Q: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

My name is Yanshuo (彦硕). I am a scholar of Chinese literature and culture, especially multi-ethnic and multicultural Chinese studies. I received my PhD from the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford. Before joining the University of Michigan as a postdoc in Fall 2020, I taught in the Program of Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University.

Q: Tell us about your research?

As a scholar, it's my job to help present a fuller picture of Chinese culture, especially with regard to its ethnic diversity.

The main aspect of my research is multi-ethnic Chinese literature, meaning literary and cultural productions created by China's ethnic minority groups (少数民族).

While I was a PhD student, I noticed that in American academia, most of the Chinese literary cultural and artistic works taught in American classrooms tend to be produced by the majority Han authors. This is a little bit problematic because China is a multiethnic country with 55 officially recognized ethnic groups. They are distributed in many provinces and regions of China, making up a very important aspect of Chinese culture. They cannot be forgotten in our examination of China and understanding of Chinese cultures. So, as a PhD student, I grew aware of this phenomenon.

Yanshuo (left) with a group of Qiang women.

Personally, I was born and raised in Sichuan province, which is a multi-ethnic province in Southwestern China. I grew up interacting a lot with those minority groups. My father is a teacher and he has always had a passion for minority cultures. He's also an artist. He took the family into those minority regions often when I was a teenager. I had an early exposure to multi-ethnic cultures in China, and I was always amazed by the different costumes, linguistic traits and histories.

When I was writing my dissertation, I focused mainly on a minority group called the Qiang (羌族). Qiang people have a long history in Chinese culture. Scholars argued that you could find the presence of Qiang from the Oracle bones of Shang dynasty.

The Qiang was presented throughout Chinese history and in a lot of different dynasties.For example, in Han and Tang dynasties, whenever the word Qiang was mentioned, it was seen as a cultural other, an ethnic and cultural group that was very distinct from Han Chinese.

There is a poem, here it goes as:

黄河远上白云间，

一片孤城万仞山。

羌笛何须怨杨柳，

春风不度玉门关。

So the mention of Qiang flute (羌笛) was very prominent in classical Chinese poetry. And it's very interesting because at the time, Qiang occupied the western frontier region of China. Qiang flute was played in the military camps in the ancient times. And a lot of Chinese poets mentioned it because it was kind of an expressive instrument for the soldiers in the frontier to express their desire, sadness, and longing for home.

Qiang flute had a very rich imagery in Chinese poetry. And I studied that in my dissertation too , along with the evolution, the historical change embedded in the image of Qiang from the ancient times to the very 21st century.

Q: How was the Qiang people portrayed in history?

Qiang in Han dynasty, for example, they were referred to as Xi Qiang(西羌), the Western Qiang group. You will see a lot of descriptions about how those people practiced different cultural customs. They could have tattoos. They could pierce ears. Body piercing and tattooing were not accepted in Confucian culture, but they were in those non-Confucian cultural borders of China. So, you could see these depictions and different cultural norms and costumes described by Chinese literati.

But there was this kind of cultural othering- those were not the same as us. They were not Confucian. So, there was also a strong assimilation tendency for the Confucian literati to bring those frontier people into the core of Chinese culture.

There were constant cultural interactions and interplays between the Confucian cultural core and the ethnic peripheries.

Q: Do you see the Chinese (Han) literature romanticizing monitory groups? How were ethnic groups portrayed in Han Chinese literature?

Different groups went through a lot of cultural transformations throughout Chinese history. I can give you an example of Miao People (苗族), better serve as an example than the Qiang in terms of how sometimes they were romanticized and at other times they were otherized.

In the Ming and Qing dynasties, there were a lot of Han literati who went into those borderline regions. In their writings, the Miao people had those courtship dances. They were called moon dance. There were a lot of descriptions written by high-end Chinese literati about how those Miao could freely court each other. They didn't have to absorb the very rigid Confucian matrimonial ceremonies. Miao didn't practice arranged marriages, for example. So that kind of cultural exoticism and free love featured prominently into Confucian scholars.

In other words, there is no one single answer. It's always very complex. And there is a rich history and interplay between different cultures and ethnic groups in China.

Q: We spend a good amount of time talking about Han Chinese writing about other ethnic groups, what about ethnic groups writing about Han?

I think every single ethnic group has their own language, but not all of them have a written language. For example, Miao people historically didn't have a written script. But they had a very rich oral tradition, so they would disseminate their language orally, and they had like shamanistic traditions in which they used rituals to convey the knowledge and present cultural traditions. Due to this lack of a written script, you will be hard pressed to find any descriptions by Miao about themselves and other groups in history.

From the 1980s to the present, a lot of those groups with strong oral traditions start to receive a modern education and learn to write about their experience in Mandarin Chinese. So that's when you see minority writers writing about the cultural clash between growing up rural, minority and being educated in an urban center. And you will see a very strong tension between traditional culture and a modernizing nation.

In that body of literature more recently produced, we indeed see a lot of those kinds of cultural descriptions. And that's very important, because they are overlooked by many Western scholars studying about China. And that's why I want to make an intervention here with my own scholarship.

Q: What project are you working on?

One of the projects is based on my previous field work in China, I have this theoretical concept: entrepreneur of the national past.

Ethnic tourism is blooming in many minority regions of China. As a result, minority intellectuals, local filmmakers, cultural activists, are responding to this trend in a very entrepreneurial way.

To give you an example, the Qiang scholars are saying that the ancient Chinese Yu the Great (大禹) was born into the ancient tribe of Qiang in Sichuan. So that's a strong argument made by contemporary scholars.

Because they're trying to brand their local cultures to attract tourism to improve the livelihoods of local people. So that's something that I've been working on, which is to look at the interplay between the Chinese economy and its culture.

Q: How do ethnic groups deal with globalization, commercialization, and cultural preservation?

It is such a relevant and important question. I think this question is not just applicable to Chinese minority groups, but also for other indigenous groups around the world.

My argument is that we cannot rule out globalization or cultural exchange in the process of understanding minority cultures because no minority culture is pure, uncontaminated. Even the most remote villages in China nowadays have some exposure to globalization and the internet.

That being said, there are cultural traditions that are unique to every single minority group. So the tension then becomes how do those minority groups negotiate with globalization and then holding onto some of their traditions.

Nowadays, you could actually see a lot of minority cultural activists leveraging media and technology to help them preserve their traditions. So earlier this year I gave a talk at the interdisciplinary workshop here at Michigan, explicitly talking about a mother tongue language movement (母语运动). I shared about my other strand of my research, which deals with Qiang cultural activists in Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan province. A group of cultural workers and entrepreneurs were talking about the book they published (left).

I told you earlier that Qiang didn’t have a written script, but they use symbols. It is a very interesting language. This is a script newly invented by young Qiang cultural workers based in Chengdu and Beijing. On the back cover of this book, there is a WeChat QR code where you can scan and know more about this language and its culture. I think this is such an interesting phenomenon because it's really saying to us that those minority groups are actually being empowered by technology and by forces of globalization, because they can leverage the mass media to articulate their identities. With the help of technology, they are now being seen. It really tells us that globalization opens up new spaces for minority groups too.

Ethnic tourism is a space for a lot of sincere exchanges. There’s inevitably some dimensions of commercialization and commodification of minority culture taking place. But I think it's still a very precious space. Han Chinese rarely get any opportunity to come into direct contact with minority culture. But in tourist villages, you see people from different minority groups interacting and learning from each other. I think it can be a great source for future scholars and intellectuals to think about how to foster cultural exchanges through the space of tourism space without giving up too much minority tradition .

Q: What do you want to achieve as a scholar?

As a scholar, it's my job to help present a fuller picture of Chinese culture, especially with regard to its ethnic diversity. When we were talking about cultural exchange earlier, I think any kind of cultural exchange has to be based on the availability of information. I want to discover and maybe present those previously unavailable pieces of information to American media, academia, and eventually I hope there will be more understanding between the U.S. and China.

Q: Can you tell us something that most people don't know about you?

I think many people don't know that I'm actually an artist. I do a lot of oil paintings, if I am not busy with my research. I had an oil painting exhibition in Stanford when I was a student there.

-Interview and edit by Debing Su.

Q&A with Yanshuo Zhang