Ethnic minority villages uprooted
CHENGBEI GAN’EN, China — Under a portrait of President Xi Jinping, Ashibusha sits in her freshly painted living room cradling her infant daughter beside a chair labeled a “gift from the government.”
The mother of three is among 6,600 members of the Yi ethnic minority who were moved out of 38 mountain villages in China’s southwest and into a newly built town in an antipoverty initiative.
Farmers who tended mountainside plots were assigned jobs at an apple plantation. Children who until then spoke only their own tongue, Nuosu, attend kindergarten in Mandarin, China’s official language.
“Everyone is together,” said Ashibusha, 26.
While other nations invest in developing poor areas, Beijing doesn’t hesitate to operate on a more ambitious scale by moving communities wholesale and building new towns in its effort to modernize China. The ruling Communist Party has announced an official target of ending extreme poverty by the end of the year, ahead of the 100th anniversary of its founding in 2021.
The party says such initiatives have helped to lift millions of people out of poverty. But they can require drastic changes, sometimes uprooting whole communities.
They fuel complaints the party is trying to erase cultures as it prods minorities to embrace the language and lifestyle of the Han, who make up more than 90% of China’s population.
Development initiatives can lead to political tension because many have strategic goals such as strengthening control over minority areas by encouraging nomads to settle or diluting the local populace with outsiders.
In Inner Mongolia, students boycotted classes this month over plans to replace Mongolianlanguage textbooks with Chinese ones.
The Communist Party faces similar complaints that it is suppressing local languages in Tibet and the Muslim region of Xinjiang in the northwest. Xinjiang’s Han party secretary said in 2002 the language of the Uighurs, its most populous ethnic group, was “out of step with the 21st century” and should be abandoned in favor of Mandarin.