Yesterday’s New York Times illustrated its coverage of the Uyghur uprising in western China with a map titled “Minorities in China”. The print edition had a similar map.
Move the dial up to 50 percent and you’ll notice a funny thing: according to the Times, Uyghurs are actually a majority in Xinjiang (or, as they call it, East Turkestan). Same thing with Tibet: Tibetans are a majority in Tibet.
(Actually, neither of these statements are probably true. The Chinese government has sent so many Han Chinese colonists to the West that Uyghurs and Tibetans may have already lost their majority status. But I digress.)
The point is: Where they live, Uyghurs are a majority. Yet they’re dubbed–in the title–minorities.
Imagine a state that was 55% African-American. When discussing the regional struggle for control WITHIN that state, would it be accurate to call African-Americans a minority? A national minority, sure. But not just a plain old minority.
5 Comments.
It's a good point, to be sure. Kurds are a minority in multiple places, but if we considered their particular territory, they become a majority. This is even true of African Americans in many US cities. What's the upshot though? Does the picture change if we relabel?
Sent to gitmo, too.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31884168/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/
What's your take on this, Ted?
The labels are just that: labels. They aren't statistical conclusions, but are masquerading as such. It's like the term "deviant," which is said to mean a statistical outlier or minority, but, in effect, means perjoratively different. It's deviant to maintain a monogamous marriage for the rest of one's life after committing to one, because most human beings cheat, but since monogamy is considered "normal" you'll never hear the term deviant applied to it.
Minority is a label, so once a group gets the "minority" label, all thoughts on the issue cease.
Minority really has different meanings depending on its intended use. The Uyghurs and Tibetans are numerical majorities in their home provinces (and Qinghai as well for the Tibetans) but they are economically and politically marginalized. The fact that they are regional minorities is of little consequence considering that political and economic administration is guided from Beijing. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the fact that they're a regional majority but a national minority doesn't get them anything one would normally associate with being a majority. If African-Americans constituted the majority in a state, they theoretically could do quite a bit within constitutional limits to effect political and economic change. The existence of constitutionally prescribed limits on a national government's power over regional affairs would make quite a bit of a difference.
I'm part of the 'human minority" on this planet.