This new book about the Qiang people, a distinct ethnicity in Western China located midway between the Chinese and the Tibetan regions, is acutely relevant not only for its rich account of the Qiang ethnicity in particular but also as regards the fate of ethnicities in China more broadly.

In March 2026, the PRC adopted a new law enforcing “Ethnic Unity.” This legislation codifies a recent trend that has already been underway for some time: the coercive assimilation into Chineseness of those who remain culturally different. The new drive for assimilation under this new law may prove to have far-reaching consequences, including for people like the Qiang. While one paragraph in the law allows for “outstanding cultural elements” to be preserved (as tokens in the tourist industry), the new ultranationalist policies clearly intend to undercut and terminate the viability, integrity, and sustainability of ethnic cultures.

In this context, Yanshuo Zhang’s rich account of ethnic identity-making on the part of the Qiang up to the watershed of 2026 will serve as a valuable benchmark account of how the Qiang, as one of many ethnicities, has survived until today and for observing what happens to them next.

The Qiang happen to occupy a special place in the history and ethnopolitics of China. The book jacket text fails to make clear that significance, but Zhang does mention the key insight, originally put forth by Ming-ke Wang, the noted Taiwanese scholar, about how Chinese ethno-historians’ misunderstanding of how Chinese texts recycled the ethnonym “Qiang,” as a record of the “migration,” ever farther to the west of Chinese imperial centers, of the Qiang people. In fact, it was no such thing. Instead, it represented the Chinese recycling of a key word in the imperial vocabulary for the “barbarians” of the west that was continuously reattached to new groups of people as the empire’s boundaries expanded. The term thus signified no less than the real expansion of the empire as well as the mystifying illusion of its conceptual continuity. (cf. Wang’s 1992 Harvard dissertation, “The Ch’iang of Ancient China through the Han Dynasty: Ecological Frontiers and Ethnic Boundaries”).

This remarkably powerful insight about the history of the Qiang is, however, not mentioned until pages 74–75 of Zhang’s book. The point is reinforced by the additional fact that many Qiang call themselves Rma in their indigenous language; the previously unknown term Qiang was only imposed on them in the mid-twentieth century as part of the Chinese state’s drive for ethnic “classification.” It is thus insufficient, as Zhang does, to merely describe the social life of the term “Qiang” as “unstable” and “evolving”—even though that characterization is not inaccurate.

Zhang could have more clearly emphasized the Chinese state’s unilateral act of naming and ruling, not least since the objective mess of the state ethno-classification project also afflicted multiple neighboring people similarly located between Tibetan and Chinese civilization, such as the Pumi (see Koen Wellens, Religious Revival in the Tibetan Borderlands: The Premi of Southwest China, 2010) and the Gyarong (see Jinba Tenzin, In the Land of the Eastern Queendom: The Politics of Gender and Ethnicity on the Sino-Tibetan Border, 2013). These neighbors share both the geography and the core predicament of the Qiang, which is the key concern of Zhang’s book: How to survive by “creatively belonging” in a China that presumes to both define them and rule them, while also seeking to uproot the formidable power of Tibetan influences.

The investigation of “creative belonging” as a response to this new predicament in modern China stands as the main achievement of this book. Zhang devotes the three main parts of this rich study to that phenomenon.

Part I discusses how the faux ancient Qiang connection has been recast as real history in post-Mao China both for commercial tourism and, in direct relation to the spectacles of tourism, as a way for the Qiang to creatively appropriate a place for themselves by embracing a role in the self-narrative of the Chinese. Zhang skillfully recounts the construction of a Qiang connection with the ancient lore through the story of King Yu, who was putatively of Qiang origin. Obvious parallels would be the “Miao” efforts to place themselves at the origins of history by way of identifying with the figure of Chiyou despite his supposed arch-villain status, as well as, beyond the “minorities,” the Chinese themselves, who once held they were Babylonians (cf. Tze-ki Hon, “From a Hierarchy in Time to a Hierarchy in Space: The Meanings of Sino-Babylonianism in Early Twentieth-Century China,” Modern China 36.2 (2010): 139-169).

Part II discusses the exoticization and celebration of Qiang architecture and cultural ambiance in the medium of film. Zhang’s attempt to investigate the interplay between Chinese-language and indigenous-language renderings rather than study them in isolation is fascinating and productive. Of course, these films are all subject to the same political censorship, which sets limits of expression. Zhang’s riveting analysis also points to how exotic ethnic settings, through an “ethnographic poetics,” lend themselves to a critique of Chinese society, gender relations, and so on in a manner that evokes the parallel achievement of the late female director Zhang Nuanxin’s movie “Sacrificed Youth” (Qing chun ji, 1985) set in Yunnan. This critical sounding-board effect, it must be noted, may be why today’s PRC leaders want to silence all cultural difference. It will always have this “seditious” potential, which they cannot tolerate.

Part III addresses literary interventions in the same spirit. Most, if not all, the writings that Zhang examines are in Chinese, which is inevitably conducive to self-exoticization (including gender-inflected exoticism) in the choice of subject matter. Such challenges resemble those of Anglophone American Indian writers today and authors from India who write in English, the language of the British or American colonial states. The Qiang, like those authors, are similarly located between tradition and modernity, history, and the present. Zhang provides a fascinating discussion of multiple Qiang writers’ works, leading to the book’s general conclusions about the challenges of the future.

Zhang ends on an optimistic note: “The invention of the Qiang identity … will keep evolving and adapting to new situations. Minority identities will incorporate new inspirations and become open to new imaginings in order to create the many futures of ethnicity” (p. 246).

This will only be possible, however, if the Chinese state allows the Qiang and other ethnicities to continue to exist. History is littered with examples of peoples and languages and cultures that have been eradicated by force and have permanently disappeared. In today’s China, the nationwide forced-assimilation campaigns launched over the last decade are intensifying, and the new Ethnic Unity law of 2026 may even be a step toward the abolishment of the minority nationalities (minzu) altogether, as many Chinese policymakers have been demanding.

It is a pity that Zhang does not engage with these dark clouds, which have been building on the horizon over the last decade. Can the Qiang, as a small people, hope to be exempt from the new state-organized drive to suspend the “multiethnic imagination” of her book’s subtitle?