9 THE CHINESE AND THEIR NEIGHBORS "The people of China are all one nationality." -Sun Yat-sen (1924) "Our country is a land of many nationalities." -PRC publication, dated 1981 The borders that China claims today derive from events that took place two hundred years ago. Between 1755 and 1792, imperial armies waged a series of successful wars and campaigns against native groups on almost all of the Empire's frontiers. The results were dramatic. By the end of the Qianlong period in 1795, the Qing imperial govern­ ment controlled Chinese Turkestan, Mongolia, Tibet, and all of South China from Yunnan to Taiwan. Never before had any Chinese domain been so large. It was a high-water mark that established permanently, as far as the Chinese are concerned, the traditional boundaries of their country. CHINA still has the ethnic and territorial composition of the Empire. The People's Republic controls virtually all of the possessions of the Qing dynasty, and these territories extend far beyond lands occupied by Han Chinese. In the frontier regions inherited from the Empire can be found a wide variety of ethnic and linguistic groups who have not been as­ similated into the Chinese nation. Outside of China's heartland and yet within her international boundaries live Tibetans, Mongols, Kazakhs, Uighurs, Tais, Koreans, Manchus, and many other groups and races who are different from each other and from the Han. In a world neatly divided into nations and states, these people are Chinese-and yet they are not Chinese. They live in China and are citizens of the People's Republic, but they are not the heirs of Chinese civilization, literature, history, or tradition. In the modern Chinese state, the non-Han people left over from the Qing Empire have become the national minorities. The government of the People's Republic presently recognizes fifty-six distinct ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups among its citizenry, and only one of these is the Han, that group of people traditionally known as the "Chinese." The other fifty-five are minorities. Of course, the Han are overwhelmingly greater in number than all of the minorities combined. 158 MINORITY LANGUAGES OF CHINA Theirs is also the national language, history, and culture of China. But the sixty-seven million non-Han citizens of China are far from a negligi­ ble constituency, even in a country of over a billion people. The Chinese government puts each of its fifty-six different nationalities on a theoreti­ cally equal footing and considers its minorities to be just as much Zhong­ gu6ren, or "People of the Middle Country," as the Han are. This means that the word "Chinese" has now been redefined along the lines of citizenship, and its use as an ethnic term is actively discouraged. The ethnic majority is officially referred to as the "Han." Instead of Chinese culture-which is now supposed to be used only in connection with the customs and trappings of the modern Chinese Com­ munist state-there is "Han culture." Instead of the Chinese language, there is the "Han language" (Hc:'myu), a word that had always been used in the same meaning but with a slightly literary flavor. And so on. But how far these new definitions have penetrated into actual usage can be questioned; even in official sources inconsistencies can be found, and in dealing with foreigners, of course, the word ,"Chinese" must almost always be used in its older, more familiar meaning. But the efforts of the government to apply the name "Chinese" to all its citizens show the importance it places upon the minorities. The minorities also enjoy theoretical autonomy. The areas in which they live have been designated by the government to be autonomous regions, counties, and districts, thus making China, at least on paper, a multinational, federal state on the pattern of the Soviet Union. There are good reasons for the attention the minorities receive. The territories that they occupy comprise over half of the country's total land area. These territories also form the strategically important frontier re­ gions that lie along the borders that China shares with the Soviet Union, India, and Vietnam. For the most part, the lands are thinly settled, some­ times only by nomads, and so offer hope for relief from population pres­ sures in China's heartland. The minority areas also contain most of China's mineral and forest resources, as well as over 80 percent of the herds of livestock from which the country derives its meat and wool. Properly exploited, these lands could considerably enrich the material well-being of all of China's citizens, Han and non-Han alike. But the minorities are important not only for the lands that they occupy. Their condition is essential for the image that the People's Re­ public wishes to project to the world. Minorities happily and enthusiasti­ cally integrated into the life and functioning of the Chinese state are the best kind of advertisement for a successful and benevolent government. THE CHINESE AND THEIR NEIGHBORS 159 But discontent, or worse, open rebellion-such as the Tibetan revolt of 1959-can be an embarrassment of serious proportions. When an esti­ mated seventy thousand Uighurs, simultaneously pressured by the gov­ ernment to institute social reforms and attracted by a higher standard of living, fled across the lightly guarded Xinjiang border in the early 1960s to join their brethren living in the Soviet Union, the result was a major propaganda victory for the Soviets at Chinese expense. On the other hand, there was great rejoicing in Peking in 1974 when members of a minority militia participated in the capture of a Soviet helicopter; the event was highly publicized, and the Chinese press made much of the alleged determination of those people to defend their homeland against aggression. The minorities have political power, both real and potential, that must be constantly reckoned with in China today. The authorities have therefore been cautious in how they implement policy. Special concessions are granted to minorities; rules that apply to the Han majority are often suspended. Until quite recently, for example, minorities were exempt from the draconian laws on birth control, and even today local cadres in places like Xinjiang are probably wary of pushing strict adherence to the rules for fear of precipitating political unrest. Divorce laws, especially in the case of Muslims, and sumptuary laws regulating funerals do not affect most minorities. Minorities also enjoy certain rights and privileges not granted to Han Chinese. They often have preferential treatment, for example, in the case of university and professional school admissions along guidelines not completely un­ like those of the affirmative action policies implemented in American edu­ cational institutions, and analogies could be drawn on several levels. Such policies seem justifiable and perhaps laudable in certain cases, because non-Han people do not usually speak the standard language natively, and, since they often live in very underdeveloped areas, the primary and secondary educational facilities available to them may sometimes be far inferior to those in Han areas. But some minority privileges, such as the higher stipends granted to non-Han students, are difficult to explain in these terms. Minorities are officially encouraged to preserve their own languages and cultures, and a great number of pronouncements have been released reaffirming their rights to do so. The 1954 Constitution has several arti­ cles to this effect. In designated minority areas, the government recog­ nizes local languages as official media of communication, and they are used by the state in its dealings with the populace in those areas. Even Han Chinese working there are required to learn the local language 160 MINORITY LANGUAGES OF CHINA (though it is unclear what level of fluency is deemed sufficient or how strictly the requirement is observed-some say it is often ignored). The medium of education in elementary school is the minority language for the first three years, and it is taught as a subject through middle school. In minority areas, such things as newspapers, books, and magazines are often published in the local languages, and in Peking the Nationalities Publishing House (Minzu Chiibanshe) regularly issues books in the five major minority languages: Tibetan, Mongolian, Uighur, Zhuang, and Korean. Similarly, local radio stations broadcast in minority languages as well as in Chinese, and the Central Broadcasting System in Peking puts together programming in the major minority languages. Language usages also reflect politics. We have already mentioned that the word "Chinese" is used in a way that implies equality among the various groups. The standard language is no longer called the "National Language" (Guoyu), as it was in Republican days (and still is on Tai­ wan), but rather the "Common Language" (Putonghua). The Chinese names of some groups have been changed fron:.t words with pejorative connotations to more positive, or at least neutral, terms. The old name "Lolo," which referred to a large Tibeto-Burman group in South China, was once used condescendingly by the Chinese and has therefore since been replaced by the name "Yi" in Communist usage. The Jingpo, another Tibeto-Burman people, are no longer-at least in public­ known as the "Wild Men" (Yeren). The word 'Fan' was formerly used by the Chinese almost innocently in the sense of 'aborigines' to refer to ethnic groups in South China, and Mao Zedong himself once used it in 1938 in a speech advocating equal rights for the various minority peo­ ples. But that term has now been so systematically purged from the lan­ guage that it is not to be found (at least in that meaning) even in large dictionaries, and all references to Mao's 1938 speech have excised the offending word and replaced it with a more elaborate locution, "Yao, Yi, and Yu." "Tribe" (bitluo), a somewhat demeaning word frequently used by Chiang Kai-shek, has disappeared from general use.