Ethnic Minorities In China

If you visit Xishuang Banna, an “autonomous region” in southern Yunnan province bordering on Burma (Myanmar), you might find that Chinese friends will warn you to take care. You might even hear comments from urban, Han Chinese about the ethnic minorities there, such as, “They are like wild people!”


    One reason many strange tales abound about China’s minority populations is that unlike America’s diverse population, they are not for the most part integrated into Chinese mainstream society but are “allowed” to practice their own cultures and religions as they have been passed down through the centuries. As a result, China’s minorities often dress and look quite different from Han, who make up the majority of the population of China and who for the most part wear contemporary Western
fashions. For example, the women of the Dai minority still wear the long colorful skirts of their ancestors, silver belts, and side-buttoned blouses. The Hani women favor black, pleated kiltlike skirts with elaborately embroidered leggings, black woven tops, black headdresses, and thick silver ornaments in their earlobes. Their teeth are often dyed red from chewing betel nut. Many men in Yunnan sport elaborate tattoos on their legs and arms. And true to one story that we assumed was legend, some tribesmen do wear leopard pelts tied to their belts, supposedly captured without the aid of weapons other than their fists. Young men dressed in the orange robes of monks ride on bicycles and motor scooters en route from village to temples, where they can study the religion, language, and history of their people outside the Han-dominated curriculum of China’s public schools.


      In fact, China officially recognizes 56 distinct ethnic groups, although the true ethnographic divisions could easily run far more than one hundred. (In fact, the 1964 census listed 183 different ethnic groups. It’s not clear why the government chose to change the classifications.) In China’s imperial past, the government often used ruthless force to try to Sinicize other ethnic groups and turn their territory into vassal states. During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards again wreaked havoc on minority temples, art, and the people themselves as they brutally tried to impose Mao’s form of communism, combined with their own sadistic violence, onto these cultures.

      Today Chinese anthropologists travel the country and try to record the nation’s varied ethnic groups’ beliefs and customs. There is a feeling that time is running out to make these studies as the modern economy is making vast changes to minority regions. No longer able to survive in the twenty-first century on herding, ancient agricultural techniques, and barter-type markets, many minority groups in outlying regions far from China’s booming coastal cities find themselves struggling to adapt. In Inner Mongolia motorcycles are becoming the travel mode of choice among the nomadic Mongols, when just a decade earlier horses and yaks provided most transportation. In southern Yunnan, hunting is no longer as valuable a skill for a young man as is trafficking in heroin, which has resurfaced in China’s cities on a scale not seen since before the 1949 Communist
revolution. AIDS, too, has come to minority areas, sometimes through traffickers who return to their villages after testing the wares, sharing needles, and becoming ill, not realizing that when they take a wife, they are passing on the deadly infection. AIDS has also devastated some communities in the so-called Golden Triangle, where poppy production is lucrative and easy to accomplish in the warm climate, as needles were reused to vaccinate everyone in villages for simple things like flu shots or
vitamin injections. While the government has tried to make HIV drugs more accessible and affordable to the rural poor, stigma, ignorance of what causes the disease, and lack of access to any modern health care at all continue to stymie these efforts.

    Some classifications of minority groups are completely outdated. For example, the government still groups the matrilineal Moso society, known among Han as the Country of Women for its preference for daughters over sons, together with the Naxi, who are decidedly not matriarchal. In Moso culture, women own the property and pass it along to their daughters, they do not
marry their male lovers, and there is no traditional word for “father”; whereas in the Naxi culture a bride on her “honeymoon night” must escape from her husband’s village and run all the way back to her mother’s village which could be many miles and days away sometimes with bare feet, while a search party of Naxi men comes to collect her. If she does not make it to her mother’s home, thus proving her virtue in some kind of unusual chastity ritual, when the men of her husband’s village catch up to her, she will be treated as a slave and greatly disrespected. Very different cultures indeed! Yet they are still classified as the same according to the Chinese census.


    Minorities in China are accorded different rights from the Han majority. For example, minorities are not obligated to practice the One Child Policy lest that lead to genocide. They are granted a certain degree of autonomy in how they express their culture and are not forced to participate in Han festivals or religious beliefs. However, autonomy is limited in many respects. Children are still taught in Mandarin (or the local Han dialect) in school rather than in their culture’s own language.
Some groups such as Tibetans and Muslim Uighurs are considered separatist threats to the Chinese state and are policed very strictly. Han migration to minority regions is also seen as a threat by many minorities, as a means to dilute their cultures.


    Yet China’s minorities do manage to keep quite a bit of their traditional cultures intact, even as they adapt to the rapidly changing world. Tourism provides one major source of revenue for China’s minority groups and as a result they tend to be very welcoming to visitors.

   From highest population rank to lowest, the following is the list of China’s official fifty-six ethnic groups (please note that multiple spellings are occasionally used in China and in history books): Han, Zhuang, Manchu, Hui, Hmong (called Miao in China), Uighur, Yi, Tulia, Mongolian, Tibetan, Bouyei, Dong, Yao, Korean, Bai, Hani, Li, Karakh, Dai, She, Lisu, Gelao, Lahu, Dongxiang, Wa, Shui, Naxi, Qiang, Du, Xibe, Mulam, Kirgiz, Daur, Jingpo, Salar, Bulang, Maonan, Tajik, Pumi, Achang, Nu, Ewenki, Jing, Jino, De’ang, Uzbek, Russian, Yugur, Bonan, Menba, Oroqin, Drung, Tatar, Hezhen, Gaoshan, and Lhoba.