China’s Commodification of Minorities

This summer, I returned to China after nearly a decade to conduct fieldwork among Tibetan communities in Sichuan Province. As a scholar of Chinese and Tibetan culture who has spent significant time in China over the past two decades, I have had the opportunity to observe the transformations as Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping has centralized power and revitalized Chinese nationalism.

New, tightened restrictions became especially apparent on this most recent research trip, during which the government unexpectedly re-routed me from my Tibetan fieldwork sites. Instead of my planned research itinerary, I was led on a three-week tour of Yunnan Province by a CCP tour guide, who encouraged me to take the opportunity to “learn about the full richness of China’s many other minority groups.” 

Throughout this spontaneous new itinerary, I was blocked from any meaningful encounter with Tibetans and instead shown a sanitized simulacrum of minority culture in the form of plays, theme parks, and other government attractions aimed at tourists from the Han majority ethnic group. In the new China of Xi Jinping, the cultures of China’s 55 ethnic minorities have been turned into a simulated commodity for domestic tourists under the guise of economic development and cultural preservation. Meanwhile, actual expressions of ethnic identity are suppressed.

While this process has been underway for some time, the transformation was accelerated during the pandemic by the deployment of facial recognition software and greater police-state observation. The realities of domestic Han tourism in the new context of the 21st-century Chinese police state have produced an invisible wall that sequesters minority culture and ultimately silences or otherwise obscures minority voices.

An Unexpected Change

Shortly after arriving in China – and the day before my husband and I were supposed to begin driving from Chengdu toward the city of Derge – the company we had worked with to arrange our travel called an emergency meeting. The owner explained that the CCP tourism bureau had barred our travel to the Tibetan regions of western Sichuan due to “floods.”

After a tense conversation in which I suggested a myriad of other routes or itineraries, it became apparent that anywhere ethnic Tibetans lived in Sichuan or Qinghai province had “floods.” Past experience had taught me that rhetorical games like this were a common tactic used by the Chinese government to deny access to people and places without explicitly saying “no.” Proving this point, I later confirmed that many foreign tourists had visited these regions during the summer. There were no “floods.” Either I had specifically been “graylisted” – allowed to enter China, but unable to go to any sensitive areas – or all foreign researchers like myself were barred from entry to Tibetan regions.

After scrubbing my research trip, the company offered a three-week trip through Yunnan, designed in consultation with both the national and provincial tourism bureaus. The next morning, our primary tour guide introduced herself as a CCP member who did not work for the company, but had been specifically asked to help culturally interpret for us on the trip. We traveled on a classic Yunnan tour that began in Kunming, and traveled through Lijiang, Dali, and Shangri-la, before eventually returning to Chengdu via Xichang.

While I was unable to do my planned research, the trip proved an eye-opening experience on how Han Chinese perceive and interact with minority culture.

Commodifying Minorities

The itinerary led us to a variety of sites created, primarily, for domestic Han tourists to experience China’s ethnic minorities. Among these was the Yunnan Minorities Village in Yunnan’s capital city of Kunming – a modern version of a “human zoo.” In this sprawling park, each of Yunnan’s 26 ethnic minorities has a pavilion showcasing their traditional homes, temples, and village life. Han guests are invited to interact with local representatives of the ethnic minority, each dressed in the most exaggerated representation of their traditional garb.

Especially popular with Han tourists are the performances, where a minority ensemble stages exuberant demonstrations of their traditional dances and songs. The emcee of each performance referred, in Mandarin, to the Han guests as “friends” (朋友) and invited everyone to dance along with his performers, often while making jokes to the audience about the simplicity of life in the minority villages outside the big city.

These dance experiences were echoed by other performances in Kunming, including the sold-out “Dynamic Yunnan.” Created by celebrated Bai minority dancer Yang Liping, the show claims to preserve dying forms of minority dance in an extravagant two-hour performance featuring hundreds of dancers, drummers, moving set pieces, and high-end lighting. The performance depicted minorities as alternately highly sexualized or deeply childlike, reflecting the “noble savage” trope ubiquitous in early Western anthropological literature. A shirtless drummer wearing only a loin cloth and drumming a song representing the sexual union of men and women was followed by a gaggle of minority women dressed as young girls making flirtatious gestures with their hands.