Retaining our roots

The Old Town of Lijiang is a well-preserved old city of the Naxi ethnic group in Yunnan. Residents there used to write and read Dongba pictographic characters, speak the Naxi language and play Naxi folk musical instruments. Statistics show that in 1983 there were 62 well-known Dongbas, the spiritual and cultural head of the Naxi culture in Yunnan. The number has shrunk to less than 10 today.

But there were warnings. As early as 1994, The Independentnewspaper in the UK warned that Dongba Fetishism, the local religion of the Naxi people, was perilously close to extinction with the headline “Last of the Dongbas in danger of fading away.” “Knowledge of [that] particular cultural legacy is gone with them,” said Li Zhidian, a cultural official in Lijiang.

Nowadays, 70 percent of Naxi children cannot speak their own language. The young people do not wear their traditional costumes unless at big festivals and important rituals. What’s more, many local residents moved out of the old town, while immigrants swarmed in to seek fortune from the booming tourism industry. The anthropologist He Shaoying warned that the old town of Lijiang might recede into a body without the soul of the Naxi culture.

Other ethnic minorities are faced with the same predicament. Take the Dai people in Yunnan Province for instance. Dai boys can write their ethnic characters, but most of the young people feel ashamed to speak the Dai language. In most Dai villages, few boys are interested in their traditional religion or style of martial arts. Villagers are eager to change their bamboo buildings (typical Dai buildings use bamboo as the main construction material) into modern houses made of steel and concrete.

This wave of modernization is sweeping China and is steadily changing people’s lifestyles, putting cultural diversity in danger of being assimilated. How to retain cultural diversity is a daunting challenge for China as well the world today.

By Dong Jirong