Comment by throwaway2037
4 days ago
Mainland Chinese gov't claims to have 56 official ethnicities in their country. They are certainly celebrated by official media. In particular, they seem to love the southwest portion of the country (Guangxi and Yunnan) with many mountaineous regions and various ethnic groups, mostly because they do not protest the central gov't. Also, look at the coins and bills of yuan -- many different ethnicities.
The PCR’s official diversity has been a Potemkin village since the 1970s. Yes, the coinage still shows multiple languages, and the Chinese do love their touristy ethnic villages where people dress up in traditional clothing (though often these are outside actors instead of actual locals). However, there is almost no room for minorities to use their own languages; even in the family circle there has been increasing pressure to switch to putonghua.
Around the turn of the millennium, Muslim Uighur radicals got a lot of attention in the international press. But what most of the world had not followed was that before that, there had been conflict between secular Uighur Communists and the central government because the former saw the space for use of Uighur shrinking. Those Uighurs were silenced or forced into exile abroad, leaving only Islam as a channel for ethnic discontent.