Contemporary Minority Migration, Education and Ethnicity in China - Book Review

Journal of Population Research, May, 2003 by Dudley L. Poston, Jr.

Robin Iredale, Naran Bilik, Wang Su, Fei Guo and Caroline Hoy, Contemporary Minority Migration, Education and Ethnicity in China. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishers, 2001. 296 pp.

In the People's Republic of China, there are 56 nationality populations: 55 minority nationalities and the majority Han. According to data from the 2000 Census of China, the minorities number over 105 million persons, representing nearly 8.5 per cent of the country's population. Although this relative number of over eight per cent is small, China's absolute number of more than 105 million persons belonging to ethnic minority groups is of some magnitude. For instance, China's ethnic minority population is considerably larger than the 76.4 million black, Native American, Asian and Latino minorities population counted in the United States in 2000. Indeed, if the minority peoples of China were a single country, they would be the eleventh largest country in the world. Surprisingly, non-Chinese scholars, including many demographers, know relatively little about the minority peoples of China, let alone their demographic dynamics. There is little competent, systematic and comparative research available about this siz eable population, particularly its patterns of internal migration.

The new book by Robin Iredale, Naran Bilik, Wang Su, Fei Guo and Caroline Hoy on Contemporary Minority Migration, Education and Ethnicity in China is an attempt to fill this void. Their book, which is another in the fine series of volumes on 'Migration Studies' being published by the Edward Elgar Publishing Company, focuses particularly on the rural-urban migration patterns of China's minority peoples, and considers also the migration behaviour of the Han majority.

There is a very small research literature on the internal migration of China's minorities. For one thing, there has been some hesitancy in China to even discuss, let alone conduct research on, the mobility of Chinese minorities. The minorities living in autonomous regions 'were expected to remain in the regions where special policies were in place to enhance their socioeconomic status. Theoretically ... [they] were not free to move without permission [of the government]' (p. 14). The research reported in this book is in many ways breaking new ground. Questions are addressed that have not been posed previously.

The empirical chapters cover the broad trends of migration between 1985 and 1990 of the minorities and the Han (Chapter 4); the effects on the Mongolian minority people of Han in-migration into the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region (Chapter 5); the extent to which the out-migration of Tibetans from Tibet to other areas of China has aided the social integration of Tibetans in the mainstream of Chinese society (Chapter 6); the degree to which the increased internal migration of the Uyghur people (China's largest Muslim population) from their historic home in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region to other parts of China, particularly to Beijing, has led to their colonization (Chapter 7); and the degree to which increased geographic mobility to Beijing of the Uyghurs and other Chinese minorities has affected Beijing socio-economically. The empirical analyses use data from the 1990 Census of China as well as from a Sample Survey of Ethnic Minority Migrants that was conducted in 1996-97.

This book not only covers important demographic issues, such as those just mentioned, but also addresses some of the subtleties and complexities of ethnic identity in China. To illustrate, in China the minority populations are not thought of as races and, with but a few exceptions, are not distinguishable from one another solely on the basis of physical and anthropometric criteria. Their identification depends to a much greater degree on cultural and linguistic differences that over time have been relatively persistent. Despite this lack of physical and phenotypic differences that would distinguish them from the Han majority, many, but not all, of China's minority populations meet, more or less, the principal three criteria deemed by social scientists as important for being viewed as minorities. These are that (1) each group constitutes a small proportion of the country's total population; (2) each minority group exhibits an awareness that its members share a common culture as members of their group; and (3) each minority nationality has experienced some degree of discrimination from the majority.

As examples of cases not meeting these requirements, the authors note that the Uyghur nationality is 'in fact an artificial construct of the Communist party' (p. 20), and that the group is now striving to establish a self-awareness. Similarly, the Hui people are characterized by a 'wide cultural and religious diversity' (p. 19). The authors make much of the situation of ethnic definition in China, because, according to them, there are two definitions in China: 'self-definition by the ethnic group itself and definition by the state' (p. 19).