Representations of Miao Ethnicity in Social Media Posts Concerning Chinese Ethnic Minority Photography

This study investigates the representation and production of Miao ethnicity within the practice of ‘ethnic photography’ on the Chinese social media platform RedNote. Analyzing a corpus of 100 RedNote posts from 2021 to 2025, the research explores how Han Chinese cultural tourists perform minority identities through staged photography involving Miao-style costumes. The findings reveal that while the primary motivation is the creation of aestheticized ‘pretty pictures’ for social media consumption, these performances are grounded in Chinese majority culture’s stereotypes and folklore concerning Miao ethnicity. Visual markers, especially silver ornamentation, serve as the essential signifiers of Miao culture while the adoption of archetypes such as ‘princesses’ and ‘sorceresses’ frames ethnic difference as primitive, exotic and sexualized. These digital representations are often geographically dislocated, occurring in both tourism-oriented ancient towns and non-Miao tourism sites, and they remain largely abstracted from the actual lived realities of Miao people. Authenticity is found to be a marginal concern for participants, who instead favor performances of ethnicity that fulfill the majority culture’s needs and desires. The paper concludes that Miao ethnic photography acts as a tool for Han self-realization, reproducing China’s long-standing patterns of the creation of ethnic difference within a contemporary digital tourism framework.

China · Ethnic culture · Ethnic group · Folklore · Photography · Representation (politics) · Social media · Tourism · Asian Culture and Media Studies · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations · Diverse Aspects of Tourism Research