The last quarter of the twentieth century brought increasing tensions between those who demand local and those who demand national identities. In some cases these tensions led to the dissolution of nation-states along ethnic lines, as in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Because schools serve not only the economic but also the political integration needs of nation-states, the education system provides an arena within which to view the relations between national and ethnic identities. Political authorities and educators in many nations claim that their public educational systems are meant to provide disadvantaged minorities with educational and economic opportunities equal to those of the majority. Yet the challenge facing all systems is how schools can help minorities to gain access to a social and economic system that is dominated by the values of the majority while, at the same time, retaining their separate ethnic group cultures and identities. China’s approach to the problem of educating its more than 100 million minority nationalities is relevant to this question. 1 With the world’s largest population and up to 100 different mother tongues, China grants numerous preferences to minorities. Since the 1980s preferential policies for minorities have been promoted in China toward decreasing differences in education and living standards as well as reducing tensions between various minority groups and the majority Han. These policies have the ultimate aim of ensuring ethnic stability, national integration, and economic development in minority areas. Such policies include bilingual education and university admissions quotas for minority applicants. This study explores China’s educational policies for ethnic minorities in one particular academic setting, the Central University for Nationalities (CUN) in Beijing, and how these policies are experienced by the students who are supposed to benefit from them. The study takes an emic perspective by looking at the perceptions of minority students at CUN on how these policies shape their social and economic opportunities and at how these