This paper theorizes Mongolian musical practice in Inner Mongolia as a form of ecological mediation that challenges dominant separations between culture and nature. Rather than approaching sound as symbolic representation, I argue that musical practices actively produce relationships among humans, animals, land, and governance under conditions of accelerating ecological transformation.

Drawing on ongoing fieldwork, interviews with musicians and instrument makers, and documentation of ritual and performance contexts, I examine how ecological knowledge is embedded in vocal production, instrumental timbre, and material practices. Vocal forms such as long song and throat singing enact modes of listening attuned to wind, animal movement, and spatial openness, while rhythmic structures resonate with histories of nomadic mobility. These music practices articulate relational ethics grounded in interdependence with the grassland.

At the same time, musical sound becomes a site where environmental disruption and regulatory intervention are negotiated. Under intensified grassland management policies and shifting economic structures, narratives surrounding music register dispossession, constraint, and uneven power relations. The story of Suhe and his white horse is a folk story often linked to the morin khuur, can be read not simply as folklore but as an acoustic response to loss and territorial rupture.

By positioning sound as a material and political force, this paper explores how music, as a material and political force, carries ecological knowledge that can support or question contemporary environmental practices.

This paper extends a transnational ethnography of contemporary Hani music, the aural expressions of people who identify as descendants of an ethnic group in Southern China, Laos, and Vietnam. In the past decade, a vibrant reggae scene has been flourishing in Yunnan, Southwest China, where bands led by ethnic minorities gained recognition through album releases and international tours, alongside the rise of regional record labels (e.g. Sea of Woods). Among those joining this wave are Hani musicians (e.g. band “Wild Mushrooms”), who mobilize reggae, ska, and psychedelic elements to reimagine traditional folk songs in contemporary musical production.

By examining Hani musical innovations as a critical case of “Yunnan Reggae” and “Global Grooves,” this paper asks how the intersection of Afro-diasporic genres and Hani traditions engender new forms of intercultural interaction, minority identity negotiation, and transnational circuits. I argue that Hani musicians do not position themselves as preservers of “heritage” or participants in “world music” markets; rather, they develop what I call “counterpublic musicking” practices that articulate dynamic forms of Hani identity (Small 1998; Warner 2002). Gleaning insights from ethnomusicological scholarship of mediation, circulation, and mobility (Meintjes 1990; Novak 2013; Kielman 2022), this paper challenges ethnonationalist logics and reconceptualizes “caifeng” (采风) in Chinese folk music studies—a practice that documents minority music through short-term visits to rural villages. Treating recording studios, live performances, and record label practices as key sites of circulation, this project repositions Hani music within global circuits and listening publics while foregrounding its sonic mobilities and creative transgressions.

Despite its definition as a non-immigrant nation, China embodies a structural contradiction by becoming the unanticipated destination for Asia’s largest African diaspora. Since the late 1990s, transnational commerce driven by African migrants has transformed Guangzhou’s urban enclaves into a vital Afro-Asian hub (Mathews 2019; Lan 2017). However, a profound dissonance exists between this tangible presence and its inscription in official archives. While state media frames African music as a political symbol or exoticized display, authentic diasporic voices remain muted. Their sonic expressions, rooted in memories of home and global markets, are rendered inaudible within mainstream records. I conceptualize this absence not as a vacuum, but as a blank history. Drawing on Veena Das (2020), I argue these silences are inhabited by everyday struggles and tacit knowledge that homogeneous official archives fail to register yet are haunted by. To access this history, I employ “listening to the text” (Ochoa Gautier 2014) to interrogate gaps in media reports and urban descriptors. Following Xu (2025), I treat these textual silences as active sites where fleeting sounds and embodied practices can be reconstructed. This inquiry gains urgency post-2020, as pandemic-era policies triggered a mass exodus (China Times 2024). As African residents navigate a precarious return, this blank history becomes critical for understanding their resilience. By attending to the friction between their silenced everyday realities and China’s hegemonic narratives, this study renders the diaspora’s invisible history visible, revealing a sonic presence surviving within the texture of the ordinary.

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.