The speech was published on Friday at China Minzu News, an official outlet focused on Beijing’s ethnic policies. Pan, who is ethnically Han, said he had observed a “disconcerting trend” in recent years where ethnic minority artworks were swayed by “Western multicultural theories”.
He said: “This is evident in narrative models that isolate individual social groups for development, in constructing a closed historical lineage for a single ethnic group, in the binary oppositions of urban versus rural, modern versus traditional, and centre versus periphery, as well as in cutting off the close connection with the historic progress of the entire country, and generate self-centred and exaggerated expressions.”