2 / The Challenge of Sipsong Panna in the Southwest
Development, Resources, and Power in a Multiethnic China
The southwestern minority areas, like the rest of China, have undergone tremendous political and social changes in the past twenty years. Economic reforms and the opening of trade have created new opportunities for the many minority minzu (ethnic groups) in the region. At the same time, issues such as unequal development, the exploitation of natural resources, mass immigration, and poorly developed education create tensions and constitute new challenges in people’s lives and to the local and central political leadership. Compared to the Tibetans, Uygurs, and Mongols, whose relations with the state have been turbulent, the southwestern minorities are less confrontational. Yet by studying them, we notice the continuing problems the PRC faces in dealing with even the less truculent minorities.
In this chapter, I discuss some major consequences of the political and social changes during the last two decades on social developments and ethnic relations in the multiethnic southwest. I argue that political approaches toward China’s minorities in the southwest need to take into account the multiethnic character of the area, rather than focus exclusively on a few selected minorities. Many minority intellectuals in the southwest (and elsewhere) are intensely engaged in struggles to rediscover the histories of their own ethnic groups, histories that may contrast with the prevailing image of minorities as “backward” and create for them a place in the national history of China. Rural minority members, on the other hand, often are concerned with more mundane issues, such as production, loss of income as a result of environmental degradation or new policies of environmental protection, or the limitations on upward social mobility for minorities. Based on data collected largely during periods of fieldwork in local areas of the southwest, this chapter mainly deals with Chinese migrations to minority areas since the 1950s, policies of education and language, the management of natural resources, religious practices, and the impact of tourism. These are all issues of intense negotiation between different minority groups—stratified in terms of class, gender, and generation and obviously having different social interests and changing cultural practices—and local mediators of state policies, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the political elite in general.
The southwestern part of China (Yunnan, Guangxi, Guizhou, and southwest Sichuan) is characterized by strong variations in cultural practices and ethnic identities. Most of China’s fifty-six officially recognized ethnic groups inhabit this area, which is generally among the poorest in the country. Yunnan Province alone is home to twenty-six officially recognized minzu, including the majority Han. Disregarding the official classification of minzu and counting instead local (and flexible) concepts of ethnic boundaries, the number of ethnic groups in the southwest would increase by many times. Several ethnic groups often inhabit the same administrative area, which complicates the state’s approach to, for instance, minority autonomous rule and minority education. Adding to the historically complex ethnic composition of the southwest, most minority regions have experienced considerable immigration of people belonging to the ethnic majority, the Han, since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. These Han immigrants and their descendants (who often consider themselves to be “locals” in the minority area)1 need to be taken into account when analyzing social and political relations and developments in those areas. Just like the ethnic minorities, the immigrant Han are stratified in terms of class, social status, gender, and age. And contrary to common ways of representing Chinese immigrants in minority areas, they do not have uniform political and cultural interests or similar relations with the state and the local minority people they encounter.2
Many of the minority peoples living in the southwest are relatively small in number, some with populations of less than one hundred thousand (the Jinuo, Premi, Bulang, and Dulong, for example), but others have populations of more than one or even several million (the Zhuang, Miao, Yi, and Tai, for example). The total number of people belonging to minority ethnic groups in the southwest exceeds 44 million, and in Guangxi, Guizhou and Yunnan Provinces, the minority population constitutes over 30 percent of the total population. Nevertheless, the minorities in the southwest are often disregarded in Western and international debates about minority rights and issues in China because they rarely make strong demands for autonomy or independence and because they lack an influential international lobby such as that of, for instance, the Tibetans in exile. However, locally these groups often struggle to accommodate to new policies and economic changes and raise issues that relate to their own cultural, religious, and economic rights as minorities and citizens. Though they are less visible than minority groups with organized representatives in exile and those that use violent means of expression, the southwestern minorities’ various ways of negotiating their own positions and creating room for maneuver within the political system illuminate some important aspects of how China operates as a so-called multiethnic state.
As becomes clear in a comparison of the different minority areas, the minority ethnic groups in China cannot be regarded as a homogenous group of people, but as officially categorized minority minzu, many of them are faced with a number of similar cultural and political challenges in their lives. The social and political issues raised in this chapter are all closely related to China’s national policies on minorities and to the development of global markets and increasing international contacts. The discussion is mainly based on the situation in the Tai Autonomous Prefecture of Sipsong Panna, in Yunnan Province, and derives from long-term fieldwork carried out mainly among the Tai people3 and Han immigrants in various minority areas of China. However, the issues raised illustrate current trends that may be observed in many other minority regions in southwest China, which are inhabited by several different ethnic groups.
THE TAI AND OTHER MINORITY GROUPS IN SIPSONG PANNA
People who call themselves Tai in China have gained official recognition as the Dai minzu, or Daizu. This minzu consists of 1,025,402 people (1990 figure), who traditionally live in Yunnan Province.4 They belong to a much larger group of Tai-language speakers in China,5 and they are normally divided into two main groups: the group often called the Tai Na in the Dehong region and the Tai Lüe in Sipsong Panna.6 Historically, these two groups of Tai lived in different regions, had different rulers, followed different branches of Buddhism, and used the forms “Na” and “Lüe” only on those occasions when it was necessary to distinguish between them. Nevertheless, because of their cultural and linguistic similarities especially, researchers in the 1950s decided that they all ought to be officially classified as one Dai minzu.
The region known today as Sipsong Panna (or simply, Panna),7 on the border with Burma and Laos, was historically ruled by a Tai (Tai Lüe) king. A Chinese administration was established in Sipsong Panna after 1911, but in practice, the Tai king and local princes continued to rule the area in most internal matters. When the CCP started to operate in the mountains of Sipsong Panna in the mid-1940s, during the Civil War, the ruling Tai elite was split over which side to support—the Communists or the Nationalists.
When, in 1950, the CCP gained firm control over the area, it allied itself with parts of the Tai elite and treated the influential Buddhist leadership gently so as to assure the loyalty and cooperation of the Tai people. The CCP promised the ruling elite autonomy in a new prefecture ruled by a local government dominated by members of the Tai ethnic group. In 1953, the Tai Autonomous Prefecture was established with people belonging to the traditional Tai elite occupying the most prominent positions of government. However, the local CCP branch was, and continues to be, headed by a Han. This division of power is common in all minority autonomous areas of China and has profound consequences, partly because the head of the Party is generally acknowledged as having more power in practice than the head of the autonomous government.
The establishment of a Tai Autonomous Prefecture was not uncritically welcomed by all ethnic groups. Though the Tai people’s king had historically ruled the region, there were other peoples living in the area who would have liked to gain more representation in a new autonomous government under Communist rule. The Tai in Sipsong Panna inhabit the green and fertile subtropical valleys, but higher up in the mountains live people belonging to other minzu such as the Akha, the Blang, the Lahu, and the Jinuo. These people have traditionally been hunters and have practiced slash-and-burn agriculture. They have traded with the Tai, but rarely have they engaged with them socially or intermarried. The Tai have tended to regard them as inferior, and even today, many Tai are firmly against their children marrying members of these groups.
At the time of the establishment of the autonomous government, some Akha people (officially classified in China as Hani) raised the issue of more groups sharing power, but this was rejected. To prevent uprisings against Communist rule, it was first of all necessary for the CCP to gain support from important members of the Tai elite and, through their influence, the majority of Tai commoners. However, by the mid-1950s—even before the disastrous Great Leap Forward of 1958–59—the policy of cooperation with traditional Tai and religious elites was turned into a policy of struggle, in which Tai and other minority peasants were encouraged to fight against their local headmen and traditional authorities. The goal was to obtain a socialist system wherein the CCP had a monopoly on power. Many monks and laymen fled, mainly to Thailand. This trend continued during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), a period characterized by the heavy and undisguised repression of all religious activity and expressions of ethnicity. Monasteries were closed down or smashed, monks and novices were forced to return to lay life, and all other so-called remnants of feudal society (including the Tai script) were repressed.
Granting autonomous rule to officially recognized minority ethnic groups in provinces, prefectures, counties, and sometimes even townships has been an important strategy of the Communist government to ensure the cooperation of minorities and gain their support. In the reforms that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution, minority autonomous rule was again emphasized as the legal structure in minority areas. Nowadays, although there are obvious and strong limitations to the actual nature of “autonomy,” local elites may sometimes find room within the law to create flexible policies on, for instance, the language of instruction, religious practices, and birth control.
Today, Sipsong Panna functions as an autonomous prefecture whose government is run mainly by Tai representatives. According to official statistics, the population is 820,000. Approximately one third are Tai, one third are Han, and the rest are mainly Akha, Blang, Lahu, and Jinuo. However, the actual number of inhabitants is much larger because of the ongoing unregistered immigration of mainly Han into the area. Religious practices have revived since 1978, especially among the Tai, who (together with the Blang) follow Theravada Buddhism. Many rural Tai parents send one or more sons to be novices in a local monastery for a period of time. The other non-Han groups in the area practice other local forms of religion and have no monastic traditions. Living standards have generally improved in the area since the reforms began, but as in the rest of the southwest, many of the mountain areas especially remain poor, with underdeveloped communications and education. In the mid-1980s, this area (like other border regions in Yunnan) was opened up for cross-border trade, and tourism became an important industry. This resulted also in a considerable immigration of Han people seeking work. The reform policies have led to improved opportunities for Tai and other minorities to reestablish contact with family members—in Thailand especially, where most Tai families have relatives—and to develop international relationships with Buddhist organizations, researchers, NGOs, and development organizations. Trade has increased, and state-owned rubber plantations have developed into large enterprises.
However, the development of different parts of Sipsong Panna has been very unequal, and there is a tendency for Han immigrants, rather than local minorities, to control and profit from the tourist industry and trade. Some serious side effects of development have arisen within the last fifteen years: drug smuggling (from the Golden Triangle into China), drug abuse, and prostitution (with the ensuing problem of the spread of HIV and AIDS). As often noted in Chinese publications, Yunnan was the first province to develop a serious HIV problem, and with the high number of prostitutes (mainly Han immigrant women) and Han male tourists (often participating in conferences or official meetings), Sipsong Panna has its share of the problems that accompany the virus.8
RECENT MIGRATIONS TO MINORITY AREAS IN THE SOUTHWEST
The influence of recent large-scale Han migrations to minority areas such as Sipsong Panna on local policy, development, education, the environment, and ethnic relations can hardly be exaggerated. Immigration is a direct (and in some periods, indirect) result of Chinese policies and needs to be considered when analyzing the social situation of China’s minority peoples today and their relation to the state and government. Therefore, minority studies in China needs to integrate the study of the Han immigrants to a much larger extent than it has so far.9
Migrations from central China to the empire’s peripheries have taken place throughout China’s history, sometimes as government-organized colonization, sometimes as individually motivated resettlement. Migration was often seen as a means of establishing control over, and curbing unrest in, the outlying areas, as well as easing the population pressure on land in China proper. Individually motivated resettlements took place often, as a result of overpopulation, famine, wars, epidemics, and natural catastrophes.10 The history of southwest China has to a large extent been formed by ongoing migrations and immigrations of different peoples, and the ethnic pattern of the region today is extremely complex and fluctuating. In the 1950s, the aim of the CCP was to determine, on the basis of what were presumed to be objective criteria, the number and names of all the minority ethnic groups in China. Not least in the multiethnic southwest, this turned out to be an insurmountable task, even for researchers who themselves believed that objective criteria could determine people’s ethnic affiliation. China’s most prominent anthropologist, Fei Xiaotong, acknowledged that the ethnic complexity of the southwest, especially the highland region of Yunnan and Guizhou, constituted a special obstacle to the researchers’ aim of identifying distinct ethnic groups. Of the more than 400 groups that publicly asked to be recognized as minzu in the 1950s, more than 260 were from Yunnan Province alone.11 Official recognition of a minzu was supposed to be objective—based on historical and linguistic facts; recognition was important because it became the basis for determining which groups would get the right to form local, autonomous governments. Later, one’s status as an officially recognized minority person could in some cases also be a factor in allowing easier access to education or special treatment with regard to birth control. Therefore, the children of Han immigrants married to minority women were normally registered as minority minzu.
In spite of a long history of Han migration to the southwest, many of the areas today designated as minority autonomous counties and prefectures experienced large-scale Han immigration only after the establishment of the PRC, and especially since the mid-1950s. Immediately after the Communist takeover in 1949, the government started to transfer personnel to the border provinces in order to establish control. Between 1950 and 1958, nearly five hundred thousand people moved or were transferred to Yunnan Province alone—as military personnel, cadres, or workers reclaiming wasteland.12
With plenty of natural resources, a sparse population, and not least, a potential for developing rubber production, the border region of Sipsong Panna was of special interest to the new government. In the early 1950s, the Han in Panna made up only a few percent of the population. They had come in the early twentieth century to trade and develop tea plantations, and by the time the Communists arrived in the region, most of them had either left or settled in the mountains among the various hill peoples. Today, the locals of Panna and the Han immigrants who arrived much later (after the 1950s) regard these early Han settlers as a special group. They are known locally as the “mountain Han” (shantou Hanzu), and they are generally not seen as having any special connection with the more recent immigrants apart from their common ethnic status.
In the mid-1950s, the Chinese government started to transfer people to Panna on a large scale to set up and run new rubber plantations. Initially, the plantations were organized by the military, and the first groups to arrive were mainly soldiers and military personnel. After a short time, they were reorganized as state farms (nongchang), and large numbers of new cadres and workers, mainly Han, were recruited from outside Panna. During the Cultural Revolution, thousands of young intellectuals (zhishi qingnian) from Chongqing, Shanghai, Beijing, and Kunming were also sent “up to the mountains and down to the villages” to work in the state farms of Panna. They rarely settled in ordinary Tai or other minority villages, and most of them left again in 1978. The majority of the earlier state-farm settlers, on the other hand, remained in the area with their children, who are now known as “the second generation” (di er dai).13
By 1995, people officially registered as Han made up 26 percent of the total population of Panna. In the prefectural capital, Jinghong, they made up as much as 48 percent.14 However, this figure excludes a large number of unregistered settlers and temporary migrants. Local government cadres interviewed in 1997 estimated that the unregistered population of Jinghong County alone was at least 30,000 to 50,000 people (in addition to the registered population of more than 350,000 people).
From the 1950s to the late 1970s, Han immigrants were almost exclusively government-sponsored workers and cadres with their families. Today, the majority of Han in Panna are still somehow connected to the state farms, which produce mainly rubber and have developed into major enterprises. These state farms function as work units, with their own medical services, their own schools (the best in the region), and their own housing facilities.15 However, since the early 1980s and especially in the 1990s, the development of tourism and trade has attracted large numbers of individual migrants and workers who either have been actively recruited to work in new private enterprises or have decided on their own initiative to try their luck in one of the developing border regions.
Interestingly, many of them come from the same regions of China as the earlier, government-organized immigrants. Most are from two specific counties in Hunan Province, namely, Liling and Qidong, from which tens of thousands of state-farm workers and cadres migrated in the 1950s and 1960s. Relatives and neighbors of previous migrants from these counties are naturally well informed about the developments in Panna and the growing demand for labor. The current migratory pattern of people individually moving from certain areas of Hunan, for instance, to specific parts of Yunnan is therefore an indirect result of the earlier government-organized large-scale migrations.
In addition to the individual migrants from Hunan, many others have come to Panna from Sichuan, the most populous province of China, where millions of workers have been laid off in the recent reform of state-owned enterprises. Although the government has done nothing to organize or directly support the Han migration to Panna, the trend will continue as long as there are working and trading opportunities for immigrants. But with the immense Han immigration of recent years and the simultaneous decline in Chinese tourism (thanks partly to new opportunities for Chinese to visit even more exotic places, such as Thailand), Han immigrants are moving into more remote areas of Panna and many are crossing the border into Burma.
By and large, both the state farms and the Han cadres in the local administration have been supportive of the new immigrants, although some cadres have also raised concerns about their impact on the environment and the social atmosphere in the area. The government no longer consciously transfers large numbers of Han to the southwestern minority areas, but generally, it regards the increase in Han immigration to the western parts of China as a positive development—in terms of improving the economy of these areas, expanding political control, and easing population pressure in the eastern provinces, where both rural and urban unemployment is increasing. Some people in the minority areas, as well as some Chinese researchers, have pointed out that the grand new national plan to “develop the western regions” (xibu da kaifa) will lead to even more immigration because of the need for trained experts and the plan’s limited focus on long-term local education.
In Sipsong Panna, the recent large-scale Han immigration is a direct result of the opportunities there to develop trade and tourism, as well as the relaxation of the former restrictions on internal migration. Many of the recent settlers from China’s rural heartland had previously migrated to the large east-coast cities. Many of them reported in interviews that they were used to being treated badly in the large cities by both the locals and the local administration; in the border region, on the other hand, they found that they were relatively well received. Indeed, many local officials expressed a generally positive attitude toward the ongoing immigration of Han peasants. Though they regarded them as poor and uneducated, they considered the minority areas to be even more backward than the rural areas in China proper. Therefore, they emphasized the more advanced methods of trading and doing business these peasant newcomers were bringing, as well as their more advanced culture (understood mostly, but not entirely, in terms of their level of Chinese education). According to many local officials, the peasant migrants’ level of “civilization” (suzhi) and education was “higher” than that of the local minorities. In the large coastal cities, to the contrary, these rural Han migrants had been commonly seen as poor, dirty, stupid peasants, useful only as long as they were willing to take on work that no city folks wanted.16
In Sipsong Panna, several creative and successful entrepreneurs were consciously recruiting Han workers from some of the poorest areas of Yunnan and neighboring provinces rather than attempting to work with local minority labor. Minority workers were often described by Han entrepreneurs as being demanding and less willing than the Han to accept poor housing and long working hours. One cadre and entrepreneur, interviewed in 1997, expressed his preference for Han labor in the following way:
The Tai in the plains have fields and they have money. They are not interested in working for us. They do not want to work for others at all, and many of them rent out their own fields in the dry period, and then just plant rice when there is water enough. Or they let their fields the whole year. Now, the minorities in the mountains—they have fields but no money. They do not mind working for others, but the problem is that when they come here, they cannot stand it, they cannot eat this kind of bitterness [chibuliao zhei yang de ku]. For the town and township enterprises17 we get most of our workers from poor places outside Panna. Most are from Mojiang or Jingdong, where people are really poor. We deliberately go to poor areas to keep our costs down, and we recruit Han workers. We rarely employ people from poor minority areas such as Lancang or Ximeng because then we encounter the same problems as with workers from Panna. They cannot “eat bitterness,” and whenever we tried to hire some, they quickly left. They are not stable, and they are even quite lazy. Mostly we ask poor Han couples to come and work for us because they are more reliable. When they come here, they have absolutely nothing. Just a simple backpack and nothing more. They stay here because they have come together and because they can make more money than they were able to do at home. They endure the hardship in the beginning, and after some time, if they work well, they start to make money. These workers from poor places in Yunnan really have an impact on the economic development here in Panna.18
In spite of being regarded as absolutely essential for the economic exploitation of the tourist potential and the development of local markets and enterprises in the minority area, the peasant migrants were not seen by local cadres, administrators, and Party leaders as having any other special mission in the area. In this regard, they differed significantly from the earlier Han migrants who were transferred or recruited by the government to the Panna region and other minority areas in the Mao period. The earlier migrants were not merely expected to bring in a new political system and the means to exploit hitherto unused natural resources but also to promote a common Chinese language, a Chinese education system formed by the Communist Party, and systems to train minority cadres capable of gradually taking over the administration in ways fully acceptable to the new regime. On a more abstract level, they were supposed to teach the minorities to become good Communists and Chinese citizens in the new Chinese state. This implied spreading the Chinese language, gradually eradicating religion, establishing celebrations of Chinese national festivals, promoting symbols of a unified Chinese nation, such as the flag, the anthem, and national day, and suppressing cultural practices (e.g., those related to marriage and religion) that were incompatible with Communist ideals. The Communists in the early period held high the ideal that all nationalities should be treated equally under Communist rule and that traditional “Han chauvinism” (da hanzuzhuyi) should be eradicated. But locally, the civilization campaigns were often regarded more as an attempt by Han people to eradicate minority cultures than as expressions of Communist Party policy. The vast majority of people sent to the minority regions in the southwest to direct development, establish governments, and organize education were Han people, and mostly they were prepared, through descriptions in the media, in literature, and during meetings, to encounter backwardness, poverty, and ignorance of Chinese culture and civilization in the minority areas they were sent to.
Among Han officials, it is common to encounter strong perceptions of the minorities as childlike, backward people in need of help from what is regarded as more advanced ethnic groups. To deepen our understanding of how ethnic relations are evolving in the southwestern areas, it is necessary to focus on the much more complex aspects of the actual relationships today between Han immigrants and minorities. In the dominant Western discourse on Han migrations to minority areas of China, the Han are often pictured as a homogenous group of colonizers with more or less similar (racially discriminating) views, goals, and perceptions. However, the Han immigrants are, just like the minorities themselves, highly stratified in terms of class, gender, age, and level of education, and they have very different degrees of access to political and economic power. Therefore they also engage in different kinds of relationships with the different minority people they encounter locally. Many of the poorest Han peasants have taken up jobs in the service sector, which very few Tai people will accept. Many minority people therefore regard these Han peasants as being at the bottom of the local social hierarchy. Differences in social class and level of access to power are so profound among different Han immigrants that they cannot be regarded as a common, unified group of “colonizers.” There is no doubt that the massive immigration of Han to the minority areas of the southwest since the mid-1950s continues to play a very important role in the way that relations are developing today; therefore, the processes of developing local relations between different ethnic and social groups, including the immigrant Han, with various social positions, need to be thoroughly analyzed to better understand the consequences of China’s political “management of the minorities.”
LOCAL RESPONSES TO POLICIES OF LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION
The establishment of a standardized education system in all areas inhabited by minority ethnic groups was an important political aim of the CCP when it first gained control in the border areas. Through their participation in a state-controlled education system, minorities were expected gradually to become better integrated into the political system and able to take up various positions within the administration of their local regions—positions that were initially occupied by trained Han. The obligation to participate in state-organized education was seen as a basic means for the minority peoples to achieve equality with the Han and to make them equal citizens in the Communist state. Mass participation in the state education system was regarded as fundamental for promoting the spread of a standard Chinese national language, for developing feelings of national identification among minorities through the teaching of China’s history and Communist ideology, and for eventually changing social and cultural practices and habits that were considered unhealthy and undesirable in the “new China.”19 Thus, in regarding its purpose as partly geared toward fostering national feelings, identifications, and loyalties, the CCP’s view on minority education did not, in fact, differ significantly from most other modern state-education programs in the world.
Under the Law on Regional National Autonomy, minority autonomous areas in the PRC have the right to organize special training in minority languages based on local needs and demands. During radical leftist periods, this right was often suppressed. In the early 1980s, in the wake of the disastrous Cultural Revolution, which had created strong resentment against the Han among many minority members, it was essential for the government to regain the trust and cooperation of the minorities. Religious practices were again allowed to flourish, and decisions on whether or not to establish special language programs for minorities were to a large extent left to the local autonomous governments. Since 1980, special minority education has been reestablished in a number of regions, although with varying success.20
In Sipsong Panna, this created new kinds of largely unexpected tensions. Just as religious practices resumed, the contract land system was introduced, and the result was that people’s living standards generally rose. People were eager to rebuild destroyed temples, and most Tai villages collected money to make it possible for Tai boys once again to become novices for some years, as had long been the custom among the Tai Theravada Buddhists. For about twenty years, it had been impossible to train monks in Panna, and therefore knowledgeable monks who were willing to teach in the numerous small temples that emerged were in high demand. Consequently, several villages took the initiative to invite monks from Thailand and Burma to come to Panna to teach, and rural Tai people started again to send their sons to the monasteries at the age of seven or eight or even older. This became a problem for educators and the local Bureau of Education. Within a few years, the number of Tai girls in many village schools south of the Mekong was far larger than the number of boys, who were often spending time in the monasteries rather than in school. Newspaper articles and government reports criticized what was perceived as irrational behavior by the Tai: they were chastised for spending money on temples rather than on developing the market economy and for following old habits by providing boys with Buddhist training rather than sending them to the Chinese state school. Attempts to experiment with special schools for Buddhist novices gained national interest and attracted a number of scholars and bureaucrats who praised local educators’ creative efforts to combine state education and religious practice. But the experiments stopped after a few years, and there were no attempts to restart them. Although researchers in China had found the experiments interesting, local educators and monks alike considered them rather fruitless, and they never managed to establish constructive cooperation between the schools and the monasteries. Today, the educational level of the Tai in Panna is relatively low, and even with affirmative-action policies that give them extra points on university entrance examinations, the Tai have not been very successful in this regard.
Language is a core issue in the debate over education for the Tai, as well as for many other minorities in China. In the 1950s, as part of the central government’s effort to promote literacy among some of the officially recognized minorities and construct written languages for others, the Tai script was simplified. After that, Tai language classes were carried out in the new simplified script, whereas teaching in the monasteries continued to be in the traditional script in which all the Buddhist texts were written. By the 1980s, the trend was clear: to the degree that Tai children learned any Tai script at all, the boys learned traditional Tai in the monasteries and simplified Tai in short-term courses in the schools; the girls, on the other hand, never attended classes at the monasteries and therefore learned Tai script only if they attended a course in simplified Tai at school.21 Then, in 1986, apparently after pressure primarily from the older generation of Tai men who were related to the previous elite, the local government decided to abandon the teaching of simplified Tai and return entirely to the use of the traditional script. School materials had to be rewritten, and the local newspaper had to start publishing in traditional Tai. Some intellectual Tai were firmly against this because they had learned only simplified Tai, but by the mid-1990s, amid growing contacts with Thai and Tai people from Thailand, Burma and Laos, and with increasing concern for maintaining Tai culture among younger Tai intellectuals, opinions generally seemed to change in favor of the traditional script. It was therefore surprising when the government in 1996 decided to return to the use of the simplified Tai script. Once again, school materials had to be rewritten, and Tai language classes were cancelled for a long time. Although these decisions were taken at the local-government level, the confusion surrounding the teaching of Tai in schools is still partly an expression of the limited willingness of all levels of government and of the Party administration to expend resources on language classes for minorities. Since the 1980s, the number of Tai classes set up by schools in Panna and supported by the local government has generally been very small. They are mostly voluntary, only Tai children participate, and classes normally amount to only two hours a week. My interviews with teachers and headmasters in Panna in 1994 revealed that several (Han) headmasters were not even aware that the Tai classes in their own schools were taught in traditional, rather than simplified, Tai script.
In addition to short-term classes in the Tai language, at least one village school in Panna has carried out a comprehensive experiment in which Tai was used as the language of instruction for other subjects, and the Tai script was taught as the first written language for students in the lower primary grades. The Chinese language was then gradually introduced from the first year as the children’s second language. The experiment also included a “control” group of students who were instructed in Chinese and who learned the Tai language only in a special class. When I visited the school in 1994, the teachers and the headmaster were enthusiastic about the project and found the results of the experiment very encouraging. Based on the children’s examination results and teachers’ reports, they were convinced that the children in the experimental class developed a stronger knowledge of, and confidence in, not only their own language but also Chinese. Within the local government, however, there was strong resistance to the project, and it was stopped after a few years because of lack of financial (and seemingly political) support. When I revisited the school in 1997, no Tai courses were offered at all, and the school authorities were rather disappointed about the lack of economic and political support for what they regarded as a successful experiment.
But if one focuses entirely on the Tai minority and their opportunities for pursuing education in their own language, one loses sight of a number of other issues related to education in Panna and most other ethnic-minority areas in the southwest. For instance, although the Tai have their own language and script, other minority groups in the area have their own language but no traditional script. They are therefore normally not entitled to receive instruction in their own language and no special classes are available. Some teachers and educators in fact regarded this as an advantage for minorities such as the Jinuo, the Akha, and others. Unlike the Tai, they had no history of being the ruling ethnic group; they had no monastic tradition, no script, and no tradition of teaching in their own language. Therefore they were, in the eyes of many teachers, more willing than the Tai to adapt to the Chinese school system and abandon their own cultural practices. At the same time, many local educators were very concerned that they were not able to provide teachers who were actually able to communicate with the children in their own language, at least during the first year of schooling. One of the biggest obstacles for the local governments has been to recruit qualified teachers for these remote villages, and it has proven difficult to make those who are recruited stay and endure the poor living standards and low wages. Thus, teacher training is one of the priorities of many local governments, but teacher training in itself does not solve the problem of poverty and poor living conditions that makes especially the mountainous areas unattractive for teachers of any nationality. Furthermore, a recent study of education in another rural minority area in the southwest (Yanyuan County, in Sichuan’s Liangshan Prefecture) has demonstrated that the language of instruction in schools is not necessarily an important factor in determining the different levels of educational attainment by children belonging to ethnic minorities. As is known from other parts of the world as well, factors such as distance to school, social status, and traditions of formal education as a means of social mobility are often far more important than the language in which classes are taught.
Since the mid-1980s most people in Panna have been aware that the best schools—normally perceived as those that produce students capable of continuing on in the education system—are the schools connected to the state farms. These schools are not administered by the local Bureau of Education and may recruit their own teachers. Being directly connected to the state farms, they have better funding than most ordinary schools in the region, and they are organized specifically for children in the state farms, most of whom are Han. A few minorities are allowed access, but they have to pay tuition. Other good schools are the local so-called key schools (zhongdian xuexiao), where nearly all the teachers and the majority of students are Han or children of minority cadres. The local secondary “minority schools” (minzu xuexiao), on the other hand, are popular not because they are considered to be especially good but because students there receive financial support from the government. The minority schools have their own admission rules and take in a number of students from all the officially recognized shaoshu minzu, even when they do not have the examination points normally required. All the schools I’ve mentioned have no special curriculum or language training for minority students. Educators generally consider this useless because by the time they reach secondary school, the students already have a sufficient knowledge of the Chinese language. This exemplifies how the study of minority languages in Panna and other areas of the southwest is regarded as a mere transitional tool for reaching the higher levels of standard Chinese. Thus, the tendency is to organize courses in minority languages only if they are considered indispensable for improving children’s adaptation to Chinese or for preventing indirect local resistance toward a school system that largely ignores local minorities’ cultures, languages, and beliefs.
The Law on Regional National Autonomy explicitly states: “Schools where most of the students come from ethnic minority groups should, whenever possible, use textbooks in the students’ own languages and use these languages as the medium of instruction.”22 In practice, minorities in the southwest generally have few possibilities of studying their own languages in the context of the standardized school system. Compared to, for instance, many Tibetan areas, they have fewer opportunities to pursue education in their own languages even at the most basic levels. In addition to the problem of resources and some local officials’ skepticism toward organizing special programs for minorities, national attitudes and policies concerning the relationship between the national language and minority languages influence to a very great extent the practical possibilities and willingness of schools to experiment with specialized programs. This is not necessarily due to specific orders or regulations from above but is more often a result of limited resources and self-censorship (related to awareness of the need to adapt to new trends at the higher political levels of decision). Furthermore, since the language of educational success and upward social mobility within the administrative system is standard Chinese, many minority people themselves—and especially those with a Chinese education—are first of all interested in assuring their children’s proficiency in Chinese. They are not necessarily especially concerned with promoting their own language through the state education system. In this respect, there are profound differences between minority areas, between different minority groups, and even between different people belonging to the same minority group. In the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, when the government was eager to improve relations with the minorities, a positive attitude toward the development of special minority language courses prevailed, though at the same time, the authorities wished to strengthen the general level of Chinese. In recent years, a number of bureaucrats and educators have taken a somewhat different stand and argue more strongly that the whole debate on bilingual education (shuangyu jiaoyu) has failed to focus on the fact that only a high level of proficiency in the Chinese language can help minority areas develop to the same economic and educational levels as most Han regions. In the mid-1990s, most education officials and many teachers in Sipsong Panna were disappointed that the non-Han generally still had a very low level of Chinese. Some of them argued that the purpose of learning minority languages in school was above all to promote the transition to Chinese and that this process was currently going much too slowly. Although several Tai educators were unsurprisingly extremely positive toward the various experiments with teaching Tai as the first language, many Han teachers and officials thought that only a much stronger focus on Chinese at the expense of bilingual or mother-tongue education would speed up the economic and educational development of the minority regions. This view has also found expression in recent debates among some Chinese legislators on how to regulate standard Chinese and make it obligatory for all citizens to use. Several minority people engaged in local education in the southwest have pointed out that research material on bilingual education has decreased considerably in the last two years. Financial support for developing teaching and other materials in minority languages is also limited. Most publishing houses now need to earn money, and it is sometimes difficult to get material in minority languages published because it is rarely sold in large quantities and used mostly in relatively poor areas anyway. Furthermore, many local officials now shy away from bilingual education, fearing that it goes against the political tide, which stresses the need to strengthen the national language and build national unity, rather than engage in costly projects to promote what are often regarded as insignificant languages that lack a modern vocabulary.
THE MANAGEMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES
In the whole of southwest China, the management of natural resources is vital for the Chinese government, which needs timber, minerals, rubber, and the like to promote and maintain the industrial development of the PRC. At the time of the Communist takeover, many important natural resources were still largely unexploited in areas traditionally inhabited by ethnic minorities. As a result, numerous conflicts arose over the right to exploit them. Today, with new environmental concern on the part of the government and with legislation to provide new environmental safeguards, disputes related to the control and use of resources are on the increase in many minority areas in the southwest.
As in other regions of China, large tracts of forest have been cut down in the southwestern minority areas since the 1950s, and deforestation has been blamed for the disastrous floods of recent years. People in the rural southwest are increasingly complaining that the climate has changed, that floods and drought are ruining their economy, and that the government has not taken full responsibility for the effects of its own policies. The main periods of decline in forest quantity and quality (according to Chinese scientists, whose findings are supported by peasant accounts) were during the Great Leap Forward, when everybody had to produce steel and needed wood for charcoal; in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when government policies on grain production forced peasants to open up forested areas for agricultural production; and in the early 1980s, when land had been contracted but many forested areas were not managed very well and private individuals were able to log them with impunity. After 1984, new laws ensured that the logging of forested areas in the southwest (and in other parts of China) was more efficiently controlled by the government, but by that time, many areas had already seen a considerable decrease in the number of trees. The Law on Regional National Autonomy states that the organs of self-government in minority autonomous areas “shall protect and develop grasslands and forests and organize and encourage the planting of trees and grass.” At the same time, it instructs them to “place the interests of the state as a whole above anything else and make positive efforts to fulfill the tasks assigned by state organs at higher levels.”23 Thus, local control of natural resources in minority areas has generally been subordinated to broader national interests and central policies. In Sipsong Panna, the state’s control of large forested areas through the state farms was firmly established in the mid-1950s.
In the late 1990s, as part of the central government’s attempts to prevent future disasters, projects have been initiated to replant trees, and a total ban on logging in many of the most deforested areas has been enforced since 1998. People in many districts in the southwest now have to return the land that was opened up on hill slopes, and sometimes on grasslands, to the government, as part of its reforestation programs. In private conversations, peasants as well as township administrators today often express concern that the compensation for land returned to the government is insufficient to provide the peasants with a reliable income. Often, compensation is paid out as financial support over a fixed number of years; for many peasants, this is a short-term solution that compares unfavorably to the long-term consequences of their loss of land. Although from an environmental standpoint, the government’s efforts to reforest the southwest are essential, they create at the same time new social problems, not least in poor, remote minority areas. The ban on logging was introduced suddenly and with no prior investigation of the social impact on those border regions that depend on timber production for income. When efficiently enforced, the ban causes many areas to lose their main source of income, and local unemployment rates rise significantly. This has already happened in several of the poorest minority areas in the southwest in Yunnan and Sichuan.
In state-owned plantations, which traditionally handled the majority of state logging operations, tens of thousands of mainly Han employees have been retrained to plant and maintain forests. However, many plantations also used to employ local minority peasants, on a contract basis, to assist in the most physically demanding labor of felling trees. With the sudden ban on logging, these peasants lost their jobs—in areas where there is often no other industry or alternative way of sustaining a family. The logging industry also indirectly supported minority people: some had invested in trucks to transport the timber, and others had started restaurants and small hotels for the truck drivers along the transportation routes. Taxes from the timber industry used to provide many counties in the southwest with an important part of their revenue, and some counties (for instance, Meigu and Muli Counties, in Liangshan Prefecture, in Sichuan) lost up to 85 percent of their revenue from the sudden ban on logging. Even with state compensation, this has had serious consequences for those areas with no alternative industries and underdeveloped means of communication and transport. Although the state’s interest in timber ensured a certain degree of government investment in building and maintaining roads and electricity in these remote areas, this is no longer economically viable, and the economic responsibility is now, to a large extent, left to the prefectures and counties, which have few resources. Thus, local governments and leaders in a number of minority areas have turned their interests to the development of tourism, which some regard as one of the most realistic ways (and sometimes the only way) of generating alternative revenue.
Subtropical Sipsong Panna is one of the few regions in China where it is possible to produce rubber. Since the mid-1950s, national policies have been aimed at achieving self-sufficiency in strategic materials such as rubber; beginning in 1956, the government organized migrants (from Hunan Province especially) to settle in Panna and develop new rubber plantations in formerly forested areas. The local Tai were allowed to maintain their fields in the plains, but conflicts arose over sacred forest areas in the mountains, and people who depended on swidden agriculture and hunting for their livelihood clashed with state-farm employees whose primary task was to provide the country with rubber. As one early Han settler said, “The biggest problem was to explain to the minorities that all land and all forest in fact did not belong to them, but to the country.” There have been several serious clashes between the mountain people and the new state-farm settlers, but these have been rarely reported. The media always stress the idea of mutual understanding between the state farms and the locals and the need for unity and sacrifice to develop the motherland. Economic reforms after 1978 have made it possible for local state farms to develop quickly into large enterprises that produce not only rubber but various consumer goods. Recognizing that the state farms have been successful, more Tai people have also become interested in rubber production, and some have now contracted forested areas from the state farms to engage in private production.
TOURISM, RELIGION, AND INTERNATIONAL CONTACTS
After 1980, in the new economic climate of reform, many minority areas—not least in the southwest—proved to have a potential for tourism. Although most Chinese tourists in the early 1980s were either male cadres attending conferences and meetings or honeymooning couples, huge numbers of urban Chinese now have the means and are anxious to see their country. They are supported in this desire by the government, which has encouraged the building of tourist facilities all over the country. Having visited China’s most famous historical and cultural sites, including Beijing, Xi’an, Hangzhou, and Suzhou, an increasing number of tourists has begun to look farther afield, toward areas that are considered exotic and culturally distant from their daily lives. Remote border regions have long been featured in the media, which represent their minority inhabitants as colorful, cheerful, and exotic. Sipsong Panna was well known before the 1980s as a place of beauty, hospitality, and even danger (from wild animals or malaria). Many Han settlers who moved there in the 1960s and 70s recalled having read a popular novel, Song of Dawn at the Borders,24 which describes the heroic and zealous young people who volunteered to go to this inaccessible area and develop it. When the area was opened up to foreign visitors and border restrictions were eased, investments in new hotels, dance bars, shops, and other businesses related to tourism quickly grew. The sleepy capital of Jinghong became a construction site for four-star hotels, minority theme parks, monuments, and new streets. Today nearly 1.5 million tourists a year—the vast majority of them Chinese—visit this area, which has approximately 800,000 inhabitants. Businessmen from the rich southeastern cities of China have invested in the tourist industry, and the state farms have their own hotels and activities related to tourism. Conferences and meetings of various levels of government officials from all over China are organized in the pleasant surroundings, and visitors have access to more small private restaurants and shops than ever before. In fact, tourism has developed so fast in Sipsong Panna that some visitors have started to complain—as do many Western visitors in heavily developed tourist areas—that tourism has ruined the original atmosphere of the place. Whereas earlier, in the mid-1980s, tourists were excited to visit Tai and Akha villages and see the jungle, visitors in the late 1990s often expressed deep disappointment over the lack of hospitality and the absence of beautiful women bathing freely in the floods, as they had seen so often featured in TV programs. The much publicized Water Splashing Festival also tended to pale when tourists realized that it was celebrated (for their sake) nearly daily in various leisure parks and resorts. By the late 1990s, the number of tourists going to Sipsong Panna was slowly decreasing, partly because of the renewed possibilities for Chinese tourists to buy affordable trips abroad to countries in Southeast Asia—trips that most tourists I interviewed found potentially much more exciting than a visit to Sipsong Panna.
Still, Sipsong Panna remains one of the most popular tourist destinations in southwest China, and other minority areas in the southwest have started to follow similar paths of development. In areas where government and Party cadres find that there is a potential for attracting Chinese and foreign visitors, and where other resources are scarce, tourism is often seen as the only realistic way out of poverty. As shown in Tim Oakes’s comprehensive study of tourism in Guizhou, many local village leaders also share that belief.25 To this end, they are willing to commodify and market their culture.26 At the same time, the experiences of those minority areas that already have a developed tourist industry suggest that local minorities are not necessarily the ones who profit most from this industry. Even in an area such as Sipsong Panna, with a developed tourist industry, only a few towns and villages near the most popular tourist destinations directly benefit from tourism, and there have been many instances where the interests of local peasants have been sacrificed for the sake of promoting an industry that benefits other sectors of society. Disputes over land and land use are common in many of the areas that have focused their development on the tourist sector. Locals have raised concerns about mass tourism’s impact on the environment, about the large-scale immigration of Han Chinese, and about the frequent conflicts of interest between peasants and local traders on the one hand and well-connected entrepreneurs and government officials on the other. Local reactions against mass tourism in Panna have mainly taken the form of scattered and quiet criticism of developments that many people feel they have had no control over. Nobody, including the local government, has been in control of how the tourism industry has evolved, but quite a few people outside the political elite in Panna have, in different and often indirect ways, expressed their dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of specific issues connected to the development of tourism. Admittedly, tourism brought an airport to Panna, but those who lost their land because of the new airport were far from satisfied with the meager compensation they were offered. The nightlife in Panna is famous, but many locals were more than disturbed by the daily sight of state employees eating and partying at the country’s expense in the many bars and restaurants. Prostitution has become a major business in Jinghong, and many locals despise the women sex workers, who are mainly Han from Sichuan and other provinces. Most new shops and restaurants in Jinghong are run by immigrant or second-generation Han who know better than most locals how to cater to the needs and wishes of Chinese tourists, and competition is very tough.
On 4 December 1997, I carried out a street survey in Jinghong to find out who ran the various shops in one of the major shopping streets at the time, where they came from, and which ethnic group they belonged to. I chose that particular street because it had a whole range of different kinds of shops, and it was not, as were some other streets, lined with mainly one type of enterprise.27 Here, people from different parts of China were running different kinds of shops, and in addition, there were many small-scale traders with stalls or simply selling or repairing goods from a seat on the pavement. In each shop or stall along the street, at least one person was asked to participate in the survey, which inquired only about the shop or stall owner’s place of origin, gender, age, and ethnic affiliation. In cases where people had time and interest in talking further, they were asked about the history of their migration to Panna and their reasons for starting a business there. As can be seen from tables 2.1 and 2.2, there were altogether ninety-two privately owned or privately contracted (chengbao) shops and small stalls along the street. Two (maybe three) were brothels disguised as beauty parlors; the others were restaurants, food stalls, repair shops, pharmacies, jewelry stores, shops with electronic articles, clothes shops, and so forth. Of the ninety-two privately run shops, eighty-four were run by Han (of whom thirty-five were from Panna, which meant that they belonged to “the second generation”). Three shops were run by members of the Hani minzu (two Akha and one who called himself a Biyao), four by Tai (one of whom was not from Panna), and one by a Yi. The survey found that many shops changed ownership relatively frequently within a short period of time, something that was explained as mostly a result of rather fierce competition. Many interviewees explained that it was becoming increasingly difficult to do business in Jinghong, and many were considering moving to the Panna county towns of Mengla and Menghai or to smaller towns in these counties. In the other shopping streets of Jinghong, shops and restaurants run by Tai or other local minorities constituted a small minority, though there was still a considerable number of Tai and other minorities selling vegetables and food products (rather than clothes) in the market. According to the government office responsible for the administration of private enterprise, an estimated 80 percent of people selling goods (including clothes and vegetables) at this market were people from outside Panna who mainly bought goods through contacts in larger cities and brought them to Panna to sell.
TABLE 2.1
Privately Owned Businesses*
on a Selected Jinghong Shopping Street:
Owner’s Ethnicity
Source: Author-conducted survey, 4 December 1997.
*This includes the small private stalls that were run simply by a person sitting on the pavement. It does not include three state-owned enterprises.
TABLE 2.2
Privately Owned Businesses on a Selected Jinhong
Shopping Street: Owner’s Place of Origin
Source: Author-conducted survey, 4 December 1997.
The reason so few shops were run by members of local minority groups, according to most shop owners, was that local minorities were neither interested in nor capable of running businesses. Many local minority people I interviewed partly agreed with this view, but they explained that first of all, minorities were unable to compete with the more experienced Han businesspeople. They did not have the economic backing and contacts in the larger cities needed to set up modern shops or restaurants. Many thought the Han immigrants had benefited more from the boom in tourism because minority people did not know how to exploit the economic opportunities that presented themselves and were not willing to take up unattractive jobs in the service sector. Moreover, many of them had land and therefore found it unnecessary to engage in business.
Because of the lack of a forum for public expression of dissatisfaction, the only ways people were able to voice or display their opinions about development were through occasional contacts with cadres higher up in the administrative system, through their local village leaders, or through informal talks with neighbors, friends, or relatives about the behavior of the elite. Dissatisfaction was mainly directed against specific, concrete aspects of development and never manifested itself in the form of spectacular outward collective expressions.
In the southwest and other minority areas of China today, the development of tourism is often connected to government policies on religion. Any attempt to understand how local governments and Party organizations approach religion must take into account the fact that many minorities’ religious practices constitute a resource for developing tourism. Although the central government’s religious policies (including its support for the rebuilding of temples destroyed during the Cultural Revolution) are not primarily geared toward developing tourism in minority areas, local governments’ policies in areas such as Sipsong Panna are often geared to do just that. The Buddhist Tai, especially in rural areas south of the Mekong River, in Panna, have transmitted their religion through generations, while constantly reworking it to accord with changing political and economic circumstances. Since the 1980s, when people’s incomes were raised, they have rebuilt a lot of old temples and monasteries, and they have invested in a number of new buildings and monuments related to their Buddhist practices. As in many other minority areas, the government supported the rebuilding of destroyed temples both in recognition of the disastrous effects of the Cultural Revolution and as a means to heal some of the wounds it inflicted on relations between the minorities and the Han. For the local people who have revived and renewed their religious practices and other activities (such as education) connected to the monasteries, the rebuilding of temples since the 1980s has obviously had nothing to do with a need or wish to develop tourism. But for local governments in areas with a clear potential to develop large-scale tourism, governments facing decentralization and decreased economic support from the state, beautiful temples were clearly something to offer urban Chinese visitors. For the average outside visitors to Panna, the religious practices of the Tai constitute a strong visual encounter with a culture and people different from their own. Tourists going to Panna expect to find—and do find—young boys wearing yellow robes, beautiful temples, and Buddhist celebrations where colorful monks perform exciting rituals. Now that more and more Tai are building their traditional Tai houses in new, modernized versions—against the will of the government, which sees this as a threat to local culture—and now that much of the jungle has been cut down, the visual images generated by religious practices remain an important asset for an area whose 1.5 million tourists annually may not be content to visit an organized “minority village” or be entertained in one of the many “traditional” restaurants run by Han immigrants.
The more relaxed political climate since the early 1980s has also paved the way for religious contacts across borders, and every year, monks from Panna travel to receive training and expand their contacts in monasteries in Thailand. This trend has been prompted partly by the development of tourism, which has allowed a large number of people from Thailand, especially, to visit Panna and support the local monasteries. Today, financial support from organizations in Thailand for the reestablishment of monasteries and construction of Buddhist statues plays a very important role in the religious revival in Panna. The study of standard Thai has become popular among young Tai, not only because of religion but also because of the development of trade with Thailand and the new international contacts with investors, businesspeople, and Thai tourists.28 Some monasteries have started to teach standard Thai, as well as other modern subjects such as mathematics and Chinese language. The government tries, through the local Bureau of Religion, to keep track of the number of novices and monks, and monks have to apply for permission to go to Thailand to study in other monasteries. The government also tries to regulate the content of the curriculum at the largest monasteries, which it insists should include the Chinese language. At some points during the 1980s and 90s, it tried to prevent foreign monks from staying and teaching in Panna. At the same time, the government accepts that the monasteries receive donations from Thai and other Buddhist organizations, and since the Tai have not politicized their religious practices, they are generally not perceived as a threat to the government’s demand for unity.
However, the renewed practice of sending boys to monasteries at a young age in Panna poses new problems for the government. It directly contravenes both the government’s policies on education and the Law of Regional Autonomy, which states: “The state shall protect normal religious activities. No one may make use of religion to engage in activities that disrupt public order, impair the health of citizens, or interfere with the educational system of the state.”29 The practice of sending boys to monasteries does interfere with the educational system of the state, mainly because the monasteries and the school authorities have never found a way to reconcile religious tradition with the modern demand for attending a state-controlled school. The schools now allow religious novices to attend them, even while connected to the monasteries, but few novices actually do. Most monks do not encourage novices to attend the state school. At the same time, the reform era has brought with it demands that parents pay for schoolbooks, as well as various other expenses (including, sometimes, tuition), and this has increased the popularity of a monastery education for some people. Parents pay monasteries too, but they would do this anyway, since it is regarded as a normal way of supporting the monastery and performing good deeds as Buddhists. In practice, there is currently no connection between the state educational system and the Buddhist monasteries. To a certain extent, they compete for pupils. Those educated in the Chinese system are at least to some extent equipped to obtain social mobility in China. Those trained in the Buddhist monastic system receive support for their cultural and linguistic traditions from Thailand and from other Tai peoples, as well as from Buddhists and Buddhist organizations in and outside of China. The fact that the best Chinese schools are attended mainly by Han children and the children of minority cadres, while the less prestigious ordinary schools are attended mainly by minority children, together with the fact that it is practically impossible for most minority children to receive any training whatsoever in their own language or to learn about their own culture and history, means that minority children grow up less able to voice their demands or influence political and economic decisions locally.
CHINA’S POLICIES TOWARD MANAGEMENT OF MINORITIES IN THE SOUTHWEST
Many of China’s southwestern minority areas are characterized by the peaceful coexistence of numerous minority ethnic groups, although a range of issues—large-scale immigration, environmental degradation, and unequal access to power and resources, to name a few—may eventually divide them. Some of these minority peoples are relatively unknown in the West. However, an increasing number of NGOs—both Chinese and foreign—have established bases in Yunnan Province especially and are dealing mainly with environmental and poverty issues. The educational level of minority peoples in the southwest is often low compared to the Chinese average; this is partly because minorities are usually not very successful in voicing their demands or advancing local causes before Chinese state organizations. The vast majority of minority people in the southwest are not interested in (or even considering) seeking independence from the Chinese state. Perhaps partly for this reason, they are hardly visible in the dominant Western-media images of China’s minority ethnic groups. In the multiethnic southwest, groups with different histories, religions, languages, and relations to the Chinese state live together and interact socially. Many are struggling to improve their lives through creative local initiatives in trade, religion, education, and production, and by establishing contacts with various organizations and institutions nationally and abroad. Support for these local initiatives may increase the visibility of these groups and strengthen their attempts to ensure their own cultural, political, and economic interests and rights.
The Chinese government’s campaign to develop the western regions means that considerable state resources will be redirected toward that part of China (which comprises more than 60 percent of the nation’s territory). The western regions contain China’s poorest areas; they are inhabited mainly by ethnic minorities and are sites of potential social and ethnic conflict. The government is trying to attract more foreign investment to these areas, and large, prestigious workshops and conferences are being held to promote the campaign. The government’s emphasis is on infrastructure, industry, and urban development. Within the western regions, the campaign is being actively promoted in the press and through meetings of cadres at different levels. Local people are discussing the project and joking about it: “Will it simply bring a mobile telephone to everyone?” they ask. Criticism has already been directed against what is seen as the campaign’s first and foremost interest: building up the infrastructure to move natural resources out of the west and into the central and eastern parts of China. Insufficient attention has been paid to building a better educational system so as to achieve economic development, the critics argue, and they worry that the campaign may result in new immigration of skilled labor from eastern China.
Government plans aside, the campaign has provided a political framework for some minority cadres, teachers, and administrators to initiate projects they think will promote local development, such as the translation of an English encyclopedia for children. Foreign NGOs and aid organizations have been permitted to support these local initiatives, which has led to greater cooperation and mutual understanding in places where these kinds of contacts are often weak but strongly desired. Examples of such local initiatives, many still in their preliminary stages, may be found all over the southwest.
Environmental concerns—specifically, the loss of forested areas—have led the state to establish more and more nature reserves in the southwest. However, the lack of a public forum for debate makes it difficult to ensure that local people’s interests are being heard and considered. A similar problem exists in regard to industrial development and the government’s attempts to attract foreign investment. It is common to hear businessmen complain about the lack of skilled labor when companies are set up in areas other than the larger cities or east-coast areas of China. In the west, and not least in the southwest, this is a problem that is largely connected to the low levels of education in many of the towns and villages. Villagers often live in remote areas, and it is not uncommon for rural children to attend primary school for only the first three years or to not go to school at all. Since 1949, the Chinese government has achieved remarkable results in the field of education, but today, a number of regions are still lagging far behind the national average, and many minority people in the southwest are complaining about the dwindling resources spent on minority education. It is becoming increasingly difficult to publish material in minority languages because publishers now have to make money, and books in minority languages rarely become best-sellers. Furthermore, most teaching material in minority languages has tended to focus on issues of local culture, stories, heroes, and specific customs. Some minority intellectuals have started to argue that although this kind of material is badly needed, there is an equally urgent need to develop a modern vocabulary in minority languages to ensure that minority children are able to learn about the modern world in their own language as well as in Chinese. Another major concern is the lack of qualified teachers. In a number of minority areas, educators and education bureaus have tried to improve teacher training, including training in minority languages, but scarce resources make this very difficult. Generally, minority ethnic groups in the southwest see education as a way to preserve and develop their own languages, promote knowledge of their histories, improve their means of expression, improve their opportunities for finding jobs, and lay the basis for further economic development that they themselves direct.
In other words, most minorities in the southwest are not concerned with political independence but rather with how to advance their own interests, which include raising their communities’ living standards and increasing control over their own lands, cultures, and customs. I am convinced that in addition to the already existing and expanding contacts between foreign entities and government organizations and educational institutions at the central and provincial levels, there is a need in these areas for more support for local initiatives, as well as more contacts with local elites, policy makers, teachers, and researchers.
NOTES
I am grateful for the suggestions for improving this chapter made by Matthew Kapstein, Morris Rossabi, Koen Wellens, and the outside reviewers for the University of Washington Press.
1. Some of them call themselves “local people” (bendi minzu).
2. See also Hansen, “Call of Mao or Money,” and Majorities as Minorities.
3. The Tai of Sipsong Panna speak a Thai language, and according to common transcriptions of Thai, they should be called “Thai.” This is pronounced like the Chinese phoneme transcribed in pinyin as dai.
4. Economy Department of National Minority Commission et al., Zhongguo minzu tongji, 53.
5. Of which, the Dai, Zhuang, and Buyi languages are closely related to the standard Thai language of Thailand and the standard Lao of Laos.
6. Transcribed according to the common practice of transcribing the Thai language.
7. Xishuangbanna in Chinese.
8. On prostitution and the marketing of Panna as a “sexy tourist destination,” see Hyde, “Sex Tourism Practices.”
9. Fieldwork-based studies of China’s southwestern ethnic minorities include Harrell, Cultural Encounters (several articles); Brown, Negotiating Ethnicities; Cai, Une société; Litzinger, Other Chinas; Schein, Minority Rules; Wellens, “What’s in a Name?”; and Hansen, Lessons in Being Chinese.
10. See, for instance, Lee, “Migration and Expansion.”
11. Fei, Fei Xiaotong xuanji, 285.
12. See, for instance, Li, Shi, and Gao, Jindai Zhongguo yimin shiyao, 364.
13. This is a common way of referring to the offspring of those Han (and to a limited extent, those Hui, and other minorities) who after 1949 were sent to minority areas to help establish control of the vast borderlands. These early immigrants are often presented as pioneers who contributed even their children and grandchildren to the cause. See, for instance, Li, Neidi ren zai Xizang.
14. According to a local, unpublished report from the statistical bureau.
15. Increasing competition from Southeast Asia is expected to result in serious economic strains for the rubber-producing state farms, with their many employee benefits. Although the schools are still generally regarded as the best in the region, the average age of state-farm employees is high, and providing for the large number of retirees presents a formidable challenge.
16. For an elaborate and interesting study of rural migrants in large cities, see especially Solinger, Contesting Citizenship. See also Davis, “Never Say ‘Dai.’”
17. Mainly hotels, the sugar factory, tourist enterprises, and contracted rubber plantations.
18. This man was born in 1962 on a state farm. He had participated in a short-term course to become a cadre in a minority area, which secured him an influential administrative post, as well as opportunities to engage in private enterprise.
19. I have previously described and discussed Chinese minority education in the southwest in much more detail in Hansen, Lessons in Being Chinese. See Postiglione, China’s National Minority, for a number of recent articles concerning minority education in China, especially Harrell and Ma, “Folk Theories of Success,” for a study of education among rural minorities and Han in the southwest.
20. After the Cultural Revolution, the Law on Regional National Autonomy was revised, and the revisions were made effective in 1984.
21. See Hansen, “Ethnic Minority Girls,” for a discussion of the relation between gender and language training among the Tai.
22. Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo Minzu Quyu Zizhifa, article 37.
23. Ibid., articles 28 and 7.
24. Huang, Bianjiang.
25. Oakes, Tourism and Modernity.
26. See also Schein, Minority Rules, on ethnic tourism in Guizhou.
27. In the restaurant district, small-scale restaurants were very obviously run mainly by Sichuanese, while Shanghainese ran the larger restaurants, hotels, and bars. Shops in the garment district were run mainly by entrepreneurs from Zhejiang. The market area had many people from Hunan selling vegetables, meat, and fish.
28. Sara Davis even suggests that a pan-Tai ethnicity might be growing, especially among Tai monks and musicians who have traveled to Thailand and Burma. See Davis, “Never Say ‘Dai.’”
29. National People’s Congress, Law of the People’s Republic, article 11 (emphasis added).