The biographies of individual Yao elites include time spent as Taoist priests, participation in the struggle against the Guomintang, complex roles in PRC political movements in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and, with the post-1979 reforms, research and the oblique promotion, or at least tacit defense, of the transmission of Taoist ritual knowledge (such biographies were not unique to the Yao, and could also be found among other ethnic minorities).