Home › Intangible heritage › Yingge dance › Recognised inheritors
Yingge · Recognised inheritors
This is Volume 10 of ten in the Yingge feature. It records four national-level representative inheritors, by the item, batch and number under which each is officially registered.
Header texture: photo by H2v5o68z, CC0
This volume is compiled from the registration records of national-level ICH representative items and takes only what the official pages can state: name, item, number, batch and career.The scope stops at the public files of national-level representative inheritors— local inheritors at each level, team leaders and the people who teach the art in the villages are several other kinds of record, and this volume does not take them; that is not a claim that they do not exist. Names are ordered by batch and number, not by fame.
The “related inheritors” fields of the three project pages, together with the person files in the Digital Museum of China ICH, are every official source that can be checked at present. What the pages do not say, this volume does not add.
Chen LaifaYingge (Puning Yingge) · second batch · no. 02-0355
Male, Han, born November 1957 (per the project page table; the person file says “born 1957”), from Puning, Guangdong. Nominated by Jieyang, Guangdong; protection unit the Puning Cultural Centre.
He began learning Yingge dance at 18, was lead stick the following year, has coached since 1990, and is the sixth-generation inheritor of Puning Yingge. The file records that “his stick work in performance is supple and martial, quick and fierce”; his representative pieces include “Martial Spirit of Yingge” and “Nanshan Yingge”.
Sources:Person file, Puning Yingge project page.
Yang WeiYingge (Chaoyang Yingge) · second batch · no. 02-0356
Male, Han, born August 1932 (the file text says “born 1932, from Shantou, Guangdong”), from Shantou, Guangdong. Nominated by Shantou, Guangdong; protection unit the Chaoyang District Cultural Centre, Shantou.
He learned Yingge within the family. He began martial arts at nine, had the basic routines by fifteen, became lead dancer at eighteen and then took over coaching. In 1991 he composed the seven-strike routine.
Sources:Person file, Chaoyang Yingge project page.
Lin BingguangYingge (Jiazi Yingge) · fifth batch · no. 05-2213
Male, Han, born March 1968, from Lufeng, Guangdong. Nominated by Lufeng, Guangdong; protection unit the Jiazi Yingge Culture and Art Service Centre, Lufeng.
He began learning Yingge at twelve under Yu Rong and other older performers. From nineteen he has worked for a living and performed at the same time, arranging and organising teams to play within the province and beyond. He began taking pupils in 2001; the file records that “he has taught more than fifty pupils to date”.
Sources:Person file, Jiazi Yingge project page.
Lin Zhongcheng (Lin Song)Yingge (Chaoyang Yingge) · number and birth year not recorded officially
Male, Han, nominated by Shantou, Guangdong. His name appears in the “related inheritors” field of the Chaoyang Yingge project page; the number and the date of birth are both blank.
The Digital Museum has a person page for him (address below), but it carries only item information: no birth year, no account of his training, no description of his skill. So this volume records three things only: name, item and nominating place.
Sources:Person page, and the “related inheritors” field of the Chaoyang Yingge project page.
Of the items the four belong to, the Puning and Chaoyang routes have registered teams in the Volume 6 team table The Jiazi route is in Lufeng, Guangdong, outside that table, and this volume does not add a team for it. The teams in the table and the people here cannot vouch for each other: a team does not mean a registered inheritor, and a inheritor does not mean the team is on the ground.
How they tell it themselves
The table above is registration data. How a man talks about Yingge is another layer. The passages below are Chen Laifa’s own words in interviews between 2023 and 2026, with the source at the end of each and no rewriting.
“At the heart of Yingge dance is one word: yi, what is right.” He went on: “In the past many people saw only the bustle and never knew what it was saying.” (Global Times, 2026-02-14)
How a whole performance is built: “I will say it: of all the Yingge teams in Puning, not one has a more complete story than our Nanshan Yingge.” He divides a performance into eight passages: scouting down the mountain, the heroes come out, making up to enter the city, seizing the chance to reach the prefect’s office, robbing the execution ground, crossing the fast water, the triumphant return, joy and victory (Farmers’ Daily, 2023-06-06). Same team, same arrangement; the 2026 interview records the passages as scouting down the mountain, the heroes come out, making up to sell their trade, seizing the chance to break into the prefect’s office, raising havoc at Damingfu, rescuing Lu from the office, crossing the fast water, the triumphant return. Eight either way, with several middle passages named differently. Both are given here and neither is corrected.
What may change and what may not: “The essence of the art handed down from the ancestors cannot be touched. But there are places that fall short: the force and the watchability can still be raised.” Elsewhere he puts it harder: “Yingge dance must innovate, but it must not lose its flavour.” (China News Service, 2024-02-18)
What counts as having learned it: “Our dancers do not learn it the moment they come in; sometimes they follow for four or five years before they can go out and perform. Carrying Yingge dance forward is a good thing, but there has to be a proper master to guide it; go crooked and the flavour goes.” (China News Service, 2024-02-18)
What the faces used to be like: “What did they paint with before? Candles. Melt a candle, add colour, paint it on the face — very crude. Later the materials improved, but the faces are still painted by local custom, very simply; to tell the characters apart they just hung a waist tablet, Lu Zhishen, Li Kui — the name written out.” (Farmers’ Daily, 2023-06-06)
How the old rule was broken: Nanshan Yingge kept the rules “to men, not women; within, not outside”. After the Puning Nanshan Yingge transmission base opened in 2024 he talked repeatedly with village elders and Yingge representatives and broke the limit — “now children from around here, even from elsewhere, can come to the base and learn, so long as they love Yingge dance.” (Global Times, 2026-02-14)
These passages are spoken words carried by the press, not a record made on the spot by this site; the reporters have tidied them and dropped some particles and pauses, so the full exchanges must be checked at the sources given. No checkable interview with the other three — Yang Wei, Lin Bingguang, Lin Zhongcheng — was found, and this page does not speak for them.
Two things outside the list
First, the body of the Chaoyang project page carries another passage naming “main inheritors: Hong Feiying, Guo Yaoyang, Chen Hanlong, Yao Xinta, Yang Wei, Zhou Xiuxing, Chen Kunli, Lin Abao and others” — eight names. That is descriptive text, not registration; apart from Yang Wei none of the seven appears in the “related inheritors” field and none has a checkable person file. This volume does not fold them into the table above, nor use them to decide who counts as a representative inheritor.
Second, four in the table does not mean Yingge has only four national-level representative inheritors. The “related inheritors” field is filled item by item, and the same item may gain further recognitions in later batches; this volume follows the pages as they stand and adds nothing they do not list.
← Previous volume: the glossaryBack to Yingge dance →
Sources
The item material and person information in this volume are compiled from the project pages and person files published by the China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network and the Digital Museum of China ICH; the links are listed under each name and all were opened and checked on 23 October 2026. The quotations in “How they tell it themselves” come from three further sources: Farmers’ Daily, “Behind Yingge dance’s breakout” (2023-06-06); China News Service, “Chen Laifa, inheritor of Puning Yingge: innovation must not lose the flavour” (2024-02-18); and Global Times, “Chinese New Year, a taste of the world” (2026-02-14). All three were opened and checked on 24 October 2026.
Official registration data stands as the cited pages give it; this site holds no official standing and makes no ranking, appraisal or certification.
If the official pages are updated, this volume is revised to match and the revision date is kept at the foot of the page.
Last revised: 24 October 2026