Propaganda About the Unity of Nationalities Intensifies During June

The Central Propaganda Department praised 18 model individuals and work units for "strengthening nationality unity" in a recently published "Ode to Progress in Minority Nationality Unity." The State Ethnic Affairs Commission (SEAC) Web site highlights the new work, which reflects a national campaign to "intensify propaganda on unity" among China's 56 ethnic nationalities. In a keynote address to the National Ethnic Work Conference in late May, President Hu Jintao said "it is necessary to conduct nationality solidarity propaganda and education campaigns on an extensive scale." Xinjiang Communist Party General Secretary Wang Lequan called in January for "vigorously stepping up propaganda and education in the Party's nationalities policy and national unity" to show that "the fallacies spread by national separatists...are all outrageous lies." Xinjiang has pledged this spring to "make schools the battlefront for disseminating ideology" about the party's nationality policy.

In late May, China Central Television began airing a 12-part documentary on the accomplishments of the Regional Autonomy system entitled "The Road to Common Prosperity." Also in May, the SEAC promoted another film, called "The Teahorse Road" and set in Tibet and Yunnan in 1942, as an epic "story of the great melding of nationalities into a single whole, bound by blood and mutual affection."