State of the World's Minorities 2007 - People's Republic of China

The definition of ethnic minorities/nationalities in the People's Republic of China has been conceived by the state and does not truly reflect the self-identification of such ethnic minorities or the reality of ethnic diversity within China's boundaries. Mínzú (the Chinese term that signifies non-Han 'undistinguished ethnic groups', numbering more than 730,000 people) have not been recognized among or classified within the state's official 56 ethnic minorities (these comprise the majority Han grouping and 55 minority nationalities).

The Mínzú also do not include ethnicities that have been classified by the state authorities as belonging to existing minorities and hence denied their legal rights to public participation. For example, the Mosuo are officially classified as Naxi, and the Chuanqing are classified as Han Chinese, but they reject these classifications as they view themselves as separate ethnic minorities.

Some groups are still actively fighting for recognition as minorities. In the 1964 census, there were 183 nationalities registered, among which the government recognized only 54. However, census numbers are somewhat suspect due to the reregistration of significant numbers of Han people as members of minority nationalities in order to gain personal benefits, such as exemption from the family planning policy of 'one family one child' or the right to cremate their dead.

The recognized ethnic minorities have considerable autonomy with regard to their way of life and this has resulted in complicated forms of autonomy for six provinces (among them Inner Mongolia, Tibet and Xinjiang), but also in the creation of autonomous cities, prefectures and municipalities where minority nationalities are territorially concentrated. In practice, the system remains subject to the political control of the Communist Party. For instance, the Constitution stipulates that the leaders of an 'autonomous area', and most of its representatives to the People's Congress, must be members of the area's main nationality. However, the Chinese Communist Party, which controls the government and holds all final decision-making powers, is exempt from these stipulations. According to available records, appointments made in September 2006 to the Chinese Communist Party's committee in Lhasa, which in effect runs Tibet's capital, had a lower proportion of Tibetans than at any time in the last 40 years.

China's western regions are the most ethnically diverse, with 80 per cent of the country's minorities living in the area. However the Mínzú are mainly distributed in the border areas of the north-east, north, north-west and south-west of China. Many of these regions have significant natural resources, including oil, gas, minerals and precious metals, and new regional development strategies are being specifically targeted there. Nevertheless, without accompanying decentralization of political power, this strategy risks further exacerbating the already simmering ethno-regional tensions, as development rights for these groups are totally controlled by the central government.

Since 11 September 2001, the Chinese government claims to be acting against global terrorism. However, activists say that this is a convenient excuse to crack down on areas susceptible to ethnic tensions. This has led to widespread arbitrary arrests, closure of places of worship and the sentencing of hundreds of people to harsh prison terms or death after grossly unfair and often summary judicial processes. China's 8.68 million Uyghurs, who are the largest Muslim ethnic group in the country, have felt the brunt of these policies in 2006, particularly in Urumqi, the capital of the Xingiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Uyghur observance of Islam is severely curtailed on a routine basis; mosques are under government control, and students and civil servants are not allowed to publicly engage in any religious activity other than observing the Muslim ban on eating pork.

According to the population census in 2000, the illiteracy of ethnic minorities is 14.63 per cent, 60 per cent higher than the national average. As such, a central government 2006 decision to allocate a special fund of 10 million yuan (US $1.28 million) each year to foster the education level of minorities and improve school conditions for primary and middle school students in minority areas is to be applauded. A China View (Xinhua news agency) article in November 2006 reports that about 6 million children are attending more than 10,000 bilingual schools in China, using both Mandarin and ethnic languages, and more than 3,000 textbooks are compiled in 29 languages annually.

Throughout 2006, the Chinese state continued investing to improve ethnic minorities TV programming in minorities' languages. Currently, in the autonomous areas of ethnic minorities, of 441 radio programmes, 105 are in ethnic minority languages. In addition, of 489 TV programmes, 100 are in ethnic minority languages. Moreover, the TV stations managed at prefecture or county level in ethnic areas also use more than 10 ethnic minority languages or dialects, including but not limited to Dai, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Korean, Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Zhuang.

Ethnic minorities find it increasingly difficult to compete for certain jobs; it is not uncommon to find signs at job fairs saying 'Uyghurs need not apply'. The huge boom in economic and industrial development in itself threatens the cultures and languages of minorities. China's famed Western Development Strategy exemplifies this trend, its main aim being to extract oil and gas from resource-rich rural areas for use in urban, coastal centres. Indirectly, however, Chinese Communist Party leaders hope that the resulting influx of Han Chinese settlers and state capital into the western regions will lead to assimilation in areas currently dominated by the presence of minorities. Ultimately, it appears to be an internal colonization project. On a more positive note, the Chinese government partnered with United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 2006 to attempt to lift ethnic minority groups out of poverty through developing cultural-based industries and tourism.