This is a visual ethnography project on how the Qiang people in Sichuan, China resist the governance and regulation of governments at different levels.

Historically, the Qiang people have been migrating along the margin of the Chinese Empire, exhibiting cultural fluidity higher than many other ethnicities. On May 12th, 2008, an earthquake measuring at 8.0 Ms hit the Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, situated between the Tibetan Plateau and the eastward lowland region in Southwestern China. Forty miles from the epicenter, the entire Radish Village, where houses were built with yellow mud, was wiped to the ground. Around 30 out of one thousand villagers, all ethnically Qiang, were killed.

The earthquake dug up layers of local history and turned the Qiang region into a blank slate for state intervention. During the post-earthquake reconstruction, cities and villages were rebuilt with modern materials and at modern speed, while religious sites were left in ruins. Highways cut through Walnut tree orchards; dams flooded ancestral farmlands. Public squares, cultural museums, and ethnic villages were constructed in and near the city of Wenchuan, to tell the Qiang people, one of the fifty-five designated ethnic minorities in China, what is archetypal “Qiangness”.

Radish Village is a microcosm where one can see the negotiation between local cultural fluidity and imposed Han cultural hegemony. The making of a “Qiang” ethnic minority stands upon the unmaking of deposited Qiang customs and memories. The making of China, similarly, is at the expense of the unmaking of many possible Chinas.

With an anthropological approach, the artist looks at the tension between Qiang people and central governance, and how this tension is embodied in changing religious, agricultural, and constructional practices. This project aims to capture a glimpse into China’s modernization development and the poetic irony living under the state’s dominion.