One of the unexpected consequences of economic reforms in
China has been ethnic revitalization.1 Economic reforms initiated in
minority areas were designed to improve the living conditions of
minorities and hasten their general development, thereby
encouraging their integration into the Chinese Han majority
mainstream.2 Marxist theories have long held that socioeconomic
development leads to the erosion, and eventual disappearance, of
class differences, as well as national and ethnic loyalties. Economic
reforms, by stimulating growth in the economies of state-identified
minority groups, were therefore expected to promote the
assimilation of minorities into the broader Han majority culture. In
China, not unlike the former Soviet Union, the opposite has
occurred: As minorities developed economically, so did their ethnic
consciousness.