 It's my great pleasure, well, this afternoon, to welcome Naomi Yamada from major university, who's giving her talk, Changing Approaches to Positive Discrimination in Education in China. And I think that maybe I will just leave it with this short introduction so that I don't take away from her time. Very happy to be here, and I want to especially thank Dr. Nathan Hill for inviting me. So the title of my talk today is Changing Approaches to Positive Discrimination in Education in China. And in China, as in almost every multi-ethnic nation state, there's inequalities in education that correspond to ethnicity. So the Yohui Jiangsu, the preferential policies are kind of positive discrimination system, which means that special measures are available for certain groups so that there can be greater general equality. That's the idea. But as with affirmative action in the United States, the preferential policies have long been criticized within the country. And there is an imagined endpoint when they are no longer needed. That may be sooner rather than later. I'll be talking about China's preferential policy measures in higher education and some of the connected debates or discourses. So first of all, just briefly sketch out general framework of some of the policy measures and then talk about the logic for their implementation and for some of the current undoing. Let's see. Oh, here we go. Okay, so Yohui Jiangsu, preferential policy measures in higher education can refer to a couple of things. One, score adjustments on the Gaokao, the National College Entrance Exam. And these are often called bonus points or Jiaofen by Kolopili. They're most widely known in connection with minority students, Xiaoshu Min Association, but they're also given to some other categories of students like the children of martyrs, Lea Shidson and two overseas Chinese students and not all minority students have been eligible for these added points on the Gaokao. There have always been annual changes to the policies that affect which group and region are eligible, but minority-focused point provisions for the Gaokao are in the process of being reduced and discontinued throughout China in prefectures and provinces throughout China. And the preferential policies can also refer to the national system of preparatory classes, the Yukaban for minority students for higher education. And that was the primary focus of my dissertation research long ago. Students can enter the preparatory program with lower scores than needed for direct entrance to university. And then after a one or two-year program, they can proceed to the affiliated university without retaking the entrance exam. And only minorities are eligible for Yuka theoretically. There's a lot of stories about fake minorities, but I never met anybody who admitted to that status. The two largest represented groups in China over the past 70 years that have been eligible have been the Tibetans and Uyghurs depending on where they live. So in Ching Hai province where I primarily was the two largest affected minority groups were the Tibetans and the Hui. And there were smaller groups like the Salar and the Mongolians who also were part of the Yuka ban. There's other preferential policies that concern tax revenues and have concerned family planning, but I've been focused on higher education. So I published a book at the end of last year connected to the preferential policies for higher ed mainly focusing on the preparatory program. And in my research, I found that these policies have been understood and rhetorically they're talked about as important for managing ethnic-based contradictions. Because I'm from the US, the frame of reference I have a positive discrimination apart from preferential policies in China is affirmative action. And interestingly, there was an important edited volume that came out in 2009 called affirmative action in China and the US. So some people choose to translate Yokei Junsu as affirmative action in English. There's a different basis for these systems, for the positive discrimination systems and the term affirmative action doesn't accurately describe the measures in China, but calling it this makes the topic more accessible to people outside of China. So after all, there are similarities in the types of complaints that members of non-eligible groups have. Many, Han, Zoumini and the Han majority object to these measures saying that they are unfair. And this is very similar to the reverse discrimination discourses that come up with reference to affirmative action. And if you're from China, if any of you are from China, you probably know there's a widespread perception that minorities have extra benefits. I've never met anyone in China who hasn't heard about the score adjustments, the added points, the Jiofen. In my own writing, I call them point provisions because sometimes what people call Jiofen refers instead to the lowering of the cutoff score, Fin Xuqian and not to adding points on top. So I just say point provisions. At any rate, the adjusted scores on the Galco are well known. Fewer people are aware of the Yukuban, but the preferential policies are often raised in response to criticisms of China's treatment of minority peoples. I was asked by the China Journal to review a book called From Empire to Nation, State Ethnic Politics in China, which was published last year by Cambridge. And the author of the book, Xuqian, really painted a picture of extensive ethnic-based prerogatives. And in describing some of the preferential policies, the author talked about reverse discrimination and blamed the policies for exacerbating ethnic tensions. And what she said really represents a common discourse in China. One argument she makes is that the extension of these policy measures to Xiaoshu Minzhu to minority peoples, facilitates politicized ethnic identities that are destabilizing to the Chinese state. And this argument that she makes follows from and builds on an argument made by Peking University professor of sociology, Morrow, who controversially argued in 2004 about the need to quote, de-politicize ethnic identities by cultivating a common civic identity, a common kind of superordinate identity and dismantling ethnic-based preferential policies. So I'll come back to his argument a little bit later about the preparatory program. In 2018, there were 7.9 million students entering college, regular higher educational institutes. And in the same year in China, there were 44,429 students enrolled in preparatory programs for higher ed. So it's a relatively small program. And criticism of the preferential policy measures is not new. But I think it's important to note that this program doesn't actually affect that many people. It's a pretty small provision. But these programs have carried on in some form in the face of criticism over generations, with the exception of the Cultural Revolution. The philosophical framework of the program hasn't changed significantly in its 70-year history, even though the content and the organization and the fee structure have all changed. But the program is still talked about in terms of development. And the idea is that if there's development, it will bring various ethnic groups into parody and prevent these contradictions that could destabilize the country. And the courses have a history going back to the early years of the People's Republic of China, the early 50s, was stated goals of recruiting minority cadres and encouraging economic and political development of minority areas. While recruiting cadres is not such a main focus now, administrators still explain the program in terms of preparing rural minority students for Chinese higher education. So it's supposed to be a year with kind of reinforcement of high school, what they learned in high school, and then they can go on to college. Some of them may need help with Mandarin if their first language is Tibetan or Uyghur, or, well, I was gonna say Korean, but actually the Koreans don't have, they don't attend Yookaban. They do, they have been receiving Jaffa, no. An assumed corollary is that it will lead to a reduction of tensions and contradictions. So this was on the Ministry of Education website. I checked today, it's still there. It was written in 2005. And this is a translation, my translation. Preparatory classes and nationality specific classes held in ordinary higher educational institutions are special policy measure by which the party and country can speed up the training of people of special talent from minority regions. This is the higher educational institutions utmost responsibility and duty. Anyway, it goes on to say that it promotes stability and sustainable development in minority areas, strengthens the solidarity and safeguards the country's unity. So at first glance, it's hard to understand the connection between safeguarding the country's unity and classes for minority students. And the training of minority individuals is linked to their eventual contribution to home regions and autonomous prefectures, which is linked to development and inter-ethnic cooperation, which is linked to an absence of conflict or threats to the state. So the mass internments in Xinjiang, which I first heard of in 2017, seemed like a departure from the policy logic of accommodating diversity in the interests of development and stability. The diversity efforts seemed to have given way to a new method, a promotion of sameness, monolingualism, anti-alternate belief systems in order to achieve some kind of unity. And at the same time, there's discontinuation of teaching in minority languages. So in Qinghai, there were proposals a decade ago to stop teaching in Tibetan, content and language classes in Tibetan and to stop translating textbooks in Tibetan. But there were protests at the time and the end point was delayed. They didn't follow through on their end point, which was, I think, 2020. But in Xinjiang, there has been discontinuation of teaching in Uyghur and in Jilin, the mean Kalmin, the students who want to test in, you take the Gaokao in Korean, for example, that will be canceled as of 2026. And some of the Korean classes are going to eventually be canceled as well, although they're still in operation now. Most of my time spent in China was in Qinghai province, where I lived as an English teacher and later grad student and researcher. And I was also at Beijing-Dashui Peking University for about five months. So Qinghai is in Northwest China on the northeast portion of the Tibetan plateau. And you can see the Qinghai grassland behind me. I was first an English teacher for two years at Qinghai Normal University in the late 90s from 1997 to 99. And some of my interlocutors have been familiar to me since that time. And then I renewed my affiliation from 2009 to 10 as a graduate student. And then I returned for follow-up trips to Qinghai in the summers of 2013 to 15 and to Beijing in 2017. The largest ethnic groups in Qinghai are Han, Tibetan, Hue, Solar, Mongolian, and many students are eligible for preferential policies. Qinghai's only second to the Tibetan Autonomous Region she's on Zhezhu in terms of low primary school enrollment attendance and low childhood and adulthood literacy rates. And while I was there as an anthropologist I became interested in how people talked about the preparatory program, the logic behind it, and by extension the preferential policies. And I became interested in the rhetoric about the program and how it actually operated and how people affected by the policy of the teachers, the students, the potential students understood its purpose. All right, so Qinghai's had significant representation in the preparatory program. This is a map that my husband helped me make and it shows the ratio of preparatory course slots to higher education institution slots. So every university in China they have a set number of slots and they allocate these in very specific ways. So there will be slots allocated from certain places for students from Qinghai province. So if you look at this map you can see that Qinghai and Ningxia are in black and they have the highest ratio here of preparatory class slots to HEI admission slots. HEI means Higher Education Institution. So this includes four-year universities or two-year vocational schools. But the ratio here for Qinghai is one to 17, meaning that there was one preparatory course slot designated for a student from Qinghai for every 17 slots for higher education. This is back in 2010. And then if you look at only regular four-year undergraduate admission the ratio is even higher. So it's one to 6.7. So this was the highest ratio of any administrative unit in China meaning that one undergraduate tract preparatory class slot was allocated to a student from Qinghai for every 6.73 direct admission undergraduate slots for students from Qinghai, for Benka. So the previous slide was Benka and Joanka Vocational School and Regular Higher Education Institution. This is just for four-year colleges. By way of Ningxia had the second highest allocation. Okay, if I'm losing you the point is that there aren't options to go to college from other places via this route if you have lower scores. So this will add a year or two to your education but you can use the slot. You can get in with a slightly lower score and then you don't have to retake the Gaokao. You can just continue at your institution. So by way of contrast there were no Yuka slots for Gaokao examinees from Beijing. And one thing that is important to note about slot allocation. They're allocated for students based on the province or autonomous region they come from but the allocated slots for those students are from all over China. So the slots are allocated for students from Qinghai but the students don't all attend Yuka Ban the preparatory course in Qinghai. So although there are Yuka Ban in Beijing like Zhongyao means Uda Shui, the means of University of China no one from Beijing attends Yuka Ban and there's a good reason for this as students in Beijing have greater educational access. Okay, so by 2016 more slots were allocated for students from the Tibetan Autonomous Region from Xinjiang. And this can be seen in this map you can see these giant black areas now. So that's one strategy for educational equality to open more slots up for students from the West. But this data is difficult to interpret because the Ministry of Education didn't include in their public information the number of slots for study within these two regions. So this presumably affected the total allocations for other provinces as well. So that is if there were slots within these Autonomous Regions allocated for students from other provinces to study they didn't appear in the data. So for example, I'm almost done with this point but for example, in 2016 Beijing Foreign Studies University had two slots allocated for, I'm sorry, I just realized that. Okay, two slots allocated for students from Qinghai province out of 35 allocated in total for Yuka. The total number of allocations for Qinghai students from a variety of tertiary institutions across China including Beijing Foreign Studies University and institutions within Qinghai added up to 1,695. So 1,695 slots for students from Qinghai. However, institutions in the Tibetan Autonomous Region and Xinjiang were simply not listed although slots allocated for students from the Tibetan Autonomous Region and Xinjiang institutions across China are listed. So we can see that there are slots open for them to go to other provinces but we don't know how many slots they have in their own areas. So the allocating of spots for students from the West is one way to ensure greater access to education but it also means that they're leaving, they're leaving their homes. It's less common for students from Qinghai to have inland classes, Navy ban and Yuka ban for lower levels like junior high and high school than for students from Xinjiang and from the Tibetan Autonomous Region but Qinghai comes out as having one of the highest ratios of Gao Kao examinies who are allocated spots in Yuka ban for tertiary education. And these measures and provisions do enable students to compete on a more equal basis when faced with the national curriculum developed in the East but it also seems to indicate a pessimism about the prospects of building excellent educational facilities in the West. And although more slots are opened for them multi-ethnic provinces and autonomous regions underperform the national average for students who go on to tertiary education overall. So there's just less students who will go on to college or vocational school. For people who test in other languages the mean Kao Min could take the Gao Kao in another language. There are typically zero slots allocated for them at prestigious schools like Beda or Qinghua or any prestigious universities apart from means of universities, I think minority universities or teaching university, normal universities, Shizhen, Dachui. There's a persistence of educational disparities that start at the level of elementary school in minority areas, particularly in Western regions Qinghai, Gansu, Xinjiang and Tibetan Autonomous Region. These are just a couple of pictures from a school near Qinghai Lake. Probably the school is no longer open because there have been a number of school consolidations over the past decade to pre-factual centers. The idea is that the students will have better facilities but then again, they're farther away from their families. They may have to board. So there's a stress on regional development as well as individual career and educational development. There's this idea that individuals can study and go back to their birthplace and help develop the area. And that's part of the logic behind the programs. But there's so much competition for university slots and people really go to extremes for extra points. Some will even move to different provinces for better test results. Those are the Gao-Kao migrants, Gao-Kao Yiming, although I think that that has pretty much been discontinued. For every strategy that individuals come up with, then there's a counter strategy to prevent it through policy. So it goes to figure that many parties in China resent these programs that might give, that might give more points to other students. Students in elementary schools and Tibetan autonomous prefectures in Qinghai like this one would be eligible for UKBAN or point allocations. The teacher here is reviewing the alphabet in Tibetan, mainly for my benefit, since it was too easy for the students. And you can see in this picture on the wall, there's a saying from Chairman Mao Zedong that basically says if you study well, then you can aspire to higher levels. And in between this saying is a picture of the 10th Panchen Lama. That's kind of an interesting connection of things. So here is a vocational high school in Yushu. These are Tibetan students and they would be eligible for preferential policy measures. I actually took this picture right before the earthquake in Yushu. So this school that these students are, a few months after I took this picture, there was an earthquake and the epicenter was at this school and school was destroyed. And then actually the one thing that the Board of Education did was they actually allocated extra points for some of these students who had their education disrupted. But some of the students at the school died. So there are these gaps in education. There are well-meaning administrators who want to correct the gaps. At the same time, there's just this relentless competition to get into a good school, to get every point possible. So there's always this impetus to end and reform the preferential policies. In 2015, a publication issued by the Ministry of Education and five other departments published some requirements related to radically adjusting Gaokao point provisions. In the same year, the head of the ethnic education division of the Ministry of Education, Maoliti, he said that the ultimate goal is definitely to have no added points. Zwayzhou and the Mubiao kunding shibu jiafen. But there's still no clear timetable for the cancellation. However, since that time, across China, a number of provinces have canceled or restricted the jiafen for ethnic minority students. So there have been, just listed, okay. Sorry, from 2015, many provinces began to reduce and eliminate the extra points. Shanxi, Hebei, Zhejiang, Guangdong, Hubei, Jiangxi have reduced or actually, I think all of those have canceled the extra points. And then over the next five years, from 2020, many provinces are year by year reducing with end points in the next five years. So typically what they'll do is they'll start with, like if they have a 10 point allocation, they'll go down to five points. And then after a set number of years, they'll completely stop them. So let's see some of those. Yeah, Zwayzhou from 2022 will adjust downward and then by 2026 eliminate them. And Jiangsu will eliminate the extra points for the, will eliminate the point provisions for the Gaokel for Xiaoshu Minzhu from this year. Jiangsu is limiting the extra points to the Linxia area. Jilin, they'll be canceled entirely from 2023. Fujian is going from 10 to five points and they'll cancel the point provisions for ethnic minorities from 2025. Liaoning is slated to eliminate them as well. So just across the board, there's more, but across the board, there is an elimination of these ethnic based Gaokel points. The ones that remain are available to candidates from remote areas. And these are specified from the Ministry of Education as border areas, mountainous areas, pastoral areas and ethnic minority regions. So places where minorities live. And then additionally to get some of these points, the students have to show that they have kept their household registration and their school registration for a set number of years. And part of the impetus of this is related to those old complaints about fraud, about Han posing as minority students and getting extra points or entering the Yuka ban. So part of the impetus for change is to combat Gaibian, Xiaoshu, Minzu, Shenzhen, this change of minority status, taking on minority identity, not providing an incentive for this and to stop the Gaokel immigrants to give them no incentive. All right. So another change that's happened over the past two decades relates to just the structure, the fee structures of universities. So with the Yuka ban, with the preparatory programs, I'd often heard that the programs were meant for development and to help the poor. But at the same time, some people said that the programs were for the rich. And so it was hard for me to understand this contradiction initially until I realized that over the past 15 to 20 years, the programs have shifted from being mainly government supported to being largely Zifei or self-funded by students, which seems to undermine the goal of aiding those in the most need. But the universities don't have a lot of choice as they're increasingly run like businesses and they're less supported by the state. In 1999, higher education institutes in China were granted the status of legal persons. The fees in Qinghai are still quite low, but the students have to pay for an extra year or two if they go through the preparatory program. But that's still considered a benefit because it's preferable to, if you fail the Gaokao, you might have to pay for a year of cram school and you wouldn't have a guarantee of doing well on the Gaokao and students who delay entry by a year are repeaters and not eligible for some schools. So there's just an immense number of considerations. All right, originally when I began doing class observations interviews, I thought that perhaps the preparatory program was supposed to provide a cultural bridge between rural secondary education and Chinese higher education and a description of the features of the preparatory program at Qinghai Shidak included a transitional quality at Guojuxing. And there was mention of diversity of the students' backgrounds, the discrepancy in their cultural foundations and the psychological characteristics Xinli Te Dian, which differ from the Han. But when I asked questions about whether there were different definitions of education or if different teaching methods were used because of cultural differences, the teachers and the administrators would explain to me that everyone is part of the same country and the goals and definitions of education were determined by policy. And they stressed that the students lacked foundational knowledge and they said that they were behind, so the programs really have a remedial purpose. And some students joke that they are Gao Si. So there's three years of high school, Gao Yi, Gao R, Gao Sen. So Gao Si, the joke is it's the fourth year of high school. The rhetoric in the program really touches on contradiction and positions the individual student as a kind of means-to ambassador. The subject in one of the classes I attended at the Yukuben, at the preparatory campus was politics and the teacher discussed the reunification of Macau in Hong Kong and the importance of Taiwan's eventual reunification. She also talked about America's meddling on this issue. And I was surprised about that because I was usually the teachers will wait till I leave, but she wanted to let me know. So then she shifted into a discussion about developing personal quality and she pointed out that the students should be more tolerant of each other. And she said without enough tolerance, it was easy to chansheng maoduan, to engender contradictions. And if these were not quickly resolved, then they could become larger conflicts, kuei, yin, fa, da, de, chung, tu. At first I couldn't understand the shift between national sovereignty and territorial claims and self-cultivation and interpersonal skills, but the topics touched on questions of nation and unity. So if outside forces are potentially creating chaos, then internal cooperation could bridge and minimize difference. And I mean, it was just sitting in these classes that I learned about dialectical materialism. But the teacher went on to tell the students that the country was multi-ethnic and multi-religious and the students represented different groups. And she said that the reason the students were able to be together in the classroom was because of the party and the country for the gift of this policy, which allowed the students to receive a higher education. And she said, we should keep a grateful heart, we should thank the party and the country. So the courses and other preferential policy measures, they're pronounced on development, on overcoming contradictions, and they link self-cultivation and personal development with national stability. And then if you're in China, you often can see banners everywhere with kind of uplifting messages or with dictates, things you should do. So here we have one that says Shuo Wenming Hua, Xing Wenming Zhu, Shuo Wenming Ran, like speak like a civilized person, behave like a civilized person. Here, as another one, establish a consciousness of language norms, raise ethnic cultural quality. Xu Li, Yu Yang Guifan, Yixin, Tigao, Yunzu, Wenhua, Sujir. So I am gonna come back right now to Ma Rong, who I referenced a little bit earlier in the talk. There is an effort to emphasize unity with the nation and to overcome contradictions. And this relates to this discourse of politicized ethnic identities. So Ma Rong is a sociologist at Beidou at Peking University and he has written extensively on minority and bilingual education. And he has linked preferential policies and means of based educational offerings, minority based educational offerings, such as the preparatory program and minority education. He's linked all these things with nationality consciousness. And this line of thinking is echoed by other education scholars as well. So his idea is that if these students or these groups become too aware of themselves as nationalities, then they will think that they're at the same level as the state and there will be contradictions between them and between the state. Ma's argument follows a logic of contradictions and it's generated debates and ideas that have been followed by academics and policymakers. And I know that for some of us, we think, well, academics, nobody listens to academics. And that's largely true, but in this case, in this case, some academics have been listened to very carefully and the policymakers have changed our approaches based on what they have said. So for example, his argument influenced a call by Hu Angang and Julien He for a second generation of ethnic policies, the Ardaimine Zujianze in 2011. And the second generation proposal from the two Hoos was less culturally sensitive than Ma's proposal. You may recall it was Julien He who stood before the United Nations in August 2018 and stated, there were no reeducation centers in Xinjiang. So he's been linked to policy shifts and detentions in Xinjiang. The relationship between the logic of contradictions and ethnic policy in China, it's illuminated by Ma's argument and the criticism it drew in second generation discourse. So Ma's reasoning is that the nationalities model in China was borrowed from the Soviet Union and that had the consequence of politicizing ethnic consciousness. He went on to say that the Soviet Union eventually split up along lines of ethnic nationalism and China would do well to ostensibly ensure against the same fate to consider changes to the conceptual model, notably by changing terms and use from nationality or Minzhu to ethnic group or Zutren and to shift from a Minzhu or nationality-based model of ethnic policy to a depoliticized, to Zhang Zhihua, our culturalist, Wenhua Ju Yi model. And he thinks that the United States has a kind of culturalist model. So he depicts the United States as having one national superordinate level of culture under which there are lesser cultures that is ethnically expressed subcultures. And then he uses the expression of one polity and many cultures, Zhang Zhihui, Wenhua Duoyuan. And this kind of expresses his understanding of the American model. But he additionally is linguistically signaling pioneering sociologist, Fei Xiaodong's foundational vision of pluralist unity which was Duoyuan and Yi Ti. So he's saying Zhang Zhihui, Wenhua Duoyuan, one polity and many cultures. And Fei Xiaodong's vision was Duoyuan and Yi Ti, pluralist unity. So he's reconfiguring the pairs of characters in phase expression to construct his own. So a counter narrative, however, takes it as a given that preferential policies and regional autonomy even in a reduced capacity don't accomplish this developmental and assimilative transformation. So according to this narrative, which relies on the policy ideal of equality and unity, preferential policies encourage contradictions. And Ma Rong finds accordance with anthropological consensus on the point that ethnic difference is not inherent but socially constructed. He works off this counter narrative by further expressing that an admission of difference and a production of nationality consciousness at the level of identity is the facilitator of the development of contradictions. So, I mean, I think that it's important to notice the shift in approach to contradictions because in the past, there's this idea that there are antagonistic contradictions or dieu malduin which cannot achieve anything positive. But then there's these non-antagonistic contradictions or naebu malduin which are transformative and can be celebrated. But in this telling, really any kind of difference is bad and potentially explosive. Okay, so again, there are proposed endings to the point provisions and some places have already canceled the point provisions for ethnic minorities. The preparatory programs are still continuing and there are more boarding schools and Navy ban that are being promoted. Okay, we can make one contrast between affirmative action and preferential policies and that's the basis. So notice again that in this piece in the South China Morning Post, they also refer to the preferential policies as affirmative action. So policy provides a kind of description of an outcome and affirmative action really expresses that there's some kind of affirmative or positive action that has to be taken in order to counter discrimination. And there's a recognition of racial discrimination in the title affirmative action. Preferential policies as a descriptor is a bit different. It expresses that in order for development of these poor Western areas to occur some preference must be shown. With regard to higher education in the US the achievement of diversity has really replaced affirmative action as a policy rationale. So it's no longer about group-based structural discrimination and states can ban affirmative action for university admission consideration. Also universities in the US cannot make a point or quota system, which is in China central to how the policy measures work. Everything is based on points and quotas and allocation of slots. In China, the name of the policy tells you something about the approach. So they're called preferential policies. The idea is that in order to develop minority autonomous areas and to train groups of people to train minorities they need to be given preference. The focus is on development. There isn't an overt acknowledgement of discrimination. So if the context of tension in the US is about racial animus in China it's connected to a fear of separatism. And then policy arguments to dismantle or reconfigure the preferential policies are connected to this fear. Will there be greater unity if there are some accommodations or not? The question of how to prevent devastating contradictions is always linked to the preferential policies. Whether they maintain or dismantle or reconfigure the policy measures is connected to this question. And they could come to an end. There is an imagined endpoint for them. So there's a similar dynamic between these two systems these two systems, they're subject to political wins and fluctuations. And just as the Trump administration took up new challenges to affirmative action in the US similarly in China some eligible categories for the preference of policy measures have been retracted and some point provisions have been eliminated. And then of course the situation in Xinjiang from 2017 undercuts policy on minority autonomy and rhetoric on diversity. Okay, well thank you very much for this and I will start us off with a question. In the context of the coronavirus pandemic in particular we have come to find it normal to talk about a kind of let's say systemic rivalry between I don't know China and the US in particular and one handling the situation well and one badly. And then kind of using if you like this discussion of contradictions one contradiction that I find really intriguing is you know Ma Long's vision of the second generation nationalist policy is explicitly modeled on the US. And from my perspective, this kind of thing that was great about socialism was this sort of multinational vision of the polity that goes back to the sort of, this is probably what this fellow was talking about. Sort of like Ottoman empire, Austrian empire sort of we're all, we can have multinational flourishing under the same sovereign. Whereas a move towards this kind of one nation is one state kind of French model which has an inherently genocidal logic to it is what China's moving towards. So it seems very odd that China's like we're so proud to have this Chinese model which is just like America. And we will give up on socialism and pursue a bourgeois notion of the nation state. And is there any, I don't know self-awareness of that contradiction in China or among these social theorists? Well, first of all, I don't think that everything Ma Long wanted to do was really adopted. So the second generation is who Angang and who Lihhe who came a bit later. And actually Ma Long has a lot of criticisms about the second generation policy. So yeah, so his, although he says that he's inspired by the US a lot of academics and politicians have criticized him and said, we can't be like the US. We are China and we are going to achieve this in our own way with Chinese characteristics. So that's really what he's often criticized for. And I mean, there's a whole raft of criticisms of him and he's responded to a lot of them. But I do agree with you that the China model is very similar to the French model. So I think that there is the sense that maybe there was a kind of flirting with the idea that diversity could bring about some kind of unity and equality, but in the end, I think people have decided no, instead we're just going to achieve equality by everybody being the same and not having identifiable differences. So yeah, I mean, I guess you could say in France, if you can't wear a he job because you stand out in public space, well, China maybe they'll do the same thing, but I don't think they're going to see themselves as inspired by France either. Well, maybe just very specifically, I particularly found, and I don't know if it's Ma Rong or not, but this like, oh, we've looked at the anthropological literature and it turns out that nationality is always the sort of imagined construction that leads to sort of splitist notions of solidarity. Well, why wouldn't that be true of the Zhonghua Minzu? That's like- Well, I think the idea is you can, if that's true that it's constructed then why don't we construct one? Why don't we construct some superordinate culture that everybody can be a part of? I mean, obviously everybody can't be a part of it and that's the problem. And it sort of takes the state, I don't know as an organizational form, the nation state as a moral good in and of itself, I guess. Yeah, and there were so many discussions. I mean, I don't know how many policy makers listen to these discussions, but there were a lot of forums at Zhonghua Minzu Dashui and at IUAES, the International Union of Anthropological Sciences. I mean, they had a lot of discussions about the danger of these kinds of thinking and discussions about what had happened to indigenous people and peoples in Canada and in Americas when there was genocide and how terrible it was. And please, for China not to follow the same direction. But, I don't know, maybe some people took it the other way to say, well, maybe we can't have unity if we just all speak Putonghua and- I mean, certainly if you just look at certain young people on the internet, I've seen people say like, oh, you know, America killed all its indigenous peoples and it got rich, so maybe we should give it a try. A lot of the students, at least to me, would just say that they were glad that they had the opportunity to go to college. And some of them were, you know, the first in their families to be able to do so. So they thought it was great that they could go. Some people thought it was like a waste of time, but that it was necessary in order to go to university. And some people thought, well, we have a lot of free time. We can just have fun. We don't have to study that hard. There were some students who did have to study hard who may have had trouble linguistically or with some of their subjects. And so they did have to study harder. So, yeah, so there's quite a range. I had read in one book, I mean, I think it's much more fraught in Xinjiang. I think it has been much more fraught in Xinjiang where, you know, Minghao, Ming and Minghao Han, the people who test in Chinese and the people who test in a minority language almost takes on the level of an identity. So there was, I was reading in a book by Timothy Gross that some of the students complained that they were disadvantaged, that they could have maybe gone directly to university, but they had to go through these remedial classes. And I didn't hear that so much in Qinghai, but it is true that students will, when they fill out their forms, their application forms for a university, they have to apply to a category. And so you can kind of hedge your bets and say you want to go to the preparatory program, but maybe if you had a few points more and you didn't calculate it correctly, maybe you could have gone directly to university, but you missed your chance and you had to spend this extra year because you chose the preparatory program instead. Others are very strategic about it. So for example, maybe they want to get into a higher ranked university. And so instead they could go directly to a lower ranked university, like an urban university, but they will instead opt to go to the preparatory program of an Iban university, a top tier university. So they spend an extra year or two, but they get a more prestigious degree in the end. I have the impression just again from sort of, I don't know, anecdotal chatter that in terms of the normal people's, by which I mean Chinese people's understanding of this preferential system, some Min Zhu are sort of more problematic than others. So like you hear the Manchus talked about a lot. It's like, well, no one's really Manchu anyhow. And so anyone who is Manchu just pretends to be Manchu in order to get points. Whereas maybe some honey who lives in Yunnan in a tree or something, that's okay if they get some extra points. I've heard a lot of things like that. But I assume that actually Manchu's don't get extra points. But anyhow, can you just talk a little bit about the ideological status of different nationalities in public discourse on these questions? A lot of places where the group doesn't speak their own language, well, with the exception of the Hui and in some areas they don't have Yucatan at all. So a lot of those don't apply. But it's true that there is resentment about this kind of group-based privileges that my neighbor had the same education as me, but she has this chance and I don't. I did meet a student. I'm trying to think what group she was. She was, Ewinkie, am I saying that right? Ewinkie. Ewinkie, Ewinkie, Ewinkie. Yeah, she had gone to the Yucatan and actually she got in as a Yucatan student, but then I think she didn't actually have to go through a program. And she expressed a little guilt to me about it. She said, well, someone like me she really shouldn't have the opportunity of this program, but I did. So yeah, I think that's definitely, but even for groups that are at some disadvantage there's still a kind of resentment there. And I think that that really has more to do with just a lack of interaction, that some of the people criticizing these people they've never had any interactions with them. Yeah, they have to do that. And the students from the West might not know about that university, so they might not write it down or it might be too expensive or less desirable to attend. So, but yeah, they do everything on an allocation slot-based system. The privilege left to me is to thank Naomi for giving this really interesting talk. So let's all, I don't know, clap for Naomi and thank her for being with us today. All right, so thank you. Thank you. It was good to be remotely with all of you as well.