Erja (L) and Pema (R) celebrate with guests during their traditional Tibetan wedding near Rongdak in Kham on 26 January 2012
Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters
China is promoting their policy of encouraging interracial marriage between ethnic Han and native Tibetans, the Washington Post reports. The report suggests the current publicity is aimed at achieving ethnic unity, and points out that critics argue that its true aim is to further weaken Tibetan culture.
Chen Quanguo, China’s highest official in the Tibetan region, was photographed with nineteen mixed families last month as part of the ongoing publicity campaign. The Washington Post reports that Chinese media have also been ordered to run stories featuring mixed couples, focusing on children who identify equally as Chinese and Tibetan.
The Chinese government claims the policy will resolve tensions between the two peoples, praising Han-Tibetan couples as “models of ethnic unity”. Government incentives further encourage the unions, through vacations and prizes with preferential treatment for children born of the couples in education, employment and Communist Party membership. These incentives add to a number of pre-existing benefits extended to minority couples and their children, including exemption from China’s “One Child Policy”.
Parents of interracial children often choose to list their heritage as Han, commented one anonymous government office worker, saying they believe this may offer their child the chance of a better future. Parents frequently send their children to schools elsewhere in China, she said, where the quality of education is higher than in the Tibetan Autonomous Region.
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In a telephone interview with the Washington Post, Tibetan activist and poet Tsering Woeser, damned the policy, comparing it to the worst practices of colonisation, though she expressed no objection to the practice of interracial marriage without state coercion.
In an appeal to Tibetan and Chinese history the Chinese government commissioned a play last year, dramatising the relationship between Chinese Princess Wencheng of the Tang Dynasty and Songtsan Gambo, then king of Tibet, which took place over 1,000 years ago and led to peace between the two nations. The musical is currently showing in Tibet.
The campaign has seen some success since its inception, with the Communist Party’s research office in Tibet reporting an increase from 666 interracial marriages in 2008, to 4,795 in 2013.
At his photoshoot with interracial families, Chen Quanguo told reporters that he considers it the government’s responsibility to “actively promote interracial marriages”. “As the saying goes,” he said, “‘blood is thicker than water,’ we should make our ethnic relationship like that”.
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