Marginalized Majority or Dis/Advantaged Minorities---Educational Experience of Chinese Ethnic Minorities in China

There are 56 ethnic groups in China, more than 91% of Han majority group and 55 ethnic minority groups constituting less than 9% of total Chinese population. These 55 minority groups widely distributes throughout China except five Autonomous Regions (Xinjiang Uygur, Ningxia Hui, Tibetan, Inner Mongolia and Guangxi Zhuang), of which Ningxia is where I was born and received K-12 education while Xinjiang is the place where I attended college and taught English at the Alma Mater University after my graduation from college until I came to U.S. to pursue my doctoral studies in Ed. D. in Curriculum Studies program at Georgia Southern University. In China I, a Han Chinese, was a marginalized “visible majority” (Li, 2005, p.1) like a grain of sand in a northwest rural county while my potential participants were advantaged minorities not in terms of ethnic heritage maintenance but in terms of formal education they received in cities where they had more access to advanced educational and academic resources as well as job opportunities, although their ethnicity derogated through the process of acculturation (Schumann, 1986; Conle, 1993; He, 1998, 1999, 2003; He, Phillion & Connelly, 2005; Phillion, 2002 & 2010). On the other hand, regarding national policy I was prestigious while my potential participants were disadvantaged, as Belle and Ward (1994) argued that “minority students are disadvantaged in schools because of conflicts between mainstream ideologies and the home cultures of these students” (cited in Phillion, J; Hue, M. T& Wang, Y. X. (2011, p.25). All my ethnic minority participants were born and received education in cities in China but never benefited from National Preferential Policy for Minorities Education (guo jia shao shu min zu you hui zheng ce国家少数民族优惠政策), which bears resemblance to the Affirmative Action taken in U. S. in 1960s. The original policy in China was initiated and implemented in early 50s and revised many times to be more fitting for ethnic minority groups. The current policy significantly responds to the Article 37th of the Regulation for Higher Education Admission in 1987 (Pu tong gao deng xue xiao zhao sheng zan xing tiao li di san shi qi tiao《普通高等学校招生暂行条例》第三十七条) in consonance, which legislated that all children for ethnic minorities and Han majority children living in minority regions were required lower scores to enter undergraduate and graduate programs in Chinese universities. However, my potential participants who were all born and received education in cities never benefited from this policy. On the contrary, I, as a Han, benefited from the policy. Therefore, in China who benefited more politically, economically, educationally, linguistically and socially? I as a marginalized and beneficiary majority or my potential participants as dis/advantaged minorities