All-smiling, all-dancing, all-colourful: The ethnic minorities of China

A farmer of the Zhuang ethnic minority, in Jiazhancun, Guangxi, China.

View Photos (12) Image © 2009 Tom Carter

Just as surely as death and taxes, so China’s National People’s Congresses happen with monotonous regularity. And at each Congress, all cameras and eyes are trained on the delegates from China’s 55 so-called ethnic minorities.

To ram home the point that they are ‘ethnic’ and not at all like the Chinese (Han) majority, the minority delegates are all dressed in colourful costumes and gravity-defying headgear; smiling excitedly as they pile into the Great Hall of The People.

The Han delegates, by contrast, are dressed sombrely in dark suits (the western suit being now, apparently, their national costume) with expressions to match: staid, stoical and stiff. In brief glimpses of unedited news footage they can be seen, head tipped back, sleeping soundly as government orators drone on for hours. The lively minority delegates, on the other hand, seem to manage to stay awake throughout even the most brain-numbingly boring speeches.

Their alertness and higher level of fitness is probably to do with the fact that they dance (and sing) incessantly when they are not busy making colourful handicrafts. Even outside the Great Hall of The People, between speeches, the ethnic minorities break out in spontaneous song and dance, while the Han look indulgently on. After all, singing and dancing is what minorities do. It is, many visitors to China could be forgiven suspecting, what they are for.

Entries in Chinese-made websites and tourist brochures about the ethnic minorities (or ‘nationalities’ as they’re called in Chinese) often use language like this: “Like all other minorities, they are good in (sic) singing and dancing.” “They are backward but love song and dance.” “They are always happy as they sing and dance in colourful costumes.”

Minorities laugh, croon and skip their way through every advert made to lure people into China Travel, dressed in the most outlandish garb decorated with everything from little pom-poms to headdresses of shiny coins, animals’ tails and birds’ feathers. The costumes look impractical, to say the least. Are they even real?

It would be reasonable for foreign and Chinese tourists alike to wonder if the colourful costume thing isn’t just something that the minorities trot out when they are called on to entertain tour groups at dinners, or perform on TV in Chinese New Year extravaganzas.

When the cameras are packed away and the last tour bus has disappeared in a cloud of diesel fumes, don’t the dancers then take out their T-shirts, ghetto jeans and truckers’ caps, and start grooving to the latest house music while sipping coffee and gnawing on baguettes?

Isn’t all that ethnic stuff, in short, just for show?

Apparently not.

Tom Carter’s photo book CHINA: Portrait of a People shows that the minority people indeed go about their daily business dressed in colourful, intricately woven and seemingly quite impractical garb. During two years of travelling around China, visiting each of its 33 provinces, Carter took thousands of photos of minority people in every setting imaginable: from the most densely populated cities to the most inhospitably out-of-the-way places.

Here they are in all their glory – the Tibetans, the Mongols, the Turkic Uyghurs, the Manchurians, as well as the lesser known Hui, Yi, Miao and Naxi – all lovingly captured at work and leisure and, yes, dressed in distinctive traditional clothes.

Carter started his China experience as an English teacher in Shandong province. Not satisfied with seeing only that tiny corner of the vast and varied country, he soon started travelling to more and more far-flung places, taking photos of everything he saw with his “ancient” digital camera.

He soon realised that the China most visitors see on a quick tour of the Forbidden City and the Great Wall, with a swing around Shanghai and a glimpse of the Terracotta Warriors, doesn’t reflect the reality of the Middle Kingdom in which most Chinese live.

He was especially fascinated with the faces of members of minority groups, and as the book shows, they were happy to let him photograph them in the most intimate situations, such as breastfeeding their babies.

Carter’s book should really be titled Portrait of a bunch of hugely different peoples. For in it we see such a vast range of facial features, skin hues, habits and, well, cultures, that it could fill a continent with twenty different countries or more – which is what China really is.

The Chinese government insists that the areas annexed by China over the years – Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and other places on the fringes of the empire – are, and always have been, part of China. But at the same time the indigenous people living in these areas, which presumably will also remain part of China forever, are not allowed to call themselves Chinese.

This is an interesting contradiction. On the one hand there is the almost hysterical insistence on the government’s part of a ‘One China’ in which all inhabitants must adhere to Chinese rule. On the other there is the notion that even when members of minority groups are born in China, speak Mandarin from birth, manage to wrangle an education and somehow insinuate themselves into the Han world, they will never be proper Chinese.

With the exception of Genghis Khan, who Chinese historians have now Pythonesquely decided was Chinese (Yes! Born in Inner Mongolia, which belongs to China and has always done so, therefore Chinese!) no one but the Han can call themselves Chinese.

But as an act of generosity on the government’s part, the minorities are allowed to live in China, bear more than one child (unless they’re Tibetan) and sing and dance in their funny way, as well as send token delegates to brighten up the dreary National People’s Congress which, unsurprisingly, is a body with zero power or influence.

Tom Carter’s photos show the minorities as they are: a myriad of vastly different peoples far more interesting than the one-dimensional, cliché-ridden singers and dancers which the powers that be so dearly love to present to the world.

In CHINA: Portrait of a People he shows them like he shows the Han Chinese: as individuals who happen to live together in the huge, beautiful, cruel, contradictory and infinitely intriguing country which is China.

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CHINA: Portrait of a People, by Tom Carter.

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Published on 1/12/09