CHINA’S POLICY TOWARD ETHNIC GROUPSAND THEIR COMMON PROSPERITY

(Part Four)

　　VI. Protect and Develop Ethnic Minority Cultures

　　The culture of an ethnic group represents its important characteristic and serves as a source of its vitality, creativity and cohesiveness. The ethnic minority cultures in China are a vital part of Chinese civilization as well as intellectual assets of the entire Chinese nation.

　　The Constitution of the People’s Republic of China stipulates that the state helps ethnic minorities accelerate the development of their cultural undertakings based on their characteristics and needs. The Chinese government adopts policies and measures to respect, protect and support the inheritance, development and innovation of ethnic minority cultures, and encourage all ethnic groups to enhance their cultural exchanges and develop their cultural undertakings.

　　Protect and develop the spoken and written languages of ethnic minorities

　　In the 1950s the state conducted a survey on the spoken and written languages of its ethnic minorities, on the basis of which it established special institutions to do research on these languages and help ethnic minority people create or improve their scripts. Of all the 55 ethnic minorities in China, 53 have their own spoken languages, except the Hui and Manchu that use the Han language. Among them 22 use 28 scripts, and 12, including the Zhuang, Bouyei and Miao, use 16 scripts which have been created or improved with the help from the government. Now there are approximately 60 million ethnic minority people in China who regularly use their own spoken languages, accounting for over 60 percent of the country’s total ethnic minority population, and about 30 million ethnic minority people who regularly use their own scripts. There are 154 radio and television stations using the languages of ethnic minorities in ethnic autonomous areas, and China National Radio and local radio stations broadcast in 21 minority languages daily. The number of publishing houses designed to serve ethnic minorities has increased from 17 in 1978 to 38 in the present, located in Beijing and 13 other provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the central government, and the number of minority languages they use has grown from five to 26 in the same period. In 2008, a total of 5,561 titles of books were published in minority languages, with a total print-run of 64.44 million, 6.41 times and 6.37 times the figures in 1978 respectively. The autonomous regions of Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet have stipulated and enforced relevant regulations and detailed implementation rules concerning the use and development of their own spoken and written languages.

　　In order to make ethnic minority peoples share the fruits of the information age, the state has adopted measures to promote the normalization, standardization and information processing of ethnic minority scripts. So far, the state has formulated national standards for coded character sets, keyboards and fonts of Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur (Kazak, Kirgiz), Korean, Yi, Dai and others, which, submitted by China, have been included in the latest edition of the international standards. A number of electronic publishing systems and office automation systems have been developed, and some websites and web pages have been built in minority languages. Some relevant software can already be operated via Windows.

　　Support and help ethnic minorities to develop education

　　The Chinese government has always attached importance to developing education in ethnic minority areas. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the state called a number of working conferences to make plans for promoting education among ethnic minorities. The Constitution, the Law on Regional Ethnic Autonomy and the Compulsory Education Law all expressly include provisions on helping ethnic minorities develop education. Central and local educational administrative departments at all levels have especially set up offices in charge of ethnic-minority education administration to implement and enforce state policies on ethnic minority education, and to study and handle special issues. Special education subsidies for ethnic minorities have been earmarked at both the central and local levels in order to meet the expenditure needs due to ethnic and geographical reasons for ethnic minorities. Especially since the adoption of the reform and opening up policies, ethnic minority areas have witnessed unprecedented development in elementary, vocational and higher education, as well as in teacher training, “bilingual education” and education in ethnic unity. In 2002 the Decision on Deepening the Reform and Accelerating the Development of Ethnic Minority Education issued by the State Council further clarified general and specific policies and specified overall plans in this regard. In 2005, in the Outline of the Eleventh Five-Year Plan for National Education, it is clearly stipulated that the country will stick to the principles of regional planning and classified guidance, and it is emphasized that public educational resources will be allocated in favor of rural areas, central and western regions, poverty-stricken areas, border areas and ethnic minority areas.

　　In recent years, the state has successively implemented the project of compulsory education in poverty-stricken areas, the project of renovation of dilapidated rural primary and secondary school buildings, and the project to make nine-year compulsory education basically universal and to basically eliminate illiteracy among young and middle-aged adults in the western region. The central government has invested a total of over 29 billion yuan, thus greatly improving the conditions of schools in ethnic minority areas. At present, there are 20,906 ethnic-minority primary schools and 3,536 ethnic-minority secondary schools nationwide. All other schools of various types at all levels enroll ethnic minority students as well, and grant them due preferential treatment. In 2004 the state started to implement in rural areas in western China the policy exempt them from incidental fees and textbook payment and provide students there subsidy for boarding, which has brought benefits to the great majority of ethnic minority students. Since 2006, the reform of the rural compulsory education funding mechanism has been carried out in the western region as a first step. The state allocates special funds to ethnic minorities and ethnic minority areas with special difficulties. For example, each year some 120 million yuan is allocated to rural primary and secondary schools in agricultural and pastoral areas in Tibet to offer free meals, free boarding and free schooling. By the end of 2008, the number of ethnic minority counties that had reached the targets of making nine-year compulsory education basically universal and basically eliminating illiteracy among the young and middle-aged had amounted to 674, accounting for 96.6 percent of the total in these areas.

　　In order to strengthen understanding and communication between ethnic groups, enhance ethnic relations of equality, unity, mutual assistance and harmony, and promote the development of all ethnic groups, for many years the Chinese government has committed to developing “bilingual” teaching (teaching with an ethnic minority language and the Han Chinese language) in ethnic minority areas, and has achieved good results. By 2007, there had been altogether over 10,000 schools using 29 scripts of 21 ethnic minorities nationwide to carry out bilingual teaching, and the total number of students attending these schools was over six million.

　　The state supports higher education development in ethnic minority areas through measures such as “paired-up” educational support for institutions of higher learning in western China, cooperating with local authorities to cofound institutions of higher learning in ethnic minority areas, strengthening the establishment of special disciplines and degrees, and expanding enrolment. At present, ethnic minority areas have 167 general institutions of higher learning, with 77,000 teachers and 1.235 million students. The state renders great support to the development of vocational education in ethnic minority areas. In 2008, the central government invested 827 million yuan in the five autonomous regions, helped build 83 county-level vocational education centers and secondary vocational schools for demonstration purposes, as well as 145 practical training centers of vocational schools and 10 international demonstration vocational higher schools; and allocated 974 million yuan as a state stipend for students of secondary vocational schools in the five autonomous regions, financially aiding over 830,000 students, accounting for 90 percent of the students attending these schools.

　　Through 60 years of efforts, the educational undertakings in ethnic minority areas have scored considerable achievements. By the end of 2008, the number of ethnic minority students attending schools of all types at all levels throughout the country came to 21.996 million, among which the number of ethnic minority students attending general primary schools was 10.708 million, accounting for 10.4 percent of all such students; the number of ethnic minority students attending general secondary schools was 6.802 million, making up 8.5 percent; and the number of ethnic minority students attending general institutions of higher learning was 1.339 million, making up 6.2 percent of all such students. The overall cultural quality of ethnic minority peoples has improved significantly. According to the fifth national census in 2000, for 14 ethnic minorities, including the Korean, Manchu, Mongolian and Kazak, the number of years of education has surpassed the national average. At present, there are university students from all the 55 ethnic minority groups, and for about a dozen ethnic groups, including the Uyghur, Hui, Korean and Naxi, the average number of university students per 10,000 people has already surpassed the national average.

　　Rescuing and preserving cultural heritage of ethnic minorities

　　A national planning group and office for collecting and publishing ancient books of ethnic minorities have been established by the state to organize the work for recovering, collating and protecting ancient books of ethnic minorities. By the end of 2008, several million titles of such books had been collected, of which over 110,000 had been edited. As many as 377 ancient titles of ethnic minorities have been included in the first and second batches for the National Catalogue of Precious Ancient Books, and five institutions including the China Ethnic Library have been listed among the first and second groups of important institutions for the preservation of ancient books at the national level. Among them, the ancient Dongba literature manuscripts of the Naxi ethnic group have been listed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World. In addition, the Chinese government has set up special institutions to collect, edit, translate and research the three major epics of ethnic minorities: Gesar of the Tibetans, Janger of the Mongolians, and Manas of the Kirgiz, and significant progress has been made in the work. In recent years, the state has earmarked a large sum of money for collating and publishing the Tripitaka in China, an encyclopedia of Tibetan studies in 150 volumes.

　　For over three decades since the 1950s, more than 3,000 experts and scholars organized by the state completed their research, editing and publishing of five ethnic-minority subjects, including a series of books on ethnic minorities in China, a series of books on their concise histories, a series of books on their languages, a series of books on the overview of ethnic autonomous areas in China, and a series of monographs resulting from the survey of social histories of ethnic minorities in China, totaling 403 volumes, 100 million Chinese characters and a print-run of over 500, 000 copies. In recent years, the state has organized the work for revising and reprinting the above five series. From the 1950s up to now, the state has organized three large-scale surveys, striving to find the folk cultural and artistic materials of ethnic minority peoples and prevent them from falling into oblivion. The government has also organized over 100,000 people and finished, after 30 years of effort, the compilation of the Ten Collections of China’s Folk Cultures and Arts of Ethnic Groups, a key subject of the National Philosophy and Social Sciences Plan. The collections comprise 298 volumes (450 sub-volumes) in 500 million Chinese characters. In addition, the state has also organized and completed the publishing of 108 titles on various artistic theories of ethnic minorities, totaling approximately 25 million Chinese characters.

　　Beginning in the 1980s, the state has invested large sums in the renovation and maintenance of key cultural relics sites under state protection, including the Drepung, Sera and Gandan monasteries in Lhasa of Tibet, the Kumbum Monastery in Qinghai Province and the Kizil Thousand-Buddha Cave in Xinjiang. Between 1989 and 1994, the state invested 55 million yuan, 1,000 kg of gold and a large quantity of silver in repairing the famous Potala Palace. Since 2001 the Chinese government appropriated 380 million yuan as a special fund for repairing the Potala Palace, Norbulingka and Sakya Monastery. In the 11th Five-Year Plan period (2006-2010), the government will invest 570 million yuan as special fund for the maintenance and protection of 22 major cultural relics sites in Tibet. Since 2005 the state has invested 400 million yuan for preserving over 20 key cultural relics and historical sites in Xinjiang in the 11th Five-Year Plan period. To date, in ethnic autonomous areas there are 366 key cultural relics and historical sites under state protection, of which two are included in the World Heritage List – Historic Ensemble of the Potala Palace in Lhasa and the Old Town of Lijiang, and three are cited as World Natural Heritage – Jiuzhaigou Valley, Huanglong Scenic and Historic Interest Area and Protected Area of Three Parallel Rivers (Nujiang, Jinsha and Lancang) in Yunnan.

　　The state also attaches great importance to preserving the intangible cultural heritage of ethnic minorities. Since 2002, funds from the central government coffers have totaled 386 million yuan for preserving intangible heritage items, a quarter of which has been used in ethnic minority areas. Among the two groups of 1,028 items on the national intangible cultural heritage list published by the State Council, 367 are associated with ethnic minorities, taking up 35.7 percent of the total. All the 55 ethnic minorities in China have their own items on the list. Among the three groups of 1,488 representative inheritors of national intangible cultural heritage projects, 393 belong to ethnic minorities, accounting for 26.4 percent. The Mukam Art of the Uyghur people and the Mongolian Long Folk Songs have been listed in the third group of UNESCO’s “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Mankind.”

　　Promote ethnic minorities’ cultural and artistic undertakings

　　In the early 1950s, the national-level Central Ethnic Song and Dance Ensemble was established. In recent years, by undertaking the project of Long Cultural Corridor Construction in the Border Areas, the projects of setting up county-level libraries and cultural centers, township and town cultural stations and village cultural rooms, the project of “extending radio and TV coverage to every village,” and the national cultural information resources sharing project, the state has greatly improved the public cultural service system in ethnic minority areas, and enriched the cultural life of the people there. By the end of 2008 there were 10,282 cultural and art institutions across China, of which 651 were art troupes, 191 sites for art performances, 604 libraries, 80 mass art centers, 643 cultural centers, 6,859 cultural stations and 240 museums. At present, the number of cultural institutions owned by every 100,000 people in ethnic minority areas has already surpassed the national average.

　　The state actively protects the fine traditional cultures of ethnic minorities. Tibetan opera, which has a history of over 500 years, is well preserved and flourishing. Every year it is a must for the Shoton Festival, and, together with other singing, dancing and drama performances, makes the festival a most joyous event of the Tibetan people. The traditional festivals of ethnic minorities, such as the Mongolian Nadam Fair, the Ramadan Festival of the Hui, the Kurban Festival of the Uyghur, the Antiphonal Singing Day of the Zhuang, the Water Sprinkling Festival of the Dai, and the Torch Festival of the Yi, are well preserved and promoted. To date, more than 290 kinds of traditional ethnic sports have been revived and are thriving. The mural art of the Tibetans is being continuously enriched, and the Tibetan art of Tangka is well preserved. The carpets and wall hangings made by the Uyghur and Mongolian peoples are very popular in the Chinese market. The batik art of the Bouyei, Miao, Yao and Gelao ethnic groups as well as the tapestry art of the Tujia, Zhuang, Dai, Li and Dong ethnic groups have been greatly improved in designs, patterns and varieties. Thus the traditional crafts of ethnic minorities have regained their vigor.

　　A large number of people with literary and artistic talent among ethnic minorities are coming to the fore, and literary and artistic creation is becoming increasingly flourishing. There are 24 art colleges and secondary art schools in the five autonomous regions and Yunnan, Guizhou and Jilin provinces especially for training artistically talented people from among China’s ethnic minorities. Nearly 600 writers of ethnic minorities are members of the Chinese Writers’ Association, constituting more than 10 percent of its total membership. A multitude of outstanding ethnic minority writers and artists, outstanding films, singing and dancing performances reflecting the life of ethnic minority peoples become most popular. Many such songs and dances have spread all over the country, and produced a wide influence both at home and abroad. It is stipulated in state regulations that the festival of performances of ethnic minority arts shall beheld every four years. Three have been held already. In addition, the National Traditional Ethnic Minority Sports Meet shall be held every five years, and eight have been held already. The “Stallion Award” competitions for films, television programs and literary works reflecting life of ethnic minority peoples are held regularly. In addition, there are various kinds of ethnic singing and dancing competitions. Through the Spring Festival Gala of the China Central Television, some good ethnic minority performances are shown to the whole nation. All these have promoted the creation of top literary and art works of the ethnic minorities as well as cultural exchanges among all ethnic groups.

　　Fostering ethnic minority medical tradition

　　Ethnic minority medicine forms an important part of the treasure-house of Chinese medicine and pharmacology. By investigating, collating and studying medicinal materials, specialists of 35 ethnic minorities out of the total 55 have collected and compiled their own medical compendiums. Ethnic minority medicine has been developed and is widely used. In1992 the state gave permission for the setting up of centers for the production of a dozen kinds of Mongolian, Tibetan and Uyghur traditional pharmaceutical preparations and over 100 kinds of traditional medicines with the combination of traditional and modern expertise. China has 35 research institutes of ethnic minority medicine at or above the county level, employing a total of about 1,500 research personnel. In addition, the state has organized the compilation of the Materia Medica of Ethnic Groups in China, listing 396 kinds of Tibetan medicine, 422 kinds of Mongolian medicine, 423 kinds of Uyghur medicine and 400 kinds of Dai medicine in separate volumes. The work is of high scientific value and most authoritative.

　　The state vigorously supports the building of medical institutions of the ethnic minorities. By the end of 2008, 15 ethnic minorities had had their own ethnic minority medicine hospitals. There are altogether 191 such hospitals with 8,694 beds across the country. Among them, 70 are Tibetan medicine hospitals, 51 are Mongolian medicine hospitals, 39 are Uyghur medicine hospitals, and 31 are hospitals specializing in the traditional medicine of the Dai, Korean, Zhuang, Miao and Yao peoples. Beginning in 2006, the state has given priority to the construction of 10 key ethnic minority medicine hospitals, including those specializing in Tibetan, Mongol, Uyghur, Dai, Korean, Zhuang, Miao and Tujia traditional medicine, aiming at enhancing the overall level of diagnosis and treatment in ethnic minority medicine hospitals.

　　The state has launched specialized education programs on ethnic minority medicine in 14 educational institutions, and is making great efforts to foster medical specialists of ethnic minority peoples. Of the institutions, five are colleges of ethnic minority medicine, four are secondary schools of ethnic minority medicine, and five are non-ethnic educational institutions with majors in ethnic minority medicine. To date, there are 17,000 undergraduates studying in ethnic minority medicine schools all over China, in addition to 3,964 graduates. Six ethnic minority medicine traditions, namely, those of the Tibetan, Mongolian, Uyghur, Dai, Korean and Zhuang, are included in the national qualification examination for doctors. The number of medical personnel specialized in ethnic minority medicine has reached 10,000, providing an important guarantee for the improvement of the health of all ethnic minority peoples.(To be continued)