Since the early 1980s, both the Chinese populace and the government have adopted an entrepreneurial mindset that regards “tradition” and “culture” as a resource that can be reinvented, secularized, and commodified to generate economic and social benefits in rural China. However, the mist that awaits us to dispel is the underrepresented conflicting interests between the authoritarian state and the grassroots community in deciding which cultural practice shall be continued. My research answers this question by utilizing the case of the contemporary revival of dragon dance in Tongliang, a rural Southwestern district of Chongqing. It first examines the broad historical roots of the Chinese state in leveraging popular regional religions on the dragon to construct and reinforce Chinese national identity from feudal periods to the present. Next, based on my fieldwork in Tongliang over the summer of 2023, I will expose the varied grassroots interests among craftspeople, performers, and audiences in adapting the ancient tradition of dragon dance to modern secular aspirations. Beyond ascribing a sole actor in codifying and reforming the past tradition, the case of Tongliang suggests a complex social engineering where the top-down promotion of national identity has received both grassroots resemblances and resistance from the bottom up. Through this lens, the dragon dance emerges as a living embodiment of cultural reclamation. The following analysis, therefore, transcends a study of a folklore ritual dance but an inquiry into the resilience of collective identity and the politics of managing cultural heritage in contemporary China.