Minority education and gender in China

Mette Halskov Hansen, 2001, Ethnic minority girls on Chinese school benches: gender perspectives on minority education, in Education, culture & identity in twentieth-century China, edited by Glen Peterson, Ruth Hayhoe and Lu Yingling, Michigan U Press
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This essay looks at how Chinese school education may influence minority students' gender and ethnic identities by changing their attitudes to religion, their roles as men and women, and their expectations of life. The author argues that for many ethnic minority girls, participation in school education offers the opportunity to find jobs outside their villages and thereby enhance their status in Chinese society; while at the mean time, it instills in them feelings of cultural inadequacy. As a result, many of these women express contradictory feeling of, on the one hand, having gained pride as women through their (sucessful) participation in the state educational system and, on the other hand, of having developed feelings of inferiority（劣等） based on their ethnic affiliation（参与，关系）.

According to the author, there are few publications on gendered minority studies in China, neither in English nor Chinese. The general education stituation of Chinese ethnic minorities is that those groups of people have low levels of education which is considered as the obstacle to modernization as well as being inconsistent with the official ideology of equality among the country's nationalities, therefore also a potential source of ethnic conflict. Developing education among minorities and statifying their needs for especial educational measures becomes the crucial to achieve the unity of the nationalities. [official ideology of gender equality and ethnic equality]

This essay seeks to shed light on how minority women experience the Chinese educational system in which the gender perceptions were presented and discussed by female minority students. The reseach fieldwork is carried out in two locations in Yunnan province, Lijiang and Xishuangbanna. Ethnic minorities are portrayed as poor, backwardness, but culturally colorful. Ethnic tourism creates an incrasingly significant commercial side that enforces and reproduces stereotypes of "Minority women", who are popular among tourists. The exoticized and eroticized representations of minorities and minority women often become part of these women's early school experience and therefore play a significant role in the transformation of their gender and ethnic identities as they prepare to make their way in Chinese society.

Minority female's engagement in the Chinese schooling system
Girls participate less in school education, and ethnic minorities has less attendance and completion rates compared to Han majority. [poverty and son preference, cultural traditions and children's willness], but Dai does not have son preference and parental attitude of sending daughters school is neutral or positative. For Naxi female, they are warned not get marriage if they continue on with higher education, its culture favors the male to participate in education. Of course the economic factor is more important in any cases.

The development of ethnic tourism provide job opportunities for minority females, and their educational training also has sth related to local tourist industry.

How schools represent minority women
School education reflects a mixture of official state representations transmitted via textbooks, popular Han exoticized representations, and representations produced and communicated by local minority elite members themselves. The exotic representation and perception of the Tai, especially the female become good business in Xishuangbanna. Local schools engaged in business in order to get funding and money support, in return, they provides school girls dressing, singing and preforming for local business, so do local governments to show the color of ethnic minorities. Therefore, it is clear that schools actively participate in the commodification of minority women and serve to confirm and reinforce an exoticized image of minority peoples. But some girls feel shamed to dress the traditional constume publicly which they think too obviously show the backwardness of their ethnic group.

How ethnic minorities respond to the unified and standardized state educational system and the conclusion
School plays a crucial role in the ongoing process of ethnic identification, while ethnic minorities respond differently to the state education system. Processes of ethnic and gender identification are closely related--perhaps even interdependent. In the course of confrontation with an educational system based on the chinese language and suffused with notions of modernization, atheism, and nationalism that serve to transmit an eroticized, exoticized and feminized image of non-Han peoples, the salience of the complex interconnectedness of ethnic and gender identities stands out. School system usually represents the minorities as backwardness, and demanding for development. Female minority girls feel shamed.

Reference matters:
Dru C. Gladney, 1994, Representing nationality in China: refiguring majority/minority identities, in journal of asian studies, iss 1.
Louise Schein, 1997, Gender and internal orientalism in China, in Modern China, 23, no.1.
Norma Diamond, 1988, The Miao and poison: interactions on China's southwest frontier, in Ethnology 27, no.1.