While Guo Zhenming is punished, performances by a state-backed Uyghur dance troupe in Europe are promoted on social media.
A Chinese artist has been fined for “illegal filming” of folk music in Xinjiang - even as China promotes state-sponsored performances of Uyghur singers and dancers in Europe that have angered Uyghur activists.
The Chinese artist, Guo Zhenming, who is known for his work commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, told Radio Free Asia he was fined 75,000 yuan (US$10,300) and had all his equipment and materials confiscated over what he said was just a personal project not a film for distribution.
In one of the videos, there is a Uyghur girl playing a traditional stringed musical instrument known as a tambur. “This is one piece of evidence used by the Cultural and Tourism Bureau to accuse me,” Guo told RFA Mandarin.
The Urumqi Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism in Xinjiang, which held a hearing in Guo’s case last week, said the Yunnan-based film director and dissident artist had violated Article 13 of the ‘Film Industry Promotion Law’ that requires “legal persons and other organizations that intend to produce films” to send a screenplay synopsis to the relevant departments to be filed for their records.
But Guo told RFA in an interview Wednesday that his filming of folk music in cities and villages across Xinjiang in December 2024 and January 2025 was not intended for commercial use, and he had not scripted a film.
Instead, it is a personal art project with contemporary Chinese musician Wang Xiao to create and collect folk music while traveling and filming the landscape of Xinjiang, he said.
“The current shoot in Xinjiang is just a record of artistic music-collection field trips. I never said I would make a movie. There is no studio or trailer, only some filming equipment and materials,” Guo said.
The Urumqi Culture and Tourism Bureau reasoned he was likely to turn the footage shot in Xinjiang into a film as he had previously screened a documentary - which was about artists haunted by the Tiananmen Square massacre – at the Berlin Film Festival in Germany, even though he had not obtained official permission to release that film.
In February, Urumqi authorities had raided Guo’s house and seized all his equipment, including two cameras, one hard drive, two filters, a set of lights, and a recorder.
Chinese netizens and artists have criticized the punishment against Guo as government’s suppression of artistic freedom and ‘high-seas fishing,’ a term used in legal circles to describe cross-provincial policing beyond a particular office’s jurisdiction.
Uyghur anger over state-backed performances
The punishment of Guo for filming folk music in Xinjiang is in sharp contrast to Chinese state efforts to promote displays of Uyghur culture around the world – invariably portraying an image that Uyghurs embrace Chinese culture and live happily together with the Han ethnic majority.
Most recently, exiled Uyghur activists have objected to performances in Paris, France, and Budapest, Hungary, by the Uyghur 12 Muqam, a dance and music troupe under the Xinjiang Performing Arts Bureau.
Social media videos circulated by the troupe’s lead show highly stylized female dancers twirling against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower as bystanders clap along.
“It is a grotesque irony that China is showcasing Uyghur culture in Europe while erasing it in the Uyghur homeland,” Rushan Abbas, chairwoman of the World Uyghur Congress, told RFA.
“The same regime staging dance performances abroad is the one that has criminalized Uyghur religious expression, bulldozed our mosques, banned our language, and detained our artists. This is not cultural preservation—it is cultural propaganda. Europe must not be complicit in this whitewashing campaign," she said.
China’s communist government is accused of grave human rights abuses against the minority Muslim group in Xinjiang, with the U.S. government has determined amounts to genocide.
Anger in cultural circles
It’s unclear whether Chinese authorities’ decision to throw the book at Guo is motivated by his reputation as a dissident, or by the fact that he was documenting Uyghur culture that Beijing is accused of erasing.
But the imposition of harsh penalties on Guo has angered those in China’s legal and cultural circles, who say this is the first such case where authorities have meted out punishment for “individual or personal filming conduct” under the Film Industry Promotion Law, since its implementation in 2017.
“The Film Law regulates organized film production activities, not individual filming,” said Li Xiongbing, the lawyer representing Guo, who argued at a hearing on April 11 that there were “serious problems in the application of the law” and that the Urumqi authorities were not the law enforcement body with jurisdiction on this case.
In a letter to the Urumqi Municipal Culture and Tourism Bureau, Guo’s legal team pointed out that the bureau had clearly crossed its administrative authority and recommended that Guo’s equipment and materials be returned immediately and the penalty decision be revoked.
RFA could not immediately reach the Urumqi Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism office for comment.
Impact on artistic freedom
Chinese netizens fear the move will have wider implications for China’s creative ecosystem, beyond just the film and art industry.
“Film a movie in Hunan, and get fined by Xinjiang. It may sound utterly ridiculous, but it belies a serious problem: our ever-shrinking space for artistic freedom,” wrote one WeChat blogger named Li Yuchen.
“If this nonsense continues, I fear that the next people punished for ‘illegal filmmaking’ will be you, and me, and everyone we know who has ever used a camera or a mobile phone,” Li added.
Chinese artist He Sanpo, who now lives in Thailand, echoed a similar sentiment, calling the penalties “absurd” and reminiscent of an order by officials of Sanhe City in Hebei province, who had ordered that all the walls of the city be painted green overnight.
“They are as absurd as the political jokes of the former Soviet Union. Once public power overrides the law, it is like a tiger on the street, that can hurt people anytime and anywhere. Any absurd and terrifying incident may happen,” He told RFA.
In December 2022, authorities in Dali in China’s southwestern province of Yunnan placed Guo under 15 days’ administrative detention for “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” a charge frequently used to target peaceful critics of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, after he made some comments about the “white paper” protest movement.
Filming ethnic minorities inside China’s borders can be deemed sensitive by authorities.
In 1995, China had sentenced Tibetan musician Ngawang Chophel to 18 years in prison for filming traditional Tibetan folk songs and dance, over a two-month period in Tibet. He was charged with “committing espionage crime” and for using the cover of filming Tibetan music to gather sensitive intelligence and engaging in “separatist activities.”
RFA Ugyhur Service contributed reporting. Translated by Tian Li. Edited by Tenzin Pema and Mat Pennington
