Cultural and Political Disciplining inside China’s Dislocated Minority Schooling System

ABSTRACT

More than 200,000 ethnic minority students have passed through China’s dislocated minority schooling system since 1985. This program deracinates adolescent Tibetan, Uyghur and other chiefly minority students from their families and local communities and educates them in Putonghua in boarding schools located in Han ethnic majority cities in central and coastal China. Drawing on detailed rules and regulations from more than a dozen of these schools, this article interrogates the disciplinary mechanisms and dynamics at play in these schools. It highlights how dislocated schooling seeks to re-socialise minority students in the values, ethics and norms of mainstream Han Chinese society, with the goal of creating an ethno-comprador elite to serve as proxies for Han/CCP power while simultaneously functioning as exemplars for those Uyghurs and Tibetans who have yet to fully embrace majority norms.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• ethnicity
• ethnic minority education
• neidiban
• disciplinary power
• dislocated minority schooling
• Uyghurs
• Tibetans
• education

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Yi Lin, Chen Yangbin, Yang Miaoyan and Yuan Zhenjie for their comments on a previous draft, and the editors of Asian Studies Review, Michael Barr, Jonathan Benney, David Hundt and Anne Platt, for their adroit editorial assistance with the review process and the preparation of the final manuscript.

Notes

1. The term minzu (民族) is deeply polysemic. Depending on the context, it can be used to connote a range of conceptually distinct terms in English, such as race, nation, nationality, ethnicity and ethnic group. Today the same two characters are used to simultaneously refer to each of China’s 56 distinct minzu or ethnic groups (formerly nationalities) and the collective, shared identity of the Chinese nation or race. In the article, we have sought to gloss minzu in English according to the specific context of its usage while providing the original Chinese characters for reference.