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Trapped in Politicization of Ethnicity: The Dilemma in China’s Ethnic Minority Education

China has fifty-six official ethnic groups, which comprise the majority Han and fifty-five ethnic minority groups. The designation of a minority status, according to official narrative, is based on the fact that each group is a “numerical minority in comparison with the Han” (Zhu 2007). In reality, the term minority has long connoted peripheral, barbarian, inferior, backward, and distrusted (Yi 2008, 2016; Yang 2014), which has exotic and colorful cultures different from the Han. Therefore, state schooling in China has been a contested field for asserting multiculturalism along its primary goal of civilizing and integrating the ethnic minorities (Postiglione 1999; Chen 2008; Yang 2014). Hence, the issue of balancing cultural diversity and national integration is an important yet interesting research question to be explored. In 2007, Ma Rong, a well-known Chinese sociologist specialized on ethnicity, acutely criticized China’s “politicization” of ethnic minorities in handling ethnic relations and urges Chinese government returning to the culturalization tradition practiced since ancient times (Ma 2007). He argued that the current practice of separating minority affairs in another system different from the Han has actually created an “another Han vs. minorities dual structure” in addition to the rural-urban division deep-rooted in Chinese society (Ma 2013). As for education, the establishment of a separate bilingual education system, tertiary institutions for ethnic minorities, and inland schools for students from Xinjiang and Tibet has created a “dual educational system” based on ethnicity (Simayi 2012; Ma 2013). Ethnic identities of minority students, as observed by Ma and other researchers, have been strengthened because of such educational arrangements (Zhu 2007; Ma 2007; Yang 2014). Correspondingly, ethnic boundaries have been consolidated (Ma 2007; Yang 2014), which deviates the national integration goal. In an earlier special issue of Chinese Education and Society on minority education, Zhao (2010) coined a phrase China’s ethnic dilemma in discussing “how ethnic groups move between cultural autonomy and cultural assimilation.” By reviewing papers describing education of several minority groups in that issue, including Naxi, Uyghur, Mongolian, Korean, and Hui, she attributed the contradictions and struggles minority individuals met along their educational pathways to this ethnic dilemma, within which