Ethnic ChinaLit

” 在我采访的牧民当中，尽管他们的生活过得很艰苦—11年时还住在不通水不通电的房子里，偷着放牧，不然连镇上的羊肉都买不起—却没有人抱怨过政 府所宣称的要保护草原生态的初衷。他们所不满的，是政策宣传和执行的不统一。既然当初领导一家家做工作说要恢复生态，为何允许无休止的风机建设和矿产开 发？那些挖矿的人开采完后，并不把矿填回去,工业用水也是任意排放，在草原修建的简易的土路，成了大卡车横冲直撞的理由。当年5月份发生的莫日根被卡车碾 压致死事件，是内蒙草原上牧民和开矿者冲突极端化的鲜明注脚。”

(Under the guise of protecting the environment, traditional sheep herders outside Baotou, Inner Mongolia, are no longer permitted to allow their livestock to graze freely. Meanwhile, increasingly intensive rare earth mining and wind farming tear apart the landscape. Excerpted from article in the Chinese online edition of the New York Times by Columbia U grad student Bao Beibei (草原哀歌), based on interviews conducted on site.)

A government-sponsored project to publish translations of pre-1949 Xinjiang-related texts during 2012-2020 has been launched with the February 27^th announcement (首批) that the first sixty volumes will soon be available in print (albeit in small numbers and high-end editions) and in digital format.

Dubbed the “Xinjiang Archives” (新疆文库), it will consist of originals and translations in Chinese, Uyghur, Kazakh, Mongol, Kyrgyz and Xibe. Targeted domains include works of philosophy, sociology, history and geography, literature and technology.

As usual with wordy PR announcements from China’s state-run organs, it’s not clear just how much of this is genuinely “new” or easily accessible to the public.

The Xinjiang Archive web site (www.xjwenku.com) lists data about most of the 88 original documents that will appear in the new collection (出版书目), but most carry rather old publication dates. It may be that this new collection features updated, edited versions of originals that had gone out of print, so making them available in digital format would be much appreciated by scholars worldwide. Read the rest of this entry »

The first 8 of 55 volumes—one for each officially recognized ethnic minority in the PRC—have been jointly launched by the State Ethnic Affairs Commission and the Liaoning Publishing Group (辽宁出版集团). The series is titled <走进中国少数民族丛书> (Inside China’s Ethnic Minorities).

Each book focuses on the culture and history of one ethnic group located in the northeast: Manchu (满族), Chaoxian (朝鲜), Mongol (蒙古), Xibe (锡伯), Daur (达斡尔), Oroqen (鄂伦春), Evenki (鄂温克) and Hezhen (赫折).

A quick look at the contents page for the Evenki volume (鄂温克族) indicates a fairly formulaic approach, with chapters on their origins, history of interaction with the Chinese empire, culture and customs, animism and folk tales and art. News reports stress that each book has been written by members of the featured ethnic group, a major break with the past where Han ethnologists were usually the authors.

The section names in the second chapter on warring periods and the “outlook for a brighter tomorrow” are an indicator of the “positioning” of the Evenki vis-à-vis Chinese dynasties across the centuries and up to our day:

• Establishment of the Banner System under the Qing
• Battle Over the Evenki Mink Tribute to the Qing Court
• Defending the Chinese Homeland
• Struggle Against the Japanese Imperialists
• New Society, New Life

It’s unlikely that you will find much here on the impact of post-1949 PRC ethnic policies such as those documented by Richard Noll and Kun Shi in their The Last Shaman of the Oroqen of Northeast China in 2004, or Richard Fraser in his 2010 study, Forced Relocation amongst the Reindeer-Evenki of Inner Mongolia.

. . . the three great epics—the Tibetan “King Gesar,” the Mongol’s “Life of Jangger,” and “Manas” of the Kyrgyz—have all become the object of global studies in the genre. But there is not even a basic introduction to these three epics in our histories of Chinese literature. 

Li Xiaofeng in his new piece on The Plight of Native Language Literature among Ethnic Minorities in China (“不在场的在场”：中国少数母语文学的处境，李晓峰著)

The khanbaliqist has written an informative and witty post, Spelling Pronunciations as a Method of Teaching, based on his own experiences learning Mongolian on the ground. . .in Inner Mongolia, I believe.

His description of how written Mongolian is emphasized—almost to the point of banning spoken Mongolian from the classroom—reminds me of my mother’s unhappy schooling in Taiwan many years ago.  Her teacher, whom I referred to as a “Beiping antique” (北平古董), was born in pre-1949 Beijing and taught strictly “proper” Mandarin.  The vocabulary she insisted on was so passé that my mother, whose Chinese was actually not bad, often found that the locals hadn’t a clue what she meant.

She eventually quit school out of frustration.  “The only people who speak Beijing hua here in Taipei,” she said at the “farewell” lunch to which she kindly invited her living-fossil teacher and me, “are you and my son.”

But back to the way Mongolian is taught in China. Writes the khanbaliqist:

After discussions with Inner Mongolians I know, I’ve discovered that this approach to teaching [in my class] mirrors the normal method for teaching to children to read in Inner Mongolia. Mongolian-speaking children start out learning to read words exactly as they are spelt. This means that, even though they speak Mongolian at home and already have a basic proficiency in the language, children are initially taught to read texts using spelling pronunciations, not the normal everyday pronunciations. It is only in the third year that pupils are quite explicitly told to switch over to the spoken pronunciation. The objective of this method of teaching is clear. In a language like Mongolian, where the spelling of the traditional script is in many ways far removed from the spoken language, this is a way of ensuring that correct spelling habits are put firmly in place. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2013, it’s not easy to locate what I’d consider a good overview of Uyghur writing on the Chinese Internet.

Home to perhaps 10 million Uyghurs, the 1.6m sq km Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region accounts for almost one-sixth of China’s territory and borders Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.  The Chinese government is hyper-sensitive about most anything “Uyghur,” particularly their religion (Islam), and the language, which has Turkic roots unrelated to Han Chinese.

Even so, I’ve found two articles in Chinese which are fairly informative, if dated. One by 祖姆拉提 · 克尤木 that focuses strictly on Uyghur literature in Xinjiang during 1949-2005 (新疆维吾尔文学),  and another by 阿扎提·蘇勒坦 that looks at a broader topic, ethnic literature in Xinjiang (新疆民族文学五十年) since the founding of the autonomous region in 1955.

Here are some factoids cited from the latter essay—all based on the 1955-2005 period—that offer a glimpse of literary “output” of the various non-Han peoples in Xinjiang:

See below for my table listing a selection of Uyghur authors and their works. Read the rest of this entry »

The 24-strong group of judges has announced the shortlist for the “National Literature Magazine Annual Awards” (2012 《民族文学》年度奖), as follows (eligible works must have been published in 2012 editions of the magazine):

“2012 National Literature Magazine Awards”

《民族文学》年度奖

Published in Chinese Edition

Published in Minority Language Editions Read the rest of this entry »

Yang Jing: Token ethnic?

As in the recent past, one member of a non-Han people has been named to the new 7-member Secretariat of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee: Yang Jing (杨晶), an ethnic Mongolian from Jungar Banner, Inner Mongolia. This ensures that the retirement of Vice-premier Hui Liangyu, a Hui, will not leave the party’s highest organ bereft of a representative of the other 55 “nationalities.”

Yang studied Chinese at Inner Mongolia U, joined the CPC in 1976, served many years in government in Inner Mongolia, and most recently was minister in charge of the State Ethnic Affairs Commission. For his official bio, see People’s Daily Online.

The 10th Junma Ethnic Literary Awards (骏马奖) have been announced. Open to works published in the PRC during 2008-11 by members of ethnic groups other than the majority Han, the competition is a politically correct affair co-organized—predictably—by the state-sponsored Chinese Writers Association, which claims more than 1,000 non-Han writers among its 8,000+ members, and the State Ethnic Affairs Commission. One of the judges is the omnipresent Li Jingze, editor-in-chief of People’s Literature (人民文学) and the new quarterly of Chinese literature in translation, Pathway (路灯), and also a long-time judge for China’s most prestigious literary competition, the Mao Dun Literature Prize (矛盾文学奖).

Here’s the list of the winners:

In A Book in Wolve’s Clothing, Global Times reports that French director Jean Jacques Annaud has begun preparations for filming Wolf Totem, Jiang Rong’s novel about a young Beijinger who finds himself sent down to the countryside of Inner Mongolia in 1967, at the height of China’s Cultural Revolution:

Producers are currently holding auditions for the main roles. One main requirement for actors is to have strong language skills. 

“Translations cannot be perfect. Even with interpreters, it is important for actors to have the ability and intelligence to understand the director’s explanation,” said [executive producer] Xu.

The production team is now filming experimental scenes with animals, as the most difficult part of this film project is to prepare and film a large number of animals.

To purchase baby wolves, train, feed and protect them involves many complexities. The producing company invited four Canadian wolf trainers to Beijing.

“The wolves can only understand English now,” added Xu.