengthen its relationships with the countries of Central Asia, notably with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Economic and strategic factors are strongly interwoven in these multifaceted relationships, which for various reasons have grown in complexity since the 11 September 2001 terror attacks. For some time China has been keen to build gas and oil pipelines that would involve it more closely in the energy trade network of the Central Asian region. It has undertaken active negotiations for a pipeline that would facilitate the movement of oil from the Caspian Sea through Kazakhstan to Xinjiang and for several gas pipelines as well. There are conflicting interests, and the United States is also actively involved and keen to expand its economic power in the region. The world’s only remaining superpower has also used the 11 September 2001 incidents as a mechanism for increasing its military and strategic power in Central Asia. However, there seems little doubt that at the beginning of the twenty-first century China ‘is set to become one of the world’s major importers of both oil and natural gas’ (Andrews-Speed and Vinogradov 2000: 388). The impact in terms of globalisation is potentially very significant not only for China but for the world. Already its influence in Central Asia is greater than at any time in recent history. With the onset of war in Afghanistan following the 11 September 2001 incidents, the energy and strategic diplomacy is likely to undergo change, with the growth of the American presence in Central Asia. China is likely to wish to reduce its oil dependence on the Middle East and on the United States as a way of enhancing its long-term oil security. This means that the extent of China’s economic dealings in the region is sure to grow and the process of globalisation to intensify, especially with China a member of the WTO.

Conclusion China’s economic performance in the ethnic areas has been reasonably successful, but has by no means been free of problems. It has seen prosperity of a kind probably never seen before in history in some areas, and general rises in the standard of living. The infrastructure has improved, economic growth has been impressive and tourism has generally added to lifestyle variety as well as contributing to prosperity. Absolute poverty is much less widespread than it used to be. On the other hand, the problems have not gone away, in some cases the very successes producing new ills. Inequalities have worsened. Tourism has contributed towards non-trivial social problems. Poverty has demonstrated a remarkable tenacity, remaining very serious in some places and generally more serious in the ethnic areas than in the country as a whole. Tuberculosis, once thought eradicated, has raised its head again. This chapter has focused mainly on Xinjiang and Tibet, with far fewer references to the many other minority areas in China. The reason for this is because it is these two regions that remain most controversial and difficult for the Chinese authorities. The other ethnic areas may have their problems, but in general seem quite happy to become integrated into China. One specialist (Palmer 1997: 284)

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claims that the ethnic areas are demanding more central government involvement in their affairs, especially economic affairs, because they believe that opens the way towards better sharing in the growing prosperity of China as a whole. The Chinese government’s policy is that economic development is the best way to solve political problems of separatism. On the whole it is probably right. But in the case of Xinjiang the evidence is very mixed, and at the end of the twentieth century seemed to be pointing more towards social disharmony and resentment than integration. The aftermath of the 11 September terror attacks in New York and Washington may change that situation, but there is no guarantee at all of that. There are elements of globalisation in the economic experience of the ethnic areas of China since the early 1990s. Paramount among these is the rise of oil and gas diplomacy that is linking China to countries further west in an area of crucial importance to all of the world’s main economies. But one can also identify several other major aspects of the world economy, such as tourism and the transfer of goods in international markets. And it is remarkable that for the first time a railway traverses China’s ethnic regions to link its eastern seaboard with Europe. And there are also important negative globalisation influences visible in the experience of China’s ethnic minorities since the early 1990s, such as drugs and certain diseases. Economic modernisation and globalisation have probably weakened cultural differences among the minorities. But they have certainly not destroyed them. The survival, even strengthening, of traditional medicines, which coexist with more modern counterparts, bears witness to this suggestion. Economic growth might even reinforce patterns of traditional lifestyle in the usage of crops and certain types of animals, which can become very closely linked with particular ethnic cultures. The economy might be more intolerant of difference than those other factors considered in this book, but its homogenising impact in China’s ethnic areas is very far from complete.

Politics

Plate 1 A statue of Mao Zedong in the central square of Kashgar, a Uygur city in the far southwest of Xinjiang. During the Cultural Revolution there were many statues of Mao like this one throughout China. Most have now been taken down, but this one remains. Taken in June 1999.

Economics

Plate 2 A Miao courtship dance at the Folk Customs Cultural Villages, which is a major tourist attraction in Shenzhen, a modern city very near Hong Kong. Traditionally, young Miao men play reedpipes to court ‘counterparts’, that is young women. Although the custom is still alive in some Miao areas today, the picture shows a performance put on for tourists. A modern building can be seen in the background. Taken in January 1993.

Plate 3 A Uygur performance by a professional song-and-dance company put on for tourists in Turpan, Xinjiang. The site is a space covered with traditional Uygur grape vines in the grounds of one of the main tourist hotels in Turpan. Many song-and-dance companies in China nowadays make most of their money through performing specially for tourists.

Plate 4 Mongolian dance in a restaurant in Beijing. The girls are in traditional Mongolian dress and probably most of them are Mongolians, but there is no guarantee of that. Taken in June 2001.

Plate 5 Open-air vegetable market in Menglun, Sipsong panna, Yunnan Province, not very far from the border with Myanmar. The vendors are Dai. Taken in September 2000.

Plate 6 This back street scene in Kashgar, southwestern Xinjiang, shows the old-fashioned method of donkey-drawn cart is still very much alive. Taken in October 1994.

Plate 7 A Uygur carpet-selling family in the main market of Ürümqi, capital of Xinjiang. The Uygurs are famous for their beautiful carpets, which belong more to the wall than to the floor. Taken in June 1999.

Plate 8 Uygur food stall in Kashgar. Taken in October 1994.

Plate 9 Uygur sellers of eggs in a market in Kashgar. Taken in June 1999.

Plate 10 Hardware stall in Kashgar, June 1999.

Plate 11 Uygur sellers of Uygur hats in a free market in Kashgar, June 1999.

Plate 12 Free animal market in Kashgar, June 1999. Mutton is eaten widely among the Uygurs, but as Muslims they do not eat pork under any circumstances. Sheep are useful for various other purposes as well.

Religion

Plate 13 A view of the Kumbum Monastery, which the Chinese call Taer Temple, near Xining, Qinghai Province. This is one of the most important of all Tibetan Buddhist monasteries. Although it has become a tourist attraction, it still has an active religious life, with over 700 monks. Taken in July 1995.

Plate 14 A scene at the entrance of the Kumbum Monastery. Taken in July 1995.

Plate 15 A view of the Labrang Monastery, Gansu Province, one of the most important of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries. Taken in July 1995.

Plate 16 Young monks at the Labrang Monastery. It is still very common for Tibetan boys to enter monasteries, and several I met at the Labrang Monastery told me they had been only 13 when they entered, and some had come in when considerably younger. Nowadays they are supposed to make a free choice when they reach adulthood to decide whether to return to lay life or stay in the monastery for the rest of their lives. Taken in July 1995.

Plate 17 A Tibetan Buddhist monk trains his disciple in the traditional arts at the Labrang monastery. Taken in July 1995.

Plate 18 The head monk of the Red Sect of Tibetan Buddhism with his daughter at the Labrang Monastery. Taken in July 1995. The main sect of Tibetan Buddhism is often known as the Yellow Sect and monks remain celibate all their lives. On the other hand, the monks of the Red Sect, who are far less numerous than those of the Yellow Sect, are allowed to marry.

Plate 19 Four Tibetan boys at the Red Sect Monastery attached to the great Labrang Monastery. Taken in July 1995.

Plate 20 A temple in a village of the Tu nationality in Huzhu Tu Autonomous County not far from Xining, Qinghai Province. The Tu are quite distinct linguistically and ethnically from the Tibetans, but practise Tibetan Buddhism. Taken in July 1995.

Plate 21 Two Tu women bowing down in reverence to the Buddha at the temple in the village in Huzhu, Qinghai Province. Taken in July 1995.

Plate 22 Young Tibetan women prepare to perform a ritual dance at a religious festival gathering in Maba Village, Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province. The festival saw thousands of people, almost all Tibetans, come from all around the region to take part, some walking quite long distances. Taken in July 1995.

Plate 23 A young male participant in the Tibetan religious festival. One of the leaders of the festival has stuck a long pin through the young man’s cheek, a kind of sacrifice to the gods through the pain it inflicted.

Plate 24 Vultures come to eat a corpse at a ‘sky burial’, the most normal form of disposal for the common people in Tibet. The undertaker dissects the corpse from the back, cutting the flesh into small pieces. He also crushes the bones, feeding the entire corpse to the vultures. Taken by Tama Furuno at the Langmu Monastery outside a Tibetan village in central western Sichuan Province in May 2001.

Plate 25 A Tibetan monk chants sutras as the vultures consume the corpse in the background. Taken by Tama Furuno at the Langmu Monastery in central western Sichuan in May 2001.

Plate 26 A general view of the Tibetan village outside which the Langmu Monastery is situated. Taken by Tama Furuno in May 2001.

Plate 27 The Bodhi Temple in Mangshi, capital of the Dehong Dai and Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture, in far southwestern Yunnan just on the border with Myanmar. This is the oldest temple in the city, dating from the first half of the nineteenth century. Although it is the headquarters of the local Buddhist Association, there are only four monks living there. Taken in October 2000.

Plate 28 A Theravada Buddhist temple attached to a small Dai village in Sipsong panna called Jingmengyuan, set in mountains in the extreme south of Yunnan Province. Approximately every second village in Sipsong panna has its own temple and all are still used for celebrations, festivals and worship. However, some of them, such as the one in the picture, have no resident monks to look after them. Taken in September 2000.

Plate 29 Another view of the Theravada Buddhist temple above Jingmengyuan village. Taken in September 2000.

Plate 30 The long flight of stairs leading from the village up to the village temple, long dragons sculpted on either side of the staircase. Taken in September 2000.

Plate 31 Three old men look after the Wuyun Temple in Mangshi, Dehong, Yunnan Province. There are no monks resident here, but the temple functions quite actively and is well maintained. The statue of the Buddha is visible in the background between two of the men. Taken in September 2000.

Plate 32 Boy monks playing cards in a temple outside Ruili, Yunnan Province, a few minutes drive from the border with Myanmar. It is quite common for young Dai boys to become monks and live in the temple for a period. In this particular temple, built in 1983, there were eighteen monks, including twelve young boys. Taken in October 2000.

Plate 33 The main entrance of the great Idkah Mosque in Kashgar, southwest Xinjiang, which is the largest mosque in China. Taken in June 1999.

Plate 34 Scholars and worshippers inside the grounds of the Idkah Mosque, Kashgar. Taken in June 1999.

Plate 35 The courtyard in front of the old mosque in Yarkand, southwestern Xinjiang, with the complex of old buildings that include the tomb of the famous Uygur female musician Amanisahan (1526–1560). The mosque itself dates from 1533. Taken in June 1999.

Plate 36 Uygur worshippers in the old Yarkand mosque. Taken in June 1999.

Plate 37 The main mosque in Guanghe County town, Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture, Gansu Province. Taken in July 1995.

Education

Plate 38 A class in the Koran and Arabic language in the mosque in Guanghe County. The children stay there all day during their vacation from their secular education, their parents thinking it necessary for them to have grounding in their Islamic religion and in the language in which the Koran was originally written. Taken in July 1995.

Plate 39 Children at a secondary school for nationalities in Jinghong, capital of Sipsong panna, Yunnan Province. There are nearly 1,000 students here, about four-fifths of them belonging to the Dai and other minority nationalities. One of the students in the front row is a boy monk, wearing the traditional saffron robe. Taken in September 2000.

Plate 40 A Buddhist pagoda in Mangshi, Dehong, Yunnan Province. The special feature of the pagoda, which is covered with Buddhist images, is that there is a large bodhi tree growing out of it in such a way that the two seem inextricably linked. Taken in September 2000.

Plate 41 The picture shows the same bodhi tree, which is in the grounds of a primary school. Just beside it is a map of China. Taken in September 2000.

Plate 42 Teachers at the Aimudla Primary School in Turpan, Xinjiang. The School was established with money from local people. Aimudla, the old man in the centre of the picture, donated 80,000 yuan, by far the highest of any contributor, which is why the school is named after him. The school is for Uygur children and all the ten teachers are Uygurs. The main signs are first in Uygur and then in Chinese. Taken in June 1999.

Plate 43 A class prepares to give a performance at a school in the back streets of Kashgar, their teacher giving them last-minute instructions. Taken in October 1994.

Family and women

Plate 44 A Dai woman with a small child on her back. This street is a few minutes drive from the border with Myanmar. Taken in September 2000.

Plate 45 Girl with a baby on her back, taken in a Zhuang village in Guangxi in January 1992.

Plate 46 Girl with a baby on her back, taken in a Zhuang village in Guangxi in January 1992.

Plate 47 Two young Yao women in national clothes, taken in a Yao village near Jinxiu, Guangxi, in January 1992. The women put on their national clothes especially for the photograph. However, in general minority women wear their national clothes more than do men.

Plate 48 Older Yao woman in a Yao village near Jinxiu, Guangxi, taken in January 1992.

Plate 49 A group of Tu women and children, in a Tu village in Huzhu Tu Autonomous County, Qinghai. Two of the women are in their national dress, because this was a festival day. Taken in June 1995.

Plate 50 The back view of a Tibetan woman in a remote Tibetan village. Older Tibetans are far more insistent on wearing their national clothes than are most of China’s minorities nowadays. Although this applies to people of both genders, it is even more the case with women than with men. Taken by Miss Tama Furuno in Jiangda County, eastern Tibet in May 2001.

Plate 51 Two young Tibetans who have come as onlookers to a religious dance festival. Taken in Maba, Qinghai Province, in July 1995. They have dressed up well, and the one on the right has traditional Tibetan beads. But many young Tibetans are less enthusiastic about wearing the traditional clothing than their elders.

Plate 52 A young Hui (Muslim) couple having tea at a restaurant. The young man was 22 years old, and his wife was 17 at the time the picture was taken in July 1995, and they had already been married a few months. It is against the law for a girl to marry so young, but there are special exemptions for minorities. She wears the black veil of a married woman, even though she looks rather like a child.

Plate 53 People resting and chatting near the Idkah Mosque. Taken in June 1999.

Plate 54 A group of women near the Idkah Mosque. Some women wear veils that cover the entire head, including the eyes, especially when there are men about. Taken in June 1999.

Plate 55 A group of women and children in the back streets of Kashgar. The women wear head scarves but when they are near home they see no need to wear the veil. Taken in June 1999.

Plate 56 Kazaks in their yurt in the Baiyangou region of Xinjiang, near the capital Ürümqi. They are a man and wife, the woman on the right being the wife’s friend. Yurts are like large tents. They are mobile and enable the family to move to a different place depending on the needs of the season. On the other hand, they can be quite comfortable, as this one appears to be. Taken in June 1999.

Plate 57 Women and children in a Uygur village near Gulja (Yining in Chinese), which is in the far northwest of Xinjiang, near the border with Kazakhstan. The children all belong to the family of the woman with the small boy on her lap. In all she had nine children. Families of that size are fairly common among rural Uygurs. Taken in June 1999.

Plate 58 Six Uygur girls of a nine-child family in a village outside Khotan, southwest Xinjiang. One of the oldest brothers was training for the Muslim clergy. Taken in June 1999.

Plate 59 Abdulla Tursun, an ancient Uygur man living outside Khotan who claimed to be 115 years old when this picture was taken in June 1999. There is no way to check the accuracy of his claim, but the Pamir region is known for longevity. When I met him, Abdulla Tursun was quite able to walk without a walking stick and carried on a conversation quite readily.

Plate 60 A mulberry-paper producing Uygur family in Khotan. Production of mulberry paper is an ancient craft among the Uygurs, but is dying out now with the onset of modernisation. The manager of the factory is the man on the right. The young woman at the back and on the left is 18 and the daughter of the manager. Despite her youth and beauty, she had already endured much suffering. Her father had introduced her to a young man whom she married but who beat her, as a result of which she soon divorced him. Divorce is very common and easily obtained in southern Xinjiang. Traditionally, it is the man who asks for divorce, but this case shows that the woman readily does so in the present age. She had already had a child, who died of sickness. Taken in June 1999.

International relations

Plate 61 A young Dai boy playing table tennis at a school in a village on the road between Jinghong and Menglun, in Sipsong panna, Yunnan Province. Note that he has a T-shirt with the word Thailand written across it. The Dai are closely related culturally and ethnically with the Thais of Thailand and there is a great deal of good will towards Thailand among the Dai, especially Xishuang banna. Taken in September 2000.

General

Plate 62 Zhuang village scene in Guangxi. Taken in January 1992.

Plate 63 Newly built meeting hall, also usable as a stage for performances, in a Dong village in Sanjiang Dong Autonomous County in northern Guangxi. Taken in January 1992.

Plate 64 Entrance to a Dong village in Sanjiang, Guangxi. Taken in January 1992.

Plate 65 The wind-and-rain bridge is a traditional feature of Dong architecture. These wind-and-rain bridges are covered and, apart from their beauty, very useful for a variety of social purposes. People hold meetings there, court, or chat. And they can also be used for performances. Taken in January 1992 in a Dong village of Sanjiang, Guangxi.

Plate 66 A wind-and-rain bridge in a Dong village in Sanjiang, Guangxi. Taken in January 1992.

Plate 67 People, mainly Dai, crowd for an outing near Mangshi in Dehong, Yunnan. The outing is the Dragon Boat Race of the Mangshi District. Although this is not a specifically Dai festival, they take it very seriously and dress up in their best clothes for it. Taken in October 2000.

Plate 68 Dai participants at the Dragon Boat Race of the Mangshi District. The older women have more traditional headgear and clothing than the younger couple or the children. Taken in October 2000.

Plate 69 General view of a Dai village in Sipsong panna. Taken in September 2000.

Plate 70 General view of a Dai village in Sipsong panna. Taken in September 2000.

Plate 71 A general view of the town of Fenghuang in far west Hunan Province, a Miao and Tujia region. This town is known for its traditional remnants and charm. Taken in February 1992.

Plate 72 A performance of a traditional nuo drama on a very old stage built in very traditional style in Fenghuang, western Hunan. Nuo drama is still popular among some of the minorities, including the Tujia and Miao. Taken in February 1992.

5

The realm of the mind, religion and education

Early in 1992 Deng Xiaoping made a much publicised ‘journey to the south’. It was intended to revitalise policies of economic reform throughout China, and it succeeded brilliantly. It also led on to a period of unprecedented get-rich-quick mentality, which has survived into the twenty-first century. Few people outside the CCP were any longer concerned about socialist ideology. Within the CCP corruption continued to worsen, even at the highest levels, despite serious official attempts to prevent the trend. Of course CCP leaders worried desperately about these trends, fearing that they could lead to the Party’s overthrow in an age where ruling Marxist parties had l