Living with Reform by Timothy Cheek

Author:Timothy Cheek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Ethnic reform

Reform has not been the same for China’s 100 million ‘national minorities.’ In Xinjiang, young Muslim Uighurs endure unemployment and hang out listening to tapes of Islamic lectures, music from the Stans (what are now the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrghyzstan, etc.), and political comedy. In Yunnan province, some minority counties have received so much supplementary support from the government that they have developed a form of welfare dependency. Xiaolin Guo’s research in northern Yunnan turns up the contrary case in which a few years after the central government started paying subsidies to ‘poverty counties’ the number of such counties increased – as there was little incentive to pull oneself out of the poverty classification. When the local state is staffed by minorities, intra-ethnic tensions surface, as in the case of Dai areas considered by Tony Saich, mentioned in Chapter 1. In Songpan county in northwest Sichuan, Jack Hayes found that Tibetan herders and mountain people did not so much resent the Han government officials as loathe the newly arrived Hui merchants and middlemen. Here the lines of ethnic community organized economic reform, as one, then another ethnic group came to dominate herding, forestry, local commerce, and the all-important new resource: tourism. Unlike the urban youth and rural poor or working-class versus middle-class women, these communities know each other because they live in the same geographic and social space. Competition, rather than alienation, defines their relations.18 In northwest Sichuan, the Tibetan herders and farmers see the Hui shopkeepers as lying, cheating merchants who connive with the Han officials to defraud poor Tibetans. The Hui see the Tibetans as lazy, careless of natural resources, and prone to violence. The Han officials see the Tibetans as a problem to be handled and the Hui as unreliable allies in state efforts to ‘develop’ the region. In each case, ethnic communities struggle to find a way to do better under the shifting rules of engagement of the CCP’s reform policies.

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