China has made great efforts to protect and foster the traditional cultures of the ethnic minorities in the country, according to a white paper issued by the Information Office of the State Council Monday.

The white paper entitled Regional Autonomy for Ethnic Minorities in China says that from the 1950s to the 1980s, the central authorities organized over 3,000 experts and scholars to compile and publish five series of books on ethnic minorities, totaling 403 volumes and over 90 million Chinese characters.

The series are: The Ethnic Minorities in China, A Series of Books on the Brief History of the Ethnic Minorities in China, A Series of Books on the Brief Record of the Languages of the Ethnic Minorities in China, A Series of Books on the Survey of Autonomous Areas of Ethnic Minorities in China, and A Collection of Research Materials on the Societies and Histories of the Ethnic Minorities in China.

Over 500,000 copies have been distributed, says the white paper.

Today, each of the 55 ethnic minorities in China has its own brief written history. The 55 ethnic minorities in China, except for the Chinese-speaking Hui and Manchu, each have its own language.

The Mongolian, Tibetan, Uygur, Korean and Yi languages have coded character sets and national standards for fonts and keyboard. Software in the Mongolian, Tibetan, Uygur and Korean languages can be run in the Windows system, and laser phototypesetting in these languages has been realized.

It says applied software in languages of ethnic minorities are emerging one after another, and some achievements have been made in research into the OCR (optic character recognition) of languages of ethnic minorities and machine-aided translation.

The state has set up special institutions to collect, assort, translate and study in an organized and programmed manner the three major heroic epics of China's ethnic minorities, i.e., Gesar (an oral Tibetan epic), Jangar (a Mongolian epic) and Manas (an epic of the Kirgiz people).

In the past decade, the state has appropriated over 30 million yuan (3.61 million US dollars) for the collation and publishing of 160 volumes of the Buddhist Tripitaka in the Tibetan language.

It has also earmarked a large amount of funds for the renovation of the Drepung, Sera and Ganden monasteries in Tibet, the Kumbum Monastery in Qinghai, and the Kizil Thousand-Buddha Caves in Xinjiang, and many other key national cultural relics.

From 1989 to 1994, the state invested 55 million yuan (6.63 million US dollars) and 1,000 kg of gold in the first-stage renovation of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region, and in 2001, 330 million yuan (39.76 million US dollars) for the second-stage renovation.

With the assistance of the state and efforts of the ethnic autonomous areas, by 2003, 4,787 titles of books in ethnic minority languages had been published, totaling 50.34 million copies.

There were also 205 magazines and 88 newspapers in such languages, totaling 7.81 million copies and 131.30 million copies, respectively. The ethnic autonomous areas had set up 513 art performance troupes, 566 libraries and 163 museums.

In 2003, the ethnic autonomous areas had 122 radio broadcasting organizations with 73 radio stations and 523 radio transmitting stations, broadcasting in 15 ethnic minority languages; 111 TV broadcasting organizations with 94 TV stations and 830 TV transmitting stations, broadcasting in 11 ethnic minority languages.

There were also 254,900 satellite radio and TV receiving and relaying systems, according to the white paper.