Introduction

Chinese historians use the term “semi-colonization” to refer to the period from the late nineteenth century until 1949 when China was under foreign invaders and subordinated to Western influence, named by A. G. Hopkins as part of an “informal empire” referring to “countries that retained their formal independence but were clearly subordinated to an external power” (Hopkins 2017:737). From the Opium War of the 1840 onwards, the onrush of Modern globalization saw the importation into China of core Western ideologies and categories of thought. These spread into the areas of politics, economics, society, culture, race and nation. Since then, the contemporary Chinese state has assumed many of the features of the Western nation-state (Van De Ven 2002:183–4). Meanwhile, the national pride of the Chinese state has always denied the impact of “coloniality,” focusing instead on the defeat of Japan during the second Anti-Japan War (also called Sino-Japanese War 1937–1945) and the success of the Chinese Revolution in 1949. The rise of ideas of self-determination and their translation into national entities continued at the end of the century and carried on into the twenty-first century.

When research focuses on ethnic minority groups in China, the description above of the context of China/external (Western) power is overlaid with the complex alignment of relations between populations of ethnic minority communities and the Han majority, which have taken form as part of the state’s nationalist agenda over the past century (and much longer). In the 1920s under the governance of the Guomindang Party, a member of the Yi ethnic minority (which has a relatively large population) referred to her people as “that weak and small race” (ruo xiao minzu).2 After the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, the terms for, position of and state policies on ethnic minority populations have shifted several times. In official Chinese statements since the 1950s, the word used for “ethnicity” is minzu, referring to “nation,” “nationality” or “ethnic group” dependent on time and circumstances (Joniak-Lüthi 2013:849). In common parlance in China, especially in the specific context of mainstream media such as TV and radio, “ethnicity” refers to membership of one or another of the nation’s 55 “ethnic minorities,” i.e., it excludes the majority Han ethnicity which forms 91.5% of the population. At the same time, however, ethnic identity has another side. Ethnic groups in action, as political and economic collectivities, are defined not so much by their internal characteristics of shared descent and common culture but more by their external relationships with other ethnic groups and with the state. According to Harrell, the “characteristics that define ethnicityculture and descentbecome important only when they serve to solidify a group that acts in a political and economic system that also contains other groups” (1990:516). In recent years, the dominant slogan from China’s central government has been “community for the Chinese nation” (Minzu gongtong ti 民族共同体, Xinhua 2024). This approach has quickly and deeply spread into almost every rural place across China. For instance, I visited a Hani ethnic minority village called Bangzha in 2018. The village is in a very remote area in Yunnan, Southwestern China where vehicular access remains extremely difficult, but political administration from China’s central government was actively in place, including implementation of several important contemporaneous policies, such as Targeted Poverty Alleviation (Jing zhun fu pin 精准扶贫) and the designation of Registered Impoverished Households (Jian dang li ka pinkun hu 建档立卡贫困户).3 In my recent fieldwork trips in Yunnan in early 2023, summer 2024 and autumn 2025, this situation of tight central governmental control of the ethnic minority population has remained. For instance, numerous giant posters with official slogans appeared in the most public places in Yao’an county and Shuangbai county, Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture, as well as in several counties around Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province.

The domination of China’s central state over the ethnic minorities under various economic supports plus the widespread propaganda of “forging a strong sense of community for Chinese nation” (Xinhua 2024), filters and largely reduces the minority populations’ [de]colonial awareness in some regions, even while there obviously remains a difference between the Han people and ethnic minority populations in terms of their attitudes and reactions towards the term “colonial” and the meanings and actions behind the term.4 In the specific setting of Yunnan province, according to my own fieldwork experiences since 2017, the concepts of colonization and decolonization, which might be well known by Han Chinese intellectuals, are not commonly mentioned by the ethnic minority populations in the region. The assimilation of Han culture by members of ethnic minority populations is also not commonly discussed under this terminology in Yunnan. I found that the scholars and residents were typically reluctant to discuss the impacts of the dominant Han population. As one Indigenous scholar mentioned, discussion of this topic could associate them with the concept of separatism, one that can incur state persecution (online communication, May 2023). To this end, the government’s sensitivity to potential linkages between cultural assimilation, political protest and ethnic secessionism has led to a situation in which ethnic minority populations prefer to remain silent on this matter.5

External agencies working on ICH in rural Yunnan

Today, many ethnic minority groups in China are under great pressure to assimilate to the norms of the majority Han population and they are also subject to a rush of incoming cultural influences from many parts of the world mainly through the mediation of the Han population, which they access through China’s proliferating digital media platforms, and to the numerous impacts of a globalized market economy. Yunnan is a good site in which to examine this impact: as already noted, the region has the highest ethnic diversity in China: of the country’s 55 recognized ethnic minority populations (excluding the Han), 25 are found in Yunnan, and some 38% of the province’s population are members of one or another ethnic minority. The population of Yunnan in 2020 was 47.21m, of whom 66.88% (31.67m) were Han Chinese. The remaining 33.12% were members of ethnic minority populations, including particularly large numbers of Yi (5.07m, 32.43%) and Hani (1.63m, 10.44%) Indigenous people.6 The mountainous environment of the region which historically made travel difficult has very often enabled these minority communities to keep aspects of their traditional culture different from one another, even while inter-ethnic marriages and physical proximity have resulted in some sharing of musical traditions. Many ethnic groups in Yunnan have their own distinctive languages, music and sets of religious practices. For this reason, the region is known as being rich in intangible cultural heritage among scholars, governmental officers and members of NGOs within and outside the region.

Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is a term used widely by Han people and Westerners in contemporary settings. Before the phrase was brought into China in the early twenty-first century, local scholars in Yunnan called their cultural traditions “ethnic folk culture” and referred to local musicians as “ethnic folk artists.” Inside ethnic minority communities, villagers typically called their cultural traditions by terms like “old tune,” “the tune from the ancestors,” “mountain song,” or by the names of traditional musical genres widely accepted across a local area, such as the singing genres “haba” among the Hani people or “meige” among the Yi people.7 But nowadays in Yunnan, most scholars, governmental officers and musicians themselves use the designation “ICH” to refer to their traditional culture (Rees 2012; Su 2019). The transition to name Indigenous music and culture in this way, serves as one of the many cases that many ethnic minority groups in Yunnan have been subjected to cultural assimilation in the last several decades. Ongoing cultural assimilation, along with the impact of rapid social and economic transformations to Yunnan’s environment, has caused rapid loss of many musical and other cultural traditions in the region. A growing awareness of the importance of maintaining cultural diversity has led to actions by local, national and international agencies to promote cultural sustainability. An increasing number of ethnomusicologists have established partnerships with NGOs worldwide, since these organizations can assist researchers in accessing musicians and local communities and in carrying out applied research. However, the study of these partnerships remains relatively rare among ethnomusicological studies inside China.

I have undertaken two collaborative research projects in Yunnan since 2017 with a focus on sustaining Indigenous culture. My applied work on the theme of women and sustainable development in traditional culture in Yunnan initially started with my collaboration with two local-based NGOs: Eco-Women and Yuansheng Fang, each of which had established connections among various ethnic minority communities in Yunnan.8 This project aimed to build new models through collaborative, applied research that optimized the opportunities for economically disadvantaged and ethnically marginalized women. Women were encouraged and assisted in utilizing their position as culture bearers to develop and realize new employment opportunities in the cultural heritage sector. Apart from the practical benefits for those involved, the project also sought to update theoretical knowledge on maintaining and developing cultural heritage through assessing culture bearers’ own reflections upon their roles in a development context. Since 2021, wishing to work more closely with community musicians, my second project studies how culture bearers use digital media technologies (mobile phones, TikTok, etc.) to support their traditional expressive practices. Its intent is to develop new supports for Indigenous communities as the main actors in collaborative work with outsider partners.9 The project team includes several Indigenous community leaders and music practitioners, one Indigenous staff member formerly from Eco-Women as a community leader, and the manager of Yuansheng Fang as a local senior advisor. These projects are not the focus of this paper but the experiences and contacts I have gained on them has deeply informed this writing.

NGOs in China operate in a wide spectrum of fields ranging from education, poverty alleviation, community development, the environment, and health, and offer a variety of services and support for marginalized groups in Chinese society.10 They vary greatly in size: there are many small NGOs which have less than 70,000 renminbi (RMB) [around 9,000 euros] per year to support their whole running costs, including staff salaries (in-person conversation with Zuo Zhi, manager of Eco-Women, 2017, Kunming), while some governmental NGOs have sufficient funding. Sun Jing, a staff member at the Yunnan Green Environment Development Foundation (Yunnan lüse huanjing fazhan jijinhui) which mainly protects endangered animals in Yunnan, told me her organization will very often pay its staff to travel by plane, rather than via slower land routes (in-person conversation, 2018, Kunming). In effect, NGOs in China have the capacity to be alternative social service providers and have generally proven to be effective at this task when they are provided with the space to operate (Hasmath and Hsu 2014:936–7). Nevertheless, many NGO members and governmental officials have noticed that the power of governmental support is crucial in China, both financially and politically (Ji 2015), and meanwhile NGOs have been always watched closely by the Chinese government, a country with a strong commitment to the central control of political power. This means that although there are some internationally and some privately funded NGOs, many NGOs in Yunnan are now primarily government-supported, and it has become common to use the name “social organization”, rather than NGO, to better reflect the realities of the present situation (Ji 2021).11

Sustaining original ecology: The Minority Institute and Yuansheng Fang

In the arena of Indigenous cultural heritage, outsiders from socially elite backgrounds (mainly Han Chinese) may perceive themselves as well-intentioned supporters and collaborators, but their desire to provide leadership often results in a curatorial practice that brings re-interpretation to the indigenous cultural systems in question (Zhao 2011; Yang & Lei 2019). One such typical action by NGOs in Yunnan is striving to freeze cultural traditions and prevent change in the interests of sustaining cultural “purity” at all costs. Such cases include the NGOs The Minority Institute (Tian Feng Chuanxi Guan 1993–2000) established by composer Tian Feng, and its successor Yuansheng Fang founded by Liu Xiaojin in 2004 and it is still active at the moment of writing in 2026. Such an inspiration and determination to keep cultural heritage intact can be traced in the documentary film Chronicle of The Minority Institute (Chuanxi Guan chun qiu 2002). The documentary records the story of Tian Feng and local musicians in running and working at The Minority Institute.12 In the film, Tian Feng expresses why he set up the Institute:

Its mission is, through the indigenous people’s own transmission activities, through their oral teaching and soul, their words and actions, to bring the existing living traditional culture (including aboriginal singing and dance, religious and ritual practices, folk customs and traditional craftsmanship, etc), through teaching and learning, to hand them down generation by generation.

[…]

If we don’t prevent it [traditional culture] from dying now, this tremendous traditional culture will undoubtedly vanish with great speed. That will be an unforgivable mistake of our generation in human history.

[…]

That is why the principle of The Minority Institute is: “pursuing authenticity” (qiu zhen 求真): that means, the content and form should be authentic, the emotion and the style should be pure. And “prohibiting changing” (jin bian 禁变): we are preserving the classics (jingdian 经典) of traditional culture. We are not allowed to change the classics.

Over around eight years (1993–2000), many senior musicians and young musicians gathered and were accommodated together in The Minority Institute’s building near the provincial capital Kunming, which was far away from their homes. The musicians were mainly Hani people and multiple subgroups of Yi people from Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Wa people from Ximeng Autonomous County, Pu’er city, Naxi people from Lijiang city, Tibetans from Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, and Lisu and Dulong people from the Nujiang (Nu River) region. While the intent of The Minority Institute was to foster young musicians in their acquisition of authentic performance skills, the school system employed for the transmitting of these traditions represented a completely new mode at that time.13 The musicians in the institution left their usual agricultural and family lifeways to engage in full-time teaching and learning activities. The cost of supporting their food and accommodation (and provision of a small allowance for their work) was sponsored by Tian Feng via his own savings and donations he received. But after 8 years this financial mode became unsustainable, and the Institute gradually slipped into a financial crisis. Meanwhile, Tian Feng also was involved in a court case, and the Institute was forced to close in 2000. Tian Feng tragically passed away in 2001.14

After receiving an intensive training at the Institute, many musicians had acquired high-level performing skills. When the Institute closed, some of them returned to their hometowns and became active tutors and performers whenever opportunities arose.15 Others sought professional performance careers by performing in various commercial or governmental settings. One such example was Yi female musician Li Huaixiu. Li won national competitions in 2004 and 2006 and later she was recruited to the governmental Song and Dance Troupe of Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture. With the ambition of transmitting Yi traditional music, Li and her younger brother Li Huaifu set up the Li Huaixiu & Li Huaifu Intangible Culture Heritage Transmission Institute at their hometown in Shiping County in 2011. The content of their teaching and learning was the local Yi vocal genre “Haicai qiang” (Haicai[herb] tune),16 the dance genre “Yan he wu” (cigarette case dance) and the Yi instrument sixian (4 string plucked lute) (Yang et al. 2023).

In 2004, three years after the death of Tian Feng, Liu Xiaojin was encouraged by the musicians from The Minority Institute to set up and run another NGO Yuansheng Fang. This new NGO provides performance opportunities to musicians and financial support to the cultural transmission they carry out within their local communities. Liu Xiaojin was previously a documentary producer at Yunnan Provincial TV Station. She met Tian Feng in the 1990s through her role as producer of the documentary Chronicle of The Minority Institute, mentioned above. Like Tian Feng, Liu Xiaojin believed in the notion of keeping traditional culture “intact” by “pursuing authenticity and stopping change.” However, Liu recognized that it was unrealistic to keep both tutors and learners working in a place far from their hometowns. Instead, Yuansheng Fang directly subsidizes senior musicians who agree to teach in their own communities, with a smaller payment made to learners to encourage their participation once they reach certain levels of proficiency. In this aspect, Liu hopes that Yuansheng Fang can fully sustain the traditional arts, bringing these traditions back to life in the places where they originated.

Yuansheng Fang has been in the field of ICH in Yunnan for 20 years now.17 Administratively, it is registered with the Yunnan Province Bureau of Civil Affairs. Financially, the NGO receives annual funding of from 0.1 to 0.7m yuan (CNY) from a family foundation in Hong Kong. For a long time, Yuansheng Fang hired one full-time staff member who is in charge of all the NGO’s daily issues, increasing to two full-time staff in 2018. The duties of the staff overall are to professionalize its partner musicians, including visiting partner musicians connected with the NGO, and manage these musicians’ transmission work. There are also three hourly paid workers, responsible for accounting, arts design and for finding new musicians and programs.18 The main missions of the NGO are clearly stated on its website, including: supporting transmission in rural areas, providing theatrical performance opportunities, holding a discussion forum, organizing festivals and holding a film meeting.19

To assist its musicians become known and appreciated by wider audiences outside their communities, Yuansheng Fang actively searches for the performance opportunities, both inside China and overseas. In October 2005, Yuansheng Fang led a 30-day tour of the United States. Inside China, the NGO has organized performances and festivals in large cities such as Shanghai and Beijing and at several universities across different cities. During the 2010s, the NGO held a biennial festival which gathered a hundred musicians from ethnic minority groups to perform in the Kunming Grand Theatre. Meanwhile, Yuansheng Fang has actively recorded and archived the musicians’ performances. Apart from the various contents shown on its official website, Yuansheng Fang also published a series of three books: Minjian yiren koushu (Oral Narratives of Folk Musicians Liu 2016a), Tian Feng yu Chuanxi Guan (Tian Feng and The Minority Institute Liu 2016b) and Yuansheng Fang: Xiangcun chuancheng yu yanchu (Yuansheng Fang: Rural Transmission and Performance Liu 2016c), and the previously mentioned documentary Chronicle of the Minority Institute.

The fully sponsored mode brings much uncertainty to the survival of the NGO itself. In the case of Yuansheng Fang, it has suffered two major financial risks so far. One was during the late 1990s when the Hong Kong sponsor, the Zhou Family Foundation had to stop its financial support for a few years due to the economic crisis in Southeast Asia. In 2018, one of the members of the Zhou Family foundation didn’t agree to sponsor the festival anymore so this biennial event had to stop. NGO manager Liu Xiaojin searched for alternative funding, but the potential patrons always added additional conditions, for instance, they wanted to share the NGO’s existing collection of audio and video materials or required the performances to be adapted to attract audiences from the commercial market. In these situations, Liu Xiaojin always rejected the additional requirements. The same as Tian Feng, she has made every effort to avoid commercial impact or any other change arising from social transformation (in-person conversation, Liu Xiaojin, 16 March 2018, Kunming).

In contrast to this notion of keeping traditional music exactly unchanged, Yang Liping, who had briefly jointly managed The Minority Institute during the 1990s with Tian Feng, argues that adaption and re-creation is a vital way to attract audiences, for instance, creating more variety in rhythms and movement to keep audiences engaged. Yang’s way to ensure the sustainable transmission of traditional music and dance is to take them as an enterprise into the market, including both professionalization and commercialization. Over the years, collaborating with the well-known Chinese pop musician San Bao, Yang’s “Impression Show” (Yunnan Yingxiang) has become a commercially successful model in its combination of original and adapted traditions.20. Xin Weibo, the main staff member at Yuansheng Fang, commented that Yang Liping’s Yunnan Impression Show is one of two Yunnan traditional music and dance oriented commercial shows which returns a profit. Many of the items in the Yunnan Impression Show can still be recognized in relation to their original inspirations or sources, for instance, the “Palm fan singing drum dance” (Zong shan xiang gu wu) of the Hani people from Honghe Autonomous prefecture, the “Manau Dance” of Jinghpaw people from Dehong Dai and Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture, and the “Peacock Dance with Prop” from the Dai people in Menglian Dai, Lahu and Wa Autonomous County (Xingli 2019). Nevertheless, while several scholars have noted how effective Yang Liping’s adaptations are at placing items of cultural heritage into a theatrical performance, meanwhile they have also worried about the negative side of Yang’s actions in bringing traditional music out of the places where they originated. According to this view, it is not really a transmission (Chen & Wang 2009). However, in an overall situation of under-developed economic conditions among many locales in the region, many young people have to migrate far away from their hometowns to the big city to improve their living conditions. Performing in shows like those of Yang Liping may thus still be a very sound option from the perspective of cultural sustainability for young musicians who can earn money using their musical skills rather than take assembly-line or similar manual-labor employment.

In terms of the decolonization of Han and broad Western impact, both Tian Feng and Liu Xiaojin made great efforts in bringing local musicians from marginalized positions and roles to the forefront. As Chinese writer Shi Xuejun comments, albeit from a very Han-centric viewpoint:

[Before] the composer Tian Feng [came to Yunnan], this remote province was a place where [mainly Han] people from more central parts of the China could pick up resources to compose good music with new elements while the local musicians remained in a marginalized position. Tian Feng found these community people’s music and cultural heritage. His transmission work helped many “original ecology”,21 and indigenous songs and dances survive. (2013 Preface)

The NGOs The Minority Institute and Yuansheng Fang feared the negative impact of commercial, technological and rational culture on the survival of ethnic minority culture (Xingli 2019). Their mission to keep the traditional in a state of “intactness” has contributed to the survival of authentic traditional music and culture, especially in a critical situation where traditional culture disappears far faster than the local folk musicians and governmental officers’ actions to sustain them. Nevertheless, one might also say that when NGOs intervene to preserve the music, they inevitably change it. Their “freezing” of tradition ignores local musicians’ desires to make their own choices in a situation of radical social transformation where they may have wanted to seize the new opportunities that were now open to them. From this perspective, the creation by Yang Liping, who is of the Bai ethnicity, of the commercially successful Yunnan Impression Show, which uses modern stage technology to present scenes of Indigenous music and dance, may better empower the “self-determination” of local ethnic minority musicians. As Yang has commented:

I think these things [changes] are part of life. You [referring to former generations] were jumping [over the ground] in the old days because you were chasing for your prey. But nowadays people don’t need to hunt. Then the action of jumping disappeared.

[…]

You [outsiders to Indigenous communities] can’t say to them [Indigenous people], “why don’t you wear embroidered shoes? They are so beautiful and comfortable. Why don’t you put tiles on the walls of your house?” They won’t understand why you ask these questions. They would think that you wear leather shoes, live in the tall building and large mansions, and drive cars, but ask us to ride on horses. You look at us [ethnic minority members] as you look at animals.22 (Ma 2004)

In my collaborative work with Yuansheng Fang since 2017, I encountered some cases of unbalanced power confrontation between the NGO and its community partners. When different opinions arose between the NGO staff and community musicians in terms of which activities in ICH should be taken as a priority, the expressions of local communities were often not heard. For instance, when Yuansheng Fang staff visited Yi shaman Fang Guisheng (a state-level Cultural Inheritor who lives in Shuangbai County, Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture) to document his music practice, a staff member asked the shaman which god was the most powerful in the local shamanic tradition. Fang expressed his understanding that each of the gods was equally powerful in their own areas and no single one was more powerful overall. The NGO staff then insisted that several books identify the dragon as the most powerful god. After a period of silence, Fang Guisheng finally acquiesced and the conversation moved on to another topic, but the dynamics of the exchange left me uncomfortable (fieldnotes, May 2018, Shuangbai County). During my fieldwork trip to Mayou village, Yao’an County, Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture two of Yuansheng Fang’s regular community partners, Yi musicians Luo Rongxiu and Guo Xiaowei suggested that the NGO should send a photo-grapher to document an upcoming Yi traditional wedding ceremony in their village, believing that such a video record would be valuable. But they received the response that the event was not so important and not worth documenting (fieldnotes, July 2024, Yao’an County). Meanwhile, Yuansheng Fang’s leader Liu Xiaojin informed me that since the musicians in these performances had been paid by Yuansheng Fang for their work time, her organization has the right to retain 100% of income from any subsequent sale of these video products. I paid licensing fees to copy two Yuansheng Fang videos and directly expressed the idea that the musicians in the videos should receive a share of the license fee, but my suggestion wasn’t acted upon. I understand that similar requests from scholars from Yunnan Arts Academy and Yunnan University have also been disregarded.

A living transmission with a community-based approach: The Tufeng Project

After Tian Feng closed the NGO The Minority Institute in 2000, a famous Chinese pop song lyricist Chen Zhe, who was also from Beijing, set up the Tufeng Project (Tufeng jihua) in Yunnan. The new NGO also had the mission of preserving and transmitting precious traditional culture in the region. Formally founded in 2002, the project received strong support from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the People’s Republic of China and the Yunnan Provincial Office of Cultural Production, along with international funding from the Ford Foundation (2004–2009).23 A top-down project, it commissioned experts from various disciplines to carry on village-based cultural transmission with 8 young people from local community.24 In a conference paper documented at UNESCO, Chen Zhe introduces a mechanism of teaching and learning the roots of village culture: which he called ABC Theory, stating his belief that this theory “represents the complication, sophistication and conflict created when [Indigenous ethnic minority culture] encounters the outside world” (Chen 2008:42). This organizational system for sustaining traditional culture was also reflected in the Tufeng Project’s website mission statement: We [are] “a living transmission”. The “roots” [A] help villages to self-organize and cultivate “emissary-like cultural inheritors”; the “branches” [B] serve as platforms and coordinating methods; the “flowers” [C] are transmitting, promoting, expanding [the culture], and giving back.25

From the very beginning, the Tufeng Project held the ideology that “Intangible culture only survives when it goes back to work” and believed that culture bearers should live in their original work and life settings. There were two main parts in the project’s transmission methods: first, the artist carries out fieldwork and takes audio and video recordings that record the traditions as they were; second, these traditions live: this means that people in each locality or community should teach and learn their own traditions, instead of bringing teachers and students from different villages and communities to a big school-like setting, as in Tian Feng’s The Minority Institute. In this aspect, the management of the Tufeng Project is aligned with UNESCO’s definition of protecting or safeguarding intangible cultural heritage which indicates that, “to be kept alive, intangible cultural heritage must be relevant to the community, continuously recreated and transmitted from one generation to another” (2009:3). In a representative codification of modes of performance (and its associated listening practices), Turino (2009:96) emphasizes the role participatory performance takes in the sustaining of communities, arguing further that participatory performance groupings form “relatively cooperative, egalitarian spaces that are about sociality, bonding, and fun, rather than hierarchy, competition, financial achievement, or the creation of art objects for listening” (ibid.:112).

Chen Zhe’s approach to utilizing (and collaborating with) governmental power and funding is common among many NGOs in China which aim to build a symbiotic relationship with the government (Ji 2022). Spires argues that grassroots NGOs and the Chinese state coexist in a “contingent symbiosis,” under the condition that NGO work does not promote democratization but allows folk organizations to operate while relieving the state’s social welfare obligations (Spires 2011). Chen Zhe himself acknowledges that there are complexities when collaborating with and relying on local governmental funding and administrative support. He nevertheless felt that musicians’ individual power is very limited in terms of sustaining disappearing indigenous culture, and so such collaboration is necessary, despite the challenges it brings:

The villagers’ self-awareness of the benefits of protecting their culture can’t be raised by just asking them to do it or by giving them big reasons. Instead, it needs to be nurtured in various organized activities and in a kind of gradually formed atmosphere via work-related activities which themselves create and sustain the culture. It is not enough to just let the villagers perform; we need to let them exhibit their performances [to external others] to build up their confidence in their own culture.26 (In-person conversation, Chen Zhe, July 2016, Beijing)

Chen’s approach also reveals his protective attitude toward folk musicians when facing a rapidly changing social environment. Chen said that “you can’t let a caravan [Chen’s metaphor for a pre-modern weapon] fight with a tank. Otherwise, traditional music will surely vanish.” In terms of managing intangible cultural heritage, Chen separates traditional music into two parts: roots and leaves/flowers. The root part nurtures the whole [tree] of traditional culture and won’t directly make profit, so sustaining the roots will require charitable funding. As Yunnan is full of diverse traditional music, most of which is vanishing quickly, continuous governmental funding and related policies are vital tools in helping them survive. Based on these living roots, artists can pick the leaves and flowers to make new compositions which can go into the commercial market and potentially make profit. Only when the artist produces a compositional work that utilizes traditional culture like this will society gradually appreciate the value and the beauty of that tradition. In a broader context, only when the state realizes the value of traditional culture will governmental officers consciously promote their traditional culture.

Chen Zhe’s own reputation as a successful figure in Chinese popular culture and his sustained efforts allowed the Tufeng Project to relatively quickly reach several achievements with the governmental support alongside various other national and international non-governmental funding. For instance, with partners from the Pumi minority (sometimes Primi in English sources) the Tufeng project had the following impacts from 2002 up to 2007:

2002 Chen Zhe set up the first “village group for Pumi cultural transmission” at Lanping Bai and Pumi Autonomous County.

2003 Che Zhe brought Pumi musicians from the “village group” to participate in the Guangxi Folk Music festival.

2004 Chen Zhe organized the Pumi musicians to participate in “The Conference on Safeguarding China’s National Folk Culture”, held in Dali, Yunnan.

2006 Pumi culture was selected in “The Exhibition of China’s Intangible Culture Heritage Protection Results”, held in the National Museum of China, Beijing.

2007 Pumi musicians participated and performed at the “The 9th Conference of the China Biosphere Reserves Network (CBRN): Cultural diversity: a foundation for biodiversity conservation and sustainable development”, held in Libo County, Guizhou.27 (Sina News 2008)

Following the successful case it made for sustaining Pumi music culture, the Tufeng Project attracted more attention from the Yunnan regional and provincial governments, which led to larger-scale implementation across different ethnic groups and music and dance genres. During 2012–2016, the Yunnan provincial government set up 50 “Tufeng Project traditional culture transmission model villages” (土风计划传统文化传承示范村) across the region, benefiting ethnic minority groups including the Miao, Yi, Shui and Lahu.28 Support was received by community leaders who could organize teachers and learners, set up communal spaces in the community where musicians could practice, and build up an organizational system to sustain culture (Chen 2013). However, even with such a strong initiative underpinned by state power and resources, the actual results of the Tufeng Project were not always promising in every model village. When I visited some villages in 2017 and 2018, I noticed that many musicians hadn’t been really encouraged and supported by the local government. These villages often have an open square for musicians’ gatherings and performances, and a performance room for teaching and learning. But many of the open squares were completely empty and the performance rooms were locked and full of dust, looking like they hadn’t been used for a long time. The governmental officer usually checked whether transmission activities were occurring only once or twice each year. Local musicians complained that they didn’t receive the funding which originally should be used on them.

In examining the contributions to decolonization offered by the Tufeng Project over its 20 years of practice at sustaining intangible culture heritage, at least two aspects strongly address the issue of “self-determination.” The first is Chen Zhe’s insistence on many occasions that “Intangible culture only survives when it is integrated into work-related activities which create and sustain the culture.” I read Chen’s theory and action as aiming to lead community members to reconnect with their traditional wisdom, oral knowledge, and ways of life through their musical practices. Chen’s intervention in sustaining indigenous culture has brought tangible results. For instance, a decade after he initiated the “village group for Pumi cultural transmission,” young musicians from the village group were still actively learning local music and knowledge from elderly community members. Team member Lu Fangfang commented:

The villagers also built up the ability to manage and organize cultural transmission activities, taking systematic working notes each time. Though they didn’t get direct financial gain themselves, the village has now become known by more outsiders as a tourism attraction being an “original ecological” village with music, culture, natural environment and daily activities that naturally grow together. As a result, many local people get financial benefits from the tourism-related activities in the village. (Lu 2017)

Second, as Chen Zhe addressed, “It is not enough to just let them [local community musicians] perform; we need to let them exhibit their performances [to external others] to build up their confidence in their own culture.” The Tufeng Project did encourage local musicians to bring out “self-determination” and keep an “Indigenous point of view”. Many musicians and local cultural leaders now realize that local community members should speak on which cultural heritage is to be properly sustained, rather than following cultural officers or others from outside of the communities.

Conclusion

This article is a timely reflection on matters of power, control, self-determination and colonial impact between NGO staff, various levels of government and local community musicians in sustaining indigenous cultural heritage. The case studies of ICH-related NGOs in Yunnan discussed in this article provide illustrations of well-intentioned outside support for the musical traditions of indigenous communities, but this support brings with it complexities including the impacts of the modern commercial world, the political logic of the Chinese state, the domination of Han ideologies on non-Han people, and the ideologies and practices of NGOs and similar organizations. Understanding the colonial and decolonial actions and relationships between the NGOs and other parties and the communities helps us to realize how important it is to allow community members to define their own heritage. Via my observations on these NGOs’ successes and limitations in their practices of sustaining traditional culture, I would like to add my voice to support the argument made by Chérie Rivers Ndaliko that, “The extent to which an organization supports or undermines the protagonism of people is an important determinant of truly sustainable development” (2016:151) which ultimately leads to the expectation that “people are to be the main actors (‘the protagonists’) in their future” (Max-Neef et al. 1991:8).

All the programs carried out by NGOs mentioned in this article bring Indigenous musicians from a marginalized to a more central position, where they can develop the key skills of decolonial work such as stewardship, resilience and adaptive management that enable them to cope with continuous cultural and musical change (Titon 2016). Programs provided by Yuansheng Fang and the Tufeng Project support the self-training of community leaders in cultural transmission, enable them to set up a grassroots system in handing down their cultural traditions, and raise their self-awareness in sustaining their culture and identity. These community leaders in the villages inevitably become innovative in their role as liaisons with other local musicians and with the NGOs and other external parties. When successful, the growing autonomy of these villages in safeguarding their cultural heritage shows a growing democracy which stands on the opposite side of tight governmental control (Leung 1989) and colonial impact.

If the culture bearers need to be the main actors in collaborative decolonization work with outside supporters, utilizing their Indigenous-centered ways of thinking and researching, external partners need to respect their right to work according to their own cultural emphases and adaptive methods. From this perspective, colonial traces are spotted within all the NGO programs mentioned in this article. In each case, NGO members seek to provide leadership in order to expedite their programmes of intervention, resulting in a curatorial practice where materials are reshaped to conform to the external activist’s pre-existing value system, and external “experts” speak over the voices and sensitivities of local community members. The power confrontation between the Yi Shaman and the Yuansheng Fang staff member is one such example. All the projects delivered by The Minority Institute, Yuansheng Fang and the Tufeng Project were based on an ideology of preserving culture “intact,” rather than allowing culture bearers to actively reshape their inheritances to adapt to the contemporary social world around them, even if the Tufeng Project also catered for some of the latter through its metaphor of leaves/flowers vs. roots. The expression of a Miao person who worked at the NGO Eco-women shows clearly how these programs can have very strong impacts, wherein urban values and understandings transform local perspectives and expectations:

The villagers at Qifeng really like and support my work. More people have participated in the activities we initiated. The same with the villagers in Lisichong, where kids are actively learning Miao ancient songs.

(But) the way they [NGO staff] organize the community members is same as the way they communicate with urban residents. Sometimes, the plan they made wasn’t based on the actual situation of countryside. For instance, [one NGO worker] tried to use a top-down way to initiate activities. He hoped we could achieve a goal in a short period. [In the early period], the women in the villages didn’t trust me enough to cooperate with me. We need much more communication in this process. (In-person conversation, Luo Haiyan, 2019, Kunming)

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