A Study On Cultural Change And Ethnic Relations Of Han Immigrants Of Haixi Autonomous Prefecture In Qinghai Province

Haixi Autonomous Prefecture of Qinghai province lies at northern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Most areas are alpine and hypoxia, and natural condition is very bad, which is unfit for agriculture production, so it has been the habitation of nomadic minority groups. As the border area, the past dynasties continuously recruited and migrated Han immigrants to Haixi region to open up waste land and garrison the frontier in order to maintain national stability and secure territorial integrity. For thousands years, in order to improve living environment, develop economy and build multiple cultural system, Han immigrants with minority groups made great contribution. After new China establishment, the scale and quantity of govermental or spontaneous immigration are great. During these years that they lived together with other ethnic groups in the areas, they have been experiencing cultural changes in their pattern of economy, marriage culture, religion belief and funeral culture and so on.The paper aims to unfold process of Han immigrants and present situation of ethnic relations of Haixi immigrant region by taking four immigrant villages of Tongpu township in Wulan country as a classical case to illustrate the aspects of their cultural change.This paper consists of eight chapters, three parts.The first part is prolegomenon, which discusses the whole background of this paper, illustrates research significance and current research situation, explain study methods, writing thoughts, related concepts and reasons of choosing investigated villages. The first chapter summaries natural environment, historical evolution and national situation. The second chapter discusses origin, types and immigration reason in Haixi region from the Republic of China to now, and introduce Han immigrants of Tongpu town.The chapters from third to seventh are the main body of this paper and also the part for analyzing the field-work-abtained data. The third chapter illustrates change process and reasons of pattern of economy, discribes multiple pattern of economy, and puts forward pressing problems in economic development. The fourth chapter discusses the change of marriage culture from aspects of ethnic intermarriage, uxorilocal marriage and village marriage. The fifth chapter mainly investigates and analyzes present situation and characters of Han immigrants'religion belief on Tibetan Buddhism, discusses fusion between Han's folk custom and Tibetan Buddhism. The sixth chapter detailed describes the process of funeral ritual, and illustrates characters and function of funeral ritual.The seventh chapter chooses six variables, namely inhabitation pattern, individual communication, language use, religion belief, national consciousness and social distance, to comprehensively considerate ethnic relation, furthermore concludes the characters of ethnic relation and puts forword several suggestions.The eighth chapter is concluding remarks to this topic, which discusses characters and trends of Han immigrants' cultural change, and concludes characters, influencing factors and tendency of ethnic relations in Haixi immigrant region.