4. The Yi Today
12. Language Policy for the Yi
David Bradley
MINORITY LANGUAGE POLICIES IN CHINA
Since 1950, official language and other policies concerning the group called Yi have been consistent with other practices of the Chinese state toward nearby minorities who did not pose a threat to Chinese rule and were for the most part willing to accept the Chinese civilizing project, as discussed in Harrell's 1995 edited volume. The overall political and economic goal for most of the time up to 1950 was to consolidate and expand central control. Of course this was less true in times of instability and during the early parts of rule by dynasties whose rulers were not ethnic Chinese, such as the Yuan (Mongol) and Qing (Manchu). When direct contact between Chinese and Yiexisted, such as during the former and latter Han dynasties and again during the Tang dynasty, the two groups were at first accommodated into the system of indirect rule through local tributaries, which meant that the elite began to use the Chinese language. With large-scale Chinese migration into the plains and valleys of the Yi area over the last millennium, this contact became more pervasive. Thus the Chinese language began to influence Yilanguages more and more, even to the extent that the Yi developed a cluster of writing systems based on the same principle as Chinese and using some Chinese characters (though mainly different ones).
The Chinese classification of minorities was rather procrustean, especially for smaller and more remote groups in the southwest like the Yi. Different groups tended to be lumped together under one term, and the terms used to refer to these groups changed fairly frequently. For example, the name Qiang (with a couple of variants) at various stages referred to a range of different groups in what is now Gansu and northern Sichuan. In general the policy concerning the languages of small groups or groups within the core political orbit of China was to assimilate them, initially by using Chinese as a lingua franca and medium of literacy, and ultimately by replacing the minority
When the ruling dynasty was not ethnic Chinese, as during the Yuan (Mongol) and Qing (Manchu), there was a much greater recognition and use, at least early in the dynasty, of the language of the rulers. Nominally Manchu remained the official language of the Qing court until 1911 and again in Manchukuo from 1932 to 1945; but by the nineteenth century this was very nominal indeed.
[1] For an excellent survey of the decline and current state of Manchu, see Kane 1997.
During most Chinese dynasties, the main language workers were officials in charge of dealing with outside visitors, most of whom came with diplomatic and trading missions, which the Chinese court usually chose to regard as missions of submission and tribute. These officials were themselves often members of such missions or semihostages from the ruling families of adjacent territories who were kept, sometimes against their will, in the capital to work as translators and interpreters. This practice was reported as early as the Zhou dynasty.
In 1407, during the Ming dynasty, aseparate translation office, the Siyiguan 
, was established. Staffed mainly by the descendants of previous translators, its work seems to have been rather ineffective. This office continued to exist under the Qing dynasty, under the slightly revised name Siyiguan (
). Wild (1945) provides a description of this office and its activities. It produced a series of 740-word vocabularies of the languages it worked with, including those of a few large minorities like the Yi, thus starting the lexicographical tradition that has continued in the post-1950 linguistic surveys of minority languages. The Yi vocabulary is of an Eastern Yi variety then spoken in Yongning (modern Xuyong) County in south-central Sichuan, adjacent to Weining in Guizhou; it has been reproduced and analyzed in detail in Nishida (1979). This follows the usual arrangement of these vocabularies, with the Yi characters, the Chinese gloss, and Chinese characters to represent the phonetic value of the Yi characters. Another attempt at recording Yiis found in d'Ollone (1912), which includes two Northern Yivarieties from Xide and Zhaojue and an Eastern Yi variety from Weining in Guizhou.
During the Republican period, minority language policy continued to be one of assimilation and neglect. However, during the anti-Japanese war, many scholars moved to the southwest, and a few started serious linguistic research
After 1949, minority policy was revolutionized, and minority language policy along with it. In the 1954 and 1982 constitutions of the People's Republic of China, the right of each national minority to use and develop its own language is specifically recognized (1982, article 4); in practice, however, these rights have sometimes not been asserted or implemented, especially during periods of political change. The first stage in the development of the new minority language policy was to replace many of the old and often pejorative names for minorities formerly used in Chinese, and to start training, in 1951, groups of mainly majority-group Chinese language researchers to study minority languages at the Central Institute of Nationalities. At this time, much of the Yi territory, like much of Tibet, was left partially in the hands of its traditional rulers, though an increased Chinese administrative and military presence moved into areas such as Liangshan.
The major research effort to describe the existing minority languages and cultures and establish an official classification of national minorities took place from 1956 to 1958. This was a very large team effort, with the first generation of mainly ethnic Chinese language scholars training and leading teams of middle-school graduates. Different teams from the Institute of Linguistics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences surveyed minority languages and varieties of Chinese in every part of China; at the same time, ethnographic surveys were undertaken by other similar teams. Some of the best Yiand other minority workers from these surveys later became the first generation of minority scholars working on their own languages and cultures. The linguistic part of the survey collected a word list of over nine hundred items and a substantial number of sentences in thousands of locations; some of these manuscript
At this stage the general language policy was to develop new romanized scripts for those languages that did not already have a suitable script. The Yi in Sichuan were among the first to have a romanized script, starting in 1951; this happened despite the existence of the traditional Yi script in this area. The romanization went through a number of revisions in the mid-1950s. One of these included a few Cyrillic letters, under the influence of Russian linguists working in the surveys; but with the break between China and the Soviet Union, these were removed from Yi and nearly all other romanized scripts in 1958. These Yi romanizations of the 1950s were never very widely used, and with political upheavals in the Yi areas from the late 1950s their use stopped.
The 1950s classification of national minorities followed the Soviet criteria: small groups were to be combined into larger national minorities that share a language, culture, territory, and economy. The ethnic Chinese majority is now known as Han; within this group the linguistic differences are very great, but literary and cultural unity has long been supported by the Chinese writing system. In parallel fashion, many related small groups have been combined into national minorities and in some cases renamed; this is the case for the Yi.
In general the degree of linguistic similarity within a national minority is similar to that within Chinese; that is, there are various related but often not mutually intelligible spoken varieties. This is true of the Yiand of many other groups in Yunnan and elsewhere, including the Lisu, Lahu, and Hani nationalities, whose languages are historically quite close to Yi. Non-Chinese linguists often say that the linguistic varieties within the Han Chinese majority and within some other groups are separate languages, not dialects as they are usually described within China; but this is actually a matter of noncongruity between levels of linguistic terminology. The Chinese term yuyan refers to a higher-level group than indicated by the English term language; and similarly the Chinese term fangyan refers to a higher-level group than indicated by the English term dialect, which corresponds better to the Chinese term tuyu.
When pinyin became the official phonetic representation of Chinese in 1956—58, a set of principles was adopted for minority languages and scripts, as follows:
There should be a standard variety, which should be that of a central area, with the largest number of speakers, intelligible to speakers of other varieties and preferably spoken in an economically, politically, and culturally advanced area.
New writing systems should be romanizations.
The values of letters should be according to Chinese pinyin.
Any reformed writing systems should also be romanized.
In practice, some existing scripts, such as the old Lisu script using roman capital letters and Arabic scripts for Turkic languages and Tajik in Xinjiang, were replaced by romanized scripts according to principle 4; but in most such cases the minorities have subsequently chosen to revert to the traditional script.
[2] For details of the Uighur case, which is complicated by the use of Cyrillic scripts for this and other Turkic languages in the former Soviet Union, see Wei (1993); concerning Lisu, see Bradley and Kane (1981) and Bradley (1994).
Principle 3 was intended to assist the minorities in learning standard Chinese (putonghua).The most difficult and controversial aspect of language policy was often the choice of the standard variety. This was done in the late 1950s at meetings of leading figures of each nationality, with extensive participation by the Chinese scholars who were involved in the survey work. As in most such meetings in China, the outcome was largely determined in advance, but the consultative process was seen to be carried out in full. In the case of some nationalities with great internal linguistic diversity,several different standard varieties were chosen; these often followed political boundaries, and the relevant writing systems were used in different provinces or regions, prefectures, and counties. For Miao, for example, three different new romanizations are used in different parts of Guizhou and adjacent areas of Hunan, Sichuan, and Yunnan, while amodified version of a missionary script is used by Christian Miao in other parts of Guizhou and Yunnan; see Enwall (1994) for further details.
From 1958 the anti-Rightist campaign and its minority counterpart, the Nationalities Unity campaign, had a very severe political effect in many minority areas; the traditional rulers were deposed, often rather violently, as in Liangshan, and slaves were liberated. This set minority language work back greatly, as did the Great Leap Forward, which further disrupted economic activity.After the initial preparation and trials of romanized orthographies, some school and adult literacy textbooks were published, but it is not clear how extensively they were used. All language work, and indeed nearly all education, effectively stopped during the Cultural Revolution; sadly, many dictionaries and other manuscripts were destroyed, and others languished unpublished until the 1980s. What did get published in minority languages in the 1960s and early 1970s was mainly political: Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong and similar treatises, using the romanized systems of the late 1950s; parallel editions of these were produced in various languages, using the same illustrations.
The original goal of the linguistic surveys of the mid-1950s was to produce a writing system, textbooks, grammar, and dictionary of each national minority
After the end of the Cultural Revolution, from 1975 and especially after 1978, language work restarted in earnest; many pre-1965 materials that had not been destroyed were finally published, and a massive new effort started. This involved training large numbers of young members of national minorities to do linguistic and cultural research on their own groups, and assigning them to work in language-related units, such as translation bureaus, language bureaus, and cultural offices; research units of nationality affairs commissions; nationalities-publishing offices at various levels; or at all levels of education from primary to tertiary. Publishing in minority languages expanded exponentially, and the use of these languages in education, the media, and elsewhere became fully established during the 1980s. Some nationalities whose leaders had chosen not to implement a writing system in the 1950s, such as the Qiang, Bai, and Naxi, moved to do so; others whose writing systems had been in abeyance for over twenty years, such as the Hani, revised and reintroduced them; and some, such as the Lisu, reverted quietly to their previous writing systems in many localities.
The initial leadership of post-1950 language policy for national minority groups such as the Yi was largely Chinese; some of these people are still active, but most are approaching or beyond retirement. The younger generation—including nearly all practical language workers at the national, provincial, prefectural, and county levels in the Nationalities Commission, Education Commission, language offices, translation offices, and so on—is made up of members of the group whose language they work on. These people worked with great enthusiasm during the 1970s and 1980s and produced truly massive amounts of material in and about their own languages. They have now assumed full control of language work.
Since economic liberalization, some of the impetus has gone out of language work, and a backlog of very valuable unpublished materials has again developed: dictionaries, transcriptions of traditional manuscripts, and a great deal of other valuable linguistic and cultural work is languishing in drawers
THE YI AND THE YI LANGUAGES
Like many other groups, the Yiwere called by a series of names through Chinese history. One early term was Man, which referred to a variety of non-Chinese groups in the southwest, including the Miao, Yao, Yi, and others. More specifically, the Yi were also sometimes referred to as Wuman, but this term included other groups of eastern Yunnan as well. Some more recent names for the Yi were derived from the names of dynasties, such as the Dian kingdom of the Kunming area, in close contact with the Chinese since the mid-fourth century b.c., and the Cuan kingdom (which later split into two) of the same area from the fourth to the twelfth century a.d. After this time, many Yi groups came to be known as Luoluo, written in various ways with characters containing the dog radical, luo
, or luo
, or the two together. Some Yi groups actually called themselves by these names, but most did not; naturally, these characters are pejorative. During the Ming dynasty, yet another collective term for southwestern non-Chinese groups, Yi
, became current. This was used for the Zhuang, Buyi, and other more or less Sinicized Thai groups, as well as for the more Sinicized subgroups of the Yi, but not for the more remote groups such as the Miao. With the establishment of the People's Republic of China, the old pejorative term Luoluo was eliminated, replaced by the new character Yi
, which is again homophonous with the Ming and Qing term; but it now refers only to the Yi, not to the various other groups previously included in those terms. When it is used as the former name of the Yi or in parts of names for certain subgroups within the Yi, the term Luoluo is now of course written with the human radical.
According to the traditional history, the Yi were divided into six clans, which migrated in various directions away from the Kunming area after the collapse of the Cuan kingdoms; modern linguists may have used this as one of the reasons for including six major fangyan groups within Yi. Several versions of these migration histories have been edited and published in Guo and Ding (1984). These relate to four subgroups of the Yi: the Southern Nisu, Southeastern Sani, Eastern Nasu, and Northern Nuosu.
The other two groups now included in the Yi nationality, the Central Yi
The modern names of the subgroups of the Yi are based on geographical location. Of the four subgroups who trace their origins back to the Cuan kingdom and traditionally use the Yiscript, the most numerous is the Northern Yi, or Nuosu, who live mainly in southern Sichuan but also in northwestern and northeastern Yunnan. Very close to this group linguistically is the Eastern Yi, or Nasu, with many subgroups dispersed across northeastern Yunnan, western Guizhou, and a small part of northwestern Guangxi. The group classified as Southern Yi, or Nisu, of south-central Yunnan includes some subgroups with quite different names, including the Pula whose speech is distinct and who are recognized as a separate nationality from the Lôlô (Yi) in Vietnam. Concentrated in the area to the southeast of Kunming are the Southeastern Yi, with four major named subgroups: Sani mainly in Shilin County,Axi farther south in Mile County and surrounding areas, Azhe further south again, and Azha to the southeast. The “Southern Yi” Pula extend eastward, south of these Southeastern Yi subgroups.
Map 12.1 shows the approximate locations of these groups; but note that in many areas there is overlap: for example, there are some Lipo and some Nuosu in rural areas of Panzhihua (formerly Dukou) City and Yuanmou County, with the Lipo mainly to the south of the Jinsha River and the Nuosu mainly to the north. Similarly, there are some Lipo and some Nasu in Wuding and Luquan counties, with the former mainly but not exclusively to the west; and some Lipo, some Nisu, and some Laluo in parts of southwestern Chuxiong Prefecture.
Northern Yi or Nuosu is divided by speakers into three subgroups. The northern subgroup is the “large trousers,” or Yynuo (Chinese, Yinuo),
[3] Yi names are given in the romanization introduced in the 1970s; these are usually represented in Chinese by the characters shown in the glossary corresponding to their Hanyu pinyin form.
with a fairly distinct northwestern variety around Lindimu (or Tianba
, the Chinese name of the same place); the latter is the variety described in Fu (1998). The central “middle trousers,” or Shynra (Chinese, Shengza), are the majority of the Northern Yi, and the type of Shynra spoken at Xide County was
Map 12.1. Distribution of Yi dialects in Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou
[4] All examples are given here in the standard romanization of the standard Xide variety of Shynra.
The southern are the “small trousers,” or Suondi (Chinese, Suodi), with a subdivision into western Adur and eastern Suondi proper. Of these varieties, Yynuo and Shynra are easily mutually intelligible, but speakers of Suondi must make a considerable effort to learn Shynra. There are a few villages in western Zhaojue County that are linguistically transitional between Suondi and Shynra. The trousers referred to are the men's; women's clothing, especially the headdress, also differs greatly. There are several hundred thousand Shynra in Ninglang and adjacent counties in northwestern Yunnan and a smaller number in western parts of Zhaotong Prefecture in northeastern Yunnan; and there are a few Suondi in Yuanmou and Wuding Counties, but most Northern Yi live in Sichuan.Eastern Yi, or Nasu, contains a very large number of diverse varieties spread over northeastern Yunnan, western Guizhou, Longlin County in Guangxi, and parts of southern Yibin Prefecture in Sichuan. These actually form a dialect chain with Northern Yi, but dialects at the extremes are not mutually intelligible even within Eastern Yi. In Yunnan the main subgroup is the Hei Yi, or Nasu, as described in Ma (1948) but referred to in the Christian missionary literature as Nosu. A Luquan County variety of Hei Yi was selected as the standard for Eastern Yi in Yunnan. Other subgroups in Yunnan include the Gan Yi, or Laka, in the north, Hong Yi in the west, and Gepo (also referred to in the Christian literature as Kopu) in the east. In Guizhou the Nasu are divided according to former Yi kingdoms, Shuixi, Wusa, Wumeng, and Mangbu in different areas of northwestern Guizhou; several of these kingdoms actually overlapped into what is now Zhaotong Prefecture in Yunnan and Yibin Prefecture in Sichuan, and the same subvarieties of Yi are also spoken there. In Guizhou, as discussed below, several alternative varieties are accepted in educational settings; but the Shuixi variety of Bijie and Dafang Counties is regarded as the most standard. Two other types of Yi are also included in Eastern Yi by linguists in China. One comprises the various moribund varieties of the Kunming region of central Yunnan, including Samei, or Sami, just southeast of Kunming, Sanyie just west of Kunming, and Samaduo in one village in the southern outskirts of Kunming. The other is the rather divergent variety spoken in southwestern Guizhou around Panxian County and in adjacent areas of eastern Yunnan.
Southern Yi or Nisu also includes a large range of varieties spoken in a range from central Yunnan to northernmost Vietnam; many of these are quite different, and only very limited linguistic data are available about them.
Southeastern Yi is concentrated in the area immediately southeast of Kunming. Each of the four subgroups, Sani, Axi, Azhe, and Azha, feels itself to
[5] See, for example, Vial (1908—09); for an account of Vial, see Swain 1995. For Sani society, see Swain 1995 and Swain, chapter 11 in this volume.
Though it does not really make sense to speak of a standard variety for these four groups, a local variety of Sani from the southeastern Guishan area was selected in the late 1950s; this is slightly different from the varieties described in Vial (1908—09) and in Ma (1951), and has been fully documented in Jin Guoku and colleagues (1983).In the 1990 census the Yi were enumerated at 6,572,173. Of these, 4,060,327 were in Yunnan, or nearly 62 percent; just under 1.8 million, or over 27 percent, were in Sichuan; 707,275, or over 10 percent, in Guizhou; 6,074 in Guangxi; and the remainder scattered in various areas.The following list shows the estimated numbers of speakers of each type of Yi in late 1999.
| Northern Yi (Nuosu) total | 2,500,000 |
| Yynuo (N) | 450,000 |
| Shynra (C) | 1,500,000 (as first dialect) |
| Suondi/Adur (S) | 550,000 |
| Eastern Yi (Nasu, etc.) | 1,000,000 |
| Southern Yi (Nisu, etc.) | 500,000 |
| Southeastern Yi total | 500,000 |
| Sani | 120,000 |
| Axi | 100,000 |
| Azhe | 80,000 |
| Azha | 100,000 |
| Central Yi (Lipo-Luoluopo) | 700,000 |
| Western Yi (Laluo) | 500,000 |
The above list includes the 6,500 Pula and 3,200 “Lôlô” of Vietnam in the Southern Yi total. Many of the Yi in China are bilingual in Chinese, and an increasing proportion of the younger Yi speak Yi less well than Chinese. In addition to the above totals, about 1.5 million Yi now speak little or no Yi. These nonspeakers are concentrated in Yunnan and Guizhou, especially among the Western Yi and also among the Eastern Yi. Quite a few Central,
[6] For a detailed survey of the historical linguistic relationships among the Yi Group languages including Yi, Lahu, Lisu, Hani, Jinuo, and others, see Bradley (1979).
RECENT LANGUAGE POLICY FOR THE YI
In a truly impressive effort, Yi and Chinese linguists have preserved a large corpus of Yi traditional written materials. They have also developed three different revised versions of the traditional script and taught these very widely and maintained a fourth. Each province with a substantial Yi population has taken a completely different approach to script reform.
In Sichuan, the Shynra speech of Xide County was selected as a standard; a new syllabary of 819 syllables and one diacritic (representing a tone that arises mainly from sandhi) was chosen from the traditional characters in their Xide pronunciation. This new syllabary was officially approved on October 1, 1980, and has been very widely used ever since; up to 100 percent literacy is claimed in some areas. There is extensive publishing of school textbooks up to university level (see Harrell and Bamo 1998), adult literacy materials, traditional literature, new literature in traditional and modern styles, translated Chinese literature, agricultural and political materials, and even a daily newspaper. Regular radio broadcasts and public notices in the Yiareas of Sichuan are bilingual, and much of public life can be conducted in Yi. One result is rapidly increasing knowledge of the standard variety by speakers of other varieties, derived from its use as a lingua franca and language of education and the media. There are type fonts, including various ornamental ones, typewriters, and a computer font, for this script. In addition, a standard romanized phonetic form for Shynra has been agreed upon, though it is mainly used for teaching Yi to Chinese and others or in citing linguistic examples in scholarly literature.
One curious feature of this script is that all syllabic characters have been rotated ninety degrees clockwise compared to other versions of the Yiscript; this is perhaps because the Northern Yi read their books by holding them at a right angle to the way books are held by other Yi, and the unreformed Northern script is still read right to left rather than top to bottom as the others are. Since the mid-1970s, when drafts of the new syllabary came into use, writing has instead been from left to right starting at the top left, like other modern Yi and Chinese books; but still with the syllabic characters in the rotated position. Early stone and bronze inscriptions indicate that this rotation
The Northern Yi or Nuosu syllabic script is now extremely widely known and used in Sichuan and parts of Yunnan. This is especially so in Liangshan Prefecture in Sichuan and in Ninglang County in Yunnan. This syllabary has been in use since 1978 and has had official approval since 1980. One problem with this script is that it is based on the phonetic form of the standard Shynra dialect. In the Shynra dialect there is a semiproductive tone sandhi process that changes a midlevel [33] tone and in some environments a low falling [21] tone into a lower-high [44] tone; see Bradley (1990b) for further details. Other varieties of Northern Yido not use this tone sandhi process in the same way; in Suondi and Adur it is almost completely absent, and in Yynuo it is used less, and another process that creates a higher-low [22] sandhi tone is used instead. There are other sandhi processes as well; for example, the morpheme nyi (many) occurs in all four tones and with two different vowels; and the morpheme mga (buckwheat) shows two tones and two vowels, as shown in the list below.
A speaker of Yynuo, Suondi, or Adur (or even a speaker of a local variety of Shynra where the rules are slightly different) must learn standard Shynra as a second dialect to achieve literacy, and will have considerable trouble learning all these arbitrary extra forms and their correct phonetic spelling; this problem would not have arisen if the characters had remained semantic rather than syllabic.
In the northwest of Yunnan, where Northern Yi is spoken, the Sichuan Yi orthography was introduced in the early 1980s, and continues in use in Ninglang County, though apparently not in Lijiang Prefecture as seen in the Yi village depicted in the television series South of the Clouds (Yun zhi nan). At first lecturers were sent from the Southwest Institute of Nationalities to train teachers and other language workers at the Yunnan Institute of Nationalities, but now students are sent from Ninglang County to study in Sichuan.
In Guizhou, the decision was to retain and standardize the traditional characters, but not to impose a standard pronunciation. This solution is similar to the traditional Chinese situation prior to the introduction of the putonghua
In Yunnan the policy is somewhat unusual; a completely new compromise script called “standard Yi” (guifan Yiwen) was devised between 1982 and 1987 by a committee of Yi working at the Yunnan Nationalities Commission, and approved for use from 1987 in most areas of Yunnan.
[7] This is not to be confused with the Nuosu script based on the Xide Shynra variety, which is also referred to by the same name guifan Yiwen, or Nuosu bburma in Yi.
This is based on a character-by-character compromise between Eastern, Southern, Southeastern, and Northern Yi characters; some seventeen hundred characters were agreed on in the first stage by 1987, and a further five hundred by 1990 for a current total of over twenty-two thousand. The choice was by majority rule: the version of the character used in the majority of the four literary varieties of Yi was chosen. The original orientation as still used in Southern, Eastern, and Sani/Azhe—but not Northern Yi—is kept, but written from left to right starting at the top left. Since the Sani and Azhe characters are often somewhat different, few were chosen; on the whole, characters tend to come from Eastern and Southern Yi varieties. Compared to traditional handwritten Yi, these characters are usually written in a more squared-off form. Up to 1996, published materials in this script were produced from handwritten originals, but since 1997 there is a computer font.Curiously, the first book to appear in this script was a collection of proverbs (Yang et al. 1989), followed by a word list (Yunnan Nationalities Language Commission 1989), and an adult literacy book (Yunnan Nationalities Language Commission 1990b), reprinted six months later (1990a) with identical Yi title and text, the same International Standard Book Number (ISBN), but a different Chinese title. More recently, the same commission prepared a children's textbook (1991), which has been put into use in
As in Guizhou, speakers may use their local pronunciation for the Yunnan standard Yi characters; but the only indication of pronunciation in any printed materials on this script is in a 1989 word list that uses Nasu (Hei Yi) of Luquan County, just north of Kunming. This had been the standard variety for Eastern Yi in Yunnan prior to the promulgation of the new standard, and several of the most active promoters of the Yunnan standard Yi are in fact Nasu from this area just to the east of Chuxiong.
[8] The most active of these is Zhang Chunde of the Yunnan Institute of Nationalities, who has been involved in most efforts to train language workers and students in this script.
There are serious problems with the new script, since it is a newly constructed compromise with no defined standard pronunciation and is derived from four distinct written traditions used by subgroups within the Yi whose speech is not mutually intelligible. For this reason it is very difficult for any Yi already literate in any existing variety of Yi to use. It is mainly being taught to young people, and many of them have limited speaking knowledge of their own variety of Yi. One must wonder how they will pronounce it!In mid-1994 a two-year joint training class was started as a combined effort by the Yunnan Institute of Nationalities, the Yunnan Nationalities Language Commission, and the Southwest Institute of Nationalities; the students were forty Yi already working in language-related areas at the local level from all parts of Yunnan (and one participant each from Sichuan, Guizhou, and Guangxi). They were trained in the new Yunnan standard Yi, Sichuan Yi, and in Yitraditional scripts. These graduates have now returned to their work units. Since 1988 new classes of Yi-language students at the Yunnan Institute of Nationalities have all studied Yunnan “standard Yi” in addition to their own varieties. The Yunnan Nationalities Language Commission decided in 1996 that Yunnan “standard Yi” should be taught in all Yi areas and gave subsidies to places that started immediately. By 1997 this decision was reversed, and at present it is still very difficult for anyone, even the people who
In cooperation with the Institute of Nationality Literature of the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences, I have been conducting a survey of varieties of Yi in Yunnan and producing textbook materials using a romanization parallel to pinyin to help speakers of some varieties of Yi when they wish to learn this script.
[9] I am very glad to acknowledge the financial support of the UNESCO Endangered Languages project and the very able assistance of Li Yongxiang, Maya Bradley, Deng Qiyao, and many local officials and speakers of Yi in various parts of Yunnan.
The fourth variety of Yi currently in use is the traditional Sani script of Lunan County southeast of Kunming. A comparison of the versions of this script given in Vial (1908—9), the Sani migration story in Guo and Ding (1984), and a Sani dictionary (Jin et al. 1983) shows the degree of difference often seen within traditional Yiscripts: each religious practitioner had a slightly different version of many characters, which he transmitted to his chosen successor, usually a son or nephew. The recent Sani dictionary indicates that for nearly 90 percent of syllables there is only one character, and thus Sani appears to use considerably more characters phonetically with different meanings than other traditional kinds of Yi. On the other hand, the dictionary also gives a large number of alternative forms used for many characters by different religious practitioners. Various traditional stories, including that of Ashima, have been published in this script with Sani phonetic form and Chinese translation, as well as in Chinese and English translation only. The county government at various levels makes some limited use of this script in signs, banners, and letterheads, but it appears not to be taught in schools and is thus learned only by the successors of traditional religious practitioners, by scholars, and by Sani students who study their language at the Yunnan Institute of Nationalities or the Central University of Nationalities in Beijing.
In cooperation with several Sani scholars, we are collecting several versions of the traditional Sani death ritual text; this is particularly interesting because it traces the migrations of the Sani around northeastern Yunnan over many centuries.
[10] Again, I am very pleased to acknowledge the financial support of the UNESCO Endangered Languages project and the participation of Tseng Kuo-pin, Ang Zhiling, Maya Bradley, and a number of Sani religious practitioners.
The list below exemplifies the degree of difference between the four currently used Yi scripts. The rotation of the Northern Yi variety can be noted, also the differences in rounding and shape between the Guizhou and Yunnan scripts and the greater divergence of the Sani script from the other three. The examples are the characters for the numbers one and two (whose origins
[11] For a discussion of the historical connection of this autonym with those of the Hani, Lisu, Lahu, and other Yi Group languages, see Bradley, Bradley, and Li (1997).
In addition to the efforts to promote literacy in Yi among the Yi and to translate practical materials into Yi and Yi literature into Chinese, there are extensive efforts being made at the national, provincial, prefectural, and county levels to preserve traditional Yi literature and culture. County, prefectural, and provincial language offices, mainly within the Nationalities Commission, collect, transcribe, and translate manuscripts into Chinese (and in Sichuan into the new standard Shynra variety as well). Some of this material is published, mainly by the Sichuan Nationalities Publishing House but also by the Yunnan Nationalities Publishing House, the Guizhou Nationalities Publishing House, the Central University of Nationalities in Beijing, and by some prefecture and county governments as well as various scholarly journals.
In most cases, the traditional Yireligious practitioner (in Nuosu, the bimo) who wrote a text, or one of his trained descendants, is needed to read it with any certainty, so many of the manuscripts in official hands cannot be fully read. Also, as these texts have been transmitted for many centuries, there are many archaic and obscure passages. The texts also refer to historical and semihistorical places, events, and people for which there is no other source or that are known by other names in Chinese sources, and rituals that in some cases are not now fully understood. Furthermore, the manuscripts are traditionally regarded as secret, and payment for performing rituals was one of the main sources of income, so many religious practitioners are unwilling to help in transcribing them. The worst thing is that when the religious practitioner dies, his manuscripts are usually burned with him. As the traditionally trained religious practitioners are now mainly rather old men, recording and translation work is extremely urgent; but some of their sons and nephews have studied with them, and many of the religious practitioners of this generation, now aged in their twenties to forties, have been or are being trained in Yi linguistics at the Central University of Nationalities; at the Yunnan, Guizhou, and Southwest Institutes of Nationalities with various other Yischolars; or at some of the leading research and translation bureaus, such as the Liangshan Translation Bureau in Xichang, Sichuan, the Yi Literature
The Lipo-Luoluopo and the Laluo have no tradition of using a script; rather, they share the widespread traditional story of the loss of writing: that it was given by god to every group, but that their group lost it through carelessness. Either the script fell out through a loosely woven basket, or it was written on some edible medium such as buffalo hide and eaten on the way home by the person carrying it or by some animal that stole it.
CONCLUSION: SUCCESSES AND PROBLEMS
In summary, very extensive efforts were made from the mid-1950s to the mid1960s and again since the mid-1970s to standardize, teach, and use various versions of the traditional Yi script. There are now four varieties, one each for Sichuan, Guizhou, and Yunnan, and one used in Lunan County in Yunnan.
In Sichuan there are hundreds of Yi who do language work: in the Provincial and Liangshan Prefectural Translation Bureaus; in the Sichuan Nationalities Language Commission; in the Southwest Institute of Nationalities, which has a large Yi and Tibetan language department that teaches Yi to Yi, to Chinese speakers, and to a few foreigners; in teachers' colleges in Xichang and Zhaojue; in language offices in every county of Liangshan; in the Sichuan Nationalities Language Commission; and in the Liangshan Nationalities Commission, among other places. The Shynra syllabic script is very widely seen and used throughout Liangshan Prefecture and to a lesser extent in Ninglang County in northwestern Yunnan.
In Guizhou the new script is being introduced slowly as teachers become available; since the only Yi autonomous county in Guizhou is Weining, the other local governments are not promoting it as extensively as in Sichuan. Also, a rather high proportion of the Yi in Guizhou no longer speak any Yi. The Yi language workers in Guizhou are not as many as in Sichuan or Yunnan; they are concentrated in the Guizhou Nationalities Commission, both in the Research Institute of Nationalities and the Guizhou Nationalities Publishing House; in the Guizhou Institute of Nationalities at Huaxi; at Bijie in the Yi Translation Bureau; and scattered elsewhere in various government offices at the prefecture and county levels.
In Yunnan, the province with the largest number and greatest diversity of Yi, the Northern Yi script is used in Ninglang County, the Sani script is used for some official purposes in Lunan County, and the new Yunnan standard Yi script is starting to be introduced through the education system. The Yunnan Nationalities Publishing House has Yi staff who prepare and edit books in all three of these scripts, as well as in publishing old traditional texts. The Yunnan Nationalities Language Commission also has Yi staff from various
It remains to be seen whether the very diverse Yi of Yunnan will accept the new Yunnan standard Yi script, and if so whether it will be possible to teach it successfully. The task is difficult, especially as there is no one who can comfortably read or write this script and no agreed-upon pronunciation. Indeed, many of the literate Yi in Yunnan are opposed to it, including most of the people who now work in language-related areas.
There is some cross-province coordination in Yi-language work. For example, the three main publishing houses printing Yi materials, those of Sichuan, Guizhou, and Yunnan, have regular meetings; and the Yunnan, Guizhou, and Southwest Institutes of Nationalities have exchanged staff over more than ten years and regularly meet at conferences. Yi-language scholars also meet at the more general Yi-studies conferences held every few years and at Nationalities Linguistics conferences. The most recent example of such cooperation is the sending of a Guizhou, a Sichuan, and a Guangxi participant in mid-1994 to attend the two-year Yunnan Yi traditional and Yunnan standard Yiscript course. Of course, many Yi-language scholars also participate in general conferences on minority language and other issues and know each other well.
The commitment to Yi and other minority languages in China is much more than superficial. It has become an important part of the developing Yi identity. In many cases the children of cadres who have grown up in towns and cities do not speak Yi, but now some of this young elite wants to learn to speak it. Special classes for such students have been started in some of the institutes of nationalities. Furthermore, it is now expected that good Han Chinese cadres should learn some of the minority language of the area where they work, and teaching materials have been developed to help them do so, especially for Sichuan Shynra, but also for many other minority languages. I have also met many hardworking Yi cadres who speak not just their own variety of Yi but also one or more other varieties used where they work.
In general, the Sichuan syllabic script is a great success, the Guizhou revived traditional script is only starting to spread, and there may be problems ahead for the Yunnan standard Yi script.
13. Nationalities Conflict and Ethnicity in the People's Republic of China, with Special Reference to the Yi in the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture
Thomas Heberer
Most of the earth's surface consists of states inhabited by several nationalities. Usually, minorities are openly or latently discriminated against or oppressed. The clashes that result constitute one of the main sources of domestic conflicts and instability. The French sociologist Raymond Aron predicted in the 1960s that, from a global perspective, ethnic conflict would take the place of class conflict (1962). If we look at contemporary developments in the world, this prognosis has already become fact.
From such conflict arises the critical need to provide ethnic minorities and folk peoples those rights that will allow them to survive and develop. Only in this way can the chronic potential for conflict be neutralized. This also involves the incorporation of minorities into the state with equal rights, as well as the protection of autonomous culture. This latter includes the protection of language and education; the right to identity, practice of religion, and protection from persecution; the right not to be discriminated against, and equality of rights and opportunities, from which follows the right to constitute one's own cultural organizations and interest groups.
The first part of this essay adopts a political science perspective to deal with basic problems that exist not only in Yi inhabited areas but as well in all areas inhabited by “ethnic minorities” in China (which will also be called non-Han peoples to differentiate them from the ethnic majority, the Han). After this, I briefly come to the crux of nationalities politics—regional autonomy. The second part focuses on a series of examples to discuss the problems of autonomy and the potential for conflict in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture. A third section summarizes patterns of conflict, perspectives, and possible preventive measures.
To begin with, it should be emphasized that genocide and forced assimilation are not aspects of today's nationality politics in China. Characteristics such as languages, writing systems, and customs are to a certain extent tolerated or even promoted. There are special quotas for non-Han peoples in birth planning and advancement to higher education. The state's opposition to strivings for autonomy comes clear through cultural insight. Equally important, a “Confucian path to assimilation,” Sinification, casts its shadow over nationality politics: mass settlement of Han Chinese without recourse for affected minorities, penetration by Han Chinese education and culture, incorporation into the Han-dominated structures of Party and state, prohibition of “unhealthy” customs and habits that do not correspond to Han morality,interference with religion, forced “modernization” according to the conceptions of higher authorities, and the attempt at “assimilation” that is determined by it. The traditional Confucian way of assimilation was never aimed at elimination of non-Chinese people, but rather demanded their submission to the center (formerly, the emperor), as well as their incorporation into the general structure of the Chinese empire: the goal remained their “cultivation” by means of Confucian values, that is, cultural, nonviolent Sinification. And little of this foundation has changed up to today. This does not mean, as we will see below, that there has been no change in recent decades. The developments of the reform era also demonstrate that economic liberalization has not led to the disappearance of ethnic differences, but, as in other parts of the world, to an “ethnic revival.”
TRENDS IN CHINESE NATIONALITIES POLICY AND THE YI
The Yi in the Liangshan Mountains, who call themselves Nuosu, had managed to maintain their social, cultural, and political identity virtually intact up to the mid-1950s, when Beijing attempted to integrate them into the socialist polity and society. Initial, gradualist attempts were quite successful, but radicalization of the process after 1956 provoked massive resistance in the form of a several-year guerrilla war against the Communist mission of eliminating the “reactionary slaveholding society.”
Beginning with the so-called Great Leap Forward (1958—60), an attempt to achieve economic development and even “the final goal of the communist society of plenty” through “mass campaigns,” a deliberate policy of forced assimilation was pursued. The illusion that communism was right around the corner was accompanied by the assumption that the knell of individual nationalities had rung. The “melting together of nationalities” led to coercive restrictions and even to prohibitions on the use of the language, script, customs, and religion of the Nuosu, as well as to forced elimination of social structures. Nuosu religious practitioners and members of the former ruling
For most Yi people political campaigns and movements were phenomena that did not concern their immediate sphere of living. As one Yi cadre put it in the 1980s, “In the 1950s the Partytold us Gao Gang and Rao Shushi were bad guys and should be criticized; in the 1960s Liu Shaoqi had to be criticized. Lin Biao, the deputy of Mao, was at first magnificent, then an evildoer [huaidan]. We had even to criticize Confucius. All those people were Han, and we [didn't] know if they were good or bad. We [had] nothing to do with them.”
At the beginning of the 1980s the Chinese leadership saw itself driven to a moderate policy because of dissatisfaction in minorities areas and in the interest of economic opening and modernization of these regions. The results of the Cultural Revolution had made it clear that the integration of non-Han people was to be achieved not through force, but through measures based on a broad consensus. The constitution of 1982 revalorized the minorities correspondingly, and a 1984 “Autonomy Law” formally extended to them the widest-reaching freedoms since the founding of the People's Republic. Accordingly, decisions and directives of higher organs that did not correspond to the concrete conditions of an autonomous region no longer had to be carried out (but only if the higher organs agreed!); the leading cadres were supposed to come from the nationalities that were carrying out the autonomy; the autonomous units received broader rights for regional planning and economic development, in protection and exploitation of their resources, in foreign trade, education, finance, public health, and other sectors (Heberer 1984a, 601—9). At any rate, most of the clauses are so vaguely worded that they would be unimplementable in the absence of accompanying laws. The Autonomy Law is thus a “soft law,” that is, a process of setting goals that should be followed as far as possible by state policies. One misses reference to an effective system for protection of autonomy. In addition, there are no legal measures for implementation of this law. There are correspondingly many complaints that local authorities do not hold to it.
This law did not in any way quiet the calls of many minority leaders for wider-ranging, actual autonomy (up to the maximum degree: Beijing should, following the emperor's example, manage only the international relations and military interests of large regions like Tibet or Xinjiang and leave local politics to the peoples living there). Particularly among the larger nationalities, disappointment spread widely, and younger forces radicalized because they no longer expected Beijing to solve any of their problems.
To a great degree, the existing rights themselves occur only on paper. Because they are not actionable (in the end, there is no law independent of
Thus, a basic conflict of Chinese society consists of the contradiction between the pretension to be an ideologically single-ethnic party and the fact of the existence of a polyethnic society. The Party, which, corresponding to the majority of the population, is dominated by Han Chinese, is the court of last resort. It is dedicated in its organizational structure to the leveling of all ethnic differences and is not subordinated either to the legal system or to autonomy. Therefore all forms of self-rule find their limits here. And this inhibits actual, implementable laws of autonomy.
PROBLEMS OF SELF-ADMINISTRATION AND POTENTIALS FOR CONFLICT IN THE LIANGSHAN YI AUTONOMOUS PREFECTURE
The problems of autonomy in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture are not fundamentally different from those in other regions. It should be emphasized again here that the central problem of autonomy does not lie in legal regulation, that is, in the lack of legal ordinances. Liangshan Prefecture, like other autonomous regions, enacts many local legal regulations. The weakness is rather that (a) there lacks a mechanism for implementation, and (b) the Party'sauthority is prior and superior to autonomy in every case.
[1] The “Autonomy Regulation of the Liangshan Autonomous Prefecture” of 1987 confirms explicitly the Party's leading role. See Liangshan Yizu Zizhizhou (1991, 39).
In particular, the establishment of autonomy in the prefecture is oriented to the national autonomy law, with the corresponding restrictions. Even according to this law, decisions and policies of superior state organs do not need to be carried out when they do not correspond to the conditions of the locality. In any case it gives the local authorities the right to make a proposal and have it decided upon by the corresponding higher organs (usually the provincial authorities). The decision thereby remains with those who had the original power to decide. If they stand with their original decision, then their determination is decisive and must in every case be carried out according to “democratic centralism” (Liangshan Yizu Zizhizhou 1991, 39).In the following paragraphs, I will use a few examples to problematize the rights of self-administration and the potential for conflict in Liangshan Prefecture. This is not intended to provide a comprehensive and systematic overview of autonomy, but rather to provide a selection that, on the one hand, deals with basic problems that have not yet been publicly problematized, such as ethnic names and the drawing of territorial boundaries, and on the other
The Question of Names
In the 1950s, Beijing arbitrarily created nationalities and—in some cases—nationalities names. The criteria for these were set by the Party leadership. Stevan Harrell spoke in this context of atriple pattern of ethnic classification: ethnohistory, a scholarly discourse of the history of a nationality or an area; state discourse of ethnic classification, the official classification by Chinese authorities; and ethnic identity,the perception of one's own and others' ethnic identity (Harrell 1996b, 98). The official name Yi represents the state discourse of ethnic classification. In this respect it is necessary to problematize this official name: in the first place, the fact of putting together different groups, some of whom do not see themselves as partof the same ethnic unit, all under a unitary designation is problematic in itself (Harrell 1990, 521). In addition is the choice of the name itself, which differs from the name representing ethnic identity: The Yi in Liangshan call themselves either Nuosu or Nasu, which means nothing but “people.”
[2] This is a custom practiced by many nations, as evidenced, for instance, by the terms “Inuit,” “Bantu,” “Magyar,” and “Alemannen.”
Names that they were earlier known by, such as Lolo or Yiren (the first is derived from a pejorative name, the second means barbarian), were perceived as discriminatory.The current name, Yi, is said to have been the result of a majority opinion in a survey of representatives of this nationality in the 1950s. But Yi informants indicate that the only thing actually debated was a new character for Yi. The sound was still a historical product forced on them by earlier emperors. According to many Yi, among themselves they prefer the traditional name for themselves, Nuosu (Harrell 1996b, 104 ff; Luohong 1996, 88—91).Territorial Boundaries
The Yi, the sixth-largest non-Han nationalityin the census of 1990, with 6.58 million people, are distributed across the provinces of Yunnan (4.06 million), Sichuan (1.79 million), Guizhou (0.71 million), and Guangxi (7,200). In contrast to two smaller nationalities, the Yi have no provincial-level autonomous region of their own, but only five autonomous prefectures (four in Yunnan, one in Sichuan), and ten autonomous counties (seven in Yunnan, two in Sichuan, and one in Guizhou). Proposals for creation of a province-level autonomous region uniting the Yi areas in Yunnan, Sichuan,
Social Hierarchization
The classification as a cruel and brutal slave-owner society is another issue challenged more and more by Yi scholars. It assigns to the Yi a relatively low status in the hierarchy of nationalities. The Yiareseen as the only slave-owner society that existed in China as late as the 1950s. This assessment not only seems to verify the Stalinist historical concept of social hierarchy (development from primitive society to slave-owning, feudal, capitalist, and socialist society) that perceived China to be a nation consisting of nationalities representing different stages of development, with the Han at the top of economical, societal, cultural, and political development. Thus the Han had a concept that allowed continuation of their traditional function of raising the societies of the ethnic minorities to the level of the Han, and thus of equalizing the various ethnic groups in the name of a modern theory (socialism). The Communist Party in its role as vanguard of all people living within the Chinese borders took over this traditional role of civilizing the national minorities. Henceforth, the Party decided which customs were useful, progressive, and in the interest of a people and which were not and thus were to be abolished. This classification made equality between the Han and the minorities impossible. They could not be equal because the Han stood at the top of the hierarchy, and the minorities belonged to different stages of development below and had to strive to catch up with the Han. The policy and mode of catching up was set by the Han.
This concept of hierarchization perpetuates and approves inequality and tutelage. The philosopher Michael Walzer has pointed out that the idea of a cultural hierarchy always poses a threat to the people, whose culture is devaluated. Hierarchies, said Walzer, are never “innocent,” because they tend
Economic and Social Aspects
China's recent development demonstrates that the practice of actual rights of self-administration requires an economic foundation. The bigger the economy of aregion, the greater is its maneuvering room vis-à-vis the center. And on the contrary, the more a region depends on the center or, correspondingly, a province, the less room it has for maneuvering. Autonomy is related not only to political decisions but also to economic strength.
Because the minority regions are among the poorest and least developed areas in China, their conditions for self-administration are not very good. Their economic and technological disadvantage when compared with other parts of China has, on the one hand, historical grounds. A large portion of the non-Han peoples has been, over the course of history, chased into poor regions. These peoples sealed themselves off from the outside in order not to be overwhelmed by the steadily increasing, land-gobbling Han population. On the other hand, the flawed, nationwide development policy of the 1960s and 1970s brought no progress for these areas.
In comparison with China as a whole and with the minority regions, Liangshan Prefecture ranks among the least developed regions, particularly when the economic potential of the Han-dominated prefectural capital of Xichang is not considered. The data in Table 13.1 demonstrate this quite clearly.
If we compare peasant per-capita income in the autonomous regions of Sichuan with the corresponding income in provincial-level autonomous regions, or with provinces that have a large portion of minority populations, the autonomous regions in Sichuan lie at the bottom end of the scale (Table 13.2).
Not only in comparison with other autonomous regions but also within Sichuan, Liangshan Prefecture is an especially poor region. Among the thirty autonomous prefectures in China, it was, in 1996, in terms of peasants' net income per capita, one of the poorest areas (793 yuan) (Zhongguo minzu tongji nianjian 1996, 283).
Twelve of the seventeen counties in Liangshan Prefecture in the mid-1990s were officially counted and registered as “poor counties” (pinkun xian); that is to say, they had a per capita income of less than 200 yuan per year (average: 129 yuan, less than the average per capita income of peasants for all of China at the end of the Cultural Revolution). In 1992, 860,000 of the 1.54 million Yi in Liangshan (55.8 percent) were counted as “very poor”; that is, their income was below the poverty line and they had a yearly income of less than 200 yuan, or US$25 (Qubi and Yang 1992, 33). With a 1992 peasant
| China | Sichuan | Autonomous Regions in China | Autonomous Regions in Sichuan | Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture 1989* | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SOURCES: Li Yihui (1993, 112); Qubi and Yang (1992, 32) | |||||
| *Newer data not available. | |||||
| Gross output value | 1,547 | 1,066 | 1,176 | 813 | no data |
| Income | 1,260 | 896 | 874 | 696 | no data |
| Gross output value of industry and agriculture | 2,393 | 1,729 | 1,731 | 984 | 542 |
| Agriculture | 670 | 589 | 724 | 547 | 314 |
| Industry | 1,723 | 1,131 | 1,007.5 | 437 | 228 |
| Financial revenue | 283 | 111 | n.a. | 86 | 77 |
| Peasant per-capita income | 683 | 505 | 312 | 357 | 317 |
| 1990 | 1994 | |
|---|---|---|
| SOURCES: Li Yihui (1993, 118); Zhongguo tongji nianjian (1995, 280); Zhongguo minzu tongji nianjian (1995, 188). | ||
| All China | 693 | 1,221 |
| Xinjiang Autonomous Region | 623 | 947 |
| Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region | 607 | 970 |
| Ningxia Autonomous Region | 534 | 867 |
| Qinghai Province | 514 | 869 |
| Guangxi Autonomous Region | 500 | 1,107 |
| Yunnan Province | 490 | 803 |
| Guizhou Province | 435 | 786 |
| Tibet Autonomous Region | 437 | 976 |
| Sichuan | 505 | 946 |
| Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture | 336 | 500 |
Certainly, Liangshan Prefecture has profited from the general economic prosperity of the last fifteen years. Still, the gap between minority areas and other parts of China is growing. And this despite the increased state subsidies.
The reform policies have visibly diminished the state tutelage of the peasantry and moved toward a kind of economic regime more suited to local conditions, but this has not in any way brought advantages to the autonomous prefecture. This is related to the following points: Even according to official reports, the prefecture has not been given anywhere near sufficient consideration with regard to the provision of credit, subsidies, foreign exchange, and materials by the center or the province (Zhongguo minzu jingji 1993, 26). The financial subsidies to the autonomous regions of Sichuan at the end of the 1980s were far less than those for other autonomous regions or provinces with a high proportion of minorities (see Table 13.3).
The dismantling of subventions has in addition led to a great strain on prefectural endurance. Many offices and industrial enterprises find themselves in no condition to pay wages or accounts on time.
| SOURCE: Li Yihui (1993, 115). | |
| NOTE: The figures for financial subsidies for autonomous regions of Sichuan also include provincial subsidies, so the subsidies from the center must be even less. | |
| * Newer data not available. | |
| All China | 262 |
| Inner Mongolia | 762 |
| Qinghai | 610 |
| Ningxia | 572 |
| Tibet | 505 |
| Xinjiang | 272 |
| Guizhou | 199 |
| Yunnan | 183 |
| Guangxi | 123 |
| Autonomous Regions in Sichuan | 128 |
In industrial colonization and the exploitation of raw materials, local interests are, as previously, not taken into consideration. The autonomous prefecture gets no fiscal advantage from them; the industrial colonization is directed mostly from outside and serves the extraction of cheap raw materials in the interest of enterprises outside the prefecture. Laborers are recruited outside the prefecture because of the low standard of local population: occupational training of the local population, which at most is undertaken only for simple activities, is widely left undone.
Han Chinese skilled personnel (technicians and skilled laborers), brought to the autonomous prefecture in the era before the reforms, moved back to their native regions or out to coastal regions because living conditions and living standards were better there. Thus the county of Zhaojue, one of the counties that was supposed to constitute a key point in the fight against poverty and which has a population that is 95 percent Yi, lost 995 skilled personnel between 1979 and 1992, of whom 235 were college graduates and 760 higher vocational-school graduates. Most of these were young people (Yang Jingchu 1994, 2).
Until the 1980s, trade in necessities for ethnic minorities was promoted and subsidized by the state. The dismantling of this practice of subsidies led to the collapse or weakening of the trade network.
Despoliation through deforestation, overgrazing, environmental pollution, and ecological destruction through industrial colonization have led to climatic change and lowering of the water table. Forested area in the three autonomous prefectures of Sichuan diminished from 29.4 percent at the beginning
The consequences of the transition to a “socialist” market economy also go beyond the economic sphere in Liangshan. For example, the removal of subsidies in the health and cultural sectors (free medical care and prevention of epidemics, free films and cultural activities) and the transfer of responsibility for these sectors to local authorities have led to the collapse of the health-care system and the discontinuance of cultural activities. Because of the local financial situation, clinics and health stations have been closed or made smaller. Epidemic diseases, which were thought to have been eliminated long ago, have broken out anew. In the three autonomous prefectures of Sichuan the number of local clinics diminished from 1,766 to 1,042 from 1978 to 1989, a reduction of 41 percent. Already in 1990, 53 percent of villages and 5 percent of towns and townships were without connections to the health-care-delivery network (Li Yihui 1993, 123—24, 436).
Similarly, in the educational and training sector considerable deterioration has taken place. In 1996, only 40 percent of Yi children in Liangshan attended school (in comparison to over 96 percent in Sichuan and 97 percent in the People's Republic of China, according to official reports). Only about 20 percent of girls attended school. In poor areas the school attendance rate was just 10 percent. Sixty percent of Yi over twelve years of age, according to official figures, were illiterate or semi-illiterate.
[3] The population census of 1982 shows a much higher rate for the Yi in Liangshan area: 76.1 percent, of which are 62.0 percent male and 90.2 percent female illiterates. The illiteracy rate for Sichuan overall was 32.0 percent, and for the autonomous regions in Sichuan 62.3 percent (cf. Liu Hongkang, 1988, 342).
In spite of all the touted anti-illiteracy campaigns, this situation is little changed since 1980 (58.05 percent) (Heberer 1984b, 281). The return to family farming, which made the entry of children into the family workforce profitable again, the growing costs of school attendance, and not least the weakening of the school network are the reasons for this development. Related to this is the fact that the number of primary and secondary schools in the autonomous regions of Sichuan diminished by 3,135, or 35.5 percent, from 1980 to 1989, and their number of graduates by 33.2 percent (Li Yihui 1993, 122). In 1992—94 in Zhaojue County alone, only 3 of 80 applicants secured a place in a university, none of them Yi (Jiang , Lu, and Dan 1994, 193). Correspondingly low is the number of Yi with a university degree (the Yi are last among the nationalities with more than 500,000 people). According to the 1990 censusIt is interesting to look at a list of problems given by the magazine Minzu as most irritating to the peasants in Liangshan Prefecture. These problems do not appear much different from those in Han Chinese districts, but they are understood by many Yi as results of “Han policies”:
The prices for goods that are urgently needed in agriculture (such as means of production, diesel oil, chemical fertilizers, and insecticides) are rising faster than the prices for farm products, with the result that farm incomes are diminishing.
State support monies for the agricultural sector in poverty areas (for the purchase of means of production, chemical fertilizers, insecticides, diesel oil, and so on) come significantly late. They are often paid only after the agricultural season for which they were needed is already over.
There are practically no agricultural experts in the rural areas of Liangshan Prefecture.
The prestige of cadres is at a nadir, because they often occupy themselves only as collectors of taxes and fees, and otherwise do not bother with the demands and needs of the peasantry.
The rising number of false products (less valuable or worthless imitations) in the areas of seeds, diesel oil, fertilizers, and pesticides has developed into a considerable problem that has negative effects on agriculture.
The medical network in the villages is practically shattered: therearehardly any doctors or medications, to the point where the death rate has begun to rise.
Drug taking, dealing, and addiction are rising drastically, without any intervention by the authorities. (Wang Linlu 1994, 11)
In other parts of China, including, importantly, the province of Sichuan, peasants have defended themselves by force. For this reason, local authorities rightly fear that the potential for dissatisfaction in Liangshan could increase the potential for conflict in the province as a whole, particularly as the disturbances in Lhasa in 1993 over inflation have shown how quickly economic dissatisfaction can transform into politically and ethnically inspired demands.
“Unhealthy” Customs and Habits
Socially and economically caused dissatisfaction can mount when, simultaneously with economic liberalization, the often-intentional interference in Yi customs does not stop. As in the country as a whole, there is now a retraditionalization in Yiareas. The role of clans, shamans, and magicians, as well as that of religion, is growing.
Since the 1950s, “healthy” and “unhealthy” customs and practices have been differentiated. Unhealthy ones should be eliminated; healthy ones preserved. Because this definition has never been precisely clarified, it always has
The Liangshan ribao, the bilingual daily newspaper in Liangshan, reported in 1986 the prohibition of a predeath ceremony for an elderly couple. In this traditional ceremony all the friends and relatives assemble, bring gifts, and celebrate a communal feast for several days. The prohibition was announced by the prefectural government and was justified on grounds of “waste,” even though the peasants used only their own money and consumed their own goods (Liangshan ribao, 5 June 1986). It is easy to imagine the feelings such a prohibition must have called forth among those affected. In 1996 a journal on nationalities affairs complained that, on the occasion of 383 funeral rituals in Meigu County,5,202 head of cattle were slaughtered (Lü 1996, 104). In one township of this county alone 16.5 percent of the township revenues were said to have been used for “superstitious activities.” In some areas half the income was reportedly spent on alcohol. According to the economic rationality of the Party, such behavior is wasteful. But, first, Yi may have a different rationality related to traditional social obligations (“moral economy”). Second, the state's interference is perceived as “Han” pressure on the Yiand their traditional customs. And last but not least, such “waste” could be interpreted as a kind of ethnic collective action that is more or less instinctive, and as a form of opposition against the perceived pressure of the Han.
Since the beginning of the 1980s, customs, practices, and festivals are again supposed to be officially respected. And in the constitution it says explicitly, “They [all nationalities] are free to preserve or reform unhealthy customs and habits of their own.” At the same time, in the name of measures against “unhealthy customs” and “superstition,” officials interfere in the system of customs. Because local authorities understand themselves to be representatives of local minorities, it is in practice not possible to resist such measures. This will be made clear in the following example of the bimo.
The Renaissance of the Bimo Animism and animistic ideas shaped and shape the religious thinking of the Yi. Sickness, death, and misfortune all are ascribed to the influence of spirits. Because spirits can bring evil, there were many rituals to keep them under control. The bimo as priest and magician was an intermediary between spirits and people (see Bamo Ayi, chapter 8 in this volume). During the Democratic Reforms in the 1950s, in the course of which the traditional structure of power among the Yi was eliminated, the activities of bimo and sunyi (shamans that have a lower social position than the bimo) were classified as “superstitious activities” and prohibited and their practitioners persecuted. In times of political radicalization, the bimo and sunyi were designated as charlatans and class enemies and thus
[4] In 1996, for the first time an article in an academic journal spoke of a special “bimo religion” (bijiao) (Pu 1996, 66—72).
In 1984 the State Council initiated a change with its decision that healers and magicians like bimo were to be dealt with like intellectuals. From then on, bimo could practice their activities for payment. Now there is again a training system in which young people from traditional bimo families are connected with the experience of their forebears. The bimo once again is part of the everyday life of the Yi, for officials as well as for ordinary members of that nationality. The crux of the reinstitution of the bimo was not a friendly disposition of the center. The above-mentioned collapse of the health-care network led already at the beginning of the 1980s to a resurgence of bimo and sunyi activities. These practitioners were the only ones in a position to fill the resulting gap, especially since the populace lacked the money to pay for increasingly expensive medical services.
The deterioration of health care, which was expressed, among other ways, by the fact that qualified doctors emigrated from poor areas and returned to their home districts, or changed to more remunerative occupations because of the low income in the health sector, stimulated the revival of bimo activities. In local clinics, severe diseases could in the main no longer be taken care of, and in the case of less severe diseases the local population often did not go to hospitals simply because of the cost. The roads to clinics are often long and difficult for rural inhabitants, and because of a lack of transport they often require a long walk on foot. Treatment was—and is—too expensive for peasants, who must pay the cost out of their own pockets, and anyone unable to pay would be quickly turned away from a clinic. In addition, the belief of the Yi population in the healing arts of bimo is as great as ever. News of healing results gets around quickly, and bad results, by contrast, can be attributed to supernatural powers. On top of that is the psychic function of the bimo, undervalued by the doctors of scientific medicine, as well as their knowledge of traditional healing procedures (Li Zhongfang 1994, 30—36). In the reinstitution of bimo activities the state thus was simply reacting to a change that was already in full course.
Still, it would be mistaken to attribute the bimo phenomenon solely to deficiencies in health care. And the prestige that the bimo have once again is not to be understood only in religious terms. Within Yi society the bimo assume the function of intellectuals, because of their knowledge and experience. We know from social anthropology that magicians function as guardians of knowledge in illiterate societies. In a rapidly changing world change will often be perceived as a threat, and nostalgia for the past will be
In case of illness, the bimo attempts to drive out evil spirits by magical means. Most Yi still believe that illnesses are caused by spirits and demons and can be healed only by exorcism. During the ceremonies, the bimo performs rituals according to the severity of the illness and the financial circumstances of the family.
Bimo keep in their houses many Yidocuments, which they consult in cases of celebration, sickness, divination, marriage, and every kind of magical ceremony. These documents are composed in Yi script. The Yi script could survive over the centuries only because the bimo passed it on to their pupils and followers. Ordinary Yi had no chance to learn this script.
In the area of medicine, doctors from the Han nationality usually deny that the bimo have any medical abilities. But every Yiwith whom I spoke, even local officials, expressed high regard for the bimo and their healing art. Peasants as well as officials agreed that the bimo possess many types of knowledge: knowledge of the Yi script, Yi history, meteorology, geology, and anthropology. On the negative side, Han Chinese officials most often mentioned the killing of animals for sacrifices, “interference in production,” elements of exploitation, and superstition. But every Yi can give examples of miraculous healing from his or her own experience. A local official, for example, reported that his uncle had gotten only a diagnosis of end-stage liver cancer from the doctors in the county hospital. He had been advised to go home, since he would not live much longer. The uncle then placed himself in the care of a bimo and a year later went to the county hospital for an examination, where he was given a clean bill of health. A province-level Yi official likewise reported being healed by a bimo. As a child, he had been bitten by a rabid animal. The bimo had taken a young hen and first held it under the child's arm; then he held its beak in the child's mouth and had him blow two or three times into the hen's mouth. The bimo had next drowned the hen in cold water and plucked out the feathers; then he investigated the color of the skin and other things, and after that the innards. In the official's case, the skin and innards had shown changes from which the bimo, according to
While many Han believe that bimo are consulted only by those who cannot raise money for treatment in a hospital, many Yi contradict this belief. The decision is based not only on the availability of money but also on trust and belief in the healing abilities of the shamans, as well as the continued existence of animistic and animatistic ideas.
But bimo are called for more than medical purposes, even today. In protracted bad weather, in the face of threatened bad harvests, in time of death, in questions of favorable and unfavorable outcomes, weddings, and so on—in all these situations the village bimo is present, and he performs the necessary ceremonies to placate or expel the spirits whose influence is still credited for most natural occurrences.
From the end of the 1950s the pursuits of the bimo were officially disapproved. A small portion of bimo went on to be educated as barefoot doctors (certainly the lesser bimo), but the overwhelming majority refused this offer. In knowledge, education, reputation, and social position, they felt themselves superior to doctors. Bimo were enrolled in “courses of study,” with the object of “reeducation.” Their activities, condemned as superstition, were forbidden, but in the villages bimo continued to practice. Even in the Cultural Revolution, when all bimo and sunyi without exception were defined as class enemies and “objects of class struggle,” attempts to root out the shamans and their activities were unsuccessful. They and their store of beliefs were too closely attached to the worldview of the Yi, and they continued and still continue to count as an important component of Yi society, from which almost no Yi distance themselves.
Two still-practicing bimo in the county of Meigu—Nidi Ati and Qubi Vujisse—explained that there have been bimo for twenty-eight generations (counting one generation as twenty-five to twenty-eight years). One can distinguish three categories of bimo: (a) those who understand the sacred texts and have read many of them (little bimo); (b) those who, in addition to this, can also ask the gods for help and understand psychic healing methods (middling bimo); and (c) those who, in addition to having the abilities mentioned in the first two categories, also command the funeral ritual (great bimo). The training lasts, as it always has, fifteen years. Bimo are scientists who have discovered knowledge in the areas of history, medicine, meteorology, geology,
According to these two bimo, bimo can save 90 percent of those afflicted with spirit illnesses before they die. But they understand that they cannot heal all illnesses. In the case of certain sicknesses, such as infectious diseases, it is better to go to one of the hospitals with modern equipment. Bimo strength is in psychological healing methods, supported by herbal remedies.
Even in the Cultural Revolution many young men demanded to be schooled as bimo, for several reasons. First, the deficiency in medical care made substitute care through the bimo network necessary; second, the schools were closed for a while and young people had few opportunities for education; third, the bimo and their professional standing enjoyed a high reputation among the Yi. Bimo are tolerated again today, but they remain a thorn in the side of Han cadres, who hope to convince the bimo“through educational measures” to give up their activities. But at most this succeeds only in very rare cases. The aforementioned Nidi Ati, among others, explained that the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing had invited him to demonstrate his knowledge and skills there for scientific purposes. This he declined; he would transmit his knowledge only to his successors.
Though bimo today continue to possess great prestige in rural areas, it is declining in urban areas. There the opinion has spread that modern medicine is superior to archaic methods of the bimo in many respects and that modern hospitals “get better results with a lot of spirits” than do bimo (according to patients in the county hospitals at Meigu). With the increasing level of education and the popularization of modern medical and scientific knowledge, shamanism (including animism and animatism) is doomed to disappear from Yi society. However, for many young people bimo figure increasingly as scientific authorities who, at best, know the Yi, their history, their customs and usages, as well as their script (which certainly plays a role), and in rare cases work together with the Han.
Language Policy
At the beginning of the 1980s Yi script was released again in a reformed version. As early as the middle of the 1970s members of the Yi elite had intervened with provincial authorities and argued that, without their own script, the rate of illiteracy and school attendance could not be improved. The reintroduction was, at the same time, an expression of the failure of the policy to compel the Yi and many other people to use the Chinese language, along
Although the popularization of the Yi script has occurred at least in the Yi primary schools, and there is one newspaper, one magazine, and a limited selection of books in the Yi script, there are numerous problems. The language and writing are widely restricted to primary schools, at best; Chinese becomes the primary language beginning in middle school. Because of this, the level of Yi language remains restricted, and the language and writing remain insufficiently developed. Increasingly, Yi language is being degraded to a language of the rural population.
Yi-language speakers remain handicapped in comparison to Han speakers. It is a widespread conviction among Yi, particularly among cadres and skilled personnel, that bilingual education is “useless” because only knowledge of Chinese is required for learning trades or gaining access to wider educational opportunities. Because of this, the Yi script has only a limited area of usefulness and thus has no future. In any case students have enough to do just to learn Chinese. For this reason this circle of people is widely uninterested in bilingual education for further growth, but only in Chinese-language education (Zhang, Yu, and Ma 1992, 26). This particularly applies to people who speak only broken or no Yi, or who primarily speak Chinese. This circle includes a high percentage of people who live in cities or near cities, who have higher education (generally in a Han environment), or are active as officials.
Most of the children of officials or intellectuals, from whom the elite stem, generally know no Yi. In this way, the elite becomes linguistically Sinified. Whoever has enjoyed an education in a Han Chinese environment and speaks Chinese instead of his or her native language counts as more loyal and more integrable—in other words, less inclined to ethnonationalistic tendencies. But Chinese is not only, as is often maintained, a lingua franca. It is a means of transport for Han Chinese value concepts and norms of behavior, a not unimportant contributor to a process of cultural assimilation.
Where smaller speech communities count as “backward,” where such an image is adopted by the elite of an ethnic group, where language is thus understood as a symbol for being dominated, the first step toward the extinction of the language has already been taken.
Birth Planning Policy
Birth planning policy can also lead to conflict. According to the population law of the province of Sichuan and the corresponding regulations of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, members of ethnic minorities can have two, or in special circumstances, three children. Bearing more than three children is not allowed (Liangshan Yizu Zizhizhou 1991, 122—30). For this and other reasons, it is not surprising that the rate of natural increase is higher
CONCLUSION
Among the Yi in Liangshan since the founding of the People's Republic, we may observe the following seven trends.
No Separatist Tendencies, No Demands for Independence
In contrast to the minority areas on the borders, where minorities live together compactly in large areas (Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Tibet), there have never been separatist tendencies in Liangshan Prefecture in the sense of separating from China and establishing an independent state. The region does not lie in the vicinity of national borders and has never demanded or been able to expect political independence from China. But there was a strong sense of independence in the sense of a cultural and societal independence from China. And this spirit still exists among the Yi and manifests itself in their separation from Han influence. That 20 percent of the towns and 95 percent of the villages are not yet connected to the network of roads (Sun 1997, 62) may be interpreted not only as a sign of underdevelopment but also as an expression of the desire to live a way of life not much influenced by the Han. There still exists a strong tendency among the Yi to retreat into the mountains in order to avoid control by the Han.
Revolts in the 1950s Strengthened Han Chinese Presence
Up to the beginning of the 1950s the Yi attempted to preserve their relative independence within the Chinese state. After this attempt failed, they had to adjust themselves to the new political situation. Revolts in consequence of the Democratic Reforms in the middle of the 1950s were suppressed relatively quickly and led to a strengthened Han Chinese presence. The social reforms may have been welcomed by the majority of former slaves; what the Yi desired after that was the possibility of autonomous development, without radical interference in existing traditions and without loss of their national identity.
Massive Dissatisfaction with Policies in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s
Since the end of the 1950s there had been attempts to destroy these traditions and to make the Yi fit the notions of the Han or of the Party authorities in Beijing. Every phase of political liberalization showed that such attempts not only remained fruitless but also were harmful to development in this region and to relations among nationalities. Massive dissatisfaction among Yigenerally necessitated state concessions in all areas. Economically, the Yi no longer want to be cheap providers of raw materials: they demand economic development and an economic policy that brings quick improvement of living standards. Politically, the wish for a larger measure of autonomy and for preservation of the identity of their nationality is getting stronger. But the current autonomy includes the problem that it is generally autonomy from above and does not contain the necessary democratic control mechanisms from below. Right now, demands for such control mechanisms are obscured by the improvements in individual income brought by the current economic policies. But surely not for long.
Social Change in the 1980s and 1990s
As well as in other minority areas, alcoholism, drug addiction, and collective action in the form of sporadic local unrest and criminality are on the rise (Lü 1996, 59—65). Drug addicts are such a tremendous social problem among the Yi that, for example, Yi teachers in Liangshan established “voluntary propaganda teams against drugs” in order to “save their own nationality” (cf. Minzu[November 1998]: 24).
The influence of traditional religion and of religious sects is growing tremendously, too. Chiliastic movements and sects organized by a charismatic leader (mentuhui) are spreading quickly in the Liangshan area, waiting for the end of the world and undermining Partyorganizations. More and more, these movements and sects control rural areas as well as access to Party and mass organizations and elections at village, township, and county levels (Shen 1997, 35). Such movements surface in times of erosion of traditional norms and relationships. A utopian, eschatological, and egalitarian idealism is created, a counterpoint to the symptom of decay and social disintegration and feelings of social and ethnic menace. These movements are a means to cope with the insecurity of life, particularly in a period of rapid social change.
And there is another new phenomenon: the emerging of jobless Yi in larger cities like in the provincial capitals of Chengdu and Kunming who organize themselves in informal groups (Lai and Mujie 1996, 66—72), not according to clan but nationality. This may be interpreted as a sign of growing ethnicity, since formerly Yi perceived themselves as members of clans rather than as members of a common nationality. And this ethnicity is promoted
[5] It is quite interesting that Yiwho informed me about this development argued that those Yi only would steal from Han, not from Yi people. As soon as they found out that their victim was a Yi they would voluntarily return the stolen goods and apologize. Those statements were made by different Yi informants. There are two possibilities in this argument: First, that Yi are Robin-Hood-like thieves that take things away from the Han but not from members of their own nationality. This would imply a strong sense of ethnic feeling and therefore ethnicity. Second, that such stories are created by noncriminal Yi to defend their own nationality.This would also imply a strong sense of ethnic feeling and ethnicity, as the informants claim that those Yi are not simply criminals but have developed a strong sense of ethnicity and that their acts are only directed toward non-Yi, primarily Han. And the latter could even be regarded as a kind of ethnic opposition.
Leaders of Clans and Educated Local Functionaries Emerge as a New Leading Stratum
It is true that the percentage of Yi cadres among all functionaries in Liangshan Prefecture is still quite low. Though 46 percent of the population in Liangshan are Yi, the minority cadres make up only 28.6 percent. Among the enterprise cadres they constitute only 9.6 percent (He Mingwei 1996, 16—18), and only one of sixty directors of enterprises in Liangshan is Yi (Yang Hui 1995, 50—52).
But there is a growing number of qualified Yi people taking over responsible functions and endeavoring to act in the interest of their nationality. The stratum driving the growth of ethnicity is the educated stratum among the non-Han peoples; that upper stratum is generally the primary supporter of ethnicity. Establishment of a school system in and for the minority areas, in order to educate skilled people needed locally, has significantly increased the number of people belonging to this stratum. Of course, higher education is in many ways designed to integrate members of non-Han peoples into the community of Chinese-language speakers and Chinese culture (through the use of the Chinese languages and through having institutions of higher education in Han Chinese areas); but in recent years, this
Erosion of Party Organizations
Especially in the townships and villages in Liangshan Prefecture, Party organizations are eroding. Party organizations and Yi cadres are criticized as having weak “Party spirit” (He Mingwei 1996, 13; Yang Hui 1995, 50—52). The number of Yi cadres is decreasing, not because the Han want to dominate that area but rather because fewer and fewer Yi want to join the Party and its mass organizations. The institutional gap is filled by the clans and members of religious sects.
Reinterpretation of Yi History and Traditional Society by Yi Scholars
More and more Yi scholars question the Chinese interpretation of the Yi as a cruel, backward, reactionary, and brutal slave-owner society. On the contrary,the traditional society is interpreted by many Yischolars as having been harmonious and well organized until the penetration of the Han in the 1950s.
At present we concurrently find retraditionalization as well as social uprooting among the Yiin Liangshan. On the one hand, the dominating influence of the Han in the process of opening Liangshan, and in economic development, has generated an erosion of traditional Yi culture and values, especially among Yi with weak clan bonds. Looking for better income and jobs, those Yiaremigrating into urban centers. But just because they are Yi, poorly educated, and not accustomed to job conditions in urban areas where they are discriminated against, they don't find jobs; as a result they are frustrated that they do not participate in social prosperity. Thus they organize themselves in criminal gangs, making a living mainly through criminal offenses. On the other hand, we find a revitalizing of clan bonds, customs, and religious activities in remote areas and, particularly among educated Yi, a growing nationality consciousness.
The old leading stratum of the Yi is obliterated or sits superannuated in the People's Consultative Conferences. A new one is just beginning to form. One can hardly speak yet of a stratum of intellectuals, and all leading positions today are held by Party members. Education is thus a decisive means for the development of forces who will have at their disposal the necessary intellectual skills, who will possess a relatively great amount of knowledge of their position. It will depend on the future nationalities policies whether the Yi as a nationality will remain a loyal component of China, or whether they
[6] It is worth discussing here whether the so-called tremendous increase of criminality (like highway and train robbery, drug planting and dealing, murder, and clan wars) in the Liangshan area, which was especially mentioned in the People's Daily, is a reaction to social change and a sign of ethnic retraditionalization (see Renmin ribao[People's daily], 29 May 1996).
Without doubt, the liberal policies of the reform era have given great latitude to Yiethnicity (A. Smith 1996, 445—48). Social change following upon economic change, political liberalization, and the erosion of socialist ideology led to a new search for identity among all ethnic minorities in China and also among the Yi, particularly because the process of modernization is in many ways felt by many Yi to be a menace to ethnic identity, ethnic cohesion, and mode of life. Amid rapid social change many Yi therefore turn back to their ethnic culture, seeking protection and security, and this becomes a substantial motive for ethnonationalism and growing ethnicity (Rösel 1995, 117—30). Rising ethnicity has, on the one hand, a “protective function” for an ethnic group; on the other hand, it is a symptom of a crisis (Reiter 1991, 69). As Nash puts it: “The identity dimension of ethnicity . . . rests on the fact that fellow members of the ethnic group are thought to be ‘human’ and trustworthy in ways that outsiders are not. The ethnic group provides a refuge against a hostile, uncaring world. Like a family, it has a continuing claim on loyalty and sacrifice. . . . The idea of refuge, the place where one is fully human, whatever failure or success happens in the larger world, is the cement and power of ethnic membership and continuity” (Nash 1989, 128).
This psychological force of ethnicity thus reaches beyond the idea of national consciousness and attempts to explain psychologically why people cling to their identity. And this explains to us why all attempts at force or covert assimilation of the Yi are unavailing and why political liberalization has led to a stronger self-consciousness among the Yi.
The growing influence of bimo religion and traditional culture must be understood as another indication of rising ethnicity (Haynes 1994, 150—53). In this context, religion and traditions are not only reminders of one's own culture and cultural identity: embracing them is a reaction to the process of social change directed from above by the Han. The process of modernization and change threatens the cohesion of the Yi and thus often provokes mobilization for preserving the group identity.
The case of the Yi shows that it is difficult to address Chinese nationalities as a uniform group of ethnics. Moreover there are groups with a strong desire for independence, especially where a non-Chinese religion plays a major role (Uighurs, Tibetans, Mongolians): people with a broken identity who find themselves being assimilated and people in an ambiguous position between
To guarantee the latter would require an organized representation of interests, because the right to autonomy can be represented or carried out only by organized communities. To counter the growing discrimination against members of ethnic minorities in urban areas requires intensified measures. While open discrimination is forbidden by law, it exists hidden and in daily life, and it increases in an alarming manner (reports about killing, injury, and insulting of minority peoples in urban daily life are increasing). The existence of such a phenomenon should be acknowledged, and special programs for reducing discrimination and prejudices established.
14. Education and Ethnicity among the Liangshan Yi
Martin Schoenhals
Whether to assimilate or to separate is one of the most fundamental conflicts faced by members of ethnic groups, especially by members of small minority ethnic groups, upon whom the possibility of gaining access to wealth and power through assimilation asserts a strong pull in the assimilationist direction. Assimilation seems to offer not only access to wealth and power but also the pride that comes from being associated with, and becoming more like, the dominant segment of society. To attempt to assimilate, minority groups employ a variety of strategies, ranging from changes in dress, language, and custom to residing among and even intermarrying with the dominant group, participating in their social institutions, and attaining educational credentials that facilitate access to elite positions of power.
Yet while assimilation might buy power and prestige for those minority individuals who assimilate, it also, of course, comes at a cost. As the literature has documented, rejecting one's own cultural and social institutions in favor of those of the dominant group threatens the solidarity of those minority individuals who remain behind, sometimes leading them to feel a sense of betrayal by their upwardly mobile counterparts. Gradual loss of cultural heritage by the minority group because of those who leave it, and loss of those who reject its cultural ways, can give rise to increased feelings of alienation and inadequacy among minority group members.
One reaction to this process, and a means to challenge the dynamics of assimilation, is the affirmation by minority group members of their own culture, often through the conscious display and celebration of the icons of their
The Yi of Liangshan are called Nuosu in their own language and have a distinctive culture and social structure; this essay pertains to these people, and not to other Yi, such as those in Yunnan Province.
Thus the minority group within a majority culture faces tension over competing alternatives—assimilation versus separatism—both of which may be perceived as beneficial by some and detrimental by others. For many minority individuals, the tension between cultural allegiances—to the dominant group or to the minority one—and the tension over the conscious affirmation of these allegiances through assimilation or separatism can be pronounced and sometimes painful, the source of a cultural and personal identity crisis (Fordham 1996).
Schools, of course, are prime loci for the enactment of all of these dynamics. Since education is often a primary route into the society and status of the dominant group, and since schools are usually run, for the most part, by members of that group, participation in, and success at, school can symbolically represent assimilation. Failure to succeed at school, rebellion against teachers, and refusal to participate in school at whatever level can come to symbolize separatism, or at least allegiance with the minority person's home community and home culture. It becomes a form of resistance by minority students to the wider oppression they face in society (Fordham 1996; Erickson 1987). Thus the literature on schooling and minorities is filled with examples of how minority students—African Americans, for example—manipulate their identity in school to “act white” or “act black,” sometimes seeing success at school as part of the former process, and rebellion against school, and failure to learn, as part of the latter one (see Fordham 1996, especially chap. 7).
When I went to China to study the Yi people at a multiethnic school in Xichang, the capital city of the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, I had expected to find ethnic dynamics similar to those described by scholars writing about Western ethnic contexts. Since the Yiareanumerical minority and live in a poor and remote region of China, I thought that those few Yi able to go to junior and senior middle school (basically, the equivalent of grades seven through twelve in the United States) would feel a cultural and personal tension over going to school. I also thought I would find Yi students commonly discussing this tension and the feeling that, in some way, they were betraying their parents, who are mainly uneducated peasants, and their language and culture, by entering a Han institution to prepare themselves for entry into largely Han-dominated society. I thought Yi students might feel an identity crisis, a conflict between the desire to assert a Yi identity and the desire to manipulate their personas (through dress, speech, behavior changes, and so on) so that they could more closely resemble the dominant Han.
Finally, I thought I would find what researchers working in multiethnic Western contexts have found—that discipline problems and achievement problems would be used by minority students to symbolize their opposition
But I found very little of what I expected, and when such phenomena did occur—such as Yi students not working as hard as Han students—it did not occur for expected reasons; it carried no symbolic weight as ethnic opposition. I found instead that caste and notions of Yi-ness make the Yi feel permanently Yi, so that the threat of Hanification becomes negligible. Assimilation versus segregation is not a genuine choice—one is always Yiby birth—so that ethnic identity,even in the multiethnic school context, does not become salient and politicized. Questions such as “Who am I?” and “Am I, and is my culture, worthy?” thus do not arise or are of minimal importance.
THE RESEARCH SITE
Liangshan Nationalities Middle School in Xichang (Liangshan Minzu Zhongxue), the site of my nine months of ethnographic research in 1994—95, is the most prestigious nationalities middle school in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture. MZ, as I will henceforth refer to the school, was established in 1990 when a vice-prefect of Liangshan at the time persuaded high-level government officials to help fund a school for nationalities to draw students from the entire Liangshan region.
[1] The story I heard from students, though I could not confirm it, is that the vice-prefect, a Yi man who is highly respected among the Yi for his dedication to the Yi people and for his proud refusal to be intimidated by powers stronger than himself, put on his Yi cape and went to Beijing and demanded money for a prefecture-wide nationalities school, telling the higher authorities he would not leave until they granted his demand.
The Sichuan provincial government contributed money for construction; currently money for operating expenses comes from the Liangshan government.[2] Shortly before I began my research in fall 1994, a Japanese company had searched throughout China for a needy school to which it could give a very large donation and, for some reason that no administrators of Liangshan Nationalities Middle School really knew or understood, had selected this school as the object of its largesse. During my stay in China, the final contract specifying the terms of the donation was still being negotiated.
MZ is one of the many “nationalities” (minzu) schools established throughout China at the primary, secondary, and even college levels in regions such as Liangshan, where there are high concentrations of ethnic minorities.
[3] I translate minzu as nationalities, following the Chinese approach, but the word really means something closer to ethnicities—that is, a school for students from different ethnic groups.
These schools exist alongside regular schools in the same regions. While the[4] The source for this is an unpublished Butuo County government chart on education, 1995.
Minzu in the titles of these schools means, in effect, minority. Thus, the nationalities schools' target populations are the ethnic minorities. In Liangshan, Yiand other minority students have the option of attending either regular schools or nationalities schools (provided that, in both cases, they meet the school's admission requirements). When asked the reason for establishing separate schools for minorities alongside regular schools that serve both the majority and minority populations, Liangshan educators normally explain that minority students have special needs that are best served in separate schools. In fact, regular schools in Liangshan sometimes maintain segregated classes within the school by putting minority students in their own classroom, ostensibly to better serve their special needs. When I asked the principal of MZ, a Yi man who normally gave me honest, straightforward answers to my questions, why there was a need for a separate nationalities school such as MZ, he answered rather incoherently and did not give any of the reasons one could have expected—such as the need to instill greater pride in minority students by teaching about their heritage in schools geared to them, or the use of special curricula or teaching methods.
Thus the nationalities schools do not in actuality differ fundamentally from regular schools, nor do they really seem to be administered with any conscious purpose of catering to special minority needs, other than the perception (often valid) that minority students need remedial help upon entering secondary school due to inadequate preparation at the remote, rural primary schools they often attend. During the nine months I spent living at MZ, I also visited other secondary and primary schools throughout Liangshan. I found the nationalities schools' curricula to be identical to those used in regular schools throughout all of China, a situation occasionally making for awkward ethnic moments, as when a Han primary school teacher of an all-Yi class (specifically designated as such) within a regular primary school taught a lesson from a national textbook about the ancient accomplishments of “we” the Han people.
The one way in which the curriculum differs from that of regular schools is that many nationalities schools offer Yi language courses that teach native Yi-speaking students to write their own language. This class is of course taught in the Yi language, but in all other classes the language of instruction—for speaking, reading, and writing—is Han Chinese. (In the early years of primary school, Yi teachers sometimes use Yi intermixed with Han Chinese for Yi students who have trouble understanding.) There are a few schools, considered experimental, where students are taught in the Yi language, including one entire middle school in Xide where all courses are taught in Yi. Educational administrators I met, however, told me that the general feeling is that such schools do not significantly raise Yi students' achievement level in school, and that the experiment may soon come to an end. As for the teaching staff, the nationalities schools have both Han and Yi teachers, but Han are usually in the majority.
MZ, like all nationalities schools in Liangshan, uses the same curriculum, in Han Chinese, used in regular secondary schools throughout China. The goal of this curriculum is the same as it is for secondary students throughout China: to prepare students to take and pass the college entrance exam (gao kao), the primary way to gain admission to college. Without a college degree, it is very difficult to get a good job in China, thus the college entrance exam exerts a very strong influence on teachers, students, and curricula. The one curricular difference when compared to regular schools is that MZ has two Yi teachers who teach the Yi writing system to Yi students. This is, however, an elective course (whereas all other courses at MZ are required), which students take because they can get added points on the college entrance exam if they can pass a Yi writing section. Six years of Yi language are taught, and in the upper years students read literature—both Yi literature and Han classics that have been translated into Yi. Since MZ students can already read and write Han characters well when they start to learn Yi, and Han writing is the predominant mode of communication between literate Yias well as literate Han, the learning of the Yiwritten language does not seem to have a genuine pragmatic purpose as far as educational advancement is concerned. It is more useful for adult literacy—some adults write in Yi frequently, and the Yi language is being used to run voluntary adult literacy classes. Thus, while learning to write Yi does not have a clear pragmatic or cultural resonance for MZ students, the potential nonetheless exists for a growing use of the written Yi language and for a growing cultural pride in its use. Certainly, MZ Yiclasses will facilitate this process, even if that is not their explicit motive.
MZ boasts that it has twenty-two Yi teachers, out of a total of eighty, but many of these are not culturally Yi—they have one Yi parent (usually their father) and one Han parent, and grew up in an urban Han area, speaking Han Chinese, and they have little or no comprehension of the Yi language.
As is the case with any well-respected middle school in China, MZ has earned its reputation by placing a very high percentage of its graduates into college through the college entrance exam, resulting in pressure to preserve the school's reputation by keeping its rate of students accepted into college (shengxuelü) high. Teachers push students to study, and students themselves seemed to study quite hard—probably harder, I would guess, than those at Third Affiliated. One difference I noted, however, was that teachers at Third Affiliated spoke glowingly of the students' abilities, while teachers at MZ frequently commented that their students lacked a “foundation” because most of them had attended inadequate rural primary schools. In addition some Han teachers told me, in a confiding but not malicious manner, that the majority of MZ non-Han students did not study very hard because some colleges (in particular the nationalities colleges) give preference in recruitment to non-Han students, and thus they can get into college with less effort.
The student body at MZ is 74 percent Yi, 16 percent Han, and 10 percent other minorities, such as Hui and Zang. The school is mandated by its charter to recruit students from all over Liangshan and to affirmatively recruit students from peasant families. Slightly lower admissions standards for students from especially poor regions of Liangshan help MZ attempt to realize its mandate, although the principal admits the school has difficulty achieving full geographic diversity since Yifamilies from counties with a very high percentage of Yi traditionally do not encourage their children to go to school, so the school has relatively few students from such counties as Zhaojue, Meigu, and Butuo, but many from Yuexi, Xichang, Huili, Ningnan, and so on. The overwhelming majority of MZ students are, however, from peasant backgrounds, and many are from poor families and/or from poor, remote mountain villages, and their education poses a heavy economic burden on their families. Among the forty-seven Yi students in a survey I conducted, twenty-three said they had considered dropping out of school for financial reasons.
MZ does not have statistics on the percentage of Yi males versus females at the school. However, I found in my survey of two senior middle school classrooms (ban), one in the humanities and the other in the sciences, that sixteen out of forty-seven Yistudents—about one-third—werefemale. In contrast, among Han students in the same two classrooms, eighteen of thirtyone, or 58 percent, were female.
Given that MZ is a nationalities school, I was surprised to discover a fairly significant percentage of Han students—about 18 percent of the senior middle school student body and 15 percent of the junior middle school student body is Han, a majority of them from peasant backgrounds. When I asked the principal why there were Han students at the school, he explained (as did many teachers and students whom I asked this same question) that the school recruited Han students who are exceptionally qualified in order to spur the school's Yi students to study harder—by providing a model of good behavior and by arousing Yi ethnic pride and hence the desire to study in order to compete with the Han. The motive for Han students to come to MZ is simply that it has a good general reputation and is less expensive than, for example, the most prestigious regular Liangshan middle school. I never found any Han student who said he or she came to MZ specifically to learn moreabout the Yiand make contacts with Yi. It is perhaps not to be expected that Han students would have idealistic motives for going to school with the Yi, but it is, in fact, surprising that no one articulated the practical benefits of making contact with the future Yi leaders of Liangshan.
[5] I am not sure why this is so but have a strong feeling that the Han parents in Liangshan cannot conceive of encouraging their children to make connections with the Yi, a group the Han consider clearly inferior culturally despite their local power.
WHY MORE YI ARE NOT IN SCHOOL: THE NATURE OF THE RHETORIC
According to educational documents from the Liangshan Committee on Education, only 63.4 percent of minority children seven to twelve years old are actually in school (Liangshan Prefecture Education Commission 1994a, 2). Percentages for junior middle school and senior middle school are not given, but based upon available statistics it is easy to calculate that about 15 percent of minorities attend junior middle school and only 2 percent attend senior middle school.
Why don't more Yi go to school? I questioned many informants, but almost none of their answers reflected ethnic identity conflict issues. Instead the most common reasons given were, first, lack of money: middle schools charge tuition. In addition, since most Yi students live a great distance from the nearest middle school, they must live at the school if it provides housing
In most cases families simply spend almost all of their cash income to send one child to school. For a fair number of students, relatives provide a portion of the money for education. It is not surprising, then, that so many Yi students reported having considered dropping out of school for financial reasons. One, for example, wrote, “My home is poor. I often can't afford both food and school and so often go without food. Therefore, I want to quit school.” Another Yi student wrote, “My father is old and my mother is often sick.” This is a typical answer—the student's awareness that his or her education is putting a large burden on his older parents, and that the sickness of one or both of them makes continuing in school difficult.
A second common reason given for not going to school is the need for children's labor at home. Yi children start helping their parents—for example, herding sheep or goats—early, around seven years of age in the case of several male informants. Many students said that Yi parents oppose sending their children to school, or send only one to school, because of the need for children to help with farmwork.
A third reason given was the distance of schools from home. The Yi often live in the mountains. In fact, there are Yi living almost at the tops of mountain peaks, at around 3,500 meters. Just to get to an elementary school can sometimes require a child to walk one or two hours each way, on an often dangerous mountain path. Because of this, many Yi parents are reluctant to send their children to school. At the very least, they delay sending them to school for several years, until they are around ten years old, because parents believe that by this age children can handle the long walk to school more safely.
A fourth reason, for females, is that they will just “move away.” Because Yi marriage is patrilocal, young women move away from their natal families after they get married. Therefore the Yi are reluctant to educate their daughters, because the investment spent educating them is considered lost to the family when a daughter moves away to her husband's family. Also, some traditional Yi believe that educated women make less obedient wives.
According to statistics from the Liangshan Prefecture Education Commission, the percentage of children ages seven to twelve in school is about 80 percent as a whole for Liangshan but only 37 percent for Yi females (Liangshan Prefecture Education Commission 1994c, 1). While the Yi rationale for not educating women is similar to the Han, its effect is much stronger. Han peasant females at least start school, and many of them in Liangshan enter secondary school. For the Yi, however, most girls who start
What thoroughly surprised me in interviewing students is that, with the exceptions described below, no one mentioned ethnic identity issues as a reason for not attending school. No one said that Yi students are reluctant to attend school because the schools are usually run by Han, conducted in the Han language, attended mostly by Han students, and located in Han areas. The possible loss of one's own cultural values and beliefs, as well as one's mother tongue, as one spends one's prime years away from that culture and its socializing agents—parents and other relatives—was never mentioned as a concern. This is all the more surprising considering that the Yi do not like the Han and see them as culturally quite different; the observation made universally throughout Liangshan by the Yi is that the Yi are honest whereas the Han are dishonest and sneaky. The traditional Yiantagonism toward the Han (who were often seen as slaves and captured by the Yi) remains, and is perhaps most evident in the fact that one of the worst insults a Yi can give another Yi is to call him Hxiemga (Han), since it means that person's ancestors were slaves.
The lack of ethnic identity issues affecting school participation is also all the more surprising given the very strong presence of such issues in Western educational contexts. Of course, one might suppose that my informants were reluctant to talk about ethnic identity issues because of the sensitivity of such issues. But in fact, the Yi pride themselves on their frankness and honesty, and I found that informants never hesitated to tell me things about interethnic relations, which were much more sensitive than the issue of whether they felt ambivalent about leaving home to attend school in a Han area. Whenever I felt that an informant was opening up and being very honest, I would use the occasion to ask about ethnic identity issues and schooling. Many times I would explain that some people have commented that in America some African American students see school, and success in school, as representative of acquiescence to the majority white culture that usually controls the educational system. Thus these students respond by dropping out of school or at least withholding their full effort from school.
But even my closest informants were quick to deny any parallels between my description of the American system and the Yi response to school, even though in other respects the Yi identify with African Americans, recognizing
The one exception arose when discussing the very clear asymmetry between school participation of Yi from mixed-ethnic counties versus those from pure-Yi counties. The latter were much less likely to send their children to school. One informant, whose ancestors had been proud practitioners of the occupation of bimo (see Bamo Ayi, chapter 8 in this volume), told me that many of his Zhaojue County (a county with a high concentration of Yi and few Han) relatives scolded him for receiving a Han education. He said that his relatives who are bimo are reluctant to send their children to school, which I would suggest is because bimo, the traditional teachers of the Yi, feel that the ascendant Han education is in conflict with, and a threat to, the traditional teachings of bimo. Many bimo know that the Han, as well as many Yi who have been educated in Han schools, look down on bimo as unscientific, superstitious frauds. Bimo may resent this attitude toward their profession and refuse to send their own children to schools run by, essentially, the competition. (To get a sense of the potential magnitude of this phenomenon it may be useful to know that, according to recent figures, bimo and bimo students comprise 8 percent of the male population in Meigu County, one of the counties with an overwhelmingly Yi population and low school attendance [Gaha 1996, 21—22].)
The hostility of bimo to modern schools may explain why my informant's relatives, many of whom are descendants of bimo, chided him for attending “Han schools.” But why are even non-bimo Yifrom Zhaojue, Butuo, and other counties with high Yi populations unlikely to send their children to school? The principal of MZ said that he believed it was because such areas lacked a long tradition of schools, whereas areas where Han and Yi lived together had schools. In mixed areas wealthy Yi occasionally hired Han tutors and this, the principal said, led those Yi to develop a tradition of education and a recognition of its value. A principal at a country elementary school from Butuo agreed. He believed that in his native Yuexi County Yi parents felt that it was valuable to send their children to school. In fact they competed to do so—if X's neighbor sent his children to school, X felt obligated to do the same in order to keep up with his neighbor. No such dynamic exists, however, in Butuo, this principal told me, and hence school participation rates there are very low.
What all of the above suggests is that for the Yi, with the possible exception of bimo, schools do not symbolize majority Han culture, so that going to school never becomes a polarized and politicized act of capitulation to the majority. Instead, Yi from areas where there is a tradition of schooling view schools as a pragmatic means to get ahead.
This meaning of education really became clear to me during conversations with a quho (White Yi) MZ student from Yanyuan County, a county with a mixture of Han and Yi. This student, whom I will call by his Han name Li Xiaoping, told me how he had ended up going to school rather than working on the family farm. He had two older brothers, both of whom were educated, and so Li's father had decided that Li did not need to attend school because his brothers could obtain for Li's relatives the perks of an educated person—a paying job with a steady cash income and the possibility of influence with local government officials. In addition, Li's father, although fairly well off financially, believed he could save tuition money by not sending Li to school, and he would have Li at home to help with the family's farmwork.
But on one memorable day seven-year-old Li was tending the family sheep when he passed by the open door of a local elementary school. Li stood in the back of a classroom listening, and felt overwhelmed with excitement at what he heard. Soon after this incident he told his brothers that he wanted to go to school, and they helped persuade their father that Li should go. After graduation from junior middle school, Li was preparing to leave Yanyuan for senior middle school in Xichang, a fair distance away. A large group of males from Li's clan gathered together to send him off. They gave him a large sum of money and told him to study diligently. They said their clan had not raised a well-educated person in a long time, and they promised to help him whenever he needed help.
If Li and his relatives saw school as a way to get ahead, this is also how the Han living near Li's home viewed education. And many of them did not like the idea of their Yi neighbors going to school. The elementary school Li attended was located in the valley, about an hour-and-a-half walk from Li's home. Han teenagers would linger near the school and try to prevent Yikids from getting to school. Groups of them would often beat up the Yi students, and Li himself was beaten up by them. This, and other experiences, left Li feeling that the Han were mean and bullying, while the Yi were polite and kind—an observation he often shared with me.
During MZ's winter vacation I went to visit Li's family. While sitting outside in the courtyard of the Li home on a cool but sunny February day, a neighbor rushed in with some bad news. He told Li's father, a man to whom the local Yi turned to for leadership when there were problems, that a group of Han—several dozen men, with one or two of them representing each family—had come earlier that day to the construction site of a primary school the local Yi were building. They had come to protest the building of the school, claiming that the school interfered with the grazing of their livestock. (Even to me, it was very clear upon seeing it that the school, only the foundation of which had been built, was far too small to interfere with anyone's grazing, especially since it sat high up in the foothills, a forty-five-minute walk from the Han areas in the valley.) The Han had argued with the few Yi at the school
ARE ETHNICITY IDENTITY ISSUES SALIENT FOR THOSE YI WHO DO GO TO SCHOOL?
In Western contexts one of the explanations for discipline problems and the lack of effort among disenfranchised groups in schools is that misbehavior and the withholding of effort are means by which ethnic minority students symbolize their refutation of their teachers and the dominant culture they represent, and their allegiance to their peers and more generally their minority identities (Fordham 1996; Erickson 1987).
In order to see if this occurred among students at MZ, I interviewed dozens of Yi students and asked the following questions: Who does better academically in school—Han or Yi students—and why? What students are popular in your class and why? Yi student informants, the principal, and Han and Yi teachers almost unanimously agreed that Han students at MZ do better than Yi students. As noted earlier, one reason often given for why Yi do not do as well as Han is that Yi, having gone to inadequate rural primary schools, lack a good educational foundation (jichu). Many Yialso explained that they have difficulty in school because instruction is given in the Han language, which is not their mother tongue. (Surprisingly, even students who had been living in Han areas as students and attended years of school claimed that the Han language was a major barrier preventing them from doing well in school.)
The most commonly given explanation for a difference in academic achievement was that the Han study harder than the Yi, and that the Yi like to “play” (war).
[6] It was true that the top-ranked students at MZ were mostly Han, and it is my impression that those students worked very hard. However, both Han and Yistudents may have been somewhat misled about the nature of Han students due to the fact that the school intentionally recruited a certain percentage of academically outstanding Han students in order to spur on the Yi students to study more diligently. The Han students at MZ were thus quite probably not representative of Han students in general. My impression is that they studied harder, for example, than students at the prestigious urban school where I conducted my previous research.
When I was told that Yido not study as hard, I always pushed for further explanation. One Yi student explained that the Yi do not studyBut what is especially important is the explanations I did not get. First, no one—Yi or Han—claimed that the Yi were intellectually inferior to the Han. In fact quite a number of Yi informants (but no Han informants) said they believed that the Yi are intellectually superior to the Han. Second and even more significant, no one said that the Yi withheld effort in order to “act Yi.” While working hard was clearly identified as Han behavior, no one said that the Yi choose not to work hard so that they do not seem like Han. Just as Yistudents denied that Yiavoided or dropped out of school as a statement of ethnic protest, they also denied that they misbehaved or did less work in order not to be like Han. In fact when I asked students what they had learned, if anything, by going to school with Han students, a common answer was that they had learned to study more diligently. This was seen as a Han virtue, and one that the Yi should adopt. Many students told me that the Yi should have a sense of pride in their ethnic group (minzu zizunxing), and when I asked what this meant, they usually explained that one should strive to earn honor for one's own ethnic group (wei women minzu zheng guang) through diligent study. (Han students often use a similar phrase, except that they say they want to earn honor for their country, something I never heard the Yi say.) Perhaps especially indicative of the absence of the ethnic politicization of effort is the fact that MZ's principal has specifically tried to increase the percentage of Han students at the school so that the Yi will emulate Han assiduousness. This strategy would not work if Yi were prone to do the opposite of what the Han do.
What is especially interesting about the issue of effort is that while whether one works hard or not is not ethnically symbolic for the Yi, effort is politicized (in the sense of symbolizing a contest of allegiances) for the Han, at least among urban Han. When interviewing students at Third Affiliated, I was often told that students who are too diligent aredisliked. They are viewed as too much the teacher's pet and, because of their diligence, not friendly enough to peers. It is the student who is intelligent (congming) whom students respect. Congming generally indicates a person who can learn things without really trying too hard. It also connotes someone who is naughty (tiaopi) and rebellious—the opposite of the obedient and simple, honest (laoshi) person. Third Affiliated students often liked and respected social, smart, somewhat rebellious and naughty classmates.
I asked Yi students who they most liked and who was most popular. In contrast
[7] My focus at MZ was Yi students and so I did not formally study Han students' attitudes. It may be that MZ Han students, who were mainly from peasant backgrounds, shared many of the Yi students' views about honesty and hard work.
Nor did the Yipoliticize disobedience to the teacher. Whereas urban Han students, caught in a complex social structure that rewards those who can display their morality and competence, thrilled at the prospect of disobeying an incompetent or immoral teacher and viewed the consistently obedient student as dull in both a social and a mental sense, the Yi looked up to students who were consistently obedient and polite toward their teachers. Hence I did not see Yi students trying to challenge or disobey teachers in order to score points with their Yi (or Han) peers.
I must add however that, ironically, both Yi students and Yi and Han teachers viewed the actual behavior of MZ Yi students as less polite than that of Han MZ students. This is one aspect of MZ that I never fully understood, since the Yi seemed to me to be as polite, if not a bit more polite, than the Han students. Perhaps the explanation for this lies in different cultural definitions of politeness. For me, and for many American teachers, Han students are too talkative out of turn during class; the Yi, on the other hand, are quiet and are good listeners and thus seemed polite according to my own, admittedly American, standards of politeness. For Han teachers at MZ, however, a student who is in the wrong should be apologetic and contrite (just as anyone whose immorality is exposed should be—see Schoenhals 1993). Han students at MZ were this way, at least to their teachers' faces, whereas Yi students were less sycophantic and hence were viewed as impolite by their teachers. But when not in a confrontation with the teacher, Yi students were less gratuitously naughty, and disobedient, than the Han I studied at Third Affiliated; and therefore disobedience, like effort, does not symbolize the ethnic or generational opposition of the Yi toward their teachers.
ANALYSIS: THE NATURE OF YI ETHNIC IDENTITY AS AN EXPLANATION FOR THE YI RESPONSE TO SCHOOLING
Why, then, do the Yi not view school as a site for the contestation of ethnicity? I maintain that this is because Yi identity does not conform to the traditional dynamics of ethnicity as described by anthropologists who have worked in other ethnic contexts.
My basic premise is simple: The Yido not see school as a setting for ethnic identity contestation because, among the Yi, identity—ethnic and social—is fixed at birth and therefore not contestable. Yi society is divided into two
Yet why is ethnicity politicized in schools in other caste societies? Surely race in America is one of the purest ascriptive ideologies in the world, and yet blacks and whites in America still struggle over their identities, and the manipulation of them in and out of school. In America, however, ascribed ideologies of race coexist with the ideology that status is achieved depending upon one's merit. The achieved and ascribed aspects of the ideologies interact and counteract each other, so that race becomes seen as manipulable to a certain extent. One's actual race may not be changeable, but in the arena where status becomes contested—in schools—racial allegiances and racial statuses can be contested: Doing well in school is viewed by, for example, some blacks as allegiance to white society and a betrayal of their own black communities (Fordham 1996). For other blacks, doing well in school becomes a means to challenge the low status of blacks by challenging the dominant majority's stereotyping of blacks as academically less capable (ibid., especially chap. 6).
But for the Yi, social status and ethnic status are both incontestable. And in fact they are really the same thing! The nuoho think of themselves as higher status precisely because they are pure Yi, whereas they believe the quho have some Han and other non-Yi blood mixed in. Those at the very bottom of Yi society are Han and other non-Yi who were captured as slaves shortly before the end of slavery in 1958. Thus Yi social hierarchy is based on an ethnic hierarchy. This link in hierarchies is manifested in marriage too, since the reason nuoho do not marry quho is because the latter are not pure Yi, and no Yi will marry a non-Yi, who is by definition lower in status. Even the Queen of England would be rejected by Yi men as a spouse, one nuoho informant jokingly told me (although the point he was making was a serious one). The social-ethnic link ensures that no fundamental aspect of Yi identity is contestable, hence the noncontested nature of education for the Yi.
The ethnic-social status link, curiously enough, means that ethnicity is
Thus the Yi, though poor and numerically insignificant in China, see themselves as superior to the Han. Therefore they do not act, with regard to school, like a minority group. This superiority is, again, not a construction based upon an opposing Ethnic Other. The Yi do not feel good about themselves by looking down on other ethnicities, as one informant explained to me. They simply know and feel that their essence makes them better. Thus there is no Yi feeling of inferiority at being a minority, nor is their sense of self-worth insecure and always in need of assertion, in contrast to the Han, who always look down on others in order to bolster their own insecure selfesteem. What all this means is that doing well or not doing well in school is not tied up with ethnic esteem issues. The Yi neither feel doomed to educational insignificance because they are minorities—in fact, as noted, many Yi believe they are smarter than the Han—nor, however, do the Yi feel they must prove their superiority educationally. How one does in school and in work is, in large part, due to fate, one informant explained, thus taking school attendance and performance out of the realm of personal, cultural, and ethnic identity. The one exception to this is the Yi recognition that the Han work harder at school, but again this observation causes no Yi any real sense of cultural inferiority or angst (as it might the Han). It is simply a fact—benign tradition, which can be easily changed without an identity conflict about becoming too Han if one works too hard.
OTHER ISSUES BEARING ON SCHOOL
There are a few other issues that help to explain the Yi response to school. First, while technically school attendance is required through grade nine by law, this law is not enforced, so school is optional. Rarely does any official
Second, very rarely do Yi females get to go to school. Thus education is seen as a privilege—male privilege. There is, therefore, no sense that going to school, or doing well in school, is emasculating for males. Good male Yi students are not teased or socially ostracized, as sometimes occurs among the Han. (It is important to add, however, that several Yi and Han females who did especially well at science were teased repeatedly by a group of Yi males from a humanities classroom. This seems, unfortunately, to be consistent with the Yi view of education as male privilege—a privilege these females were violating, and doing so at the expense of Yi male egos, since both Yi and Han more greatly esteem those who do well in science than in the humanities.)
Third, there is no perception, or reality, of widespread job discrimination against the Yi in Liangshan and consequently no sense among the Yi that they might do well in school yet fail to secure a good job because of discrimination. The Yimake up over half the prefectural officials in Liangshan, and these jobs are won by going to college and then being appointed to such a position. Thus the Yi feel confident that if they do well in school, and get into college, they will be rewarded with a good job. This is in clear contrast to, for example, the American situation, where the legacy of open discrimination is only a generation back, and the perception of its persistence deters some minority students from really working hard in school (Ogbu 1974).
Fourth, the Yi communities are still quite autonomous in Liangshan, culturally, socially, and linguistically. There is thus no real reasonable fear that education will lead to the Yi assimilating Han ways of doing things, and thus lead to the destruction of Yi culture. The position of Yi communities high in the mountains and Yi pride in their culture ensure that the Yi language, culture, and communities will persevere into the indeterminable future.
CONCLUSION
The Yi present an interesting case study for the study of ethnic identity and its relationship, or lack thereof, to academic achievement and behavior in school. The ascribed nature of Yi status and ethnicity means that the assimilation/separation dilemmas faced by minority ethnic groups in a multiethnic society are not confronted by the Yi, even those who go to largely
Not only does the ascribed nature of ethnicity preclude assimilation dilemmas and the politicization of ethnicity, but the relativized nature of ethnicity—in which every Yi person is slightly more or less Yi, rather than Yior not-Yi—leads Yiidentity to not depend on a dichotomized Ethnic Other for its own definition. It is hard to convey what I nevertheless felt very strongly about the Yi: The Yi do not think of themselves or their own worth as deriving from a contrast with an inferior Ethnic Other. They do not need to constantly look down on, for example, the Han, to make themselves, as Yi, feel superior. They simply feel they are Yi at birth, and by birth, are good. Thus, whereas in most multiethnic settings one group often derives its identity and value through repeated performances of opposition to an Ethnic Other, the Yi show no such dynamic. Consequently, the Yi do not need to do the opposite of a dichotomized Ethnic Other such as the Han in order to define and defend their own identity. They can do well in school, or fail at school, with little effect on their sense of who they are as Yi.
15. Nuosu Women's Economic Role in Ninglang, Yunnan, under the Reforms
Wu Ga (Luovu Vugashynyumo)
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND RURAL WOMEN'S STATUS
Scholars writing about women and economic development are divided on the question of whether the penetration of capitalist markets into communities previously practicing subsistence agriculture is helpful or detrimental to women's position in family and community. Boserup (1970), for example, suggested that in many colonial situations, development, along with Eurocentric ideas about the proper role of women, led to erosion of women's traditional social rights and economic autonomy. Dauber and Cain (1981) and Ahmed (1985) pointed out that the development of commercial agriculture and wage labor had deleterious effects on rural women. Other literature has stressed the “feminization of subsistence agriculture” in situations where men have switched to cash crops or migrant labor and left women with the burden of providing for the family's subsistence needs (Staudt and Jacquette 1982; Tinker 1990).
Afonja (1980), however, disagreed with these blanket statements, pointing out that it may be wrong to imagine that the predevelopment world was one where women always had a significant degree of independence. She also noted that the feminization of agriculture has not occurred everywhere, that there are places where women's agricultural contribution remains small and others where commercialization has increased both women's and men's agricultural labor inputs. Boserup's general formulations are thus applicable only under certain conditions.
Since the late 1970s, China's economic reforms have greatly changed the structure of agricultural economy and rural society. The introduction of the household responsibility system and the creation of related economic incentives have significantly stimulated agricultural productivity.As a result, surplus
My field study of Nuosu women in Ninglang County, Yunnan, presents a more complicated picture. In some villages, there are new forms of stratification and inequality, while in others the reforms have brought new economic opportunities for women. Because of the nature of Nuosu society, including the patrilineal clan ideology,women's social roles aredifferent from those found in Han villages. Detailed examination of these case studies will show that it is impossible to generalize about the effects of economic reform on women's status even for people of asingle ethnic group in a single county, let alone for China as a whole.
NUOSU WOMEN'S ROLES BEFORE THE REFORM PERIOD
When economic reforms were first implemented in the 1980s, the rural economy of places like Ninglang, and the role of women in that economy, had already been through considerable changes under the collective agricultural regime of the 1950s through the 1970s. Before the 1950s, what evidence we have from Han-language sources indicates that Nuosu women played a variety of roles in the traditional agricultural economy. In general, it seems that in traditional society in the Ninglang area, women's economic role was determined by class. Among wealthy families, who also tended to belong to the high-status nuoho stratum, women's work consisted primarily of herding sheep and other domestic animals; the women rarely plowed fields or grew crops. Among commoners, women's economic roles seem to have been more varied. I have recorded the following roles: planting fruit trees; herding sheep; carrying wood; planting and harvesting buckwheat, corn, and potatoes; gathering mushrooms; and gathering medicinal plants from the mountains for sale in the market. In addition, both high-and low-caste women engaged in crafts such as weaving wool, dyeing cloth, making hats, and spinning and weaving silk linings for skirts. Even before 1956, there was also local variation in women's agricultural work: in buckwheat-growing areas women tended to have a greater role in agriculture than in oat-growing areas, where fields were fallowed in alternate years and labor requirements were less intensive.
In 1956, socialism came to Ninglang with the implementation of the Democratic Reforms. Despite the geographic remoteness and ethnic minority status of the Ninglang population, nationwide policies of collectivization, communization,
After 1960, the large communes, here as elsewhere, were broken down into smaller collective units, which resulted in a recovery from the famine of 1960—62; but soon the reradicalization of policy during the Cultural Revolution caused further troubles for local farmers. The emphasis on “grain as the key link” brought particularly deleterious results to a mountainous area like Ninglang, where the traditional economy had emphasized—in addition to grain—forestry,livestock raising, and fruit growing. In order to raise more grain, large areas of forests were cut down. In addition, local peasants had no experience with high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat and could not obtain enough fertilizer to grow these new varieties efficiently. As a result, there was an overall decline in agricultural productivity.
How did Nuosu women fare during the period of collective agriculture? My interviews with several local women concerning this period indicate that they had been dissatisfied and had displayed a fair amount of resistance to what they considered unsuitable policies. Some had used their private land for sideline enterprises and crop diversification. Others had engaged in the illegal practice of reclaiming wasteland without official permission in order to be able to plant freely. Jare Anyumo recalls this time: “There are Yi proverbs that say, ‘In the high mountains, animal husbandry is fit; in the lowlands, honeybee production is proper,' and ‘Lower land does not need plowing; the land itself is fertile.’ Here we live in high mountain conditions, which have low productivity due to weather conditions. The project of scientific agricultural experiments to double-crop rice and wheat, disregarding local conditions, brought disaster here.” She also pointed out the deleterious effects of collective incentive and compensation systems: “Before the economic reforms of the 1980s, for a long time there was no private land. Peasants always talked during working hours. They never cared about fertilizer or seeds. There were no training classes on how to plant corn covered with plastic during the winter. There was no migration policy, and no plan for planting fruit trees. During the commune period, I got 14 points a day,
[1] During the period of collective agriculture from 1956 to the early 1980s, production team members were paid in “work points” (gong fen), and the proceeds of the collective harvest were shared among the team's households according to the points earned by the households' members.
and at the end of the year this worked out to a cash income of 60 yuan. If you add work-pointJare Gagativumo could earn 300 yuan per year doing miscellaneous work in the township grain station, but the jobs were arduous: washing bedclothes for the township hotel, gathering wood for sale to cadres, mending and washing grain bags, digging ditches, and building roads.
Women also faced difficulties and inequities related to childbirth. Alur Zhoshy's wife, Lypimo, recalled, “After my first birth I only got eighteen days' rest, and my husband's mother was not at home. I had to garden food for my family. According to the rules, women who had given birth only received basic grain [jiben gongliang], but no work-point grain [gongfen liang]. I had to go back to the fields after giving birth. It was difficult for the whole family. Qumo Guoguo was right when she told you that during the 1950s, male peasants could earn 10 work points per day, but women could only earn 8. When a woman was resting after birth, in addition to her basic grain she received only 2 work points.”
Not all women had similar experiences. According to Qumo Lydimo,
During the 1950s and 1960s, I was part of the “hardworking youth team,” which was building the road into Yongningping. Each day I earned 10 work points. After this, I started working in Zhanhe, loading goods at the grain station. I received 10 yuan per day, and sometimes also could make 3 yuan per day making clothing; in addition I sold a pig for about 200 yuan and soybeans for another 200 yuan each year. I did almost anything to get money for my family: plowing and planting, loading goods, and working in a sewing shop. Women usually got only 7 or 8 points; the best received up to 20, while children got 2 points for herding the animals. There were many taboos against women climbing to the loft for grain, pruning apple trees, or plowing the land like men. Because my husband was working in a cloth factory, however, I did everything. He was not at home, so I had to do these male things. After six months, I had to bring children to the field and set them down there while I worked.
In general, then, Nuosu women's economic role was expanded in some ways during the collective period—they worked on road construction projects during the winter slack season, for example—and curtailed in others: forestry,animal husbandry,and craft production were all limited by the grainfirst policy. When the economic reforms came in the 1980s, however, Nuosu women gained opportunities to both resume traditional economic activities and develop new ways of making money in the market economy.
WOMEN'S ROLE SINCE THE ECONOMIC REFORMS
The economic reforms came to Ninglang, as they did to the rest of the country, beginning in the early 1980s. The former emphasis on subsistence production and self-sufficiency has been replaced, here as everywhere, with a
The relaxation of control over agriculture and the incentives of the market have had a profound impact on the Ninglang economy. In particular, traditional economic activities such as sheep raising and forestry have been revived on a large scale. Sheep are once again raised for wool and meat, and women play a large role in this industry. As Bbuyo Anyumo from Yongningping explained, “Shearing sheep wool is a woman's job. Nowadays the price of wool is 2 yuan per jin. We shear three times a year, in March, July, and October. The wool from July is the best. Generally 1 sheep produces about half a jin per shearing, for a total of 1.5 jin per animal per year. My family has 10 sheep, so we have 15 jin of wool per year. Women use the wool to make shapa, a special skirt and dress for winter time. We also make bedcovers. Sheep are also very important for parents, as gifts especially before they die. According to Nuosu custom, there should be a sheep killed for each person when they die. This is called ‘following-parents sheep.’”
Forestry has also become available to peasants again. In 1981, the county government distinguished state from collective forests, and in 1984 it further divided collective forests into collective and private forests and began using the contract system to divide up collective and private mountains. The government also instituted incentives for reforestation, paying families a certain amount for every mu of mountains reforested after cutting.
Forestry has thus become a significant source of peasant income in some areas. But unlike animal husbandry, forestry offers few opportunities for women. According to Jjisse Anyumo, “Tree cutting is only for men; women are not allowed to participate. Cutting trees is the most lucrative economic activity in the Xilaping area, but gender bias and discrimination exclude women from this job. For example, the 1992 lumber quota assigned to Yongningping Township is 10,000 cubic meters, and 5,000 for Xilaping. A wage of 24—30 yuan is paid for each cubic meter of wood cut. Women have no right to earn these wages, since they are not permitted to cut trees like men. Brothers and fathers are very proud of their special contribution to the family economy. Women can be road builders, but they are not permitted to cut trees. Why?”
Another new source of income is planting “covered corn,” an activity in which both men and women can participate. Sete Guojiamo explained,
To plant covered corn, you must spend money on the plastic cover. In Wanhe Village, we have five households who planted this corn. Special seeds cost
― 261 ―7 yuan per jin, with the government paying 5 and the household 2. This kind of corn is a high-yield crop, with up to 1,000 jin per mu, where 500 is generally considered a high yield here. To plant the corn we also need water, and some lazy households did not plant this corn since it requires too much water, and bringing water up to these mountain areas is very difficult. Other families are very industrious and weed three times.The first year I helped other people to plant, and the second year I started to plant myself. In Yongsheng County they started to plant this corn in 1985, but here we did not start until 1992. There were five households here who planted. We started on April 10—17, after the [Han Chinese] Qingming holiday, the Nuosu time of preparing the land, watering, fertilizing, planting, and covering it to try to maintain the temperature. Actually, we learned many new scientific methods, especially in pig feeding, from Mr. Sun [Han Chinese], a twenty-seven-year-old technician who has a nice attitude toward Nuosu women, and also from the station head, Hielie Lybusse, a Yi man who taught us how to use fertilizer.
It is thus evident that Nuosu women are once again playing a wider role in the local economy of Ninglang. But precisely because the reform policies had recognized the error of imposing a uniform, grain-growing regime on all areas, I found that the reform economy was taking very different directions in the three townships in which I worked, and that women's roles varied greatly from one part of Ninglang to another.
Yongningping
Yongningping is the most isolated and remote of the villages that served as my field sites. Of the forty villages in the township, twenty-eight lack water. Many parts of the township are not accessible to transport systems and thus not suitable for growing cash crops for export. In this area, women's work consists mainly of collecting water and firewood, preparing food, and engaging in the many tasks of preparing fields for and planting, fertilizing, and harvesting corn, the main subsistence crop in most of the township. In lower-lying areas, women also cultivate sweet potatoes, and they grow buckwheat in the higher regions. There is some fruit orchard development in Yongningping, and women plant, tend, and harvest fruit. Training classes have been held for Yongningping women to teach them proper spacing between crop rows, which crops can be interplanted with which trees, and how to tend trees for maximum yield.
Domestic livestock production is also very important in Yongningping. Taking care of livestock is the first job for younger girls, one that often prevents them from attending school. Women also build fences to protect crops from the incursions of domestic animals.
Xingyunpan
Household productivity in Xingyunpan is higher than in Yongningping, with corn yielding 800—1,000 jin per mu (in contrast to about 500 in Yongningping),
Xingyunpan is also Ninglang's model township for growing apple trees. According to the government plan, the 50,000 mu of land in the township was to be divided, with 24 percent planted in apple trees, 4 percent in huajiao (Sichuan peppercorn trees), 4 percent in plums, and 12 percent in forest species. Women are heavily involved in apple and other cash-crop production in Xingyunpan, as explained to me by the township head, Jiesha Wani:
The women of Xingyunpan benefited from the basic infrastructural construction of the 1950s: electricity from the reservoir built at that time has benefited seventeen villages. Since 1986, this water has helped women with apple tree planting, and there are now 12,000 mu producing apples. For example, the Alur Aguo family harvested 1,200 jin of apples in 1991; the Jiesha Guoguo family in Maoguping had only two apple trees, but their income was 500 yuan, and the Liu Yipu family planted 300 apple trees, and harvested 10,000 jin of apples, for a cash income of 5,000 yuan. Bbuyo Fuha's family won the first prize in the 1991 provincial apple competition in Kunming. The county policy is that both apples and green-manure crops can be exchanged for rice at the county grain station, and that the families developing these crops will pay no new taxes for six years. In the Xingyunpan area, these policies have resulted in 12,000 mu of apple orchards, with about 45 percent of the trees now producing fruit.
All this prosperous commercial agriculture has meant an increase in women's workloads. Green manure crops are planted in October and harvested in June. In June, sweet buckwheat is planted, and it is harvested in December. The busiest times for women are the harvest in September and planting season in March and April.
Wanhe
Of the areas in which I conducted research, Wanhe Village in Zhanhe Township is the most favored economically. Economic reform here brought privatization of land for villagers, but an unfair land policy has increased the inequality among village households. According to Aku Shama Gaga,
Wanhe Village divided its land in 1982, and at first there were three big groups contracting land from the village. My husband was head of the third group. Even at the beginning, the three groups were not given land of equal quality. Jjiggu Ajie'sgroup had the best land, and Jjiesse Yoqie's and my husband's groups had so-so land, so that when the land was further contracted to individual households,
In Wanhe No. 1 Village, many better-off households owe their success to the nonagricultural employment of husbands or daughters, rather than to hard work in agriculture. Poor households, on the other hand, are vulnerable to the effects of late planting, poor weeding, lack of cash for seed, transport problems, labor shortages, lack of agricultural knowledge, poor soil, and the inability to hire machinery.
Migration has also played a part in the agricultural division of labor in Wanhe. On the one hand, many male laborers have left the village in search of off-farm employment. This has left women from these households to participate in every aspect of agricultural production. They also purchase seed, fertilizers, and chemicals; hire extra labor; and market the surplus produce. On the other hand, because of the village's favorable location, thirteen families moved to it during the reform era. These people typically do not have land of their own, so they lease from families with a land surplus, and the latter now count rent as a major source of income.
Ward (1986) pointed out the paradox that increasing women's work often simply meant longer workdays with no improvement in status, but it is clear that women's work in Ninglang differs greatly according to social status. Rich households in Wanhe are more likely to hire labor, while poorer people in Xingyunpan are more likely to rely on themselves, meaning that the workloads of women in Xingyunpan increased more than those of Wanhe women. Wanhe women from wealthy households are also more likely to set up shops to earn money, and this, along with their involvement in nonagricultural craft enterprises, has raised the value of their work for their families. At the same time, Wanhe women are more likely to engage in wage labor during the agricultural slack season. In other words, Wanhe women have achieved considerable economic independence in the reform era.
Women in Xingyunpan, by contrast, take a much more active role in agricultural work and take on multiple roles in the agricultural sector, aided by government extension services. In Yongningping, the most remote area, kinship-based social organization still survives, and women's work is mainly concerned with the care of animals belonging to their husbands.
Women and the Market
In Zhanhe, the commercialization of agriculture and the commoditization of the household economy, along with the increased control exercised by
Much feminist research has concentrated on analyzing the social and economic background of women's move to the marketplace. Factors listed by Gugler and Flanagan (1978) and Vandsemb (1995) include divorce, widowhood, premarital pregnancy, barrenness, and escape from social pressures or disagreements between kin. Other scholars have in contrast stressed changes in the gender division of labor, as well as simply the expansion of the market itself. In the Zhanhe market there were many kinds of women active in trade. For example, divorced women moved from farming to marketing, and their market activity sometimes provided the sole support of their households. They were able to work in the market because their work did not depend on rigid separation of the home from the workplace. Women whose husbands had low incomes moved to the market as part of a strategy for coping with economic change. Some younger women entered the market to escape unhappy marriages. And others simply wanted to take advantage of newly diversified economic opportunities or, in the case of wealthy families, to further supplement their income. Some market women in Zhanhe were known to be very rich—Molie Agamo, for example, who told me,
I was married in 1972 and this year I am 41 years old. My sons are 19, 16, and 13, and are very helpful to me. Weused to live in Dahosan Village, Sibuhe Township, but in 1981 we moved to Wanhe because the location of this village is very good for commercial production. My husband returned from army service in 1989, took out loans to buy a tractor, and we made money from transport work. Last year, we sold pigs for 800 yuan, and I have used 10,000 yuan of family money to set up my first shop, and have now earned almost 30,000. I have also helped some women sell their mushrooms, medicinal plants, animal skins, wool, garlic, and vegetables. I pay a tax of 40 yuan to the government each year, along with an administrative fee of 15 to the village. I am a very lucky person, and I think I have also made some contributions. In our village, the Jjiesse brothers are the wealthiest—they have opened the first hotel. Zhanhe is a very complicated place; people even call it “Little Shanghai.” But the market of Zhanhe has helped many women, both rich and poor.
Alur Vugashoviemo is another woman who works in the market. She is a model laborer in animal rearing, with twelve pigs and fourteen chickens at her home when I visited her in 1993:
At first I only sold them to the county, but later on I learned that if I kill the pigs first and then sell them in the market, I will make more money. For example, if you sell live pigs to the county, you might get 100 yuan, but in the market you might make as much as 700, since the price is about 2.9 yuan per jin for live pigs, but good meat in the market might sell for as much as 5.8 or
― 265 ―even 6 yuan. My husband is so proud of me for this job—I can sometimes make more than he does.I started to learn to rear animals three years ago. I first talked with my friend, then I bought feed and high-quality pigs. I could not read the instructions on the feed bag, so I always had to bother Yang Qingning to read them for me. When my pigs got worms, I could not read the instructions, and put too much medicine in their food, so five of them died, and my husband was very angry. I cried also. This job can be difficult, too, but the market here has indeed helped me a lot. Compared with before 1982, when the government did not allow markets here, I really like the new situation.
With the rise of the market, women have stepped into the marketplace to make their careers and seek independence, but they also face new problems such as sexist violence. For example, Jiho Nyunyumo's fiancé accused her of being a prostitute and beat her so severely that she had to be hospitalized. Many men still see women, even those who work in the market, as property, and when incidents of sexual violence have happened in the Zhanhe market the police have played a rather passive role, either arriving late or not interfering, in deference to the power of male kin over women.
Since the Zhanhe market was formally established in 1986, there have been 116 women registered as traders. The majority of these come from the nearby counties of Huaping and Yongsheng. There are 11 women who belong to the special category of women with bad fate—divorced or widowed. Jjiesse Vuji Aqiemo reported,
After my husband went to military service, I came back to my own village. They [her husband's family] asked me back but I decided to divorce, and a friend helped me come here to work. After the death of her second husband, with a daughter and a son in school, Shama Lyviemo, at age forty-three, had to find some way to support them. Shama Viemo of Wanhe received her dowry of 3,000 yuan back after her divorce. She used 1,000 to rent a room and buy a sewing machine and some cloth to open a shop. Jjiesse Alymo, forty years old with no education, is from Wanhe No. 2 Village. Her first marriage ended in divorce, and she then married her former husband's brother, but this also ended in divorce. After the second divorce, she came here to open a shop in the market. She wants to help her two sons to go school.
CONCLUSION
The experiences of Nuosu women in Ninglang County demonstrate that there is no single trend that affects the status of female rural subsistence producers when they move into a market economy. The women of remote Yongningping have returned to something resembling their role in the traditional economy—animal husbandry, housework, and supplementary agricultural work, all within an economy mostly controlled by the men of their households.
16. The Yi Health Care System in Liangshan and Chuxiong
Liu Xiaoxing
There are, as yet, very few scholarly studies of the health care system of any Yi people, despite the presence of both a flourishing traditional sector and a biomedical sector advocated by the Chinese state. This chapter explores what causes changes and what remains the core of continuity in the health care system of two Yi peoples: the Nuosu in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan (see chapters 2—9, 14, and 15), and the Lolopo in Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan (see Erik Mueggler, chapter 10).
The field of health care was a major frontier where the Chinese state promoted scientific knowledge and techniques along with communist ideology, expecting ethnic minorities to give up their “backwardness” and identify themselves with the progressive nation-state. Under pressure by the state and the dominant Han ethnic group, the Yi neither gave up their ethnic identity and medical culture nor resisted loudly. Instead, people took their ritual performance underground during the years when it was officially forbidden. They pragmatically made use of the official health care, adopted some scientific knowledge, and eclectically modified their own medical practices, so as to survive and develop in the circumstances in which they were situated.
CULTURAL BACKGROUND OF THE YI HEALTH CARE SYSTEM
Ethnic Identity
Study of Yi health care is complicated by the fact that the different local groups classified in the 1950s as belonging to the Yi minzu (nationality, ethnic group) have different histories of interaction with the surrounding Chinese national culture and with Han people. According to recent research
There are similarities and differences between the Lolopo and Nuosu. Lolo is the reiterative of lo, which means tiger in Lolopo dialect (Liu Yaohan 1985, 40). Men call themselves Lolopo while women call themselves Lolomo among this group of the Yi. Nuosu also called themselves Lolo less than a century ago (Liu Yaohan 1980, 122). In Nuosu language, la means tiger, as do its variants lo, le, and lao, recorded in the literature (ibid., 120). People from both groups are proud of themselves for their special connection with the tiger (Liu Yaohan 1985, 41, 42). Before the Communist takeover, both state officials and their Han neighbors called them Lolo, which in Chinese, though similar in pronunciation to what they called themselves, carried the derogatory meaning “savages” or “barbarians.” Now, the state refers to the whole group as the Yi; what the people call themselves depends on which language they are speaking. They call themselves Yiwhen speaking Chinese; they call themselves Lolopo, Lipo, Nuosu, and so forth when speaking their own languages. Their Han neighbors simply call them minzu or sometimes lao Yi bao (old Yi brothers), which connotes incomprehensibility, dirt, and laziness, as Harrell has observed (1990).
Economic Life
Most Yi in China live a rural life that depends on agricultural production. Long Jianmin, in his article on the historical restriction of production in the Yiarea, points out that there are neither broad lowland plains nor large grasslands in the mountains where the Yi reside, since valleys and rivers cut them into small pieces. The Yi engage in both swidden and sedentary agriculture and animal husbandry. They grow buckwheat, potatoes, and oats in high mountain areas and maize, wheat, peas, and beans in the lower uplands, planting corn and rice where conditions permit. They farm extensively using simple tools and techniques. Slash-and-burn as a form of cultivation was practiced at least until the late 1980s and may be practiced still (Long Jianmin 1987, 196—210; Yu Hongmo 1988, 21). The Yi also raise domestic animals, including sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, and horses. To a great extent, this industry provides resources for maintaining and promoting relations based on lineage or family systems, such as gifts and sacrifices. The characteristics of Yi trading activities well portrayed the influence of clan principles.
Until a few decades ago, Lolopo were not good at commercial activities in their homeland. Many of them were ashamed to sell their products at local
Traditionally, these peoples' food supply and cash income have depended predominantly on local agricultural production. All things related to agriculture are meaningful, and some are especially significant to them, such as mountains, streams, rains, fire, crops, and animals. Myths and legends describe the close relationships between human beings and these natural phenomena and entities in the physical world. Each subgroup of the Yi has festivals and ceremonies celebrating and reinforcing such cosmic relations. Nowadays, many Yi people live in cities and have entered production sectors other than agriculture, such as factories, mines, businesses, governmental institutions and services. The education they receive and the health care services they use have led them to know more about the germ theory and biomedicine than their fellow villagers know. Yet, the majority of the Yiarepeasants, and most of them maintain traditional notions of health and illness.
Social Organization
Social organization among the various Yi groups is not all the same, because the Yiareso diverse. Generally speaking, however, there are two models. Most Yi in Yunnan and Guizhou were strongly influenced by Han Chinese hundreds of years ago. Their political systems fit into the systems of Chinese dynasties. The most important social unit is the family, a term that conveys both political connection to the regional community and blood ties to the broader family system. Most Yi families are nuclear families. Normally a household consists of a husband, wife, and their unmarried children. When the children grow up and get married, they form a new family and live in a separate house. Usually a woman marries into her husband's family. However, it is not uncommon for a man to marry into his wife's family and carry on her family name if her parents do not have a son.
Unlike these subgroups in Yunnan and Guizhou, Nuosu in Liangshan maintained the administrative function of their patrilineage system (see Anne Maxwell Hill and Eric Diehl, chapter 3 in this volume) until 1956, when the Chinese Communist Party carried out the Democratic Reforms, replacing lineage systems with all levels of political institutions. Nuosu mainly live in and work as nuclear families, but the lineage remains significant to most of them and still affects their lives. Before 1956, the Yisociety in Liangshan was divided into four social strata: nuo or nuoho (elites), qunuo or quho
In sum, among the Yi, the nuclear family is the basic unit of production and living, while the patrilineage is the institution for keeping social order and security among Nuosu in Liangshan. Ancestors, who brought people into the world and held them together in families and lineages, are highly respected, and their blessing is desired by their descendants. As a result, a great number of healing rituals involve the ancestors (see Bamo Ayi, chapter 8 in this volume).
THE HEALTH CARE SYSTEM
The health care system of the Yi community is what Charles Good called an ethnomedical system that includes the total medical resources available to and utilized by this community (1987, 22). It is concerned not only with how to manage bodily suffering but also with the economic lives, ideologies, and sociopolitical relationships among the Yi people and their interactions with the outside world. The Yi, like any other people, have, over time, developed their own ways to cure and prevent illnesses by integrating other people's ideas and techniques into their healing practices. Yi healing practices are thus a mixture of indigenous beliefs and outside influences.
Theory of Illness
Yi consider etiology in terms of both natural and supernatural aspects. According to Azi Ayue, a Yi physician trained in traditional Chinese medicine, the Yi consider “wind” to be the most important cause of illness. Normally, wind is the dynamic of life and production, but it also causes sicknesses under certain circumstances. Poisons and worms also lead to illnesses (1993, 98—99).
Supernatural causes are many. For example, an illness may result from the fact that an ancestor blames the living descendants for not providing sacrifices on time. Or perhaps one's ancestors are too weak to protect their descendants because they have not received enough offerings. Or an illness may be a message that an ancestor injured by wild spirits sends to living descendants in order to ask for their assistance. Spirits avenge themselves on people who offended them, and this may take the form of an illness. People lose their souls by being frightened or seduced. People see strange phenomena, such as snakes copulating or a cow's tail tangled with a tree, phenomena
Although many Yi do not reject biomedical causes of sicknesses, most interpretations of illnesses are still based on the traditional theory of supernatural causes. These beliefs are constructed by the Yipeople from their cosmology and other aspects of ideology,and constitute one of the major factors that determine patterns of illness behavior and health-care decision-making. Some of these beliefs are less important, so people are not very serious about them. Others, such as evil caused by various spirits, and ancestors' roles in health problems, have been deeply rooted in most people's minds at both conscious and unconscious levels over time. Therefore, it is very difficult to change or eliminate them.
Spirits as the Cause of Illness
Yi divide spirits into good and evil. Some spirits attack people aggressively, some punish people who offended them, while still others help ritual practitioners heal patients. Spirits are usually named after the illness they cause, such as the spirit of leprosy, of headache, of red eyes, of the drowned, of the people who jumped off cliffs, and so on. Regarding the latter two, a person seduced by one of these evil spirits would lose control of his or her mind and jump into deep water or off a cliff; thus these are considered the result of illness. The Yi call on ritual healers to invoke a certain kind of spirit to release the relevant sickness from the patient when possible. There are so many spirits in the world of the Yi that the interactions between human beings and spirits take place at least as frequently as those among people themselves. Spirits resemble human beings in that both need food and both have feelings, so, like people, spirits can be pleased or offended. Although people carefully maintain good relations with their ancestors and good spirits, and endeavor to stay away from bad spirits, they cannot avoid offending or running into the latter because the spirits are invisible. Dissatisfaction, anger, punishment, and invasion by the spirits are common causes of sickness (Lin 1961; Qin et al. 1988; Ma Xueliang 1943). Punishment can be the result of the spirits' dissatisfaction and anger, but invasion can be initiated by ancestors and other spirits for other reasons, such as by request of the victim's human rivals. Of all supernatural beings, ancestors are particularly significant to the Yi.
The Role of Ancestors in Health Care
In contrast to Han Chinese, who see ancestors primarily as benign beings, the immediate concern of the Yi with their ancestors tends to be etiologic,
Cosmology
Yi have a strong interest in, and keep searching for, the origin of the universe and of human beings. This is manifested in Yi traditional culture in the form of myth, both in oral epics and classic literature written in the old Yiscripts. Expressions of the cosmology of Yi people vary from one subgroup to another. Some describe water as the origin of the universe. They say that “the first thing evolved from Chaos was water,” then all things on the earth were developed from it (SFAS 1960). Some suggest that the air or fog formed the sky, the earth, and all kinds of beings and items in the world (Luo and Chen 1984; GINS 1982; Guo and Tao 1981). In an Axi epic the original form of the universe and everything in the world was a cloud (HIFY 1978). A wellknown Yimyth in Yaoan entitled Meiguo describes how a tiger's body became the universe and all planets and things on the earth were gradually generated from it (CIFY 1959).
No matter how diverse the ideas about the origin of the universe are, all emphasize movement and change. The word universe is written in old Yi as two symbols, OO
e . Although Yi characters are primarily phonetic, some of them, such as these two, are hieroglyphic. O indicates the space in which all things exist; O
e is an egg, which implies life and relentless movement (Bai 1995, 67, 93; Zhu Juyuan, personal communication, 1995). As far as the origin of human beings is concerned, myths and legends express awareness
Male and Female In the Yi myth of creation, uplands, trees, grass, stones, and people are all divided into male and female. Things exist and develop only as pairs, such as the sun paired with the moon, the sky paired with the earth, big stars paired with small stars, and black clouds paired with white clouds (CIFY 1959; HIFY 1978). One can still see the trace of dual cosmology in Yi daily life. For example, the Lipo subgroup of the Yi in Tanhuanshan, Yunnan, divides natural objects and household utensils into female and male according to their size: the larger objects are female and the smaller ones, male. The Yi in Ninglang had used a solar calendar composed of ten months in a year and thirty-six days in a month. The Yi named the months after five pairs of elements—wood, fire, earth, copper, and water—so they had five female months and five male months each year (Liu Yaohan 1985, 59). Yi astrology, according to the associations of sun-female bright and moon-male-dark, divides a day and night into female day and male night (ibid., 96). Some Lolopo families in Yunnan enshrine their ancestors in calabashes. Each calabash contains a couple's spirits: parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. The calabash inhabited by the souls of male and female ancestors is called nielomo. Portraits of ancestors (male and female together) are worshiped in some Yi households. The descendants call this portrait nielomo as well. Nie means ancestral spirit, lo means tiger, and mo means female. That is, they use the female ancestor to represent the ancestors of both sexes. Interestingly, the way the Yi categorize the features of male and female is very similar to that of the Moso and the Lahu, among whom women are highly respected (Du Shanshan 1992; Yan and Song 1983).
Seven and Nine The Yi use the number seven to signify female and nine to indicate male. In a Nuosu cremation, for example, they make a coarse wooden chair with two long boards on either side and a wooden plank across
Left and Right According to Liu Yaohan, the Yi, unlike many groups in the world, see the left as positive, the right as negative, and they associate female with the left and male with the right (1985). Meiguo, a Yi myth about the universe being developed from the body of a tiger, says the tiger's “left eye became the sun and right eye the moon” (CIFY 1959). The Yi highly value the left. When a bimo holds a ceremony, he calls the souls of the ancestors with his left hand while he drives away evil spirits with his right hand. Some Yi literature recorded the ancient custom of handing things to ancestors, respected ones, seniors, and parents with the left hand, and to wild ghosts and belittled ones with the right hand. The Lolopo in Yunnan make ancestral tablets with the female on the left and the male on the right. All these data indicate that the left is considered better, stronger, and more positive than the right in Yi cosmology, and that the Yi relate the female to the left, the sun, and ancestors (Liu Yaohan 1985, 48—49).
The above discussion of cosmology may seem a digression from the subject of the Yi health care system, but it signifies the ideological and historical aspects of Yi culture. It is on this cultural ground that Yi developed their health beliefs, forged their interpretations of illnesses, and evaluated health care providers in each sector. These peoples' understanding and evaluation of different health care sectors affects what kind of health care they choose—how they make their decisions and act on them. Having examined these basic cosmological beliefs, we can now consider where the Yiseek medical help.
Sectors of the Health Care System
As far as health care is concerned, both Arthur Kleinman (1980) and Charles Good (1987) suggest that people choose methods from three different sectors. The popular sector, Kleinman states, can be seen as a matrix containing several levels: individual, family, social network, and community beliefs and activities. The traditional (folk) sector refers to medicine and is frequently classified into sacred and secular parts, but the division is often blurred in
The Popular Sector Among most peoples in the world, the family is the first place to seek healing for illness and injury, an estimate of the seriousness of one's health problems, and help in making decisions for further treatment. Many people in Yi communities know at least some methods of curing an ailment or minor injury and are able to hold simple rituals for the purpose of healing illness. Commonly, the Yi people ask for medical help from neighbors or kin. Most ailments are actually handled within households. For example, to stop bleeding Yi apply a kind of efflorescent stone powder, a glue made from spider webs, or chicken feathers to the wound. To treat different kinds of pains, they use massage, steam, and/or single or combined herbal remedies. The Nuosu patrilineage plays an important role in preventing and curing illness in Liangshan. Some healing rituals involve a whole lineage: when a ritual is held to imprecate evil spirits or divine the agent who cast a spell on the patient, each family has a representative attending the ritual to join the chanting or shouting, because a collectivity will make this kind of ritual powerful. Hu Qing jun (1985) describes a sort of children's gathering called axyi momge in the Liangshan area. To halt a disease that was quickly spreading from village to village, all children of the village attended the meeting under the guardianship of their parents. This meeting, held by one of the headmen of the lineage, was actually an exorcism of the evil spirit that causes this disease. In this way, the lineage serves to manage children's health problems, both by decision making and ritual performance.
The Traditional Sector The traditional sector of a health care system is classified by Kleinman (1980) as having both secular and sacred components. In Yi areas, the secular part includes herbalists, massagers, bonesetters, and midwives. Most of these healers inherit prescriptions from their older generations, as well as collect valid therapies through their own experiences. Some of them were recruited by the local government into the state-run township clinics after 1956.
The sacred components of the traditional sector of the Yi include mainly two kinds of healers: bimo and sunyi. Bimo are also called baima, beima, abeima, bumo, xipo, xibo, duoxi, and so on, depending on the dialect and translation. Bimo work as diviners, ritual practitioners, and healers who communicate with both natural and supernatural worlds. In the Yi language, bimo means “teacher” and “the one who knows.” It is an office achieved rather than inherited, though it is important for a person to have bimo family or lineage
Of all kinds of knowledge preserved by bimo, medical theory and techniques have been sought most frequently. During a healing ritual, a bimo reads or recites ritual scriptures for hours, sometimes for a few days. He also makes sacrifices or sticks twigs into the ground symbolizing the way for the return of the patient's soul. As healers, some bimo also use herbal medicine or other healing techniques, such as massage. A bimo named Nurtiha was so good at massage that people called on him mainly for this, rather than for prayer, though he was also a very good ritual practitioner (Li Shikang 1995, 108).
Another kind of sacred healer is the sunyi. Unlike bimo, sunyi can be either male or female and need not be literate in Yi writing. Sunyi do not inherit the position and skills from their family or lineage members, nor is their education systematic like that of the bimo. However, they too must learn from experienced sunyi (Azi 1993, 11). Usually, those who become sunyi are people who have had the experience of suffering from mental illness. After recovering, they have a bimo divine for them and hand them a drum made of sheepskin, which is their major ritual implement. Sunyi drive evil spirits away from patients by beating the drum and by whirling and dancing with the whole body shivering while muttering chants of exorcism (Lin 1961, 127; Hu 1985). Although bimo and sunyi are different in many ways, their distinctions are blurred in practice. Usually bimo rituals are language-oriented, while sunyi rituals are performance-oriented; most practitioners conduct their kind only. However, some practitioners can perform both kinds of rituals. Bimo and sunyi, together with herbalists, have traditionally taken responsibility for protecting the health of Yi people.
The Professional Sector Western missionaries introduced biomedicine to the Yi. The earliest hospitals in both Liangshan and Chuxiong were built by missionaries, who brought biomedical techniques into the areas where they were preaching, in the early twentieth century. Later, the Guomindang government established some biomedical facilities in cities and towns. By 1949, in the fourteen counties of Chuxiong prefecture there were 10 clinics, with a total of 20 beds and 47 medical personnel. Some people in the cities could reach the facilities if they wished, but before the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 the Yi living in the uplands had much less access to the clinics (WLYG 1985; WCYG 1986), so biomedicine was of little importance to them as a means of resolving health problems.
It was the Chinese Communist Party state that made it possible for peasants in remote rural areas to use biomedical health care. After the Communist revolution, the state set up a medical network in the early 1950s reaching from the capital city to the villages. The People's Hospital of Chuxiong was established in 1951, and dispensaries in surrounding counties were gradually
The morbidity and mortality rates for infectious diseases diminished notably. For example, the morbidity rate of leprosy was .2 percent in 1962, but it was reduced to .046 percent by 1984, and the relevant medical institutions expect to reach the goal of eradicating leprosy by the end of this century. In the 1950s some vaccines began to be used, including smallpox vaccine, T.A.B. vaccine,
[1] The vaccine for typhoid and paratyphoid A and B.
cholera vaccine, and bacillus Calmette-Guerin for tuberculosis. Since the 1960s, vaccines for polio, measles, and epidemic encephalitis have been used. The morbidity rate and breadth of epidemics of these diseases have been greatly reduced; special attention has also been paid to malaria, dysentery, and hepatitis. Health care for women and children has improved since 1953. The prefecture started to train midwives in new methods of delivery,and had retrained more than a hundred traditional midwives by 1954. By 1984, in Chuxiong Prefecture there were 749 rural midwives in addition to village health workers (WCYG 1986).The biomedical sector is now organized in the following way: At the lowest level, the village, there is usually one health worker (known during the 1970s and 1980s as a barefoot doctor) who serves more than a thousand people. The most important responsibilities of this position are family planning, immunization, and sanitation. The village health workers treat ailments, perform first aid, and refer patients to higher-level medical facilities as well. At a higher level, there is the township clinic with several physicians, who are usually trained in a middle-level medical school. The physicians supervise the work of village health workers, perform family planning surgery,and treat patients with both biomedicine and Chinese medicine. Physicians at this level usually do not go to the villages; rather, patients come to see them. These physicians avoid, at least publicly, communicating with religious healers because clinics are seen as official, scientific institutions, while healers are private and seen by the state as “superstitious.” Township physicians treat most diseases, but if the patient's situation is severe or requires surgery or mental health care, they refer the patient to a higher-level (county or prefecture) hospital, which has better equipment and doctors with medical degrees. In fact, very few patients are sent to provincial hospitals, because hospitals at the prefecture level are able to heal most diseases, and patients from rural areas usually cannot afford to pay for care far from home, even if it is necessary.
THE ROLE OF THE STATE AND THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE RESEARCH
The Role of the State
Charles Keyes and his colleagues suggest that in Asia there is a general tendency to view ethnic, local, and religious identities as an obstacle during the process of nation-state building. They state, “The perpetuation of primordial identities was, indeed, seen by political leaders and social scientists alike as a fundamental problem in the development of modern nation-states” (Keyes, Hardacre, and Kendall 1994, 4). However, the basic differentiation of communist and capitalist ideologies, and the historical backgrounds of the nations, had different impacts on the medical practice of the people. Robert Thorp comments that, particularly in the case of the Chinese, creating a sense of national cultural identity requires persuading all of the non-Han peoples that they have a stake in the fate of the Han majority. If ethnic groups always place their “Chinese” citizenship behind their own ethnicity, the state will fragment (1992, 18—19).
The state knew this well and made great efforts to avoid letting it happen. The political leaders, just like the scientists, policy makers, and religious fundamentalists that Byron Good (1994) observed, see “a similar benefit from correct belief”; they have adopted the attitude that they will “get people to believe the right thing and our public health problems will be solved.” The difference is that, compared with other nations trying to promote modernization and eliminate local religion, China has been particularly successful in forcing its policies all the way down to the village level; until the implementation of the economic and administrative reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, the government was able to officially stop local practices. This was mainly because the Chinese Communist Party was well organized and the Central Committee had greater control of the nation, from the top to the bottom, than many other parties and states in Asia. Policies were the tool by which the state directed the thoughts and actions of the nation, and the local officials disciplined the activities of people. Although freedom of religious belief has been guaranteed by the Constitution in China, the religious practices of the Yi, like those of many other ethnic groups, are not recognized as a religion (zongjiao), but as superstition (mixin). It therefore legitimated the action against Yi sacred healers and forced them to stop their practices for about thirty years (Qumo 1993, 148; Wang Linlu 1994, 150; Li Shikang 1995, 109). Their experiences with state-run health care services, the education program, and the campaign against “superstition” have together caused the Yi people and their religious specialists to make changes in their ideology and health care practices.
As a result, many Yi people now recognize and accept the efficacy of biomedicine in curing infectious and many other diseases, as well as the importance of immunization and public hygiene. These changes, along with the elements of the Yi medical tradition that have remained in use during the process of new China's nation-building, reinforce the Yi idea of “double solution by divinity and medicine”—that is, the urge to use both healing rituals and medicines in their health care practices.
The content of ritual healing has also changed. In addition to the traditional concern of relationships with lineage members and relatives, there are new rites for helping local officials adjust their relationships with higherlevel government and helping private car owners drive safely. Some ritual healers, especially those of the younger generation, are becoming interested in biomedicine and are even trying to learn biomedical methods of diagnosis and prescription to better control illness (Tang Chuchen, personal communication, 1994). Others, however, have hardly been able to shake off the nightmare of the campaign against them. Jike Zehuo, one of the most powerful bimo of the Jike lineage, published his autobiography before his death. In the book, perhaps fearfully, he continued to criticize himself for practicing harmful superstitious rituals and praised the Party for bringing liberation to him and the Yi as a whole (Jike 1990, 17, 31). Another bimo kept saying “praise the Communist Party and praise Mao Zedong” during an interview about his ritual activities (Quomo Yuozhi and Li Shikang, personal communication, 1994).
Ironically, after nearly two decades of economic reform, which the official news media claims is a great achievement of socialist modernization, the state is no longer able to control the country's widespread religious activities. I personally can attest to this. When I investigated economic reform in a Yi township ten years ago, the Yi were very hesitant to talk about the topic of ritual practice. Yet in 1995 and 1996, I ran into various ritual events in almost every village I visited during my pilot research and observed many rituals during my fieldwork. More dramatically, starting early in the 1980s, bimo began to be called “ethnic intellectuals” (minzu zhishifenzi) rather than “superstitious activists” (mixin huodongzhe) in Chuxiong and later in Liangshan. The number of bimo grew quickly after this. A special institute was established for studying bimo culture in Liangshan in 1996. One cannot help but ask why these changes happened.
Implications of the Research
The change in the Yi medical system we have been examining here is not a spontaneous process occurring in some isolated community.The Yi, though
People such as the Yi who live in remote areas, although constrained by their natural circumstances and the available means of communication with the broader outside world, are not as “stubborn” and “backward” as some political leaders and policy makers have perceived. In contrast to the presumed backwardness and ignorance, such people have developed methods of seeking knowledge about the world and resolving problems in their daily lives. These methods include divination and healing rituals, which are not ancient artifacts but a dynamic knowledge system. Many anecdotes demonstrate that these people are not narrow-minded at all. For example, almost all ethnographers in Africa, China, and other places have had the experience of villagers requesting biomedicine from them. These people accept new medicine and therapy as long as they see them to be helpful. When the immunization program in Chuxiong started in the early 1980s, it was difficult for health workers to locate the children who should have had the vaccines, because the scared mothers tried their best to avoid having their babies injected. Nowadays, a notice bearing the vaccine information and date is enough to attract enthusiastic parents who may walk many miles to bring their children to the health station to get the shots. Some ritual practitioners also accept new medicines and therapy. A young bimo in Dayao County, for instance, learned to use biomedicine while simultaneously performing healing rituals. Such examples show that these people are open to new information, knowledge, and techniques and accordingly adjust their behaviors to the changed environment.
Ironically, many well-educated people, including political leaders and policy makers in China, are not able to treat local healing rituals as openly as the Yi treat biomedicine and science. These officials are actually restrained by their ethnocentrism and desire for political power over Yi people. Byron Good argues that it is difficult to avoid the strong opinion that one's own system of knowledge is a progressive one (1994, 7). Similarly, when the state in China labels local ritual practices as superstition, this implies that the people are ignorant, backward, and uncivilized and therefore in need of education and direction. According to officials, the state had to replace these people's primordial tradition with scientific knowledge, to replace their “false
Although the Chinese state is penetrative in terms of its power over Chinese people, and was especially so during the 1960s and 1970s, there has still been space for ritual practitioners to survive under its rule. This basically results from the Party's own nature. The policies of the state are not always consistent. In Yiareas, the campaign against “superstition” started officially in the early 1950s, and, as I noted, bimo were not allowed to practice openly for about thirty years. However, they were not always persecuted in the same way. In fact, most never stopped holding rituals, such as “guiding the way for the deceased” and healing rituals, at the request of villagers in the rural areas, though the rituals were of smaller size—less complex and with fewer attendees—and shorter than those held before the prohibition.
Discussing the situation in rural China, Ann Anagnost suggests that the “campaign against superstition” has not been a ceaseless but rather a fitful impulse. The consequence of this practice has been an intermittent policing that “must be read . . . within its wider political context” (1994, 227). One cannot discuss government policy in China without considering the internal situation of the Chinese Communist Party. The policies reflect the outcomes of factional struggles within the Party. How local governments interpret and carry on the policies also makes a difference. In recent years, local governments have seen the advantages that cultural tradition may bring: economic benefits such as making local strengths visible, appealing to tourists, and the possibility of attracting investments from developed areas of both China and overseas. As a result, Yibimo were transformed from “superstitious specialists” to “ethnic intellectuals,” and some were even recruited into local social-science research institutions. Their status and treatment were changed by what Anagnost called “the power of naming” (ibid., 228), not for their good but for the political needs of the state.
CONCLUSION
In an attempt to obtain a better understanding of change and continuity in the Yi health care system in contemporary China, I have examined Yi medical experiences and relevant issues in light of medical anthropology literature generally. The existence and development of Yi medical tradition is indeed “the triumph of practicality,” as Stella Quah has called the prosperity of traditional healing in Asia (1989). As far as the Yi health care system is concerned, the government-sponsored biomedical service compensated for the lack of this element in local health care systems. The modifications that the Yi made in their traditional practice updated their ability to deal with current problems. Therefore, Yi medical practice is doing well, rather than dying out. The Yi might not have intentionally done anything counterhegemonic, but the rituals' importance lies, as Anagnost puts it, in “their ability to disrupt the totalizing claims of power,” so that “the little resistances of everyday life are not readily visible, yet they do subvert the values and symbolic order of a totalizing structure of power” (1994, 247).