Ethnic minority commits cultural suicide

• Source: Global Times
• [23:03 August 03 2009]
• Comments

Yushicheng is the last Primi village without a road in Lanping Bai and Primi Autonomous County of the Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan Province. Photo: IC

By Zhang Yuchen

Zhang Hong was crushed upon hearing the 70 Primi ethnic minority families living in the poor, remote virgin forest hamlet of Yushichang finally agreed to a logging road they had resisted for decades.

With a population of about 400, Yushichang is the very last Primi village without a road around the town of Hexi in Lanping Bai and Primi Autonomous County of the Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan Province. The Primi number about 30,000 in total, 16,000 of them living in Lanping County, Yunnan Province.

Most of that county’s people are Primi, according to Zhang, a volunteer with Global Village in Beijing, a non-government, non-profit organization dedicated to environmental education and strengthening of China’s nascent civil society. As a Global Village project volunteer, Zhang lived with the Primi in Yushichang for more than a year.

Some 90 percent of the Primi inhabit mountainous areas at an average elevation of 2,500 meters and live in log houses. Their last remaining forest includes rare native nugmeg-yews, according to Hong Kong-based newspaper Wen Wei Po.

The controversial new road connects the village to the local hub – Jinghua – the village to which Yushichang belongs administratively.

“As I was told, the moment village leader Yang Zhouze was elected leader of Jinghua he began promoting this road,” Zhang said. “Before that day, he never held any village post.

“And whether or not Yushichang needed a road or which of the two proposed roads be built – questions like these had been intensely debated for five or six years among all leaders and villagers.”

A Sichuan logging company last year abandoned its plan to log the forest, according to Zhang.

“The company was permitted to cut down 5,000 square kilometers of forest near Jinghua but in the end they logged only 2,000 square kilometers.”

One square meter of forest fetched 500-600 yuan in 2008, about 300 yuan more than in 2005, according to Zhang. Yushichang owns 80,000 lucrative square meters, the last raw forest of the Primi ethnic minority.

In the 1980s, village chief Yang Jinhui led Yushichang villagers to defend their land from freelance loggers coming in from all over the country planning to cut down virgin forest.

“My uncle told me dozens of villagers just stood in line to the entrance of our village with hoes to stop the loggers,” said Yang Dexiu, 25, Yang’s niece.

Han Chinese call trees “shu,” but the Primi call their trees “shuzi,” a much more intimate word that reflects their deep cultural ties to the forest.