Under a portrait of President Xi Jinping (習近平), Ashibusha sits in her freshly painted living room cradling her infant daughter beside a chair labeled a “gift from the government.” The mother of three is among 6,600 members of the Yi ethnic minority who were moved out of 38 mountain villages in China’s southwest and into a newly built town in an anti-poverty initiative.
Farmers who tended mountainside plots were assigned jobs at an apple plantation. Children who until then spoke only their own tongue, Nuosu, attend kindergarten in Mandarin, China’s official language.
“Everyone is together,” said Ashibusha, 26.
Photo: AP
While other nations invest in developing poor areas, Beijing doesn’t hesitate to operate on a more ambitious scale by moving communities wholesale and building new towns in its effort to modernize China. The ruling Chinese Communist Party has announced an official target of ending extreme poverty by the end of the year, ahead of the 100th anniversary of its founding next year.
POVERTY REDUCTION
The party says such initiatives have helped to lift millions of people out of poverty. But they can require drastic changes, sometimes uprooting whole communities. They fuel complaints the party is trying to erase cultures as it prods minorities to embrace the language and lifestyle of the Han, who make up more than 90 percent of China’s population.
Photo: AP
At a time when the party faces protests by students in China’s northern region of Inner Mongolia over plans to reduce the use of the Mongolian language in schools, officials want to show they are sensitive to minority cultures.
They invited reporters to visit Chengbei Ganen and four other villages — Xujiashan, Qingshui, Daganyi and Xiaoshan — that are part of what authorities see as a successful development project for the Yi in Sichuan Province’s Liangshan prefecture.
The initiative is one of hundreds launched over the past four decades to spread prosperity from China’s thriving east to the countryside and west.
Photo: AP
Mass relocations still are carried out because some mountainous and other areas are too isolated, said Wang Sangui (汪三桂), president of the China Poverty Alleviation Research Institute of Renmin University in Beijing.
“It is impossible to solve the problem of absolute poverty without relocation,” he said.
In Sichuan, which includes some of China’s poorest areas, 80 billion yuan (US$12 billion) has been spent to date to relocate 1.4 million people, according to Peng Qinghua, the provincial party secretary. He said that included building 370,000 new homes and over 110,000km of rural roads.
Photo: AP
In Chengbei Ganen, 420 million yuan (US$60 million) was spent to build 1,440 apartments in 25 identical white buildings, a clinic, a kindergarten and a center for the elderly.
Craftspeople sell silver jewelry, painted cow skulls and traditional clothing that are popular with Han tourists. Yi women can study to become nannies, a profession in demand in urban China, in classes taught with pink plastic dolls.
Roadside signs call on people to speak the official language. “Mandarin, please, after you enter kindergarten.” “Speak Mandarin well, it’s convenient for everyone.” “Everyone speaks Mandarin, flower of civilization blooms everywhere.” Murals on buildings depict the Yi with members of the Han majority in amicable scenes. One shows a baby holding a heart emblazoned with the ruling party’s hammer-and-sickle symbol. In one village, Xujiashan, annual household income has risen from 1,750 yuan (US$260) in 2014 to 11,000 yuan (US$1,600), according to its deputy secretary, Zhang Lixin.
Development initiatives can lead to political tension because many have strategic goals such as strengthening control over minority areas by encouraging nomads to settle or diluting the local populace with outsiders.
PROTESTS
In Inner Mongolia, students boycotted classes this month over plans to replace Mongolian-language textbooks with Chinese ones.
The party faces similar complaints that it is suppressing local languages in Tibet and the Muslim region of Xinjiang in the northwest. Xinjiang’s Han party secretary said in 2002 the language of the Uighurs, its most populous ethnic group, was “out of step with the 21st century” and should be abandoned in favor of Mandarin.
The party boss for Liangshan prefecture acknowledged its initiative isn’t purely economic.
Authorities want to eliminate “outdated habits,” said the official, Lin Shucheng. He listed complaints about extravagant dowries, too many animals butchered for funerals and poor hygiene.
“We are fighting against traditional forces of habit,” he said. At the same time, ruling party officials say they are preserving Nuosu, a Yi language, through bilingual education in schools and government support for a Nuosu newspaper and TV show.
“We protect and promote the learning, use and development of the Yi language,” the provincial party secretary, Peng, told reporters.
The party might be willing to promote Nuosu because, unlike in Tibet or Xinjiang, the Yi demand no political change, said Stevan Harrell, a University of Washington anthropologist who has spent more than three decades visiting and studying the region.
“There is no ‘splittism’ in Liangshan,” Harrell said, using the party’s term for activists who want more autonomy for Tibet and Xinjiang. “So it is kind of safe to have the Yi language as a medium of education,” Harrell said. “And it scores points for the government against those people who rightly point out that Uighur and Tibetan languages are being severely suppressed.” The region, like the rest of China, reeled from the coronavirus outbreak, said Lin, the Liangshan party boss. But he said anti-poverty work was back on track and authorities were confident they could meet official deadlines. Older villagers welcome the jump in living standards.
“You can eat whatever you like now,” said Wang Deying, an 83-year-old grandmother of five. “Now even the pigs eat rice.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would