Ethnic Minority Literature in the PRC

“Ethnic minority literature” (shaoshu minzu wenxue) is the umbrella-term used to refer to the literary production—both in oral and written forms—of the People’s Republic of China’s officially recognized ethnic minorities. This seemingly straightforward definition is, however, problematic when applied to specific literary works and to specific authors. The notion of ethnic diversity has, in fact, shifted throughout China’s history. For long, the concept of Chinese ethnicity had been based on the proximity to Confucian cultural norms, to then become institutionalized during the Republican period with the notion of the Five People of China (wuzu gonghe), and subsequently substituted by the PRC’s taxonomical system that came to recognize one majority group (the Han) and fifty-five ethnic minorities. Given competing notions of ethnicity, the classification of a literary text and of its author are often contested for pre-PRC Chinese literary works. Another dispute hinges on the author’s ethnic identity and on the content of a literary work. Some authors are in fact of mixed ethnic background and/or do not write about themes immediately related to “their” ethnic minority. While most ethnic minority authors write solely in Chinese, some authors— though rarely —write also or only using other languages. More common are cases of other authors who intersperse their Chinese with terms from ethnic topolects creating a linguistic and culturally hybrid literary works. A key feature of ethnic minority literature, especially since the early 1980s, consists in the emergence of institutional networks constituted of research centres, professional associations for scholars and authors, and literary prizes.