Location: Sister Meal Festival at Shidong, Guizhou, China (26�40'11.24"N,108�18'14.10"E)
Date: 24 April 2005; 4.50pm
Camera: Canon 300D with kit kens
Lately China had been struggling with their treatment of minorities with a few headline-grabbing incidents. In the last 3 years, there were riots in Tibetan Lhasa, ethnic conflicts in Uighur Urumqi and last month in Inner Mongolia. The problem is the way the Han Chinese perception of their own rule and reading and treating symptoms instead of causes. They are in a classic situation of being blind to their own defects. The resentment of Chinese Han Communist rule by the ethnic minorities in these provinces are so strong that a traveller has to be blind (or travel in a package tour) not to notice or hear about it in these places. But to be fair, not all ethnic minorities in China are hostile towards the Han Chinese majority. Minorities such as the Miaos and Zhuangs enjoy better quality of life now than they ever did in the past in China. They managed to maintain a lot of their culture and celebrate their festivals such as the Miao�s Sister Meal Festival, in ever grander fashion each year; so much so that these festivals are now major tourist attractions.
