Asymmetrical belonging: the selective assimilation observed in Chinese-educated ethnic minorities

Abstract

The ethnic minorities in China follow two major linguistic educational systems. They receive an education and write the college entrance exam in either Chinese or their own ethnic language. However, the existing literature views the expansion of Chinese education to the ethnic regions of China in recent decades as a forcible process of cultural and linguistic assimilation, so that Chinese-educated minority students become more sinicized (Han Chinese) and their own ethnic identity is eroded and eventually lost. This study examines this alleged assimilation process based on interviews with 30 Chinese-educated ethnic minority young people, including the Mongols, Tibetans, and Uighurs. Our study shows that the Chinese education process conditions the manners, skills and life goals of minority young people that facilitate them to access mainstream Chinese society. Nevertheless, they still retain ethnic ties through family life and many of them show a strong interest in their own ethnic culture.

Keywords:

• Language
• ethnic identity
• China
• selective assimilation

Acknowledgement

We want to thank Ka To Chan, Yujing Jia and Tenggis for research assistance provided for this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The territorial boundaries of China, or the Chinese state, keep shifting over time. The current Chinese state inherited most of its land from the Qing Empire (1644-1912), whose territorial scope was different from that of its predecessor, the Ming Empire (1368-1644). Throughout this long history, the frontier ethnic minorities had been in frequent contact and interaction with the Han Chinese (see Perdue 2005; Wang and Tian forthcoming; Wang 2014, 2015). Unlike the immigrants newly arriving the host countries, the three ethnic minorities we study are not new to China.

2 Scholars who study minority education in other countries also suggest that education schemes produced by the dominant ethnic group necessitate minority students to conform to the dominant language, knowledge, and behaviors (Milligan 2003; Ogbu 1991; see Swartz 1997 on Bourdieu’s observations in French universities).

3 There are examples found among our interviewees, who show a complete lack of interest in any form of ethnic culture, for example, 04_BT and 05_LTT who said that she wanted to learn Mongolian language, but showed no interest in Mongolian music, arts or history.

4 Han sometimes is a residual category. It includes people who are not ethnically classified as minority. The name of Han was originated from the Han dynasty (Elliot 2012, 179-80) whose dominion centered in the northern central plain. Whether Han, as an ethnonym, was a historical fact or a modern invention, has been a focus of debate. Some scholar points out that Han is a relative category. It gained ascendancy in the contexts of Chinese encountering the nomads (Elliot 2012, 178-89; Carrico 2012, 24). Han indeed became a powerful ethnic symbol in modern China, through the revolutionary mobilizations against the Manchu-founded Qing Empire (Leibold 2012, 212-3; Carrico 2012, 24-5).

5 Not all of our interviewees are critical of laidback lifestyle of the non-Chinese educated ethnic students. Some of them provide a structural explanation for the lack of academic motivation of those students (01_BL; 01_AKD).