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for the children of mixed marriages for such reasons. Thus the fusion of ethnic identities caused by an official policy of ethnic parsimony has resulted in confusions and uncertainties for members of (self-designated) smaller ethnic groups, and this in turn has resulted in the strengthening of an overall ethnic politicisation and polarisation.
Religiosity
Since 1978 and the ending of the Cultural Revolution there has been a very great revival of religiosity in China indeed (cf. Tapp 1986), and this has particularly affected many of the minority peoples for whom religion has become a means of expressing their newly politicised ethnicity. In the development of the minority nationalities, this has formed a third major theme. While down-playing the importance of neeb (shamanism), in Hmong villages in China, Hmong informants at the same time fervently denied that its origins might have been in Chinese Daoism, emphasising that 'it comes from the spirits of our ancestors'. Not only shamanism but the domestic propitiation of ancestral and household spirits persists in many Hmong villages, in what seems to be in direct proportion to their distance from areas of development. In some underdeveloped areas, however, where local attitudes have not seriously changed since the days of the Cultural Revolution, rituals are still performed secretly and at night for fear of party censure. Other ‘Miao' groups, such as the A Hmo or 'Flowery Miao', have demonstrated an astonishing revival of the Christianity first introduced to them at the turn of the century by a missionary named Samuel Pollard (Tapp 1982, 1985). One of the extraordinary features of this recent revival, which has divided communities of the A Hmo along Christian and non-Christian lines, in many cases involving conversions of the grand-children of original converts whose own children had already surrendered their beliefs in Christianity, and which has parallels in the great interest in Christian theology currently demonstrated among China's youth as a whole, is that for many of the A Hmo Christianity is not felt to be, indeed is denied to be, an alien creed, but rather one which has always been peculiarly their own. This would indeed appear to be in conformity with official Chinese policy on the 'indigenisation' of Christianity! Among the (mostly Tai-Lue) Dai