一个多民族的省 Yí ge duō mínzú de shěng — A Province of Many Peoples

Fifty-six peoples, and what a visitor should and should not say

The People's Republic officially recognises fifty-six 民族: the Han, around ninety-one per cent of the population, and fifty-five 少数民族 making up the remaining nine, which is still well over a hundred million people. The classification was carried out in the 1950s by teams of linguists and ethnographers, and it is worth knowing that it was a deliberate administrative act rather than a description of self-evident facts. Groups were merged, boundaries were drawn, and some communities ended up inside a category they would not have chosen — the Yi in particular cover a wide range of languages and self-identifications. Chinese scholars discuss this openly, and the 1950s surveys are studied as history. Yunnan is the most diverse province: twenty-five recognised groups live there, fifteen of them essentially only there, and about a third of the provincial population is non-Han. The names in this lesson are the ones a traveller meets — 白族 around Dali, 彝族 across the north and east, 傣族 in the tropical south towards Laos and Burma, and Naxi, Hani, Zhuang, Miao, Lisu, Tibetan and others besides. The legal framework is set out plainly enough. Minority languages have constitutional protection, there are autonomous regions at provincial level and autonomous prefectures and counties below them, and there have historically been preferential policies in university admissions and, before its relaxation, in family planning. What is argued about is how all of this works in practice: whether bilingual education is adequately resourced, whether economic development in minority areas has been on terms the residents chose, whether preferential policies help or stigmatise, and how much of the visible traditional culture is lived and how much is performed for visitors. Those arguments are conducted inside China, by people from these communities and by Han scholars, in terms considerably more specific than a foreigner can usefully add to. Subjects touching Xinjiang and Tibet in particular are politically sensitive and internationally contested, and this course takes no position on any of it. So what should a visitor actually do? 林悦's last exchange is the whole guidance, and Alex's answer is the right one: 少说话，多看. Concretely — use the specific group name rather than the collective; ask people what they call themselves; do not photograph anybody in traditional dress without asking, especially children; do not treat a village as an exhibit; buy from the people who made the thing; and if somebody tells you about their own language or festival, listen at length rather than comparing it to something. 大家看法不同 is a genuinely useful sentence, and so is 我不太了解，你能给我讲讲吗？ — I don't really know about this, could you tell me? Asked warmly, it is almost always answered generously.