About Nationalities Pictorial

Nationalities Pictorial

Nationalities Pictorial (Minzu Huabao) is a Beijing pictorial magazine founded in 1957 under China's ethnic-affairs establishment. Devoted to the lives, cultures and regions of China's 56 recognised ethnic groups, it combines photojournalism with reportage on minority areas, festivals, crafts, languages and development, and it has published editions in Chinese and in minority languages including Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur, Kazakh and Korean. The monthly is the country's specialist pictorial record of its ethnic diversity — the visual counterpart to the literary and scholarly journals of the nationalities field — and a long-running source for ethnographic photography from across China. It is distinct from the better-known general-interest China Pictorial, despite the similarity of their formats and names.

Founded in the decade of identification

The magazine's founding date, 1957, places it at a precise moment in the history it documents. In the first decade of the People's Republic, the new state undertook the nationality identification project: from 1950, "Visit the Nationalities" teams were sent out to determine what constituted a minority nationality, applying criteria adapted from Stalin's definition of a nation — a common language, a common territory, a common economic life and a common culture — supplemented, where those markers did not fit China, by historical origin, migration history and the agreement of the people themselves. The first national census, in 1953, had recorded claims from more than 400 groups; by the mid-1950s, 54 minority nationalities had been officially identified, a total that later settled at 55 recognised minorities alongside the Han. A pictorial magazine of the nationalities, founded in 1957, was thus born alongside the very taxonomy it would spend its life illustrating: a fixed, official gallery of peoples, each with a name, a territory, a costume and a culture, awaiting its portrait.

The pictorial form

Minzu Huabao belongs to the huabao genre — the large-format pictorial magazine that became one of the signature print forms of the People's Republic. Where a text journal argues, a pictorial shows: full-page photography, short explanatory texts, and covers designed as emblems. For a subject like ethnic diversity, the form was peculiarly apt. Costume, festival, dance, craft and landscape — the standard visual vocabulary through which China's minorities were represented to the nation — are photographic subjects, and a monthly pictorial could cycle through the calendar of peoples and regions indefinitely, one group, one festival, one autonomous prefecture at a time. The magazine has accordingly combined photojournalism with reportage on minority areas, festivals, crafts, languages and development: the visual celebration of diversity and the documentary record of change in minority regions, bound in the same issue.

Editions in minority languages

Like the other national institutions of the ethnic-affairs system, the magazine has published beyond Chinese. Editions have appeared in Chinese and in minority languages including Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur, Kazakh and Korean — the major written languages of China's autonomous regions. Multilingual publication was a practical as well as a symbolic commitment: a pictorial produced in Beijing about a Kazakh herding district or a Tibetan festival town could be read, in their own scripts, by the people it depicted. The pattern parallels the rest of the nationalities publishing world — nationalities presses issuing books in minority languages, the literary magazine Ethnic Literature appearing in minority-language editions — in which the centre publishes for the periphery in the periphery's own tongues.

Among the nationalities publications

The magazine sits within a recognisable family of Beijing nationality publications. The anthropologist Dru Gladney, in his widely cited study "Representing Nationality in China", names the "pictorial gazeteers" through which minority images were packaged and circulated — among them Nationalities Unite (Minzu Tuanjie) and Nationality Pictorial (Minzu Huabao) — alongside institutions such as Beijing's Nationalities Cultural Palace, the exhibition hall on Chang'an Avenue beside the offices of the State Commission for Nationality Affairs, the ministry charged with administering dealings with China's minorities. That scholarly attention underlines the magazine's documentary importance: for researchers of how the Chinese state represented its minorities — as happily accepting an official identity, typically portrayed in traditional costume — the pictorials are primary evidence, and Minzu Huabao is among the longest-running of them.

Distinct from China Pictorial

The title is easily confused with China Pictorial (Renmin Huabao, "People's Pictorial"), the general-interest monthly first published in 1950, whose title was handwritten by Mao Zedong and which is published by the China International Communications Group in numerous foreign-language editions. The two magazines share a format and an era, but not a subject: China Pictorial presents China as a whole to domestic and foreign readers, whereas Nationalities Pictorial is the specialist title, concerned only with the minority nationalities and their regions. The distinction matters to librarians and historians alike, because the specialist pictorial's archive — decades of commissioned photography from minority areas — has no equivalent in the general title.

A visual archive of minority China

The magazine's cumulative value lies in its archive. A monthly pictorial running since 1957 accumulates, decade by decade, an unmatched photographic record: minority towns before and after development campaigns, festivals as they were performed in the 1950s and as they are staged today, crafts in the hands of their last traditional practitioners and of their revivalist successors, languages and scripts in public use. Scholars who build databases of Chinese magazine covers treat such periodicals as primary sources of national memory, using their imagery to trace shifts in policy and in the presentation of, in particular, women and ethnic minorities. For ethnographers and historians, Minzu Huabao's pages offer the same service for the minority regions specifically — a dated, captioned, officially framed visual record against which other evidence can be checked.

Its covers alone form a usable chronology. In the cover-image database of Chinese periodicals assembled by the East Asian studies scholar Hong Zhang, seven decades of magazine covers are used in teaching as a window into Chinese culture, precisely because covers compress a publication's message into a single image that students and scholars, Chinese- and English-speaking alike, can read as evidence of their moment. A pictorial whose covers are portraits of peoples multiplies that effect: issue by issue, its cover sequence records which group, region, festival or costume the nationalities system chose to put forward, and in what style — documentary, celebratory or touristic — as the decades turned.

Subject: the 56 groups

The magazine's subject is defined by the official count it was founded to illustrate: 56 recognised ethnic groups — the Han and the 55 minorities, from the Zhuang, the largest minority, to groups numbering only a few thousand people. Its reportage follows the geography of that diversity: the autonomous regions of Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, Guangxi and Ningxia, the autonomous prefectures and counties scattered through the southwest and northeast, and the festivals, crafts and languages that distinguish each people. Development — roads, schools, industry, tourism arriving in minority areas — is the other constant theme, the pictorial recording both what modernisation preserved and what it transformed.

Continuing role

Nationalities Pictorial remains what it was designed in 1957 to be: the specialist pictorial of China's ethnic diversity, produced in Beijing under the ethnic-affairs establishment, in Chinese and minority languages, month by month. Literary magazines gave minority peoples a voice in print, scholarly journals gave their cultures academic standing, and this pictorial gave them a face — photographed, captioned and circulated nationwide. As a publishing artefact it belongs to the history of the huabao form; as an archive it belongs to the history of China's minorities themselves; and as a magazine it continues the founding bargain of its genre, showing the country's 56 peoples to one another, and to the world, in pictures.