Decolonial Endurance: Indigenous Wellbeing Against Chinese Settler Colonialism

Speaker: Ting Hui Lau, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Singapore

Title: Decolonial Endurance: Indigenous Wellbeing Against Chinese Settler Colonialism

Abstract: Like many countries in Asia, China does not recognize the existence of Indigenous peoples within its borders, insisting instead on the category of ethnic minority. This denial of Indigeneity forecloses discussions of Chinese colonialism, with long-term implications for Indigenous health and wellbeing. Drawing on my new book, Decolonial Endurance: Lisu World-Making Against Chinese Settler Colonialism (Stanford University Press, 2026), I argue that Indigenous health is inextricably linked to decolonization: the return and repair of Indigenous relations to land, language, livelihood, and self-determination. I focus on Indigenous Lisu subsistence farmers on the China-Myanmar border and their experiences of Chinese development. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I show how Lisu health challenges are connected to their experiences of Chinese colonialism, carried out today in the form of state-led development. At the same time, moving beyond discourses of Indigenous victimhood, I trace Lisu practices of everyday decolonization. Through storytelling, care, play, and prayer, Lisu enact forms of decolonial worldmaking that enable them to endure colonial erasure by sustaining relationships with land, refusing assimilation, and imagining alternative futures. These practices, too, are critical to health. The refusal to recognize Indigeneity, and the collapsing of Indigenous struggles into class-based or regional problems, obscures a major dimension of Indigenous health. Public health interventions must therefore attend not only to access to health services, but also to the political conditions of Indigenous wellbeing: decolonization, cultural revitalization, and Indigenous resurgence.

Speaker's bio:

Assistant Professor Lau Ting Hui is a sociocultural anthropologist in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology in the National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on mental health, development, and Indigeneity in Asia.