CHINESE MINZU EDUCATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN INSPIRATION FOR ‘WESTERN’ DIVERSITY EDUCATION?

ABSTRACT

Calls for complementing, modifying and ‘decolonising’ the conceptualisation and implementation of Diversity Education (e.g. multicultural, intercultural, and/or social justice education) are currently being heard in the ‘West’. This paper explores some of the characteristics and benefits of Chinese Minzu Education as a potential addition to the field. Our starting point is that Chinese education is often misrepresented and that knowledge about diversity in China (which includes, amongst others, minority groups and Han people), and especially about how people are educated for and through it, is scarce and negatively evaluated in the ‘West’. Taking a university specialising in Minzu studies as a case study (which should not be generalized to other Minzu institutions), we problematise formal and informal aspects of Minzu education that could be inspiring to, e.g. interculturalists and multiculturalists in ‘Western’ education. Fieldwork notes, student interviews about Minzu education and models of Minzu Diversity Learning co-constructed by Minzu students, illustrate the characteristics of Minzu education in higher education. The paper ends on a call for exploring other ‘unknown’ perspectives on diversity in education emerging from the so-called peripheries of the ‘West’.

Keywords:

• Diversity
• intercultural
• multicultural
• Minzu education
• higher education
• China

6. Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We use the idea of the West between inverted commas to indicate the somewhat unstable characteristics of this notion. In other words, the ‘West’ in this paper does not refer to a clear geopolitical entity but to a representation of today’s dominating ideological forces related to knowledge and educational production in the English language.

2 ‘All nationalities have the freedom to use and develop their own spoken and written languages and to preserve or reform their own folkways and customs’.

3 All quotes in English are reproduced verbatim.

4 Names of different Minzus in Chinese.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the research grant ‘Study on Mongolian Education History (1947-2017)’ sponsored by the Chinese National Social Sciences Foundation (Project No. 17ZDA322).