After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the state announced the existence of 56 ethnic groups, including the Han, the vast ethnic majority accounting for over 90 percent of China’s population, and 55 ethnic minorities. Every Chinese citizen, every musician, has been officially registered as belonging to one of these 56 ethnic groups. Since then, these 56 ethnic categories have remained persistent identifiers in the collection, documentation, and publication of Chinese music, as well as in the nomination, inscription, and preservation of musical traditions as Intangible Cultural Heritage elements. In the meantime, ethnic minorities have been a frequent theme in the musical representations of China and Chinese culture.

This article calls for rethinking some of the 56 official ethnic categories in the study of Chinese music. Based on ethnographic research conducted over the past two decades, I argue that these ethnicities were proposed only after 1949 as a state-sanctioned way of understanding China’s cultural others and of reshaping hundreds of existing groups native to the annexed lands who still maintained diverse non-Chinese cultures. Therefore, I suggest that ethnomusicologists avoid using these ethnic categories uncritically as analytical starting points or labels to summarize the cultural backgrounds and identities of musicians. This paper further examines how music helps actualize these ethnic categories by generating shared attributes among culturally diverse groups categorized as the same ethnic minority and by helping the nationwide public and global audiences imagine the millennia-long existence and cultural unity of these recently proposed ethnicities.