"My Culture, My People, My Hometown" Chinese Ethnic Minorities Seeking Cultural Sustainability by Video Blogging

Ethnic minorities experience challenges in sustaining their culture in regions dominated by ethnic majorities. With the popularity of video blogging (vlog) in China, many ethnic minority vloggers present and promote their ethnic culture through vlogs online. In this study, we interviewed 16 vloggers on Douyin o understand why and how vlogs can be used to sustain ethnic culture. Both ethnic cultural experts and non-experts were involved in ethnic vlog making and sharing activities in \textit{Douyin}, and cultural experts took more initiations in preserving and promoting ethnic culture while non-experts were more driven by getting more traffic and income. Vloggers' imagined audience includes both intra-ethnic and mainstream viewers, impacting their vlog-making strategies, the utilized platform features, and created vlog content. For example, vloggers taught ethnic language and built an identity for intra-ethnic viewers, and they catered to mainstream viewers' needs for ``fresh'' by creating more acceptable meanwhile ``tagged'' and ``homogeneous'' content. Both ethnic minority vloggers and viewers protect their culture spontaneously from mainstream viewers' misinterpretation. Our findings demonstrate the potential of using video blogging to address the challenges of cultural sustainability and provide design implications for future information and communications technologies to support ethnic minorities' culture sustainability.