Barry Sautman is a professor emeritus at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s Division of Social Science and visiting professor at Tsinghua University. An expert on China’s ethnic minorities, particularly the Tibetan and Uygur communities, his research focuses on minority rights, cultural preservation and social change. This interview first appeared in SCMP Plus. For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here.
What drew you to ethnic minority issues in China?
I’d been to Xinjiang perhaps three or four times many years ago. I was concentrating on a particular subject, which was preferential policies. At that time I was studying them broadly, going to different minority areas including Tibet, Xinjiang, Guizhou, Sichuan, Inner Mongolia. That was in the late 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s.
From that I got interested in ethnic minority policies more generally because there was a debate in China about them.
Some said preferential policies and ethnic policies were not broad enough and they weren’t directed sufficiently to closing the socioeconomic gaps that existed between Han people and minority people.
The other side was people who said that basically ethnic regional autonomy had created a vested interest on the part of minority officials particularly.
The debate intensified after 2008, 2009 because in 2008 there were the demonstrations in Tibet, and then in 2009 there were the [riots] in Urumqi.
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