Go West Young Han: The Hsia Fang Movement to China's Minority Areas

IN A RECENT ARTICLE in this journal Professor Jan Prybyla correctly noted a tendency among China's rusticated urban youth to prefer assignment to a nearby suburban commune, and to avoid at all costs transfer to more remote areas such as Sinkiang. Many, however, fail in this goal and are rusticated to remote frontier areas where most of China's ethnic minorities live. The present article* attempts to appraise the effect of Asia fang (downward transfer) to minority areas, both on the young people and on the cultures and life-styles of the indigenous nationalities involved. The Asia fang, or rustication, movement to minority areas has similar goals to that movement in other parts of China: to reduce cultural and class differences between city and countryside, to aid in economic development, and to siphon off excess population from urban areas. In addition, it has two other aims specific to minorities: to facilitate the integration of China's ethnic minorities, totalling about six per cent of the population of the Chinese People's Republic (CPR), into the majority Han nationality, and to strengthen the security of China's land borders, where most of these minorities live, against invasion. These latter goals involve sensitive questions. To attempt to integrate minority groups by sending large numbers of Han to live among them would render China vulnerable to charges of forced assimilation and cultural genocide. And to reveal how many Han Chinese had been resettled on her borders would be giving potentially damaging intelligence to the enemy. Thus the CPR has been under-