(TibetanReview.net, Aug06’24) – China’s top ethnic policy official has criticised works about ethnic minorities which do not focus on the common national identity as “self-centred”. By way of example, he has cited a Tibetan-language movie for only focusing on the spiritual world while not giving Communist Party of China (CPC) credit for building the region’s infrastructure, noted the scmp.com Aug 5.
The report said Pan Yue, director of the National Ethnic Affairs Commission, had made the remarks last month in a speech at a meeting of the Junma (or Steed) Ethnic Minority Literary Awards. His speech was stated to have been published Aug 2 at China Minzu News, an official outlet focused on Beijing’s ethnic policies.
Apparently suggesting how works about ethnic minorities should be judged and awarded, Pan has said: “The No 1 criterion for evaluating ethnic literature works is whether they contribute to strengthening the sense of community for the Chinese nation.”
He has also set out specific instructions on works related to different ethnic groups.
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Pan has spoken of having observed a “disconcerting trend” in recent years where ethnic minority artworks were swayed by “Western multicultural theories”.
Calling such works “self-centred” and “exaggerations”, Pan has maintained: “This is evident in narrative models that isolate individual social groups for development, in constructing a closed historical lineage for a single ethnic group, in the binary oppositions of urban versus rural, modern versus traditional, and centre versus periphery, as well as in cutting off the close connection with the historic progress of the entire country, and generate self-centred and exaggerated expressions.”
He has criticized one film about a pilgrimage by Tibetan herders that illustrates how religious faith shapes their material and spiritual world.
He has sought to point out: “Did they not know that it is the CPC that has constructed the pilgrimage paths, repaired the Potala Palace and thousands of temples, as well as compiled the Tibetan Buddhist canon?”
While he did not name the film in question, the report noted that the content he attacked matched that of Zhang Yang’s 2015 movie Paths of the Soul.
This Han-Chinese directed work has been the highest grossing Tibetan-language movie ever released in China, the report noted. It follows a group of Tibetan pilgrims on a monumental 2,000km (1,200-mile) journey to Mount Kailash, a sacred site in Tibetan Buddhism.
In a bit of a concession, Pan has said that when writing about Tibet, it was acceptable to highlight its uniqueness, but cautioned against portraying the region as an isolated “Himalayan cultural circle”, adding that Tibetans had always “looked eastward”.
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The reported noted that since 2014, policy towards ethnic minorities has been shaped around President Xi Jinping’s slogan of the “community of the Chinese nation”, which emphasises the wholeness of the nation rather than ethnic differences.
Pan has criticised claims that groups such as the Manchus, Mongolians, Tibetans and Hui were not part of the Chinese nation. He has also criticised the portrayal of the southwestern provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi as “historically unclaimed lands” that “rebel against the country”.
“It is vital to avoid narratives that stray too far from historical facts and the idea of unity,” Pan has sought to make it clear. “Importantly, it should be acknowledged that all ethnic minorities are co-creators of Chinese civilisation.”
He has sought to justify China’s current propaganda narrative crafted by state-employed academics, maintaining that “historical evidence shows that cultures fostering a sense of shared identity are well-maintained and developed, while those that undermine this unity tend to fade away over time.”
He has called on filmmakers and authors within minority communities to craft compelling stories that resonated with both personal histories and the collective national narrative promoted by the CPC.