Certain of the restaurants of Peking will offer him the specialities of the cuisine of various minority groups; at the theatre, he can see performances of plays and opera based on minority folk tales.

In the far south, in Kwangsi, he will see Chinese and the new Chuang script in all public notices. On the platform of Yunnan in the southwest, he has only to move away from the level valley lands to find himself amongst peoples whose costumes, facial appearance, and languages mark them off clearly from the Han people of the lowlands.

China, like the Soviet Union, is in fact a multi-national state. The five-barred flag of the old Republic symbolised this, for the five bars represented the five major peoples who made up the Chinese state—the Han, or Chinese in the narrower sense of the word; the Manchus; the Mongols; the Moslems and the Tibetans.

Between these groups there was, however, little equality; the dominant group was the Han group; the aspirations and the distinctive cultures of the other groups were ignored. All were exposed to a Han chauvinism which aimed at their absorption. Minority languages were ignored or discriminated against; the wearing of minority costumes forbidden.

It is not, therefore, surprising that little was known of the minority peoples of China—what proportion of China's population they represented, where they lived, or how they lived. By hiding one's group identity one might at least avoid discrimination. And, until 1953, all population statistics were little better than more or less enlightened guesses.

The coming to power of the Chinese People's Government altered this situation; a new minority policy was formulated and a full scale census of China's population was carried out.

A New Policy

The new minority policy followed closely that of the Soviet Union. It proclaimed the equality of Han and minority peoples. Discrimination, oppression of any group, and attempts to undermine the unity of the various groups, became punishable offences.

All groups have the freedom to use and develop their own languages, to preserve or reform their customs and institutions. Where-ever such minority peoples live in compact groups they have the right to a wide degree of local autonomy.

The 1953 census showed that 35 million people belong to the minority nationalities. This is a sizeable mass of people—about as large as the total population of Spain and Portugal. The minority groups represent six per cent of the total population of China; on the other hand, they occupy almost two-thirds of the area of China.

They are a major element in the population of the south and southwest; they greatly outnumber the Han, or Chinese, groups over the thinly settled steppes and deserts of western China. Today forty-seven of these groups are separately recognised and practically all have their own political representation at local government levels. Thirty are sufficiently numerous to be represented in the National People's Congress. Five are larger than the population of New Zealand; these are Chuang, Uighur, Hui, Yi and Tibetan groups.

Pattern of Peoples

At first glance, China presents a striking duality. On one hand, there is China north and west of the Great Wall, the area known to the geographer as Outer China; here the dominant groups are minority peoples, chiefly nomadic pastoralists or oasis cultivators, who occupy their historic homelands. On the other hand, there is China inside the Great Wall, Inner China or Agricultural China; here the dominant group is the Han or Chinese group.

A major and significant exception to this pattern is in the upland country of south China where large areas are occupied by minority groups such as the Chuang, the Miao, the Yi or the Thai.

The explanation for this distribution pattern is to be found in the expansion of the Han group. The Han people are, in a very real sense, "Children of the Yellow Earth." Their cradle area is the great lowland of North China, with its fertile expanses of yellow loess soils. Here, over twenty-five centuries ago, they evolved a complex civilisation based on intensive grain and vegetable cultivation.

As their numbers grew, these farming peoples pushed outwards from their cradle area and sought new land suited to their agricultural techniques. They were repelled by the cold forest lands of the northeast and by the dry grasslands of the northwest. Scattered groups of Chinese farmers and traders did, it is true, establish themselves along the caravan routes to Central Asia and Chinese control was extended over the Mongol and Turkic peoples who occupied the steppes and deserts of the west.

On the whole, however, the Chinese contented themselves with a policy of containing and controlling these nomad folk; the Great Wall, built two millenia ago, marked here the boundary between Han and minority peoples, between the steppe and the sown.

The main thrust of Chinese expansion was thus turned southwards, towards the subtropical lands beyond the Yangtse. The brown-skinned, wavy-haired folk who occupied these lands were either absorbed, or pushed into the hill areas, or displaced southwards.

And, all the time, Chinese settlement spread towards the tropics; it was based on lowland rice cultivation and left the hill areas to the more primitive groups who practised a shifting agriculture.

Today, the uplands of the southwest China are still held by a great variety of minority peoples, and Chinese settlement is largely confined to the more easily cultivable lowlands. The complex patchwork of peoples which resulted from these movements contrasts strongly with the simpler patterns of minority distribution of China's Far West.

There are, then, three major elements in China's population, First, the numerically dominant Han people. 94 per cent of China's total population, who occupy most of eastern, agricultural, China. Secondly, the compact blocks of minority peoples in the Far West, such as the Tibetans, Uighurs, Mongols and Kazaks. Thirdly, the scattered minority groups of south and southwest China. Between these various peoples there are contrasts not only in distribution, but also in languages, in religion and in social and economic organisation.

Diversity

The linguistic diversity is very great. Languages belonging to three of the world's major linguistic families are spoken by these folk. In the northwest the languages belong to the Ural-Altaic family; they include the Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic groups. They are written, not with the ideographs used by the Chinese but with scripts derived from the Koranic or Arabic script.

Most of the people of the southwest speak languages belonging to the Sino-Tibetan family; these include the Chuang, Tai and Tibeto-Burman groups. In this same area a small number of peoples speak Austro-Asiatic languages.

Only Tibetan among these southwestern languages has a developed script; this is of Indian origin. The other groups either have no written languages, or scripts which are cumbersome and little suited to present day needs. Consequently, the creation of new scripts has been a task of major importance; they are usually based on the Latin alphabet and are devised by experts of the Central Institute of National Minorities.

A new world of literacy is thus being created and an increasing flow of political and technical literature in minority language is helping to satisfy the craving of these peoples for the knowledge which is now within their reach.

The religious diversity, too, is great. The largest single religion among the minority peoples is Islam. This is the faith of ten million people belonging to ten different nationality groups. The Tibetans and Mongolians are Lamaists. Other groups are Buddhist, Taoist, or different types of polytheists whose religion is shot through with primitive survivals.

Finally, there is a great social and economic diversity. The peoples of China's Far West were nomads or oasis cultivators, living in a feudal type of society which had changed little since the Middle Ages.

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The Tibetans are mainly pastoralists, living in one of the few surviving theocracies. The people of the southwest were primitive agriculturalists; some, such as the Yi, were virtually a slave people.

To weld this diversity of peoples together into a state, to wipe out the suspicion and fear and exploitation from which many of the minority groups had suffered—this was a major challenge to the Chinese People's Government. Sifting through written accounts, and evaluating these in the light of my own discussions at the various Minority Institutes and with some of these peoples and their leaders, I am convinced that the Chinese Government has achieved a major success in this field.

Discrimination is a thing of the past; the folk music, art and other cultural attainments of the minority groups are widely popularised and contribute to the cultural richness of the Chinese people as a whole. At the political level, the policy has been to grant a large measure of local autonomy to the more clearly defined groups and to give the minority peoples a generous allocation of seats in the National People's Congress.

In the economic field the policy is to raise the levels of living in the minority regions and to eliminate the great difference which formerly existed between the levels of living in the Han group and the minority peoples. Improved agricultural techniques and industrialisation are beginning to reduce this differential.

Thus, among the Yi people of Yunnan and the Chuang people of Kwangsi whose communes I visited, small scale industry was widely developed and the rising level of living was indicated by the many new schools and the new blocks of housing which were being erected.

At the same time, the newly created scripts for these people were widely used, a considerable volume of books and pamphlets in these minority languages was available, and illiteracy was rapidly becoming a thing of the past. And, as far as I could see, there was no obvious pressure on these people to adopt methods of production or new social systems against the will of the majority; the official policy is "to give whatever help the nationalities may require in moving forward at their own pace and under their own leaders."

Institutes of National Minorities

In carrying out this policy the Institutes of National Minorities which I visited at Peking, Lang-chow and Chengtu are playing a major role. The staff of these Institutes is carrying out fundamental research into the social organisation, the economic problems and the history of China's minority peoples. They have created new scripts for those who had no written language.

Above all, they are training carefully selected students, drawn from some dozens of minority groups, not only in the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism but also to become doctors, teachers and administrators who will return to work among their own people

The layout of these institutes is impressive, the staffing generous, the library and other facilities are excellent. The students are young and enthusiastic; they will return to their remote villages, professionally skilled and ardent supporters of a regime whose resources are marshalled to wipe out the poverty and exploitation from which their parents suffered, which has given them opportunities undreamed of by their parents.

In assessing the significance of the frequent reports of unrest or revolt among the minority peoples of China we would do well to bear in mind the increasing effect of China's minority policy. It is creating—for perhaps the first time in history—a real and living unity between the many peoples of China.