China Treats All Ethnic Minorities as Equals

China pursues a policy of treating all ethnic minorities as equals and accords minorities with special care, a Chinese official said Thursday.

Speaking at the 56th session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Alternate Representative of the Chinese delegation Li Baodong said that the minorities in China, like the Han majority, enjoy not only the full range of civil rights granted by the Chinese Constitution and other laws, but also the rights legally privileged to them.

China is a unified multi-ethnic country, and her 55 ethnic minority groups make up for 8.98 percent of the total population, Li told the 53-member commission.

All 55 ethnic minority groups, irrespective of their population size, have their own representative in the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

China has established the system of autonomous government in areas where minorities are concentrated, he said. By now, there are five autonomous regions, over 30 autonomous prefectures and 120 autonomous counties in China. According to the law, the chairman or vice-chairman of the people's congress of a minority autonomous area or the governor, prefecture and county magistrate of this area has to be assumed by a citizen belonging to this minority.

There are also legal protection and state promotion of religious belief of minorities, their customs, traditional cultures and the use and development of their languages, Li said.

At present, there are over 18 million Islam followers and more than 30,000 mosques in China, out of which over 20,000 mosques and 8.1 million Moslem are in Xinjiang, representing 56.3 percent of Xinjiang's total population.

In Tibet, there are over 1,700 sites of religious activities for Tibetan Buddhism and over 46,000 resident monks and nuns.

To promote economic development and social progress of these regions, Li said, the state renders support to minority groups in terms of capital, technology and talents. For example, to speed up the economic development of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, the Chinese Central Government allocates annually over 3 billion yuan (361 million U.S. dollars) from its budget for Tibet's development.

Thursday's meeting focused on minorities' right. Li said that in 1999, the central government made a major decision to speed up the development of the western part of China.

"This strategy is bound to provide a strong impetus to enhancing the economic development of Tibet, Xinjiang and other regions in western China, and promoting people's enjoyment of wide-ranging rights there and contributing to the common prosperity of all ethnic minority groups in China," he said.



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