Keeping alive minority cultures

NIRUPAMA Subramanian

Yunan province is a showpiece of China's efforts to promote the cultures of its ethnic minorities.

In a world in which multiculturalism and pluralism are bywords for every progressive society, China is actively seeking to dispel the notion that the Government has over the years forced minority ethnic groups to assimilate with the country's Han majority.

The Government has turned Yunan, a province in south-western China that shares borders with Laos, Vietnam, and Myanmar, into a showpiece of its efforts at promoting minority cultures. The province boasts of 25 ethnic minority groups who form one-third of its 44.15 million population.

No other city showcases the varied ethnic heritage of the province better than Li Jiang, where 60 per cent of the 1.12 million people are minorities. The city has two ethnic minority counties, and the sights and sounds of the 22 groups that live here are everywhere - in the language, the music, the architecture and in the clothes.

Yang Yiben, the vice-mayor, is a woman from the Naxi who number about 280,000 and are the city's biggest minority ethnic group.

The Naxi, who claim greater antiquity than the Han, have a pictographic language that Ms. Yang said was the world's only such living language.

"We are trying to promote the Naxi language, to make different generations in the family speak and interact in it," she said in a meeting with a team of South Asian journalists touring the city on invitation from the Chinese Government.

Back in 2000, a local government survey found that about 30 per cent of Naxi primary students could speak the language and 50 per cent could understand it. After representations by local officials, the central government approved a regulation to make it compulsory for schools to teach Naxi students in the language.

Beijing also finances a research institute in Li Jiang that studies the pictographs and has translated Naxi religious texts, using the services of Dongpas or Naxi shamans to interpret the ancient pictographs.

Ms. Yang is now engaged in a campaign to preserve the Naxi dress, a white skirt with pintuck pleats and a white satin blouse with an embroidered cap for women, and baggy white trousers and shirt with a turban for men. "As a government official, I am taking the lead in this regard and wear my traditional dress on many occasions," she said.

Tourists from all over China and abroad come to Li Jiang just to experience the uniqueness of the place.

Unlike Beijing or Shanghai, the city is not a concrete jungle and revels in its own style of architecture. Everyday, a number of spectacular cultural programmes are put up, showcasing the music and dance of the Naxi, the Dai, the Bai, the Yi, the Moso, among others.

Ms. Yang counts herself as a good example of the non-discriminatory attitude of the Chinese Government towards minorities. She went to the prestigious Peking University and among several other jobs she held before she became the vice-mayor, one was as head of the Li Jiang Municipal Library and another as head of its Cultural Bureau. "I don't think in my experience I have faced any discrimination.

Over the past five decades, the ethnic groups have reached the realisation that they can become more prosperous and enjoy development along with the rest of the country only under the leadership of the Communist Party of China," she said.

She said the people in Li Jiang had benefited greatly from the Government's "preferential policies" for ethnic minorities. Students from these groups need to have 20 points fewer than non-minority students to gain admission to colleges, Over 100 Naxi hold doctorates; as many as 500 hold senior teaching positions in universities; and 22 are presidents of universities across China. Naxis also get bank loans at preferential interest rates.

"The financial input from the central government is higher in non-minority areas," she said, ticking off assistance for road, rail, and other infrastructure projects.

But she admitted that keeping the minority cultures alive was a "major challenge" in the face of the rapid changes in Li Jiang advancing globalisation and a main reason behind the campaign to save the Naxi language. "We fear Naxis will also be assimilated by the global economy," Ms. Yang said.

'Open attitude'

According to her, the "miracle" of the Naxi survival for all this time owed to the group's "open attitude" to other cultures. "We have learnt from other civilisations for our own development. Although we have an open attitude to the culture of the Han, we have kept our own cultural distinctiveness."

While the efforts to keep the traditions of these ethnic groups alive give Yunan province a more multicultural look than many other parts of China, it is also an inescapable fact that the population of China's ethnic minorities is a minuscule percentage of its total population.

The population of some groups is as low as 5,000. The Government has relaxed the one-child norm for some of the groups with endangered populations, the Naxi included.

(Courtesy: The Hindu)