Education devoted to ethnic minorities is an important part of China’s educational system. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, especially after the initiation of the reform and opening-up policies in the late 1970s, this work has achieved notable progress. Each of China’s 55 ethnic minority groups has had students who attended university. In addition, it’s not rare to see people from ethnic minorities with master’s or doctor’s degrees. The illiteracy rate among young and middle-aged ethnic minority people has fallen remarkably. The objective to popularize nine-year compulsory education and reduce the number of illiterate people has so far been realized in 329 counties of ethnic autonomous regions nationwide.

Cradle of Ethnic Minority Talent

This past June 14, Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji inspected the Central University for Nationalities of China, which has just celebrated its 50th anniversary. The premier called on the teaching staff and students of the school to contribute more to the prosperity of ethnic minority regions and the nation’s modernization drive by being boldly innovative and accelerating development of the university.

The Central University for Nationalities of China, located in western Beijing’s university district, is a key State university devoted to cultivating highly talented people from ethnic minorities. It is therefore praised in China as the top institution of higher learning for ethnic minorities.

The school has a brilliant history and tradition. Its predecessor was the Yan’an Institute for Nationalities that was established in September 1941. Despite harsh conditions, the school cultivated a large number of cadres for China’s national liberation cause.

Soon after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Central Government decided to set up a new type of institution of higher learning in Beijing, namely, the Central Institute for Nationalities. The late Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai set forth three tasks for the institute. They included: to cultivate high-and middle-ranking cadres for the implementation of the system of regional ethnic autonomy in regions where ethnic minorities live in compact communities and the development of ethnic minorities’ political, economic and cultural undertakings; to study ethnic affairs as well as ethnic minorities’ language and writing, history, culture, and social and economic evolution, and carry forward and introduce the outstanding historical and cultural heritage of various ethnic minorities; and to organize and lead the compilation and translation of works in ethnic minority languages. The Central Institute for Nationalities was officially inaugurated on June 11, 1951. In its initial development period, it was a school for the arts.

In the previous 20-odd years, the institute developed into a comprehensive university with arts majors as a mainstay and ethnology as its major feature. On this basis, it was renamed the Central University for Nationalities of China in the 1990s. The university currently occupies a leading position in the research of China’s ethnic history, ethnic minorities’ economic development, ethnic religions and ethnic minorities’ arts, and has achieved great success.

The school now has more than 8,000 students, of which 85 percent are members of ethnic minorities. The majority of its more than 60,000 graduates over previous years have already become the backbone of various sectors in the nation, ethnic minority regions in particular. Moreover, a large number of scholars, experts and professors at the school are active in teaching ethnological courses and research.

Solid Basic Education

Tan Haoling, a freshman student in the university’s Department of Ethnic Religions, is from the Gin ethnic group.

Tan comes from one of the three small islands off the northwestern coast of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. The three islands, each with an area of less than 20 square km, are the home of the Gin ethnic group of about 20,000 people. Prior to 1995, there was no middle school there. So Tan had to attend a middle school 12 km away from her home. The long journey, the language barrier and different customs all added to Gin children’s hardships in acquiring knowledge. At that time, few Gin students could pass the national college entrance examination.

For generations, the Gin people have made a living from fishing. Before the reform and opening-up policies were initiated, they lived in poverty. Thanks to the State’s policies of enriching the people, they developed deep-sea fishing, low-beach aquaculture and seafood processing and are actively engaged in Sino-Vietnamese border trade. With per-capita income exceeding 6,000 yuan, the Gin ethnic group currently ranks among the richest ethnic groups in China. The well-off Gin people were determined to eliminate the sharp contrast between their backward education and flourishing economy. A middle school was constructed in Wanwei Island in 1995 with money collected from the local people. After that Tan could walk to school in 10 minutes. More importantly, because of the easy access to a middle school, nine-year compulsory education is now available to 98 percent of school-age children there.

Compared with their elders who could speak only their own language, today’s Gin children can also speak Mandarin and English.

Today, Tan still yearns deeply for the chemistry, biology and physics labs in her middle school. It is there that she and her peers learned a lot of modern scientific knowledge. To build these labs, the local people contributed a total of 100,000 yuan.

Education Online

An Ziyu, a Yugur girl, is a classmate of Tan Haoling. Instead of talking about herself, An spoke about her younger sister, An Zilan, who is now living at home and attending an online university.

Ziyu, who is from a Yugur autonomous county in south Gansu Province, had never been separated from her sister until last year when she came to Beijing. Ziyu missed her younger sister very much. But before long, Ziyu was pleased to learn that Zilan had become a student of the Computer Department of Tsinghua University. Every day, Zilan, together with 56 classmates, studies the same courses as their peers on the Tsinghua campus with the help of the Internet.

Gansu is pressing ahead with an online higher learning program that was launched last year. The Gansu Provincial Long Distance Educational Center plans, on the basis of China’s computer networks for education and scientific research and satellite television networks, to build a digital, multi-media and interactive modern distance educational platform and diversified regional educational network. This will enable it to have the most advanced teaching for schools across the province and to develop educational systems for multiple levels and various types of distance learning.

Development of distance education backed by modern technology has effectively narrowed the gap between Gansu and the rest of China in terms of educational levels, said Yang Chuanwu, director of the Gansu Provincial Computer Office. It is especially suited to the popularization of higher education in ethnic minority regions, he added.

Gansu is expected to invest 10.7 million yuan to build 22 more online higher learning stations in the next several years, which will be able to enroll 1.13 million students.