Economic development in China's Northwest: entrepreneurship and identity along China's multi-ethnic borderlands - 52

Under the ethnic affairs management regime established by the People's Republic of China, every Chinese citizen is classified within one of 56 state-recognised 'nationalities'.

Government policy assumes that these nationalities differ from one another primarily in their levels of economic development, and asserts that ethnic divisions and identities fade with the gradual achievement of economic and social equality.

As a result, economic development policy in minority nationality areas has often constituted a replica of the model which has already proven successful in China's Han-Chinese dominated east.

Research conducted across five locations in China's Northwest paints a far more complex picture, however.

This book considers for the first time how identity informs the nature of economic participation among ethnic minority entrepreneurs in China's remote Northwest.