“Ritual Bones” and “Modern Skin”

This article examines the modern transformation of Xinchang Diaoqiang Opera, a 600-year-old “living fossil” of Chinese dramatic arts, through the intersecting lenses of state patronage, spatial negotiation and digital spectacularization. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted during the Lunar New Year of 2026 – encompassing interviews with government officials, troupe leadership, performers across three generational cohorts and thirty audience members – alongside systematic archival research into hand-copied scripts preserved in the Xinchang Archives, this study investigates how an archaic, state-designated Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) navigates the contradictions of modernity. The article identifies three interlocking dynamics shaping Diaoqiang’s contemporary survival. First, the “iron rice bowl” of government patronage, operationalized through an 80/20 funding model, provides an institutional shield against market forces while simultaneously generating bureaucratic inertia, a transmission gap between senior masters and the precarious eighth-generation performers, and a risk of cultural museumification. Second, the spatial relocation of performances from village cultural halls to the urban proscenium stage transforms the genre’s social function – from orthopractic communal ritual into an aestheticized spectacle of civilizational improvement. Third, the digital spectacularization of the Mulian ghost plays, once marginalized by rural taboo, has re-enchanted the tradition for metropolitan audiences through social media platforms and short dramas, rebranding exorcistic rites as shareable cultural capital. Theoretically engaging with Laurajane Smith’s authorized heritage discourse, Michael Herzfeld’s cultural intimacy, Tim Oakes’s heritage as improvement and James Watson’s orthopraxy, the article argues that Diaoqiang’s endurance is not a product of static safeguarding but of constant, often discordant negotiation between “ritual bones” and a “modern skin” – between the silence of the archive and the noise of the smartphone screen.

Bureaucracy · Cultural heritage · Government (linguistics) · Intangible cultural heritage · Negotiation · Opera · Safeguarding · State (computer science) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Theatre and Performance Studies