VI. Protection and Development of Cultures of the Ethnic Minorities

Culture is an important characteristic of an ethnic group, and a source of its vitality, creativity and cohesion. The cultures of China's ethnic minorities are a vital part of Chinese civilization, and are intellectual assets owned by the entire Chinese nation.

The Constitution of the People's Republic of China stipulates that the state helps the ethnic minorities to accelerate the development of their cultural undertakings according to the characteristics and needs of the ethnic minorities. The Chinese government adopts various policies and measures to respect, protect and support the inheritance, development and innovation ofthe cultures of the various ethnic minorities, to encourage all ethnic groups to enhance their cultural exchanges, and develop their cultural undertakings.

Protecting and developing the spoken and written languages of the ethnic minorities

In the 1950s the state conducted a survey on the spoken and written languages of its ethnic minorities, on the basis of which the state established special institutions to do research work on these languages and help minority people create or improve their scripts. Of all the 55 ethnic minorities in China, 53 have their own spoken languages, except the Hui and Manchu that use the Han language. Among them 22 use 28 scripts, and 12 ethnic groups, including the Zhuang, Bouyei and Miao, use 16 scripts which have been created or improved with the help of the government. Now, there are approximately 60 million minority people in China who regularly use their own spoken languages, accounting for over 60 percent of the total population of the ethnic minorities, and about 30 million minority people who regularly use their own scripts. There are 154 radio and television stations using the languages of the ethnic minorities in ethnic autonomous areas, and the Central People's Broadcasting Station and local broadcasting stations broadcast in 21 minority languages daily. The publishing houses specializing in publishing for the ethnic minorities have increased from 17 in 1978 to 38, located in Beijing and 13 other provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the central government, and the number of minority languages they use has grown from five to 26. In 2008, a total of 5,561 titles of books in minority languages were published, with a total print-run of 64.44 million, 6.41 times and 6.37 times the figures in 1978 respectively. The autonomous regions of Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet have stipulated and enforced relevant regulations and detailed implementation rules concerning the use and development of their own spoken and written languages.

In order to make the minority peoples share the fruits of the information age, the state has adopted various measures to promote the normalization, standardization and information processing of the scripts of the ethnic minorities. So far, the state has formulated national standards for coded character sets, keyboards and fonts of Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur (Kazak, Kirgiz), Korean, Yi, Dai and others, which, submitted by China, have been included in the latest edition of the international standards. A number of electronic publishing systems and office automation systems have been developed, and some websites and web pages in minority languages have been built. Some relevant software can already be operated via Windows.