China’s ethnic policy chief says minority artists must focus on common national identity

China’s top ethnic policy official has criticised “self-centred” artworks about ethnic minorities and said that they should focus on the common national identity.

As an example, he criticised an unspecified Tibetan-language movie for only focusing on the spiritual world while not giving Communist Party credit for building the region’s infrastructure.

Pan Yue, director of the National Ethnic Affairs Commission, made the remarks last month in a speech at a meeting of the Junma (or Steed) Ethnic Minority Literary Awards.

The speech was published on Friday at China Minzu News, an official outlet focused on Beijing’s ethnic policies.

Pan, who is ethnically Han, said he had observed a “disconcerting trend” in recent years where ethnic minority artworks were swayed by “Western multicultural theories”.

He said: “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.”