Recommended Citation: Richard J. Samuels, "3.11: Comparative and Historical Lessons," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 11, Issue 20, No. 2, May 20, 2013.

Early 21st-cenutry China is undergoing several radical transformations that are profoundly affecting its physical, social, and cultural fabric. Not as dramatic, perhaps, as the earlier series of Land Reform, collectivization, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, and decollectivization that framed the era of Mao Zedong's state socialism, the current processes of urbanization, labor migration, universalization of education, transport network modernization, reconstruction of villages, and social class formation, nevertheless seem destined to have an even more permanent and profound effect on the physical landscape, social structure, and culture of the world's largest nation. Physically, China's cities already contain about half of its citizens, while freeways, high-speed trains, and ordinary paved highways radically reduce transport distances, and hundreds of millions of rural residents migrate yearly to cities to work in factory, construction, and service jobs, while increasingly modern urban social services remain unavailable to them because of the caste-like restrictions of the household registration, or hukou户口 system. Almost all urbanites and most rural children in the wealthier coastal provinces receive at least a high-school education, while even in remote rural areas middle-school has become the legal and in most cases the factual minimum.

In many ways, these rapid social changes have their greatest effect on China's 110 million ethnic minority residents. Because of the physical remoteness of their home areas, even into the 1990s many members of China's ethnic minorities were relatively little affected by the trends of infrastructural construction, expanded rural education, and rural-urban migration that transformed rural areas in China's majority-Han regions. But in the past decade this has changed, as migration, education, and media now reach just about everywhere in China. Yi migrants from Liangshan in Sichuan were found enslaved in factories in Dongguan, Guangdong, in 2008; the government recruits migrant workers from places as remote as the Dulong river valley in the far northwestern corner of Yunnan, which before 1999 required three days walking just to get to the local county seat, and the ethnic riots in Ürümqi in 2009 were started when Han migrants in Guangdong spread an untrue rumor that Uyhgur workers had raped a Han woman, inciting Han to kill two Uyghur workers and, when the news spread to Xinjiang, setting off what can only be described as race riots.

Recent changes have also had their cultural effects in minority regions. Education, mobility and media reach have brought dramatically higher rates of literacy to minority regions, but partially because of the increasing economic importance of migration to Han-dominated cities, most of the increased literacy has been in the Chinese language, threatening many of the gains in minority-language literacy made by the regime's otherwise praiseworthy policies of promoting minority languages and cultures. But there is also mobility in the opposite direction, as mostly-Han urban tourists visit minority regions by the hundreds of millions, seeking clean air, natural vistas, and the nostalgic experience of a less complex and harried life. This, in turn, causes governments and local people in minority regions to re-fashion their traditional cultures to appeal to tourist tastes, at the same time they become more and more fluent in the mainstream culture that combines Chinese tradition and globalizing trends.

Stevan Harrell is Professor of Anthropology and Professor of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington, where he has taught since 1974. He has worked with Nuosu Yi scholars and others on projects relating to ethnicity, education, and environment in Liangshan since 1991.  He is author of Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China (Washington 2001), co-author (with Bamo Qubumo and Ma Lunzy) of Mountain Patterns: The Survival of Nuosu Culture in China (Washington 2000) and (with Bamo Ayi and Ma Lunzy) of Fieldwork Connections (Washington 2007).   His most recent volume, co-edited with Denise M. Glover, Charles F. McKhann, and Margaret B. Swain, is Explorers and Scientists in China's Borderlands, 1880-1950 (Washington 2011).   

Aga Rehamo is a native of Ganluo County, Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture.  After graduating from normal high school in 2000, she became a teacher in a rural elementary school in Ganluo.  In 2004 she entered a master's program at Sichuan Normal University, and after obtaining her degree returned to elementary teaching in Liangshan, until she was accepted as a doctoral student at Beijing Normal University in 2010. She has published articles on  "How to recognize real bilingual education," "Considering Liangshan Yi Bilingual Education in the Light of  Global Modernity," and "Ethnic Culture and Minority Education." She was a visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego, in 2012-13.  She is currently completing her doctoral dissertation on "The Predicament of Modernization in Yi Education."