ABSTRACT
The People's Republic of China (PRC) has one of the oldest and largest programs of state-sponsored preferential policies (youhui zhengce) for ethnic minorities. While preferential policies have been explicitly touted by national leaders only since the mid-1980s, 1 the program dates from the inception of the state 2 and is a variant of a concept pioneered in the ex-Soviet Union. 3 As of 1995, preferential policies for minorities encompassed 9 percent of China's population, about one hundred ten million people. 4
