Pondering the wider significance of my new film on the 1995 New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo, it strikes me that a major theme is the tenacity of mainland Chinese peasant communities in maintaining their ritual traditions “amidst massacre, invasion, civil war, famine, political campaigns, theft, destruction, banditry, and religious rivalry”—a history detailed in Plucking the winds.

It’s a theme I noted in this post with reference to the different modern histories of the PRC and Taiwan, and it’s all the more relevant today amidst the sanitised packaging of traditional expressive culture from the Intangible Cultural Heritage.