On October 25, 2009, this Blog was moved to:
http://learningchina.wordpress.com/
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China has a one-child policy due to a population of 1.3 billion people. What isn’t well known is that the one child policy applies only to the Han majority. That policy does not apply to the hundred million people that belong to the fifty-six minority groups in China. That means Tibetans may not be able to worship and maintain the feudal, nomadic lifestyle like they had before Mao’s brutal reoccupation of Tibet in 1951, but they can have as many children as they want without a penalty.
When emperors ruled China, the emperor wanted others to see him as a benevolent ruler embracing every kind of beauty under heaven. To do this, the emperor encouraged minorities to stay where they had always lived. No one forced them off their land with false promises. In China, if a minority king proposed a marriage alliance with the Emperor, the Emperor adopted a Chinese beauty as his daughter and sent her to the king of the minority. This is portrayed in the Dream of Red Mansions, a Chinese novel written in the 1800s.
If the minority king became powerful and caused unrest, the emperor proposed that this king marry the emperor's real daughter, as if to say, “You will be a member of my family so stop what you are doing. Since we are soon to be related through marriage, there is no need to fight.” This happened more than a thousand years ago with Tibet when the Emperor of the Tang Dynasty married his real daughter to the king of Tibet so the warlike Tibetans would stop raiding into China.
Under the rule of the emperor, minorities were not forced to pay taxes like the Han Chinese. It was believed that minorities were less fortunate and did not have the same advantages.
China's Zhuang & Yao ethnic people
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Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
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