products would conform to traditional ethnic char- | in 1972-73 than had been issued in the five years acteristics, factory personnel were said to be making regular trips to minority areas to solicit their customers' opinions.26 There were similar reports from minority areas in southern China. Department stores were said to have set up special counters to sell the brocade, lace, and special embroidery needles needed for making the elaborate costumes traditionally favored by various minority groups, and trade fairs, which had been frowned upon as "revisionist" only a few years before, were reportedly being revived to help facilitate the purchase of these products. The fairs also gave renewed attention to minority art forms, often featuring programs of folk music and dancing.""

In the field of education, increased efforts were made to expand the school system in minority areas, and schools in these areas were told to adapt their curricula to local conditions. While the schools certainly endeavored to inculcate socialist norms and to teach the Chinese language, there was also greater tolerance and even encouragement of the use of local minority languages. Peking Review boasted that in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region more books in Mongolian had been published

A Mongolian-language class at a school in the
Kiringele People's Commune, in the Inner Mongolian
Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of
China, in July 1975.

preceding the Cultural Revolution, and that thanks to state subsidies the prices of Mongolian-language books were lower than those of the same books printed in Chinese. It was also stated that a Mongolian Language Research Institute had been established, that all government organs and state enterprises were required to use both Mongolian and Han as working languages, and that all radio broadcasts were now bilingual. The journal credited the Communist Party with having saved the Mongolian language from the extinction that had threatened it prior to 1949. When one recalls that one of the charges brought against Ulanfu during the Cultural Revolution was that he had overemphasized study of the Mongolian language, the magnitude of the changes in minority policy after 1971 becomes apparent.

The same trend was evident in other minority areas. In Tibet, socialism was claimed to be offering "bright prospects for the development of the Tibetan language," and a modern printing house was reportedly set up in 1972 specifically to publish books in Tibetan. In addition to providing translated versions of the Marxist classics, this enterprise turned out traditional Tibetan works, including almanacs and catalogues of indigenous medicinal herbs." In Sinkiang, publicity was focused on the advances being made in teaching the local minorities to use p'in-yin script in place of the traditional Arabic, 30 but new script or old, the language being taught was indisputably non-Han.

The return to the principle of "nationalist in form, socialist in content" which had characterized official policy toward minorities prior to 1958 and again during the interval between the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution was also evident in other fields of cultural activity. In 1972, Jen-min Jih-pao invited cultural workers to "transplant" revolutionary operas and express their ideas through the art forms of minority nationalities, and troupes in Sinkiang subsequently staged such operas as "The Red Lantern," "On the Docks," and "White Haired Girl" using the languages and folk songs of the Uighur, Kazakh, Kirghiz and Sibo nationalities." In the south, "Red

26 New China News Agency (NCNA) report from Sining, Nov. 21, 1971, trans. in SCMP, No. 5026, p. 201.

27 NCNA report from Kunming, May 18, 1972, trans. in SCMP, No. 5143, p. 20.

28 Peking Review, Sept. 20, 1974, p. 22.

29 Peking Radio, Aug. 3, 1974.

30 Urumchi Radio, Dec. 14, 1974.
31 Ibid., Oct. 9, 1974.

On the subject of minority linguistic rights, Article 77 of the 1954 Constitution stipulated:

Citizens of all nationalities have the right to use their own spoken and written languages in court proceedings. The people's courts are required to provide interpreters for any party unacquainted with the spoken or written language commonly used in the locality. In an area entirely or largely inhabited by a minority or where a number of nationalities live together, hearings in the people's courts are conducted in the language commonly used in the locality, and judgments, notices, and all other documents of the people's courts are promulgated in that language."

the 1954 Constitution guaranteed each nationality |
appropriate representation in the local governmental
organs of its own particular area, the 1975 Consti-
tution nowhere contains such a guarantee. Thus, it
is conceivable that the PRC leadership could at some
future time decide that proportional representation
for minorities has become no longer necessary be-
cause ethnic differences will have been reduced to
the point of irrelevancy. For the present, however,
the regime appears to be making scrupulous efforts
to observe the rule of proportionality. An indication
of this is the fact that the newly-elected Presidium
of the Fourth National People's Congress includes
among its 218 members 13 persons whose names
definitely show them to be of minority nationali-

In contrast, Article 4 of the 1975 Constitution simply ties"-a six-percent share of representation almost states:

All the nationalities have the freedom to use their own spoken and written languages."

This abridgment of the old constitutional provision is open to various interpretations. Since the new Constitution as a whole is but a fraction of the length of its predecessor, it is not inconceivable that the abridgment may have been motivated simply by a desire for overall brevity. However, two other alternative explanations are possible. One is that the change may indicate the belief of the framers of the 1975 Constitution that whereas the rights provided in the 1954 document had to be spelled out in some detail because they were new, such detailed enumeration was no longer necessary 21 years later since those rights had become accepted as a matter of course. The other alternative interpretation is that the removal of specific guidelines governing minority linguistic rights might be intended to open the way for a shift to a more assimilationist linguistic policy. Present practice argues for acceptance of the former interpretation, but there is no question that the new Constitution does allow for a turn toward a more restrictive posture on minority language rights. A great deal will depend on how the shortened provision of the 1975 Constitution is implemented in practice.

There is another difference between the two documents that should be noted. Whereas Article 68 of

38 Constitution of the Chinese People's Republic, Peking, People's Publishing House, 1954.

39 For the English text of the 1975 Constitution, see Peking Review, Jan. 24, 1975, pp. 12-17.

exactly equal to the minorities' share of total population. (Moreover, since many persons of minority nationalities use Han-style names, the minorities' actual share of Presidium representation may well be larger than six percent.)

Despite the ambiguities in the 1975 Constitution, there is no question that the period since the demise of Lin Piao has witnessed a clear-cut shift in minority policy. Yet it is necessary to guard against exaggerating the significance of the changes that have taken place. For one thing, those associated with the gradualist, pluralist viewpoint were not totally excluded from positions of power during Lin Piao's ascendancy, nor was the pressure toward assimilation total and unremitting. The evidence presented above suggests that there was a radical faction which would have liked to enforce stringent assimilationist standards, insisting, for example, on the destruction of the "four olds" and on eliminating all concessions to the minorities' special characteristics. However, since such an extremist policy was not fully implemented even at the zenith of Lin's power, one must conclude either that it was not entirely typical of Lin's thinking, or that the actions of Lin and his group were constrained by a more moderate group within the leadership.

Moreover, while many of the changes in official attitudes toward minorities after Lin's fall have been startlingly abrupt, the changes do not add up to the adoption of a uniformly pluralistic policy. The emphasis on learning Chinese continues, and one cannot escape the feeling that the recent expansion of the use of minority languages has been aimed in

40 For a name list of the Presidium members, see ibid., Jan. 24, 1975, pp. 8 and 10.

Left, signs reading "Not open to visitors" and "No admittance" posted on the closed gates of an old lamasery in the Inner Mongolian town of Silinhot, now being used principally as a storehouse and bird roost; right, Chinese Muslims praying in the main mosque in Peking.

-Photos by Ross Munro for the Globe and Mail (Toronto) and by Keystone.

En-lai.

In spite of the twists and turns of its minority policy over the past quarter century, the PRC's efforts to "solve" its nationalities problem have not been without a measure of success. The futility of minority revolt has been effectively driven home on the relatively few occasions when it has been attempted. A knowledge of the Han-Chinese spoken and written language, though not universalized, now seems to be recognized by most members of minority groups as an important factor in social advancement. Similarly, there seems to be minority recognition that the CCP and the governmental structure the party has created constitutes the only promising channel of social mobility.

large part at publicizing the party line more thor- | Clearly, much will depend upon the personalities who oughly. For example, the only use thus far reported emerge as successors to Mao Tse-tung and Chou to have been made of the recently founded Nationalities School of the Kannan Tibetan Autonomous Chou was to train translators so that the campaign to criticize Lin Piao and Confucius could be brought to non-Han speaking minorities in Tibetan rural areas. The transplanting of revolutionary model operas into minority languages and settings probably falls in the same category. Moreover, the unleashing by Peking of a campaign of vilification against the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile following the collapse of negotiations for his return to Tibet," together with the recent intensification of efforts to develop Tibet on the socialist model," suggests that there are limits to the present leadership's willingness to accede to minority wishes. This is not to minimize the changes in minority policy since mid-1971. Indeed, these changes have been substantial enough to cause obvious dissatisfaction on the part of a segment of the Chinese leadership, and the existence of this dissatisfaction suggests the possibility of another eventual swing of the policy pendulum.

41 Jen-min Jih-pao, Nov. 25, 1974.

42 Lhasa Radio, June 6, 1974; and Peking Review, July 7, 1974, pp. 9-11.

43 These efforts were exemplified by the visit of Ch'en Yung-kuei, the hero of China's model agricultural unit, the Tachai brigade, to Tibet in November 1974 (Lhasa Radio, Nov. 20, 1974). There has been a sharp increase in the amount of freight entering Tibet in the past two years, much of it tractors, seed and other materials to aid in the development of agriculture there (Peking Radio, Aug. 9, 1974).

On the other hand, the party and government clearly continue to entertain doubts regarding the loyalty of many minorities. A suspicious note of bravado is detectable in the frequent rallies held at archaeological digs in Sinkiang to proclaim that the latest excavation of Han dynasty coins "conclusively proves" that Sinkiang has always been part of the ancestral land," as well as in Peking's constant reaffirmations of the "unbreakable unity" between the People's Liberation Army and the border peoples in their determination to protect China's

sacred soil." It is noteworthy that those minorities, such as the Chuang and Pai, whose loyalties are apparently not in doubt are precisely those which had already become well integrated into Han-Chinese society before 1949. This would seem to suggest that the minority policies pursued by the Communist regime have made little difference so far as solving the national question is concerned.

lution of the difficult choice facing China's minor ties the choice between retention of their ethn ties and participation in the larger society. Ther is, however, the serious question of whether the Soviet formula does not contain an inherent contradiction. That is, might not national forms embody a political culture of their own that is antithetical to socialism? Can, for example, what remains of native Tibetan theocratic rule and Lamaist religious prac tices be accommodated without setting in motion trends inimical to the attainment of ethnic unity in a socialist framework? Even the retention of more superficial manifestations of national identity, such as clothing, hairstyle, and language, have been criticized by the party as wasteful of scarce resources or as manifestations of parochialism.

It would be unwise, moreover, to assume that either time or improving standards of living will facilitate an eventual solution. Those whom the official press from time to time accuses of participating in "imperialist plots to undermine the unity of nationalities" are often so young that they can have no memory of what life in pre-Communist China was like. Indeed, it seems altogether possible that minority problems may become more rather than less severe with the passage of time. As for rising living standards, the experience of the Soviet Union has shown that this may actually encourage the growth of nationalist tendencies, presumably because increased affluence tends to enable ethnic minorities to devote greater attention to such cultural-psychological concerns as the protection of their national identity and heritage. Even the "flooding" of minority areas with Han-Chinese immigrants, which is said to be taking place under the regime's current large-scale "rustication" program, may have the effect of exacerbating tensions between nationalities rather than diluting ethnic cohesiveness. In such circumstances, the very techniques of social mobilization that the CCP has employed to solidify the minorities could work against the party and governmental system. Whereas formerly the minorities were scattered, poorly organized, and perhaps only dimly aware of other ethnic groups, the party's mobilization efforts have generally resulted in their becoming more tightly organized into cooperative production groups, factory work teams, and the like. These entities might well serve as focal points for channeling and intensifying resentments that might otherwise have remained diffuse and minor griev-ence. In theory, there could conceivably be a middle

ances.

It may be argued that the PRC's present policy, which is in essence similar to the Soviet policy capsulized in Stalin's phrase, "national in form, socialist in content," will eventually bring a satisfactory reso

45 E.g., "Strengthen the Unity of the Masses of Nationalities and
Consolidate the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," Jen-min Jih-pao,
Sept. 6, 1969; and "If Army and People are United as One, Who in the
World Can Match Them?" NCNA, July 30, 1969, trans. in SCMP,
No. 4470, p. 18.

Clearly there still remains a segment within the Chinese leadership which does not consider the state of accommodation thus far achieved in internationality relations to represent an acceptable fusion of minority characteristics or an adequately homogeneous proletarian culture. The nature of the steps necessary to attain these goals is not obvious, and it appears doubtful whether the policies advocated by either the radical assimilationists or the advocates of gradualist pluralism will achieve the desired ends. The reader cannot fail to have noticed that each side has accused the policy of the other of having undermined the unity of nationalities, and indeed both sides appear to be correct. Putting pressure on ethnic minorities to abandon their languages, customs, and life-styles has often created animosity toward the party and government and intensified the desire to retain traditional ways. On the other hand, tolerance and encouragement of minority customs and habits have tended to legitimize ethnic ties and perpetuate a sense of differentness.

In other words, China's policymakers find themselves in a fundamental dilemma where both tolerance and repression of the special characteristics of minorities tend to reinforce their continued exist

ground policy that would erode minority characteristics slowly enough to avoid arousing antagonism, yet quickly enough to prevent the accretion of vested interests strong enough to halt or reverse the process of erosion in mid-course. At least up to the present, however, it would appear that Chinese policymakers -like those of most other nations, socialist or otherwise have not succeeded in finding the key to the perennial "national question."