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NICHOLAS TAPP
personal ability and support. This has resulted in a general emphasis upon their ethnic affiliation among the intelligentsia of the minority populations, and at the same time led to increased antagonism between representatives of different officially designated minorities, and the type of ‘localism’ official policy seeks to discourage.
Against this, however, it must be pointed out that in many areas local prejudices and inherited cultural traditions are still powerful enough to prevent the proper implementation of favourable policies towards the ethnic minorities. Thus, while their economic conditions remain backward in respect to the rest of rural China, the vast majority of peasant cultivators remain unaffected by the political lobbying which may be undertaken on their behalf by their official and party representatives, and at the same time subject to local petty prejudice and suspicion. While relations between the Dai (Tai) and the Hani (Akha) of the Xishuangbanna (Sipsong Panna) are, for example, no longer those of the rulers and ruled, and Dai rice is exchanged for Hani forest products in the market places, contacts between the two groups remain limited and relations cool.2 Similarly, it is still uncommon for the Han to visit the houses of ethnic minority people, even though they may live in close proximity to each other and in interspersed villages. As one intellectual told me, ‘the customs and traditions of the minority nationalities are so different from our own, we are afraid of making a mistake when we visit them’.
Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that there has been a great strengthening of the political importance of ethnicity among the national minorities. In many areas, minority members occupy high-ranking and prestigious political positions, although they may not be the ones in whose power actual decision-making lies. The Governor of Yunnan is a Naxi (Norsu), for example, and his Deputy a Dai, and this is common in most of the autonomous areas. Yet, although it is true that central subsidies are allocated for designated minority areas, these allotments are subject to the same trickle-down problems which afflict development aid elsewhere in the world. In my own opinion, however, the Sinicisation process of the minorities is a long-term, inevitable, and continuous process (Wiens 1967; Fitzgerald 1972; Moseley 1973). While in