Retrospects and Prospects of Ethnology in China

Abstract

The Academy of Social Sciences in the People's Republic of China is not only an academic body but also an administrative body more comparable to a sort of social sciences CSIRO than to the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. One of its sub-departments i the Institute of Ethnology. This article has been chosen as representative of the style of articles published in Minzu yanjiu (nationalities research) which came into existence after the overthrow of the Gang of Four. The first copy was published in 1979 and up to the present there have been five journals circulated. It thus illustrates where China stands today in ethnological studies. Professor Li Youyi was at one time Vice-Principal of Yenjing University, is a distingulished Tibetan scholar and is Principal of the College of Minorities which is a training ground for minority peoples in understanding the new Chinese society. He visited Australia for several weeks in 1979 as a member of a delegation from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Ethnology as here understood is not taught in Australia as it includes under the one umbrella the history of languages, the migration of peoples, the study of races and the development of separate cultures. In the five issues up to the present there are no studies of the dominant Han culture although there is clearly an ideology that all the separate minzu (nationalities) of China have passed through different stages in the same order, although naturally at different speeds. Thus at the present time it is regarded as a