Indigenous Education Commons^™

Expanding Access To Undergraduate Higher Education For China's Ethnic Minority Populations, Yuqian Zhang, D. Eric Archer

Journal of Critical Global Issues

China has one of the world’s oldest and largest sets of minority affirmative action policies, which provide 125 million individuals from recognized ethnic minority groups with preferences in family planning, school admissions, employment, business financing and taxation, and financial subsidies. This paper aims to examine how China implements preferential policies for ethnic minority undergraduate applicants to its higher education institutions. Policies of preferential admissions in China are designed to compensate for inequalities in educational opportunity among different ethnic groups. This compensatory approach is based on the concept that equal treatment of differently situated groups may itself create inequality. Yet preferential …