New Year festivals a sign of change for China's ethnic groups

For centuries Wu Xianlan's village in a remote mountainous pocket of western China's Guizhou province celebrated festivals that were exclusively the domain of her ethnic Dong minority group.

Men dressed in black cotton tunics and women in finely embroidered skirts adorned with silver-coin aprons and crowns would sing of blossoming love and the beauty of the emerald green of their ancient terraced rice fields.

As they enjoyed festivals such as the New Rice Tasting Harvest and the Dong New Year in November, they would look with disdain upon the traditions of their Han Chinese rulers - but that has now changed. In a sign of their increasing assimilation, one brought on by dire poverty and the far reaching impact of the booming Chinese economy, the Dong have added the Lunar New Year to their calendar with a television style variety show.

"Until two years ago we never celebrated the Chinese New Year," Wu, 25, said ahead of the evening party over a meal of glutinous rice, cabbage soup and spicy pork soaked in fresh pig's blood.

"We are being influenced by outside culture as people leave the village to find work in other provinces and when they come back they bring with them Han culture."

It is a pattern being repeated throughout the country as millions of people from poor rural ethnic groups unable to make ends meet seek work in China's developed provinces, returning home with customs unknown a decade ago.

"Almost all young people in Xiaohuang leave to find jobs in Guangdong," said Wu, herself recently back from a year's work with a dance troupe in the southern manufacturing hub teeming with hotels and entertainment complexes.

"The main problem is no more land is being given to us kids, so we live on the land that was divided and given to our parents which does not provide enough for all of us to eat."

Guizhou offers its youth few choices. It ranked as one of China's poorest provinces for most of the 20th century, industrialisation coming only in fits and starts during the Sino-Japanese war and again in the last 25 years.

Despite some new roads aimed at jump starting the local economy by promoting ecological and ethnic minority tourism, the region of about 37 million people has been all but left out of China's economic boom.

In Xiaohuang the fixed telephone was installed for its 3,700 residents just last year. Electricity, hooked up 20 years ago, eventually paved the way for TV, but not until more than a decade later.

The mobile phone is ubiquitous among returning locals, but other modern amenities like stoves, fridges and running water are years away given the average earnings from crops are 300 yuan (38 dollars) a month or less.

Thousands of years of isolation coming to an end

For over 2,500 years the long-isolated Dong who today number nearly three million have retained their unique identity under Chinese domination, but their culture is beginning to buckle under China's economic modernisation.

It is a problem affecting all of ethnic-rich Guizhou, where 18 of China's 56 minorities live, said Zhang Hankun, a journalist for the Hong Kong-based Wen Weipo newspaper who has written extensively on the issue.

"Minorities in Guizhou are losing their traditional culture," said Zhang, a member of the Miao ethnic group from the same region as the Dong.

In schools the richness of the Dong's language, which has up to 15 tonal variations depending on the dialect, is being lost as children learn mainly Mandarin Chinese, the tongue necessary to get ahead.

"Our language is really difficult and although we do learn it in school Chinese is much easier," said Wu Guolin, 22, who works in a Guangdong factory. "Only some of the older generation know how to write it."

Government efforts to promote tourism are also impacting Dong culture. According to Wu Dingfang, a native of Xiaohuang who works as a singer and MC in Guangdong, the village and others nearby decided to adopt the Lunar New Year purely for economic reaons.

"It is mainly for tourists," Wu said with a showbiz smile, referring to the growing number of Han Chinese travellers, while insisting that the local authorities were working hard to maintain the traditions.

"Tomorrow if you would like to see more traditional Dong performances, call me and I will arrange it for you."

(AFP)