BOOK REVIEWS

Mette Halskov Hansen: Lessons on Being Chinese—Minority Education and Ethnic Identity in Southwest China

Mette Hansen is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Oslo, and this book on education and ethnic identity in Yunnan is the result of a year’s research, from 1994 to 1995, in Kunming, Lijiang and Jinghong. In her introduction she poses the following three questions, which she attempts to answer: 1. What knowledge of their own identity do pupils from ethnic minorities gain from their schooling? 2. With regard to the “standardised” education (I think “sinicised” would be more accurate), what is its effect on different ethnic groups (she deals with only some of the 55 “national minorities”, taken as representive)? 3. What role is played by education in the formation of national identity?

In order to define what these pupils from ethnic minorities learn (mainly Chinese history and language), the author presents her studies of the Naxi in Lijiang, and the Dai in Jinghong, along with supporting studies of the Hani and the Jinuo from Sipsong Panna (Xishuang Banna, that is, south-west Yunnan). Her book provides a good account of the process of sinicisation, although this is only mentioned in passing through an unexplained reference to its Chinese equivalent, hanhua. The fact is that minority peoples do not study their own culture, and the education system serves to ensure their loyalty to the state, the Party, and the Han majority.

In the introduction to her study of the Naxi minority, Hansen stresses the difficulty of getting precise data “on sensitive religious and ethnic issues”. It is certainly not easy, but that is precisely what is lacking, and it could have been obtained by putting indirect questions, in the Chinese manner, leading to a better grasp of the underlying methods and the deeper roots of this education for the minority peoples. The Naxi were forced to become Confucians, but why were they able to turn this to their advantage thanks to educational improvements, particularly after the Cultural Revolution? Part of the answer is that their culture happens not to be centred on Tibet, which is still a sensitive area, but developed in Yunnan. Although this “Shangri-la” culture, often called dongba (1), is very artistic, it remains rather indefinite while it has also become a tourist attraction, as the author herself points out.

Lessons on Being Chinese consists of five separate chapters. Do they answer the question concerning the assimilation of national identity through education? The most interesting in this respect are chapters three and five, already published elsewhere, and they demonstrate the assimilative role of education in the formation of national identity. The final chapter deals with education in the Dai community, and has already appeared in China’s National Minority Education: Culture, Schooling and Development, published in 1999 under the editorship of Gerard Postiglione of the University of Hong Kong. It addresses the very Chinese idea that the Dai are culturally “backward”, whereas the Naxi, with their more fashionable dongba culture, have a higher “cultural level”, wenhua shuiping. The former provincial governor, He Zeqiang, was himself a Naxi, and it was he who instigated the “reconstruction” of dongba culture after the Cultural Revolution. And when President Jiang Zemin opened Expo ‘99 in May 1999, he too praised Naxi culture (in Kunming and Lijiang). This culture certainly causes less anxiety than those of nearby Tibet or the Dai, which Hansen has difficulty in defining, partly because it exists outside China. Dai culture has fallen “out of fashion” in Yunnan, but it still keeps its national particularity and its touristic attraction (cf. many articles published by the Thai and Wang Jun Studies Conferences, Zhuang Dong yuzu yuyuan jianzhi, 1984)

Mette Hansen’s book provides a good introduction to the study of the education system among the little known minority peoples of Yunnan. However, the reader, whether as anthropologist or as educationalist, would like to have been informed more about the reasons behind the success of Chinese education among the Naxi and its relative failure among the Dai.