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certain conditions official policy may have tended to discourage it and local prejudice inhibited it (particularly since the prohibitions of minority languages and costumes during the Cultural Revolution, which resulted in violent confrontations between members of the same ethnic groups, as had occurred earlier during the 1930's), an aspiration to the Han economic condition and a desire for full participation in the workings of the Chinese state have proved constant features of minority history, which continue despite official policies which would seem to encourage localism, perhaps because Sinicisation is an inevitable process which neither official policies nor localism can effectively contain. At the same time and to present again the opposite picture, I was reassured by Miao cadres as to my fears for their loss of culture: ‘these things are very difficult to lose', they maintained, referring to their fengsu, or customs.
Greater-group formation
A second major trend evident in the development of the national minorities since Liberation has been the tendency towards greater-group formation and the fusion, rather than the fission, of smaller ethnic and cultural groups. This again has resulted partly from official policies of designating and classifying certain selected ethnic national minority groups, but owes more perhaps to the need to achieve some form of political consolidation in the face of greater centralisation of authority under the state after 1949. The classification of ethnic groups has long been a problem for Chinese ethnographers. Influenced by the example of Soviet ethnographers (Lemoine 1986), Chinese ethnographers have adopted the criteria of a common language, an area of habitation, a unique set of customs, attitudes and beliefs, and a traditional means of livelihood, as a means of classifying minzu, or national minorities, which as Hsieh (1986) points out, itself represents a uniquely different concept to the Western concepts of either ‘nationality' or ‘ethnic group'. In a seminal article written in 1980, Fei Hsiao-Tung outlined some of the problems relating to the classification of national minorities. Among the problematic instances he described were cases where opinions differed within a single national minority as to whether it was an autonomous ethnic group or part of another, or where class differences led to their refusal to identify
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certain conditions official policy may have tended to discourage it and local prejudice inhibited it (particularly since the prohibitions of minority languages and costumes during the Cultural Revolu- tion, which resulted in violent confrontations between members of the same ethnic groups, as had occurred earlier during the 1930's), an aspiration to the Han economic condition and a desire for full participation in the workings of the Chinese state have proved constant features of minority history, which continue de- spite official policies which would seem to encourage localism, perhaps because Sinicisation is an inevitable process which nei- ther official policies nor localism can effectively contain. At the same time and to present again the opposite picture, I was reas- sured by Miao cadres as to my fears for their loss of culture: ‘these things are very difficult to lose', they maintained, referring to their kivcai, or customs.
Greater-group formation
A second major trend evident in the development of the na- tional minorities since Liberation has been the tendency towards greater-group formation and the fusion, rather than the fission, of smaller ethnic and cultural groups. This again has resulted partly from official policies of designating and classifying certain select- ed ethnic national minority groups, but owes more perhaps to the need to achieve some form of political consolidation in the face of greater centralisation of authority under the state after 1949. The classification of ethnic groups has long been a problem for Chinese ethnographers. Influenced by the example of Soviet ethnogra- phers (Lemoine 1986), Chinese ethnographers have adopted the criteria of a common language, an area of habitation, a unique set of customs, attitudes and beliefs, and a traditional means of liveli- hood, as a means of classifying minzu, or national minorities, which as Hsieh (1986) points out, itself represents a uniquely dif- ferent concept to the Western concepts of either ‘nationality' or ‘ethnic group'. In a seminal article written in 1980, Fei Hsiao- Tung outlined some of the problems relating to the classification of national minorities. Among the problematic instances he de- scribed were cases where opinions differed within a single national minority as to whether it was an autonomous ethnic group or part of another, or where class differences led to their refusal to identify
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