Introduction to Visual Thinking

Earth and Planetary Science C20, 001 - Fall 2013 Creative Commons 3.0: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs

Freedom of Speech and the Press

The world has watched China grapple with fraught, sometimes violent, minority relations. Always sensitive and sometimes taboo as a topic of debate, China is now displaying a surprising openness to discussion. The last few years have seen a vigorous public policy debate emerge in China over the need for a "second-generation" ethnic policy. This debate is remarkable for two reasons. Though nationalities policy is a notoriously sensitive subject within China, the debate is happening openly, in the pages of academic journals and on the Internet. A second remarkable feature is the degree to which anthropological theory and a comparative framework have come to shape the debate. This paper first explores the main positions in the on-going policy discussion; it then goes on to argue that, rather than comparing China's non-Han peoples to minority immigrant populations in the industrialized democracies, the better comparison is to native or aboriginal peoples in those places. It then considers the reasons why this angle is completely missing from the present debate.