A new NGO devoted to furthering the development of Yi people in south west Sichuan’s Liangshan Prefecture received cash and in-kind donations worth almost CNY 200,000 (USD 24,000) at a fundraising banquet held on April 30, barely a month after the group registered as a social organization with the local Civil Affairs Bureau.

The Liangshan Norsu Women and Children’s Development Centre is officially sponsored by the Liangshan Women’s Federation. ‘Norsu’ is the name by which Yi people in Liangshan refer to themselves, in preference to the generic term ‘Yi,’ which originally connoted ‘alien’ in Chinese and does not distinguish between many closely related subgroups.

The fundraiser “was a great success,” says Hou Yuangao, Executive Vice-Chair of the organisation and one of its driving forces. He is barely able to conceal his excitement as he talks in his Beijing office at the Central University for Nationalities, where he first studied and has since been teaching for nearly twenty years. “We plan to support 100 orphans in Butuo County with what we have raised this time. Most of them have lost parents who were heavy drug addicts or contracted AIDS.”

From the late 1980s and through the 1990s, with migrants flowing to Yunnan along the Chengdu-Kunming railway, drugs became prevalent in the previously isolated Liangshan Norsu community. Professor Hou’s research finds that language and cultural barriers prevented Norsu migrants from integrating into mainstream society, making them a marginalised and high-risk group.

A Norsu native of Liangshan, Professor Hou has long been researching social issues among the 1.76 million Norsu people in his home prefecture. Every summer vacation he leads ethnography students in field studies of minority areas across Sichuan, Yunnan, Xinjiang and Ningxia. But he decided that “Research is not enough: I wanted to be an activist as well as an advocate.”

Since 2001 he has managed several social development projects with funding support from the China-UK HIV/AIDS programme, the US-based Open Society Institute, the World Bank and China’s Ministry of Education. He was invited by the State Nationalities Committee to serve as an expert adviser on AIDS prevention.

A Western Development Research Centre, attached to the Central Nationalities School, gave Professor Hou a platform to blend research with action. Unicef is currently supporting the Centre to undertake research in four provinces. In February of this year, the Centre established a ‘grassroots work station’ in Zhuhe township of Liangshan’s Zhaojue County. A grant from the American Chamber of Commerce in China has enabled the work station to subsidise food, medical care and school fees for 126 children from 58 poverty-stricken families in the township, and to offer ‘gift livestock’ to mothers.

It is this work that the new, Liangshan Norsu Women and Children’s Development Centre will now replicate, setting up a second ‘work station’ in Butuo County. Three more work stations are planned this year, targeting five hundred children and their families in the most seriously drug-affected villages.

Professor Hou notes that local communities have themselves been active in fighting drugs, and he expects the Liangshan Norsu Centre to follow their example and build on their work. A Zhaojue County Civil Anti-drug Association was established in 2001 as a ‘self-organised’ group and has experimented with a range of community interventions, including setting up a ‘drug patrol team,’ a performing art troupe and a ‘study group’ for drug users. Professor Hou estimates that in Ergu and Zhuhe townships these activities have helped to cut from 40-50% to 10-15% the proportion of families using or trading in drugs.

The Liangshan Norsu Centre will follow these examples of local good practice. “External help is quite important, but internal efforts are even more significant and important for sustainability,” comments Professor Hou. He hopes the Liangshan Norsu Centre can cooperate with the local Centre for Disease Control on harm reduction initiatives.

Meanwhile, the Liangshan Norsu Centre is also aiming to draw on Norsu women’s expertise in handicrafts, and is forming a handicraft cooperative in Zhuhe township. A company based in Chengdu has been contracted to oversee design and marketing, and 26 women have been selected to attend training courses offered by a Youth Business Initiative Centre that was set up by the local government in collaboration with Hong Kong-based NGO, Medical Services International. Longer term plans include establishing a handicrafts workshop to scale up production, which is currently home-based.

In the even longer term Professor Hou sees the Lianghan Norsu Women and Children’s Centre as a potential model for promoting integrated and culturally sensitive community development in ethnic minority areas, and he hopes this model may spread to other areas such as Yunnan and Xinjiang.

Contact:
Hou Yuangao +86 (0)10 6893 2324
hyg9988@vip.sina.com

Report by Tina Qian, May 30 2005