Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
find gainful employment, obtain clean drinking water, and gain access to basic sanitation
services. This is a common trend in reform-era China; measured a variety of ways, income
and wealth inequality have continued to grow throughout the Reform and Opening period,
widening gaps between rural and urban communities as well as between individuals within
communities (Naughton 2006). This pattern of uneven development has been aptly char-
acterized as “one country with four worlds”: the high-income areas of the eastern coastal
region, including Beijing and Shanghai; the middle-income areas such as Tianjin, Guang-
dong, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu, also on the east coast; the low-income, primarily agricultural
areas of China's interior; and the remote western areas with substandard living conditions
(Hu 2003).
Yunnan's position in this economic geography is not an enviable one. The United
Nations Development Program (UNDP) (2008) uses the Human Development Index
(HDI)—which includes a measure of economic productivity, life expectancy, and educa-
tion—to identify development needs and gauge the effectiveness of development interven-
tions that are designed to increase quality of life. In a recent calculation of the HDI for Ch-
ina, Yunnan ranks thirtieth out of thirty-one provincial-level units; only Guizhou, its pro-
vincial neighbor to the east, scores more poorly.
Although statemaking can be seen as a material project, its normative dimen-
sions—those driven by human values and perceptions—are equally important. How do
the center and the periphery engage in a dialogue, each emerging with characteristics
shaped by its interactions with the other? Ethnic identity, constructed over centuries of cen-
ter-periphery interactions, is a crucial part of this story. The preamble to the Constitution
of the People's Republic of China (PRC) explicitly declares the country to be a “unified,
multiethnic state [
tongyi duo minzu guojia
].” In addition to the dominant Han majority,
which constitutes about 93 percent of the nation's population, there are fifty-five “minor-
ity nationalities” (
shaoshu minzu
) that received formal recognition by the central govern-
ment following anethnic-identification project (
minzu shibie
)conducted between 1950and
1956. The minority-nationality population, which numbered 114 million as of the 2010
census, represents a special development problem for the government bureaucracy. On the
one hand, their perceived cultural and economic “backwardness” provides normative justi-
fication for targeted development, economic assistance, educational subsidies, and nation-
al welfare policies. On the other hand, many perceive the high concentrations of minority
nationalities as a barrier to actually achieving development at a level consistent with the
national average.
The anthropologist Fei Xiaotong, who studied in Britain under Branislaw Malinowski,
one of the early pioneers of the ethnographic research method, played a key role in the
ethnic-identification project of the 1950s. The project's general aim was to classify each
minority group according to Marx's schema as primitive, slave, feudal, bourgeois-capit-
alist, socialist, or Communist (Harrell 1995). The government borrowed its classificatory
