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

James Leibold · Yangbin Chen

Jan 2014 · Hong Kong University Press

About this ebook

This edited volume brings together essays by leading experts exploring different aspects of ethnic minority education in China: among these are the challenges associated with bilingual and trilingual education in Xinjiang and Tibet; Han Chinese reaction to preferential minority education; the role of inland boarding schools for minority students, and the mediation of religion and culture in multiethnic schools. The book covers these topics from a range of different perspectives: Uyghur, Tibetan, Korean, Mongolian, Han, and those of the West, combining empirical field studies with theoretical approaches. Previous scholarship has explored the pedagogical and policy challenges of minority education in China; this is the first volume to recast these problems in the light of the Chinese party-state's efforts to create ethnic harmony and stability through a shared sense of national belonging.

About the author

James Leibold is senior lecturer in politics and Asian studies at La Trobe University, Australia. He is the author of Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and Its Indigenes Became Chinese (2007), Ethnic Policy in China: Is Reform Inevitable? (2013), and co-editor of Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation and Identity of China's Majority (2012).

Chen Yangbin is lecturer in Chinese studies in the School of Humanities at La Trobe University and the author of Muslim Uyghur Students in a Chinese Boarding School: Social Recapitalization as a Response to Ethnic Integration (2008).