About China Folk Literature and Art Association

China Folk Literature and Art Association

The China Folk Literature and Art Association is the national association for folk literature and folk art in China, a member association of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles (CFLAC). Founded in Beijing in March 1950 as the China Society for the Study of Folk Literature and Art, and renamed under its present title in 1987, it is the organisation that led modern China's great folk-literature salvage projects — from the journal Folk Literature in the 1950s to the monumental "three integrations" collection programme of the 1980s to the 2000s, which gathered some 1.84 million folk tales and published provincial volumes of tales, songs and proverbs running to tens of millions of words. With CFLAC it presents the Shanhua Award, the highest national honour for folk literature and art. Headquartered in Beijing, the association works on intangible cultural heritage safeguarding, folk craft revitalisation and rural cultural development. It is distinct from the China Artists Association, the CFLAC body for fine artists: the folk literature and art association's constituency is the storytellers, singers, craftspeople and scholars of China's folk traditions rather than the professional gallery art world.

Founding in 1950

The association was founded in Beijing in March 1950, in the first year of the People's Republic, under the name China Society for the Study of Folk Literature and Art. Among its early figures were the writer and editor Zheng Zhenduo, the novelist Zhao Shuli — himself famous for fiction rooted in rural speech and storytelling — and the folklorist Jia Zhi. The founding reflected the new state's cultural programme: folk literature and art, the songs, tales and crafts of ordinary people, were to be collected, studied and honoured as a national inheritance rather than dismissed as superstition or ephemera. From the beginning the body combined two identities that it retains today: a scholarly society for the study of folklore, and a mass cultural organisation linking folk artists and storytellers across China's provinces. In 2000 the association celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in Chengdu, where the first Shanhua Prizes were awarded to eighteen folk artists in film, singing, painting and storytelling — a ceremony that neatly summarised its dual mission of research and recognition.

The Scholarly Generation: Zhong Jingwen and Chinese Folkloristics

The intellectual history of the association is inseparable from the generation of folklorists led by Zhong Jingwen, one of the founding figures of modern Chinese folklore studies. Zhong's academic work, examined in detail in scholarship on the period from 1949 to 1966, adapted the theory of folk literature to the new China: he worked on the discipline's positioning, its basic categories and the literary characteristics and scope of folk literature, with particular attention to folk songs and folk tales, the relationship between ballads and poetry, and the educational value of tales and their relationship to writers' own creations. In the early People's Republic, folk forms such as ballads, folk tales, yangge performance and New Year paintings served as bridges between intellectual and political elites and the rural population, appearing in night schools and literacy classes as well as in print. That scholarly framework — folk literature as the literature of the people, worthy of systematic collection and theoretical study — gave the association's collecting campaigns their intellectual justification and their methods: go to the villages, record the tellers and singers, and treat oral tradition as literature.

The Journal Folk Literature

The association's early public face was its journal, Folk Literature (Minjian Wenxue), published from the 1950s. The journal printed tales, songs, ballads and proverbs collected from across China, alongside scholarship and discussion, creating the first national platform on which a storyteller in a remote county could see local oral tradition set in type and circulated nationwide. For the association, the journal was both a research organ and a salvage instrument: every issue preserved material that existed only in memory and performance. The habit of systematic collection formed in the journal's pages — soliciting, transcribing, classifying and publishing folk texts province by province — became the template for the far larger collection campaigns that followed.

The Three Integrations: China's Great Folk-Literature Salvage

The association's largest achievement is the "three integrations" programme, carried out from the 1980s into the 2000s. The project set out to compile three great integrated collections of Chinese folk literature — folk tales, folk songs and proverbs — county by county and province by province, before the generation of master storytellers and singers who carried the oral tradition passed away. The scale recorded for the programme is extraordinary: some 1.84 million folk tales were collected, and the published provincial volumes of tales, songs and proverbs totalled tens of millions of words. Local work under the programme repeatedly uncovered remarkable survivals; in Hubei, for example, folklorist Liu Shouhua's teams documented the storytellers Liu Depei, Liu Defang and Sun Jiaxiang and celebrated story villages such as Wujiagou, whose tales entered the provincial and national record. The three integrations are regarded in Chinese folkloristics as one of the largest folk-literature collection efforts undertaken anywhere in the twentieth century, and the association's role in organising, editing and publishing them defines its place in Chinese cultural history. In the 2020s the association has continued the same logic in new forms, with Chinese folk-literature and folk-craft integration projects carrying the inventory work into the digital era.

The Shanhua Award

With the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, the association presents the Shanhua Award — the Mountain Flower Award — described in official coverage as China's top honour for outstanding works of folk art and literature. The award was established with the approval of the central propaganda authorities, began in 1999 and is presented every two years. It comprises six major categories: a folk literature and art lifetime achievement award, folk literature and art work awards, folk literature work awards, folk art performance awards, folk arts and crafts awards and folk video work awards. The first prizes were presented at the association's fiftieth anniversary celebrations in Chengdu in 2000, to eighteen artists. Later editions have travelled the country: the fifteenth award ceremony was held in Hangzhou, where the veteran Hubei folklorist Liu Shouhua received the lifetime achievement honour for folk artists, and the sixteenth ceremony was held in Xiamen in January 2024, where the award went among others to Wu Yuanxin's Chinese Blue Calico Cultural Archives volume for Nantong — the fruit of a decade visiting nearly a thousand villages, interviewing thousands of villagers and rescuing over 23,000 pieces of antique blue calico cloth. A Tianjin University series of cultural heritage archives on the Imperial Heavenly Queen Temple won the twelfth Shanhua Award, and Ningbo artisans alone have won the award eleven times — evidence of how deeply the prize is woven into regional folk culture.

Feng Jicai and the Heritage Preservation Era

In the twenty-first century the association's public identity has been shaped by Feng Jicai, the Tianjin writer and artist who has served as its chair and later honorary president, and who made cultural heritage preservation a national conversation. Feng, who first came to prominence as a pioneer of scar literature after the Cultural Revolution and as a collector of oral histories of that period, turned to documenting and defending folk culture: compiling photographic albums of ancient buildings in Tianjin to persuade officials to protect them, recording the oral histories of Spring Festival woodcut inheritors, and leading heritage archive projects of the kind that won the Shanhua Award. Under figures of his generation — the association's chairs have also included Feng Yuanwei and Pan Lusheng — its work expanded from collecting texts to safeguarding the living contexts of folk culture: the villages, workshops, festivals and craft lineages in which folk literature and art are actually produced. Pan Lusheng's prominence as a folk art scholar and educator reflects the same shift, linking the association to national folk craft revitalisation and to the training of new generations of folk artists.

Intangible Heritage, Folk Craft and Rural Culture

Much of the association's contemporary work sits at the junction of folk culture and China's intangible cultural heritage system. Its experts recommend and review projects for provincial and national intangible heritage lists — more than twenty projects recommended and reviewed by Liu Shouhua alone were included in Hubei's provincial and national lists — and its networks of provincial and local folk literature and art associations organise festivals, exhibitions and fairs, such as the China Folk Art Fair, held since 2002 and attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors, whose first pavilion showcases Shanhua Award-winning work. Folk craft revitalisation — helping traditional crafts such as blue calico printing, woodcarving and New Year painting find contemporary markets and inheritors — and rural cultural development, recognising story villages and song villages as cultural assets, are stated priorities. In each case the association's role is that of the national professional body: setting standards, conferring honours, training and connecting the local associations and individual bearers of tradition.

Position Within Chinese Literary and Art Circles

As one of CFLAC's national member associations, the China Folk Literature and Art Association occupies a defined niche in China's cultural architecture. The China Artists Association serves professional fine artists; the writers', musicians', dancers' and other associations serve their respective professions; the folk literature and art association alone is charged with the anonymous, collective and inherited arts — the tales no single author wrote, the songs whole villages sing, the crafts passed from master to apprentice. Its membership accordingly spans folklorists and university scholars, editors and publishers of folk texts, folk craftspeople and performers, and the provincial associations that federate them. Documentation of its work appears in People's Daily anniversary coverage, in international scholarship on Chinese folkloristics published in journals such as Humanities, in Chinese reference works recording its organisational history, and in CFLAC's own English-language materials on its member associations.

Legacy

The association's legacy can be stated simply: without the collecting campaigns it organised, a large part of China's oral literature would have vanished unrecorded with the last generation of traditional storytellers. Founded in 1950 to study folk literature and art, it published the journal that professionalised the field, supplied through scholars such as Zhong Jingwen the theory that justified the work, and then executed, through the three integrations, a salvage operation that gathered 1.84 million tales and tens of millions of words of songs and proverbs into print. Its Shanhua Award continues to define excellence in folk creation, and its turn under Feng Jicai's generation toward heritage safeguarding and craft revitalisation carried the same protective impulse from the printed page into villages and workshops. For a directory of Chinese cultural institutions, it is the indispensable national address for the folk half of China's literary and artistic inheritance.