China is a multicultural country home to fifty-five ethnic minority groups, yet due to linguistic and cultural barriers many of these groups remain understudied or unknown in the West. The Qiang, one of modern China’s officially recognized ethnic minorities, is also China’s longest-standing ethnoracial identity marker that has existed since the earliest recorded history of China. Creative Belonging: The Qiang and Multiethnic Imagination in Modern China (U Michigan Press, 2026) by Dr. Yanshuo Zhang investigates the formation and evolution of the Qiang as a people, a concept, and a cultural history in China. It further examines how the contemporary Qiang ethnic group interacts strategically with mainstream Chinese society, challenging the historically entrenched hierarchies between the sociocultural “centers” of China and its ethnic “peripheries.”

This book is based on years of ethnographic and textual-archival research in the Himalayan regions of southwest China, where the contemporary Qiang group resides. Drawing on a diverse range of official and local political discourses and previously unstudied literary, historiographical, and cinematic works, Dr. Zhang illuminates how the Qiang have carved out spaces of “creative belonging” within the parameters of multiculturalism in contemporary China. Rooted in ethnographic and textual-archival research, the book presents original materials produced by Qiang indigenous writers, scholars, artists, grassroots village cultural activists, and entrepreneurs at both the local and the global levels. Creative Belonging invites readers to rethink ethnicity and national belonging in China by centering minority groups’ efforts to expand the meanings and implications of “Chinese culture.”

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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