[EDLING:1350] Dongxiang Muslim group in China tries bilingual education

[Francis M Hult]

via lg-policy...

> >From the NYTimes, March 19, 2006
> 
> Faith and Poverty Mark Muslim Enclave in China
> By JIM YARDLEY
> 
> DONGXIANG, China No, the old man answered, standing in his bare home deep
> in a mountain ravine, he had never seen an airplane. The man, Tie
> Yongxiang, has never watched television, either. He listened to the pop
> quiz and seemed pleased when he could answer the last question in the
> affirmative. China? Had he ever heard of it? "I know what China is," said
> Mr. Tie, 68. "It is a country run by people who are supposed to be helping
> us." "Us," as Mr. Tie puts it, are the Dongxiang people, an ethnic group
> that has lived for eight centuries in the dry, forbidding mountains that
> make this county in Gansu Province one of the most isolated places in
> China.
> 
> The most recent census found 513,000 Dongxiang people in China, and the
> overwhelming majority live in and around Dongxiang County. Of the 25
> townships in the county, 19 do not have a single Chinese person. Most
> people do not speak Chinese, and some, like Mr. Tie, have only a vague
> notion of China, despite living in the middle of it. The geographic
> isolation has helped preserve an Islamic culture, as well as an ancient
> language, but it has also separated the Dongxiang people from the
> prosperity lifting other parts of China. The Dongxiang, one of China's 56
> officially recognized ethnic minorities, are now among China's poorest and
> most illiterate people.
> 
> On a recent Friday, two days after a heavy snowstorm had coated the
> mountains and left a sheet of ice on the narrow village roads, old men in
> white caps trudged through the snow to different mosques. Though some are
> too poor to send their children to school, they have pooled money to build
> village mosques as well as graceful towers with elegant curved roofs that
> serve as Muslim burial vaults. "The Dongxiang people have always believed
> in Islam," said Ma Ali, 36, the imam at an old mosque in the village of
> Hanzilin. Indeed, even within a larger region known as the center of Islam
> in China, the people of Dongxiang have a reputation for being particularly
> steadfast in their faith.
> 
> "People were devout in the past," said Ma Kui, 75, as he leaned on a
> wooden cane and waited for afternoon prayers with other farmers dressed in
> lambskin coats. "They are still devout now." But as everywhere in China,
> modernity is seeping up the winding roads to the county's larger
> settlements and beckoning many younger people. In the county seat,
> Suonanba, cellphones, blue jeans and Internet cafes arrived several years
> ago. So did Chinese building contractors, cigarettes, alcohol and food not
> prepared to Islamic code.
> 
> "The Islamic atmosphere has become watered down over time, and the older
> people are aware of that," said Ma Chunling, who is 22. "So they want to
> protect their culture, and particularly Islam." Growing up, Ms. Ma (the
> family name is quite common here) felt the otherness of being from
> Dongxiang. Her mother told stories of hiding in caves during her own
> childhood, fearful that "the Chinese" were coming.
> 
> "All of the people in the village were waiting for the Chinese to come and
> slaughter them," Ms. Ma said. "But the Chinese never came." Ms. Ma, now a
> primary school teacher, spent three years at a vocational school in the
> eastern port city of Tianjin and wanted to stay and become a hairdresser.
> But she said her parents were conservative Muslims who believed it was
> inappropriate for an unmarried woman to travel far from home. "A lot of
> young people really want to go out and see the rest of China,"  she said.
> "But often their families don't let them. It's still very, very isolated."
> For years, many Chinese scholars assumed that the Dongxiang descended from
> the Mongol soldiers in Genghis Khan's army who eventually settled in Gansu
> during the 13th century when the Mongols ruled China under the Yuan
> Dynasty. But their exact origins were never fully known, an uncertainty
> that fed an inferiority complex.
> 
> "A man once asked me, 'Where do the Dongxiang come from?' " said Ma
> Zhiyong, a historian who grew up in the county but moved to the provincial
> capital, Lanzhou, as a teenager. "I was 18 or 19, and couldn't answer the
> question. I was ashamed." Mr. Ma decided to look for an answer. Over
> several years, he scoured research libraries in Gansu, talked to other
> scholars and studied old maps. He found that some Dongxiang villages
> shared names with places in Central Asian countries like Uzbekistan. He
> also found shared customs. He said peasants in Uzbekistan and Dongxiang
> both learn to cut a slaughtered chicken into 13 pieces. He found that
> Dongxiang people described themselves as sarta, a term that once referred
> to Muslim traders in Central Asia.
> 
> There was even a physical similarity, as many Dongxiang look more lie
> people from Central Asia, as opposed to Han Chinese. Mr. Ma decided that
> the story about Genghis Khan's army was only half right. Some of the
> Dongxiang ancestors were Mongol soldiers. But he concluded that many
> others were a diverse group of Middle Eastern and Central Asian craftsmen
> conscripted into the Mongol army during Khan's famed western campaign.
> They brought several languages and, in many cases, a strong belief in
> Islam. Mr. Ma said that generations of intermarriage, including with local
> Han Chinese and Tibetans, resulted in a new ethnic group and language.
> 
> The language, if a source of pride, is also blamed for Dongxiang's
> educational shortcomings. The language is oral, so children never learn to
> read or write in their native tongue. In grammar school, the curriculum is
> in Chinese and many students drop out. Government statistics show that the
> average person in Dongxiang has only 1.1 years of schooling. Because of
> the cost, many families never even send children to school, particularly
> daughters. "When I was in primary school, I didn't understand what I was
> learning,"  said Chen Yuanlong, a local official and scholar. "Often, I
> wanted to talk to the teacher, but I couldn't communicate my ideas in
> Chinese. It was very difficult."
> 
> The challenge of trying to teach Chinese to Dongxiang children has
> attracted international aid groups to Dongxiang. The British government is
> financing a large training program for teachers. Another pilot program,
> paid for by the Ford Foundation, has created a bilingual curriculum using
> a Dongxiang-Chinese dictionary developed by Mr.  Chen and other scholars.
> That program has already produced an improvement in test scores, but its
> supporters are searching for more financial backing. Education is a
> fundamental problem but many people still struggle just to survive.
> Villages in the deepest ravines depend on potatoes and face starvation
> during drought years.
> 
> Some men who live closer to roads and commerce have become mules for drug
> runners. Others have left for manual labor in bigger cities, demolishing
> buildings or working as butchers or dishwashers. Mr. Tie, the man who took
> the pop quiz, is too old for such work. He lives halfway down a ravine
> with his wife and their 16-year-old mentally retarded son. "We beg," Mr.
> Tie said. "We have land but when our crops aren't enough, we go to nearby
> villages to beg." Farther up the ravine, closer to the road that leads to
> the county seat, Ma Hezhe, 25, watched over her 3-month-old son. Her
> family is like a snapshot of Dongxiang: two of her husband's brothers had
> left the county to work as migrant laborers; her mother-in-law, huddled in
> the corner of the communal bed, had not left Dongxiang in her entire life.
> The tiny baby, the newest generation, had been given an Islamic name,
> Ibrahim. Ms. Ma had not yet given him a Chinese name. "He doesn't need one
> until he starts school," she said. It was a local custom, she added, to
> wait until a child came "into contact" with Chinese society. There would
> be plenty of time.
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/international/asia/19ethnic.html