The Associated Press
Monday, Sept. 27, 1999; 10:48 a.m. EDT

BEIJING –– China acknowledged troubles with ethnic strife Monday and promised more help for ethnic minorities whose living standards lag far behind those of the majority Han Chinese.

The acknowledgment was part of a government report on minorities carried by the state-run Xinhua News Agency.

Members of the nation's 55 minorities – which include sizable populations of Tibetans and ethnic Muslims – must "oppose ethnic splits and safeguard the unification of the country," the report said. It said "sabotaging equality and unity" is a crime.

Many of China's poorest people are members of minority groups. The more than 100 million minorities live mostly in central or western China, where economic development is lagging far behind the eastern coast, the report said.

Beijing faces what it sees as a serious internal threat in restive ethnic regions in the west, particularly Tibet and Xinjiang, a traditionally Muslim region.

Ethnic nationalism and trade in drugs and weapons has fueled separatist violence in those regions. Tibetans and other ethnic groups also resent the migration of ethnic Han Chinese to their ancestral lands. Beijing encourages the migration as a means of anchoring the regions with government supporters and promoting ethnic assimilation.

From 1995-1998, poverty alleviation programs brought clean drinking water to 11 million poor people living in minority regions, the report said. It said the poverty rate in China's five minority autonomy regions has declined from 12.4 percent to 6.9 percent.

The government has directed more state and foreign investment to minority areas for water conservancy, power and communications projects. It also has encouraged local political representation for minorities and the use of minority languages in education and government, the report said.

China has long had favorable policies for ethnic minorities, including provisions that allow them to have more children than the one or two allowed in rural China under family planning rules.