Though often ignored by the United States, ethnic nationalism has challenged China's image of cultural homogeneity. Dru C. Gladney is a special researcher on China and Central Asia at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies. At the beginning of the last decade, not a single observer of international politics predicted that the former Soviet Union would now be fragmented into a melange of strident new nations and restive ethnic minorities. As Russian troops march on Grozny in hopes of keeping what remains of its former empire together, few analysts predict that China will be in a similar position at the end of the next decade.
China is thought to be different.
Cultural commonality and a monolithic civilization are supposed to hold China together. While ethnic nationalism has generally been absent from Western reporting and perspectives on China, the peoples of the People's Republic have often demonstrated otherwise. Continuing separatist activities and ethnic unrest have punctuated China's border areas since a major Muslim uprising in February 1996, which led to bombings in Beijing and frequent eruptions on its periphery. Though this White Paper was more of a whitewash, it did indicate increasing concern and a willingness to recognize unresolved problems, with several strategic think tanks in Beijing and Shanghai initiating focus groups and research programs addressing ethnic identity and separatism. These diverse peoples lead very ethnic lives, unable at all to talk with each other without resorting to the national language, Mandarin, which, like Swahili, is learned in state schools, and rarely used in everyday life.