ABSTRACT
Chinese education of non-Han peoples living in the geographic periphery of the Chinese state is one of the most important components of what Stevan Harrell has called “China's civilizing projects,” in which a center, claiming to be on a superior level of civilization, interacts with its peripheral peoples and attempts to raise their levels of civilization. 2 The ideology of inequality is legitimized by the conviction that the dominance of the center is truly helping and thus is to the benefit of the culturally inferior peoples. Many aspects of the communist “civilizing project” come into play within the education of minorities, which is the main arena for transmitting Chinese language, Chinese history, atheism and patriotism to the non-Han peoples. However, the civilizing and nationalist aspects of Chinese minority education have rarely been debated, and our knowledge about local ethnic minorities' reactions to these aspects of Chinese state education is particularly limited. 3
