The award ceremony of the 13th National Junma Award for Ethnic Minority Literature Creation (2024 Chinese Literature Gala: Junma Award Night) was held in Nanning, Guangxi Province on November 16. What is the Award about? What was the background of its birth? How has it helped Chinese ethnic minority literature to develop? DeepChina had an exclusive interview with Professor Wang Yan from Northwest Minzu University to introduce the development of the Junma Award.

Q: Why is the award called "Junma" which literally means steed? Could you introduce its development?

A: The name "Junma," which means fine horse, originated from the first National Junma Award for Television Art for TV series about ethnic minorities in 1986. Ulanhu, who was then China's Vice President, inscribed the Chinese characters of the award name "Junma Jiang (骏马奖)," using the image of a noble and strong horse to symbolize the creativity and pioneering spirit of television artworks from all ethnic groups.

In 1994, at the Fifth Award Ceremony, the Junma Award was officially adopted as the name of the award for the creation of ethnic minority literature, which means that the cause of China's ethnic minorities is proudly galloping forward as a drove of steeds with magnificent momentum.

In 2004, the Junma Award for the creation of ethnic minority literature was officially designated as a national award and is known as one of China's four major literary awards, along with the Mao Dun Literature Prize, the Lu Xun Literature Prize, and the National Excellent Children's Literature Award.

Q: Could you give us more details about the historical context in which the Junma Award was born? Why did the Chinese government establish a national award specifically for ethnic minority literature?

A: At the beginning of the reform and opening up, Chinese writers had great creative enthusiasm, and ethnic minority literature also needed to be developed. In January 1980, Malqinhu, a Mongolian writer who wrote a letter to the CPC Central Committee, received a reply, saying, "Something practical should be done for ethnic minority literature."

The state then organized a symposium on minority literature and made a series of plans, including convening a national conference on the creation of minority literature, holding the first national minority literature award, establishing a national literature journal, Minzu Wenxue, opening classes for ethnic minority writers. and organizing delegations of ethnic minority writers to visit and study in regions across China other than their hometowns. Since then, a virtuous cycle has been formed for the production, dissemination, research, and awarding of minority literature.

In 1981, the First National Minority Literature Award Ceremony was held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. The awards covered almost all literary genres, and as many as 140 works were honored. At that time, ethnic minority writers such as B. Burinbeki, a Mongolian writer with his work The Horse of Destiny, Li Tuo, a Daur writer with his work Wish You Could Hear This Song, and Aikebai Mijiti, a Kazakh writer with his work Old Man Nurman and His Hunting Dog Balis came to the forefront.

Since its inception in 1981, the Junma Award has been held for 13 consecutive years since. A total of 759 works and 809 writers from 56 ethnic groups have received the award. It has become the highest honor in the ethnic literary community.

Q: How does the Junma Award contribute to the development of Chinese ethnic minority literature?

A: The birth of the Junma Award coincided with the rise of ethnic minority literature in China, which comprises 56 ethnic groups and more than 130 languages. These ethnic groups differ greatly in their respective language usage and structure, and many did not have their own writing scripts before the founding of the People's Republic of China. As a result, ethnic minority literature has been a complex mixture of written and oral works, and the interweaving of Chinese writing, minority language writing and bilingual writing.

Against such a background, the establishment of the Junma Award reflects the modern transformation of ethnic minority literature. One of the original purposes of establishing the Junman Award was to "mobilize ethnic minority writers' unprecedented creative enthusiasm for the times." Since its first award in 1981, the Junma Award has been adhered to the standard of "unity of intellectual depth, artistic quality and ethnic characteristics," encouraged the use of ethnic minority languages for literary creation, and supported the literary creation of ethnic minorities of small populations (referring to ethnic groups with a total population of less than 300,000, and there are 28 such groups in China).

After more than 40 years of development, the Junma Award has cultivated a group of minority writers from various ethnic groups, literary genres and languages and has also become the starting point for the public to know the ethnic minority writers such as the Hui writer Shi Shuqing, the Manchu writer Guan Renshan and the Tibetan writer Alai, who later won the Lu Xun Literature Prize and the Mao Dun Literature Prize.

Q: What are the characteristics of ethnic minority literary creation in recent years?

A: In recent years, more and more ethnic minority writers are no longer interested in fiction, have shifted from lyricism to realism. They are paying more attention to realistic themes, and not bound by the polarized opposition between city and countryside, modern and traditional, center and frontier. Instead, they are concerned with the close connection between the development of ethnic areas and the historical process of the whole country.

I would like to give you some examples of literary works. Cliff Village by Ake Jiushe, a Yi writer, records the process of poverty alleviation in a Yi mountain village in Liangshan Prefecture, Sichuan Province. His work vividly depicts a group of diligent and persistent local people in the new era. White Tiger Village by Li Chuanfeng, a Tujia writer, tells the story of an ethnic minority village deep in the Wuling Mountains (a mountainous area in the northwest of Hunan Province and the northeast of Guizhou Province, once an area of extreme poverty in China), shaping the image of a new generation of young people who once worked in the cities and then returned to their hometowns to start businesses. In her work, Village BA basketball tournament: A Window in to China's Modernization: The Revitalization of Taipan Village, Yao Yao, a Dong writer, uses poetic language to describe the great changes from poverty to prosperity in the mountainous areas in the Miao and Dong villages of Guizhou province.

In addition, Chinese ethnic minority writers have always insisted on exploring a cross-cultural and cross-genre writing method, and the national common language of Chinese has also become widely used in their creation.

Just as Tie Ning, Chairman of the China Writers Association and Chairman of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, said at the 12th Junma Award Ceremony:

Upon reading these works, readers will surely be moved and amazed by the vast land, the people on the land and the great new era created by the people. This is our great motherland, and the people of all ethnic groups in China are tightly united like pomegranate seeds, sharing a common history and culture, and opening up a common future. This is the value and power of literature. This is also the sacred responsibility of writers from all ethnic groups in China.

Q: What do you think are the criteria for evaluating the value of ethnic minority literary works?

A: With the improvement of the award evaluation system and the policy of promoting ethnic minority literature and art, the Junma Award evaluation criteria has shifted its focus from quantity to quality, from coverage to selectivity, and from being supportive to awarding. There are also many changes in the evaluation criteria for the value of works.

In the setting of awards for the 8th award in 2004, the principle of "selecting fewer but better works, and preferring quality to quantity" was clearly stated. The works were thereby selected from four aspects: intellectual depth, artistic quality, contemporary relevance, and ethnic characteristics. In particular, contemporary relevance means depicting more contemporary social changes and characteristics in the works and, at the same time, reflecting the dominant position of the people in the works. In 2008, the 9th Junma Award proposed for the first time the principle of "selecting outstanding works that show both intellectual depth and artistic quality."

The further development of ethnic minority literature will be achieved by bringing ethnic minority literary creation into the mainstream discourse. Since the 12th award in 2020, cultural identity has been emphasized in terms of intellectual depth. It has also been proposed that works should set a correct national outlook, ethnic outlook, historical outlook, and cultural outlook. In the 13th award in 2024, the religious outlook was added, along with the concept of the community for the Chinese nation, emphasizing that all ethnic groups share weal and woe, honor and disgrace, life and death, and a common destiny. All the above changes reflect the continuous efforts of the Junma Award in leading the development of ethnic literary creation.

The interviewee is Wang Yan, professor at Northwest Minzu University

Zhang Weiwei /Editor    Liu Li /Translator

Yang Xinhua /Chief Editor    Liu Xian /Coordination Editor

Liu Li /Reviewer

Tan Yujie /Image Editor

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