Minority Education in China: Balancing Unity and Diversity in an Era of Critical Pluralism

9. Towards Another Minority Educational Elite Group in Xinjiang?

Recently Western countries such as Australia, Canada, and America have apologized at a national level for the previous boarding school policies aimed at their indigenous minorities, namely aboriginals in Australia and native Americans in Canada and America (Welch 2008; Brown 2008). Similar educational programs are still practiced in some Asian countries, for example, Vietnam and Laos (Postiglione 2009a). Among others, China’s contemporary dislocated boarding school policies have been implemented for youth from two major ethnic minority groups: Inland Tibetan Middle Schools (neidi Xizang zhongxue 內地 西藏中學, hereafter Xizang zhongxue) for Tibetans and Inland Xinjiang Senior High School Classes (neidi Xinjiang gaozhongban 內地新疆高中班, hereafter Xinjiangban) for Uyghurs.1 As of 2013, the Xizang zhongxue and Xinjiangban have been running for twenty-eight years and thirteen years respectively. Compared with the Xizang zhongxue, the Xinjiangban is a newer phenomenon but with a larger scale given the population in Xinjiang (Sixth National Population Census 2010). The overall enrollment is significant: since their advent in 2000, the yearly enrollment of the Xinjiangban started with around one thousand students, but increased to five thousand students five years later (MOE, National Committee on Development and Reform, and Ministry of Finance 2005) before reaching seven thousand students in 2011 (Xinjiang Classes 2011). Following four years of senior high school (including a one-year preparatory class plus three years of a normal senior high school curriculum), the first group of graduates completed their university training and entered the job market in Xinjiang or the rest of China in 2008. By 2010, about 13,000 students had graduated from Xinjiangban (Jiang 2011), with many of them going 9 TowardsAnotherMinorityEducational Elite Group in Xinjiang? Chen Yangbin 202 Chen Yangbin on to be successfully admitted to inland universities. It is estimated that there are now around 3,500 Xinjiangban university graduates (Jiang 2011). The number of these graduates is likely to spike in 2013 and 2019 when classes that were affected by the eight continuous enrollment expansions since 2005 will graduate . Considering the population of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), which is about 20 million, the Xinjiangban policy will have a significant impact on the Uyghur ethnic group and Uyghur-Han relations in China. This chapter seeks to explore Xinjiangban university graduates’ experiences at inland universities. It proposes the minority educational elite stratum as a framework for analyzing this policy and its impacts, and suggests that Uyghur Xinjiangban university graduates could become a new educational elite stratum in the XUAR in the very near future (Jiang 2011).2 The chapter offers a preliminary assessment of how this group feels about their elite status. In particular, the empirical data finds that, compared with their minkaomin (民考民) co-ethnics, they express pride in their educational achievements; and when compared with their minkaohan (民考漢) co-ethnics, they feel proud of their Uyghur identity maintenance. The chapter concludes that this new Uyghur educational elite stratum could not only create more Uyghur in-group discrimination in Xinjiang but also add a new challenge for Uyghur-Han interethnic relations in China. Research Method The empirical data in this chapter has been gathered from a series of in-depth individual and focus group interviews with twenty-two Xinjiangban university graduates from different universities in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, Nanchang, and Wuxi in 2010. The selection of the interviewees was a legacy of my previous ethnographic field study in one of the Xinjiangban host schools in eastern China in 2003. I employed a “snowball” method for recruiting my interviewees : firstly contacting several previous informants through email and QQ (the most popular free instant messaging program, equivalent to Facebook), and then following further recommendations through online social networks. I then narrowed down the final interviewees in order to achieve the best balance between gender, hometown, university major, and university location. During the 2010 interviews, these fourth year university students (mostly final year) Towards Another Minority Educational Elite Group in Xinjiang? 203 included nine female students and thirteen male students. Interviews lasted from one to two hours and were conducted in Xinjiang restaurants (interviewees’ most preferred choice), fast food restaurants like KFC (commonly suggested by Uyghur students), hotel rooms, or university dormitories. During the interviews, I used open-ended questions to explore the Uyghur Xinjiangban graduates’ general reflections on their high school, university, and workplace experiences. The highlighted topics were their social networks and interactions with other groups of people in daily life, such as fellow Uyghur university students from non-Xinjiangban...