The Work of Tourism
in Rural Ethnic China
LANDSCAPE
OF
TRAVEL
JENNY CHIO
Publication of this book was supported by a generous grant from the
Association for Asian Studies First Book Subvention Program.
© 2014 by the University of Washington Press
Printed and bound in the United States of America
Composed in Minion Pro, typeface designed by Robert Slimbach
17 16 15 14	5 4 3 2 r
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
University of Washington Press
PO Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98r45, USA
www.washington.edu/uwpress
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chio, Jenny.
A landscape of travel: the work of tourism
in rural ethnic China / Jenny Chio.
p. cm.
(Studies on ethnic groups in China)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-295-99365-2 (cloth : alk. paper);
isbn 978-0-295-99366-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
r. Rural tourism—China. 2. Ethnicity—China. 3. China—Ethnic
relations. 4. China—Rural conditions. I. Title.
Gr55.C55C4828 2or4
338.479151—dc23
2013046931
The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi 739.48-1984.STUDIES ON ETHNIC GROUPS IN CHINA
Stevan Harrell, EditorSTUDIES ON ETHNIC GROUPS IN CHINA
Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers, edited by Stevan Harrell
Guest People: Elakka Identity in China and Abroad, edited by Nicole Constable
Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China,
by Jonathan N. Lipman
Lessons in Being Chinese:
Minority Education and Ethnic Identity in Southwest China,
by Mette Halskov Hansen
Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political
Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861-1928,
by Edward J. M. Rhoads
Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China, by Stevan Harrell
Governing China’s Multiethnic Frontiers, edited by Morris Rossabi
On the Margins of Tibet: Cultural Survival on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier,
by Ashild Kolas and Monika P. Thowsen
The Art of Ethnography: A Chinese “Miao Album,”
translation by David M. Deal and Laura Hostetler
Doing Business in Rural China: Liangshan’s New Ethnic Entrepreneurs,
by Thomas Heberer
Communist Multiculturalism: Ethnic Revival in Southwest China,
by Susan K. McCarthy
Religious Revival in the Tibetan Borderlands: The Premi of Southwest China,
by Koen Wellens
In the Land of the Eastern Queendom:
The Politics of Gender and Ethnicity on the Sino-Tibetan Border,
by Tenzin Jinba
Empire and Identity in Guizhou: Local Resistance to Qing Expansion,
by Jodi L. Weinstein
China’s New Socialist Countryside: Modernity Arrives in theNu River Valley,
by Russell Harwood
Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands,
edited by Emily T. Yeh and Chris Coggins
A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China, by Jenny ChioA LANDSCAPE OF TRAVEL
The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China
JENNY CHIO
UNIVERSITY 0/WASHINGTON PRESS | SEATTLE LONDONPublication of this book was supported by a generous grant from the
Association for Asian Studies First Book Subvention Program.
© 2014 by the University of Washington Press
Printed and bound in the United States of America
Composed in Minion Pro, typeface designed by Robert Slimbach
17 16 15 14	5 4 3 2 r
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
University of Washington Press
PO Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98r45, USA
www.washington.edu/uwpress
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chio, Jenny.
A landscape of travel: the work of tourism
in rural ethnic China / Jenny Chio.
p. cm.
(Studies on ethnic groups in China)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-295-99365-2 (cloth : alk. paper);
isbn 978-0-295-99366-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
r. Rural tourism—China. 2. Ethnicity—China. 3. China—Ethnic
relations. 4. China—Rural conditions. I. Title.
Gr55.C55C4828 2or4
338.479151—dc23
2013046931
The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi 739.48-1984.To Teacher Pan, C. Q., W. Q.,
and their families in Upper Jidao
and
the families of Yulong, Yueliang Wan,
and Hong Lajiao guesthouses in Ping’an.
Thank you.CONTENTS
Foreword by Stevan Harrell ix
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xxix
Map of China 2
Introduction
Landscape, Mobility, Visuality 3
1	| Similar, with Minor Differences
A Tale of Two Villages 21
2	| Peasant Family Happiness
A New Socialist Countryside 73
3	| Leave the Fields without Leaving the Countryside
The Orders of Mobility 1014	| “Take a Picture with Us”
'I lie Politics of Appearance 133
5	| The Ability to Be Different
Socialities and Subjectivities 173
Conclusion
Upper Jidao, Meet Ping’an 209
Glossary of Chinese Characters 233
Notes 237
References 261
Index 285FOREWORD
STEVAN HARRELL
Jenny Chios A Landscape of Travel is about China becoming a nation
that travels. Its rural workers by the hundreds of millions travel yearly
to the cities to make clothes, to build skyscrapers, to serve diners, and to
clean hotel rooms. Its consumers bought almost seventeen million cars in
2012, causing both monumental traffic jams and perhaps the world’s worst
urban air pollution. Its premier high-speed train now takes travelers from
Beijing to Guangzhou in eight hours, while its freeways are engineering
marvels, allowing travelers to glide through, rather than over or around,
formidable mountain ranges.
One way of traveling is to be a tourist, and China is also becoming a
nation that tours. In 2010 Chinese tourists took an estimated 2.1 billion
domestic tourist trips. They go to big cities to see historical and nationalist
sites; they go to national parks and nature reserves to see scenery and to
escape the city; they even go to the countryside to experience nostalgically
that rough rural life that their grandparents and today’s migrant workers
have fought so hard to escape. And increasingly, they go to China’s eth-
nic minority towns and villages to experience difference: the difference
between their fast-paced, urban life and the bucolic rhythms of a longed-
for simpler time; the difference between their cosmopolitan world, which
can be a little gray, and the local world replete with colorful songs, dances,
and clothing; the difference between their own affluence, with its noise
ixx | Foreword
and pollution, and what they imagine to be the minority people’s “back-
wardness” with clean water, clear air, and expansive views.
Tourists do not, of course, go to ethnic minority regions to experience
the poverty, the underdevelopment, the drug addiction, or the longing to
leave that plague much of rural China these days. They go rather to experi-
ence a benign and colorful difference—a difference that local people must
continuously shape and reshape to keep attracting the tourists. A Land-
scape of Travel tells the story of two communities occupied in creating and
maintaining this gentle and alluring difference. Ping’an, a Zhuang village
in Guangxi, and Upper Jidao, a Miao village in Guizhou, are two villages
that are constantly remaking themselves to realize the tourist ideal of dif-
ference, so that they can eliminate the undesirable differences of wealth,
education, and access to the rest of the world.
To meet their own goals, the villagers of Ping’an and Upper Jidao must
“do tourism” (gao liiyou), as they themselves put it; they must maintain
their landscapes to look attractively bucolic for photographers, regulate
their architecture to look quaint and local, dress themselves to look exotic
and ethnic, and perform songs and dances that people will want to listen
to and watch. They must also provide clean, attractive rooms with indoor
plumbing and comfortable beds; serve meals that have a hint of the exotic
but still meet the particular tastes of the urban tourists; build roads and
parking lots where tour buses and private cars can reach the villages with-
out too much pothole-bumping or uphill hiking; and adjust their own
schedules to make sure to be there, looking good, when the tourists arrive.
In other words, ethnic and scenic tourism in Southwest China is about
maintaining difference while making it accessible, about how people do
the work of tourism in order to allow tourists to bridge the geographic,
economic, and ethnic differences between tourist and villager without
eliminating that difference. It is about how to be modern, to participate
actively in the modern economy of mobility while portraying themselves
as un-modern, un-urban, and un-Han enough to stay interesting to the
tourists. A Landscape of Travel is both a story and a portrait of this process
of calibrating difference. Chio tells the story in a combination of vivid
vignettes and fluent analysis, and displays the portrait in a series of stun-
ning photographs, every one of which flashes both the irony of calibratingForeword | xi
difference and the fun of tourism that is shared by the tourists, the villag-
ers, and us the readers.
A Landscape of Travel also reminds us how much ethnicity in China
has changed since the first volume in the series Studies on Ethnic Groups
in China, published in 1995: Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Fron-
tiers. That book also contained both stories and portraits of difference, but
the stories were about the encounter between state and local community,
and the portraits were of differences that had been created by the long
history of ecological adaptation and the shorter history of state projects
of nation-building. How different the differences are now in the 2010s, as
affluent urbanites and increasingly cosmopolitan villagers dance both the
circle-dances that still symbolize minorities and the dance of difference
that keeps them attracting and visiting each other. Certainly tourism is
only one mode through which China’s mobility expresses itself, and we
must remember that most villages have no tourists at all. But if we want
to understand why tourists see and experience what they do on many of
those two billion tourist trips, and how this reflects China as a nation that
travels, Chios A Landscape of Travel is both delightful and essential.PREFACE
On a bright summer afternoon in 2007, a group of Chinese travel-media
photographers, editors, and publishers gathered in a Beijing bookstore for
a casual brainstorming session. Iheir task at hand was to discuss the cre-
ation of a Chinese-language guidebook to China for the domestic tourism
market, but under the imprint of an iconic Western travel guide brand,
which I’ll call “Travelprints.”11 was invited along by a magazine photog-
rapher, a friend of a friend, who knew that I had been living in two rural
ethnic tourism villages in Southwest China and that I wanted to know
more about the Chinese travel industry. In the villages, I learned just how
vital good publicity is in creating and maintaining the success of a tourism
destination. Village residents in each place loved to recall stories about
the photographers, writers, and television crews (domestic and foreign)
who had visited and who inevitably had become enamored with the warm
hospitality of the local community as well as the beauty of the surround-
ing landscape. These villagers were proud of being seen by the media and
by people across the country and the world. Now in Beijing, I wanted to
listen in on how Chinese travel-media producers talked about their work,
which in large part was promoting and selling the experience of tourism
to potential travelers.
The discussion focused on how to create a Chinese-language edition of
an internationally established travel guide brand for domestic tourism in
xiiixiv | Preface
China. This inverted the common association of the brand with “off the
beaten track” travel in exotic, far-flung destinations for budget-conscious,
presumably “Western” tourists (xifang, i.e., from North America, Western
Europe, Australia, and New Zealand). The publishers wanted to see if they
could take the Travelprints brand and localize it just enough to appeal to
the exploding market for in-country tourism without losing the cachet of
its perceived distinction as a Western, and therefore more cosmopolitan,
perspective on travel. Up to this point, they had already published a num-
ber of Chinese-language Travelprints guidebooks to destinations outside
of China. In large part, this was achieved by translating the English edi-
tions into Chinese and editing out certain parts that might be irrelevant
for a Chinese audience (or potentially sensitive to Chinese censors) but
leaving the bulk of the content intact. But in the case of a China guide-
book for in-country tourism, the lead publisher explained that they could
not simply translate the existing English-language Travelprints guidebook
into Chinese and sell it in the Chinese market. How could they “domesti-
cate” an international travel guide to China? Was there something differ-
ent about Chinese domestic tourism?
Travelprints—indeed anyone interested in profiting from the domestic
Chinese tourism market—faced a number of contradictory conditions. By
the mid-2ooos the staggering growth and market potential of domestic
tourism in China could not be ignored. In 2006 the China National Tour-
ism Administration (CNTA) reported that there were nearly 1.4 billion
domestic tourist trips taken, or approximately 1.06 trips taken per person
(CNTA 2007).2 In 2010 the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reported 2.1
billion domestic tourism trips taken, which, given China’s official popu-
lation of 1.34 billion, translated to about 1.6 trips per person (NBS 2011).
Chinese were traveling domestically in enough numbers to more than
justify, and indeed to demand, a China guide from Travelprints. But such
a guide had to offer its potential consumers something different, some-
thing distinctive, which in this case would be a certain status based off
its brand. While the English-language Travelprints guidebook to China
was associated with budget-minded, foreign “backpackers,” the travel-
media publishers pointed out that the Chinese-language Travelprints
guidebooks were generally purchased by a more well-to-do segment of
the Chinese population: those who could afford to travel internationally
and who wanted to do so in a more independent, worldly manner. AfterPreface | xv
all, the Chinese-language Travelprints guidebooks were some of the most
expensive on the market—typically twice the price of other guides.
The problem with selling travel and tourism was its relationship to the
actual content. For example, the point was raised that many Chinese tour-
ists prefer to travel in groups with tour guides arranged through travel
agencies, and as a result, these tourists often don’t bother with guide-
books. Of course, organized groups of tourists are not the target audience
for Travelprints; the publisher acknowledged that this guide, even more
than others, would ultimately be about branding. The Travelprints guide
to domestic travel in China would need to emphasize its desirability as an
international brand by appealing to the Chinese tourist who wanted to
travel around China in a “Travelprints” kind of way. What might this kind
of Chinese tourists want? Travelprints needed to figure out how to offer
something just different enough from the current guidebook marketplace,
but how were travel-media producers and others involved in the tourism
industries, tasked with providing (or describing) the travel experience,
supposed to give the tourist what they thought he or she wanted?
A suggestion was made that perhaps they could start by translating
into Chinese the English-language Travelprints guidebook to Southwest
China, because this region was already popular with both domestic and
international tourists looking for a culturally exotic experience in some
of China’s ethnic minority areas. But to the notion of simply duplicat-
ing the existing Travelprints guide written by non-Chinese authors,
one travel magazine editor exclaimed: “Why would I want to hear what
a foreigner has to say about Guizhou [one of the provinces covered in
the English-language guide to Southwest China]?” This editor’s outburst
revealed a deeper problem: how were they to provide interesting, differ-
ent information about China to a domestic audience who already had a
strong sense of what to expect and what they wanted to experience? In
the marketplace for travel guides, the best-selling domestic guidebook at
the time was a series called China Independent Travel (Zhongguo Zizhu
You). Inexpensive and mostly full of practical details on distances, travel
times, and hotels, these guides offered very little background information
on destinations. Eiowever, the publisher scorned, without a history and
culture section in a guidebook, tourism was just “getting out of the bus to
take a picture, getting on the bus to take a nap” (xiachepaizhao, shangche
shuijiao). Relatively speaking, the existing Chinese-language Travelprintsxvi | Preface
guidebooks to other countries and world regions contained quite a lot of
background information; this was part of their perceived distinctiveness
and would need to be written anew for a domestic audience.
When I interviewed the Travelprints publisher a few days after this
brainstorming session, he said that although they still had no concrete
plans, the ideas had been helpful. He mentioned that a Chinese-language
Travelprints guidebook to China might include “foreign voices” to pro-
vide new perspectives and to promote “different types of discoveries”
(bu yiyang de faxiari) for Chinese tourists while maintaining the brand’s
international flair. This was one of the first attempts by an international
travel guide brand, he said, to “go native” in the Chinese travel guide-
book market. After listening to the publisher’s musings on what his books
might offer a domestic tourist that would be “different,” I was struck by
the similarities between his concerns and those expressed to me by the
residents of Ping’an and Upper Jidao villages, where I had been conduct-
ing fieldwork on tourism, development, and rural social change for the
previous year and a half.
While the travel-media producers in Beijing strove to find the most
appealing and distinctive means of describing the tourism experience in
order to sell more guidebooks, villagers in Ping’an and Upper Jidao voiced
uncertainties over how to “do tourism” (gao liiyou), or more precisely, how
to do the work of tourism successfully. For village residents this entailed,
in part, being different enough from other nearby tourism destinations to
attract tourists, but it also meant calculating whether or not they could
earn more money working as a migrant outside the village. For both vil-
lagers and guidebook publishers, the work of tourism was to make travel
desirable as a consumable experience for tourists and therefore profitable
for themselves. Whether in a rural ethnic tourism village or in a publish-
er’s office in Beijing, the issues raised at the Travelprints meeting highlight
the contested meanings of tourism and the difficulty of making sense of
the experience of travel. From these perspectives tourism was no longer
an activity engaged in by tourists but rather something enacted and made
possible by those who have to do the work of tourism.
This book explores the myriad ways in which rural ethnic minority
village residents are doing tourism in China today, in response to and
entrenched in the country’s dramatic socioeconomic transformations,
programs for rural development and modernization, and global con-Preface | xvii
cerns for cultural heritage preservation. Like the travel-media produc-
ers I met in Beijing in 2007, the people who reside in tourism villages
such as Ping’an and Upper Jidao confronted similar questions about how
to create, construct, and provide tourism experiences for tourists; they
debated and occasionally doubted the possible benefits of doing tourism
for themselves, their families, and their communities. Tourism is never
just leisure or economics but rather a matter of perspective, representa-
tion, and imagination. Guidebook publishers in Beijing, guesthouse own-
ers in Ping’an, and members of the Upper Jidao Tourism Association were
all engrossed in the common project of teasing out the constituent parts of
tourism as they envisioned their opportunities and ambitions within this
moment in contemporary China. As they imagined what tourists might
want, they engaged in acts of imagining what tourism and travel meant to
themselves, as individuals, framed by their own experiences and desires.
As tourism was produced and problematized by village residents, travel
itself became meaningful in revealing ways. By paying close attention
to the concerns and aspirations expressed by Ping’an and Upper Jidao
residents as they lived in, through, and with tourism, this book presents
these circumstances as a landscape of travel—a landscape in which the act
and the imagination of travel become key nodes through which tourists,
migrants, ethnic minorities, mainstream majorities, rural villagers, and
urban dwellers negotiate and make sense of current social, economic, and
political conditions.
This book aims to build an anthropological understanding of the con-
temporary regimes of labor and leisure in China today by approaching
tourism as one part, and at present one very integral part, of life in rural
ethnic China. In tourism, after all, one person’s leisure is another per-
son’s labor. At stake is our knowledge of the work and debates involved in
making tourism possible and how these intersect with, or interrupt, the
ongoing formation of rural, ethnic subjectivities and livelihoods in China
today. The focus is the doing of tourism—in other words, the work that is
conducted and debated by village residents as they pursue their own life
goals and aspirations within the growing tourism economy. The analytical
and practical significance of not privileging the tourist in tourism studies
is emphasized throughout this book; meaning-making in tourism is not
the exclusive purview of those who travel from destination to destination,
from site to sight. Rather, as my ethnography shows, the people and com-xviii | Preface
munities who do the work of tourism are just as, if not more, invested in
making tourism meaningful. The “front stage” of tourism (MacCannell
1999 [1976], building on Goffman 1990 [1959])—or what is seen by a tour-
ist—cannot be interpreted without due diligence to the “backstage,” or
what creates the conditions of possibility for tourism. What happens in
the backstage occurs in relation to a host of other imperatives, claims, and
desires. These backstage conditions determine how tourism can, should,
and will be done in rural ethnic villages like Ping’an and Upper Jidao.
FIELDWORK, METHODOLOGY, AND THE VILLAGES
It shouldn’t surprise me how much things have changed each time I return
to Ping’an and Upper Jidao, and yet every trip leaves me somewhat aston-
ished. In 2012, the number of multistory, concrete hotels in Ping’an (an
ethnic Zhuang village in Guangxi) had doubled while the number of vil-
lage residents who ran family guesthouses appeared to have decreased.
Many villagers had found new opportunities in the tourism backstage—
for example, by buying produce and meat from regional markets and
reselling them at a markup in the village to restaurants and hotels, which
were increasingly run by outside entrepreneurs. From the looks of it, busi-
ness was still very good in Ping’an; tourists streamed up and down the
mountainside in regular waves, and the entire Guilin Longji Terraced
Fields Scenic Area (Guilin Longji Titian Jingqu), of which Ping’an is a
part, was expanding its tourism offerings and sights.3 Clearly, villagers
were invested, both emotionally and financially, in the ongoing success of
tourism in Ping’an, but at the same time the village elementary school had
closed due to low enrollment. Families with school-aged children were
moving to the nearby township and county towns, in Heping and Long-
sheng, and subleasing their businesses to relatives or other contractors.
In Upper Jidao (an ethnic Miao village in Guizhou), construction plans
for a new parking lot, granaries, and the village sewage system were under
way, funded in large part by a World Bank project loan to the provincial
government.4 A much anticipated village hotel had not been completed
because of mismanaged funds; instead, six furnished guestrooms and an
indoor shower and toilet had been built on the third floor of a village house,
paid for by a philanthropist from Hong Kong who had connections withxix
Preface
provincial tourism officials. Some tourists still came to Upper Jidao, but
the general opinion throughout the village was that tourism numbers had
fallen since 2008, when the nearby Xijiang Thousand Households Miao
Village (Xijiang Qianhu Miaozhai) had been redeveloped and reopened
as the region’s premier Miao ethnic tourism destination. The World Bank
project promised a number of much needed and desired infrastructure
improvements to Upper Jidao, but residents expressed doubts about the
future benefits of tourism on their everyday lives and livelihoods.
This book represents an effort at making sense of the transforma-
tions in the lives and expectations of residents in these two rural ethnic
minority villages in the early years of the new millennium. When I began
fieldwork in Ping’an and Upper Jidao in 2006, the Chinese government
had just released its 11th Five Year Plan, in which they foregrounded rural
development as a key national policy, dubbed Build a New Socialist Coun-
tryside (jianshe shehui zhuyi xin nongcun). The development of rural tour-
ism was widely promoted as a significant means of achieving the stated
goals of improving rural-urban relations and rural living conditions. But
what did the building of a New Socialist Countryside and this attention to
rural life mean for the residents of Ping’an and Upper Jidao villages? Were
village residents satisfied with the ideas and suggestions put forward in
government policy? What else did they want from tourism? Has tourism,
which was so hotly promoted in 2006 as an integral part of the strategy for
developing rural China, ultimately made a difference to them?
Instead of locating the tourist at the center, as the active subject who
“does tourism,” my analysis takes the “hosts” as the primary actors
who do tourism. It is the host communities, in conjunction with and in
response to diverse local, regional, and state imperatives, who create the
conditions of possibility for tourism. This was reflected in the way village
residents talked about tourism; in China, rural tourism is often referred to
as nongjia le, which I loosely translate as “peasant family happiness” for
reasons outlined in chapter 2. This is a name and category used generally
to describe tourism businesses that involve family-run rural guesthouses,
rural-themed restaurants, and the experience of relaxation and leisure in
a rural, homey environment. Village residents frequently use the phrase
nongjia le as an activity; for example, when talking about how they might
further develop tourism, they would sometimes say “we could do nongjia
le” (women keyigao nongjia le).xx | Preface
To examine tourism from the perspectives of village residents and not
tourists, I situate the transformative experience of tourism as develop-
ment within what I call a landscape of travel. The notion of a landscape—
criss-crossed by travel routes for tourists and migrants as well as all of
the hopes, dreams, desires, and disappointments associated with these
types of mobility—provides a framework for understanding how tourism
is designed to and indeed does become a part of everyday experiences in
places like Ping’an and Upper Jidao. Moreover, as I elaborate in the intro-
duction, by bringing together the concept of landscape with the idea of
travel, my analysis integrates two fundamental characteristics of tourism
itself: sightseeing (visuality) and human movement (mobility). Much of
the literature in tourism studies demonstrates how visuality and mobility
are important for tourists, but my purpose is to understand how visuality
and mobility are equally, if not more, significant and transformational for
destination communities.
By “visuality,” I am referring to the “social fact of vision” (Foster 1988;
Mitchell 2005; and Mirzoeff 2011), which is exemplified in the frequent
arguments over the outward appearance of a village (waimao) or how ter-
raced fields should be maintained in order to reproduce well in photo-
graphs. By “mobility,” I am considering multiple forms of, and diverse
reasons for, travel, including tourism and migration. Thus the landscape
of travel I map is an ethnographic project in taking seriously how travel
influences individual understandings of opportunity and identity; how
rural ethnic villagers acquire the skills and knowledge to renovate their
homes to better suit tourism and achieve modern living conditions; and
how village residents learn to be touristic to successfully adapt their tour-
ism industries to attract potential visitors.
My fieldwork took place primarily in Ping’an, in the Guangxi Zhuang
Autonomous Region, and Upper Jidao, in Guizhou (see map). Both
Guangxi and Guizhou are equivalent as provincial-level administrative
units in China. Guangxi and Guizhou share a border, and regular pub-
lic bus services connect towns throughout the region. The villages were
chosen for their current participation in tourism industries and tourism-
based development programs, their popularity (as evidenced in provin-
cial, national, and international media coverage, in guidebooks, and in
numbers of incoming tourists), and their promoted status as rural ethnic
tourism destinations. Ping’an (population approximately 850) is a singlePreface | xxi
surname village, Liao, and residents who trace their lineages to families
within the village are all ethnically Zhuang; it is located an hour and a
half north of Guilin, a well-known city of cultural, historical, and tour-
istic significance in China. Ping’an is administratively part of Guilin, a
prefecture-level city. In Upper Jidao (population approximately 400), local
village families are ethnically Miao and the village is comprised of two
lineages, surnamed Pan and Huang. Upper Jidao is located in the Qian-
dongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, whose administrative
capital is Kaili, a county-level city about forty minutes by bus from Upper
Jidao. Kaili is three hours by bus from Guiyang, the provincial capital of
Guizhou.
Fieldwork in Ping’an and Upper Jidao was initially conducted over
twenty-three months between 2006 and 2007, when I lived with a local
family in each village for an extended period. Between 2007 and 2012, I
visited the villages on average once a year, staying anywhere from three
days to three weeks. I have also spent time outside of Ping’an and Upper
Jidao with village residents, as they themselves traveled for work and
sometimes leisure to regional towns near their home villages and to fac-
tories in Guangdong. I met, interviewed, and discussed tourism, rural
development, media representations, and ethnic identity in China with
university professors, government officials (including tourism bureau
officials), tour guides, journalists, and graduate students in cities across
the country, including Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Guilin, Guiyang,
Kunming, and Xiamen. These conversations, across the spaces of village
and urban China, helped me to comprehend the broader intersections
of domestic tourism, rural development, and discourses of ethnicity in
China today. Ultimately, however, it was my long-term ethnographic field-
work in the villages—including participant observation, a household sur-
vey, and semistructured interviews—that illuminated the simple fact that
what these villagers are participating in is best understood as a process of
learning how to be ethnic and rural in particular ways that have emerged
in tension and in tandem with larger national policies for development
and modernization. Doing tourism is therefore a deeply significant means
through which village residents are making sense of their place and role in
these broader transformations.
My initial encounter with rural ethnic tourism in China occurred in
2002, when I visited Ping’an for the first time. The day I went to see thexxii | Preface
terraced fields was cold and foggy, and although I hadn’t planned well
enough in advance to stay overnight, the place stuck out in my mind not
only because the terraced fields were truly breathtaking but because of
the ticket offices. The idea of charging entry to a “real” village both baffled
and fascinated me. It was enough to prompt me to revisit the village in
the summer of 2004, when I stayed for a few nights at a local family’s
guesthouse, chosen simply because the mother of the household was the
brashest, most insistent, and most unrelenting woman who immediately
approached me as I stepped off the public bus at the village parking lot.
Since then, I have almost always stayed with her family whenever I visit
Ping’an. In 2008, her family began building a large, concrete hotel just
steps away from their older wooden home, and in the summer of 2012,
I was honored to be their first overnight guest in one of the new rooms.
Over the past decade, I have followed the ways in which Ping’an has
attempted, perhaps unintentionally, to transform itself from a destination
for landscape photography based on sight-seeing into a more ethnic tour-
ism scenic area. This is in large part a response to the changing discourses
of tourism, rural development, and ethnicity in China. The history of
tourism in Ping’an is grounded in a particular way of looking at the ter-
raced fields that surround the village, and these fields remain the village’s
most highly valued asset. They are now highly contested, however, because
they are the least capable aspect of tourism in the village for generating
income for residents, as discussed in chapter 1. Discord characterizes the
political and economic relationships between the village of Ping’an, the
tourism management company in charge of the Longji Scenic Area of
which Ping’an is a part, and the local county government.
My first visit to Upper Jidao was in March 2006, at the suggestion of
Zhang Xiaosong of Guizhou Normal University and the Guizhou Tour-
ism Bureau. By then, Upper Jidao had already been marked as a site for
tourism development. Under the guise of a World Bank project loan appli-
cation and a program implemented in the early 2000s by the World Tour-
ism Organization (UNWTO), which is part of the United Nations, Upper
Jidao was selected by a team of consultants and government officials to
be a part of a “demonstration project” (UNWTO 2006, 41-44). The plan
for Upper Jidao was consciously constructed in light of experiences from
other tourism villages, including Ping’an; in fact, in 2004, organizers of
this rural tourism development program in Guizhou arranged for a groupPreface | xxiii
of villagers, including two men from Upper Jidao, to visit Ping’an as part
of a study tour. In many ways, Upper Jidao is a relative newcomer to the
rural village-as-ethnic tourism destination trend in China. However, it is
located within a few kilometers of the most well-known and long-stand-
ing ethnic Miao tourism villages in southeastern Guizhou: Upper Langde
and Xijiang (on the former, see Donaldson 2007 and 2011 as well as Oakes
1998 and 2011; on the latter, see Schein 2000).
With the involvement of regional, provincial, national, and interna-
tional organizations and agencies, the pace and impact of tourism-related
changes in this corner of Guizhou have been large scale. The bigger idea
is to turn the entire prefecture, Qiandongnan, into an ethnic tourism
“heartland,” while raising the standard of living in both Kaili and the
surrounding rural countryside. A wider, straighter highway has short-
ened travel times between Kaili and Upper Jidao from an hour to about
forty minutes. The construction of this highway was timed with the 2008
Beijing Olympics; village residents in Upper Jidao recall with pride the
Olympic torch procession that passed by the village. The difficulty for vil-
lagers has been in negotiating their newcomer status within the already
existing ethnic tourism market in southeastern Guizhou, while grappling
with the continued daily concerns that face households who still rely on
subsistence farming and migrant remittances. Since 2010, whenever I
visit, I find myself spending more and more time in Kaili with friends
from Upper Jidao who have since moved to the city. Iheir travels back and
forth between Upper Jidao and Kaili are reshaping the fabric of everyday
life in the village. The new, improved roads certainly do facilitate more
continuous movement between the city and the village for both tourists
and village residents, thus demonstrating the continued complexity of
understanding mobility as a social process.
In many respects, the individuals from Upper Jidao who choose to
migrate are no different than other migrant laborers across China; they
leave often with the intent to return and return often with a desire to
leave again. What made Upper Jidao and Ping’an so fascinating, however,
was the layering of mobilities in each place, the interwoven trajectories of
tourists and migrants cross-cutting everyday village livelihoods. Migrants
from Upper Jidao and Ping’an were returning home to find their homes
transformed into tourist destinations for urbanites from some of the
places they had themselves worked and lived in. As I lived in each villagexxiv | Preface
community, I found myself drawn to the stories of travel told by returned
migrants; their narratives of where they had been and what they had seen
across China highlighted, and indeed asserted, their subjectivities and
their village socialities in rural ethnic tourism—a perspective I explore in
chapter 3. Like research conducted by Tamara Jacka (2006) with migrant
women in Beijing and by Rachel Murphy (2002) among returnees in rural
Jiangxi, I became interested in the individual stories of travel and how,
from these narratives, potential, current, and former migrants were giving
form to and making sense of contemporary social and economic oppor-
tunities. In Upper Jidao and Ping’an, these opportunities are in tourism,
which operates in ways particular to the contemporary regimes of labor
and leisure in China. Thus mobility is doubly revealing as an analytical
perspective on both individual, subjective experiences of encountering
the world beyond one’s home and as a shared, community chance for an
active, productive role in national modernization agendas.
Whether discussing migration or tourism, one conceptual figure
around which many of the village residents shaped their stories of travel
was that of home. The element of “home” is often invoked in popular forms
of homestays and family-run guesthouses (Yu Wang 2007) and frequently
plays a central role in the marketing of rural tourism. The push to develop
village hotels and guesthouses in Ping’an and Upper Jidao was representa-
tive of this trend, encompassed in the promotion of rural tourism as nong
jia le, or peasant family happiness, where the middle character jia stands
for both family and home. For returned migrants, however, the concept of
“home” was complicated by their own travels and by their perspectives on
leaving home and then returning to create and sell their “home” to tour-
ists. For these people there was one personal, remembered understanding
of home from not-being-at-home and then another layer of collective nos-
talgia added upon return when their homes were changing to meet tourist
demands for the fulfillment of urban nostalgic longings. Participating in
rural, ethnic tourism was inevitably entrenched in a need to reconfigure
local ideas and ideals about what kinds of home were desired, by whom,
and to fulfill what needs.
As an ethnographer trained in visual anthropology, I entered my field
research sites with the clear intention of recording footage that would
eventually be edited into an ethnographic film (Chio dir. 2013). Through-
out my fieldwork I shared clips and sequences from my footage with vil-Preface | xxv
lage residents; these collective viewings of video recordings made in each
village provided a deeper sense of how tourism was cultivating a par-
ticular “way of seeing” in the communities. Using visual media in this
way allowed me to explore not only how people in Ping’an and Upper
Jidao responded to my own visual representations of their communi-
ties but also to discover their expectations of what tourism, and rural
villages-as-ethnic tourism destinations, should look like. Collaborative
visual research was a multivalent learning process for me as an anthro-
pologist and for residents in both Ping’an and Upper Jidao as stakeholders
in China’s rural, ethnic tourism industry.5 Much of my thinking on and
analysis of visuality in the context of tourism has been deeply shaped by
the comments, reactions, and questions of the villagers who watched my
footage and, in 2010 and 2012 as the film took shape, reviewed rough and
final cuts of the film itself.
Over the course of my research, I integrated video production into
the ethnographic flesh of my project by using digital video’s portability
and its visibility as a means of creating data about living in, through, and
beyond tourism in China. I also realized that by sharing footage of one
village with residents of the other, I made my project more transparent
to the villagers and myself. They could see where I was when I wasn’t in
their village and get a sense of what I was doing. We talked about how to
produce images and what images are good for. Not only did this model
the tourism “sight-seeing” experience but it became a part of how we all
were learning about what tourism entailed. Discussions with village resi-
dents in Ping’an and Upper Jidao about the visual representation of rural
Chinese villages revealed the lasting importance of knowing how to be
seen in tourism. This in turn focused my data collection and analysis on
the moments and sites at which this visual knowledge emerged during
encounters with tourists or when this knowledge was invoked for the pur-
poses of understanding where tourism was headed. My analysis thus ben-
efited immensely from using video as a research method and later through
the process of editing the film itself.
It was apparent that local village perspectives on tourism and travel were
greatly influenced and shaped by mass media representations (beyond my
own footage). This is what prompted me to spend time with travel-media
producers in Beijing after completing many months of ethnographic field-
work in the villages. So many of the conversations I had and opinions thatxxvi | Preface
had been expressed in Ping’an and Upper Jidao dovetailed with larger,
media-based narratives of travel, and indeed residents were always quick
to engage with any and all media personnel who showed up in the villages.
Television programs beamed in idealized images of urban living, while
tourism travel shows demonstrated to the villagers just what tourists want
to see and do when in a rural village. As Aijun Appadurai (1996, 53-54)
has noted, “more persons throughout the world see their lives through
the prisms of the possible lives offered by mass media in all their forms.”
Pushing this notion further, Tim Oakes and Louisa Schein (2006, 22)
have pointed out that “messages about other places are being transmitted
through all these media at a remarkable pace and density. And desires
to tour or live in these places seem to have burgeoned concomitantly.”6
Notions of place and home are increasingly complicated by the transmis-
sion of images and stories of “other” places through media representa-
tions. Coupled with the occasional researcher or development consultant
who showed up unannounced and usually asked too many questions,
villagers were learning from a plethora of sources just what constituted
contemporary tourism practices and discourses. I came to understand the
value village residents placed on learning about tourism through a vari-
ety of means—from direct interaction with tourists to training sessions
funded by international donors to media portrayals of their villages, their
ethnic group, and rural tourism activities. The residents of Ping’an and
Upper Jidao depended on “being seen” for their local tourism industries
to be profitable. For the tourists who visited these places, seeing ethnic,
rural livelihoods in all of their olfactory, tactile realities was a part of the
anticipated and desired experience. Learning how to be seen was therefore
integral to the future success of tourism in these villages.
SCOPE OF THE BOOK
Drawing on critical approaches in tourism studies as well as anthropolog-
ical perspectives on contemporary Chinese culture and society, this book
investigates the spheres of power, modernization, and nation-building
latent in tourism with the goal of understanding how rural ethnic Chinese
village residents make sense of their livelihoods and formulate new aspira-
tions. I situate my analysis at the nexus of mobility and visuality preciselyPreface | xxvii
because these are the two social processes I found to be most influential
and dominant in shaping resident opinions on how best to do tourism in
Ping’an and Upper Jidao. The introduction lays out the conceptual frame-
work of this book, focusing on how an anthropological approach to land-
scape expands the critical study of tourism for understanding both the
physical practices and material spaces through which travel is imagined
and realized. I delve more deeply into notions of mobility and visuality
to account for, and to account with, the multiple social actors in tour-
ism as a transformative social phenomenon for destination communities,
in contrast to many earlier works in tourism studies that have tended to
emphasize the tourist experience of tourism.
Chapter 1 situates these villages within the contexts of ethnic iden-
tity and visual representations of ethnicity in China since 1949, drawing
attention to how the knowledge and discourses produced in the Ethnic
Classification project (minzu shibie) influenced the later development and
promotion of domestic tourism—in particular, tourism about the nation’s
official ethnic minorities—since “reform and opening” (gaige kaifang) in
the late 1970s. I describe the history of tourism and current conditions in
the two villages, Ping’an and Upper Jidao. Chapter 2 discusses how tour-
ism has fit into recent national policies and goals for rural development,
in part by drawing on earlier, dominant discourses of rural livelihoods in
China, to justify tourism as development and to produce a desirable, con-
sumable rural ethnic tourism commodity for the contemporary market.
I focus on the national campaign to build a New Socialist Countryside
incorporated into the 11th Five Year Plan from 2006 to 2010 and the popu-
lar tourism trend dubbed nong jia le—the catchy gloss used to describe
rural household-based tourism enterprises.
One of the major domestic issues that both the New Socialist Coun-
tryside policy and the national-level support for nong jia le tourism were
intended to address was rural-to-urban internal migration and the atten-
dant social consequences of “the largest voluntary migration in the his-
tory of the world” for both rural and urban China (Wasserstrom 2010,
122).7 The goal in the mid-2ooos was to create enough opportunities in
the countryside to convince able-bodied rural residents to stay, or to
return, home. In chapter 3, I explore the perspectives of some returned
rural migrants in Ping’an and Upper Jidao on tourism and development
in their home villages. It is crucial to recognize and take seriously thexxviii | Preface
multiple, overlapping mobilities that Ping’an and Upper Jidao residents
must account for on an everyday basis in order to acknowledge that tour-
ism development itself holds very powerful, if frequently unarticulated,
assumptions about who should and who should not travel.
Chapter 4 considers the visual work undertaken in each village as a
part of doing tourism—from architectural renovations as homes are
transformed into guesthouses and hotels to the migrants who come to
Ping’an to find employment as ethnic minority models. Not everything
is as it looks on the surface of a tourism village, and this chapter details
how village residents conceive of and make sense of what I call “the poli-
tics of appearance” in ethnic tourism. This is a politics that ultimately
determines who and what looks appropriately ethnic and rural enough
for tourism and tourists, and village residents by necessity have had to
learn how to work within these changing expectations. Chapter 5 exam-
ines the internal politics of tourism on relationships within each village
and between nearby villages (some of which may or may not also be doing
tourism). The importance of being able to present oneself as just different
enough from neighboring villages becomes a key factor in achieving suc-
cess and profits in the competitive tourism marketplace.
Finally, I conclude by considering how doing tourism for Ping’an and
Upper Jidao residents is a process of learning how to be ethnic and rural,
and this learning process is very much entrenched in their identities as
modern, rural, and ethnic minority Chinese citizens. The conclusion
centers on a short study tour I organized for a group of residents from
Upper Jidao to visit Ping’an in 2007.1 close by thinking through some of
the more recent changes that have occurred in each village as a result of
shifting local and national politics as well as individual aspirations and
ambitions. Tourism is as much about the physical process of movement
as it is about the imagination of meaningful experiences to be lived—and
for the people I have met and befriended in Ping’an and Upper Jidao, their
labors at providing a memorable leisure experience for tourists demand
both respect and further attention to the complex and often contradictory
factors involved in the work of tourism.ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project has taken me from the United States to China to Australia and
back, and the book would never have emerged without the endless stream
of encouragement from family, friends, and colleagues near and far. First
and foremost, I am deeply inspired by and indebted to Nelson H. H. Gra-
burn, who taught me that a little bit of enthusiasm goes a very long way. He
has never let me forget that tourism matters. William Schaefer offered his
time and suggestions on everything from writing to how to take pictures
more seriously. Liu Xin challenged me to think critically about the funda-
mental assumptions of my research, and Chris Berry generously provided
resources, contacts, and guidance. Wanning Sun mentored my research
as it expanded in new directions. My writing has benefited in countless
ways from Stevan Harrell’s input, and his work on ethnicity and rural life
in China shaped my own thinking from early on. The encouragement I
received from colleagues, students, and the anthropology office staff at
Emory University helped bring this book to completion.
In China, I thank Yang Hui at Yunnan University, who first supported
my project and whose unflagging energy and dedication to promoting
anthropology in China continues to inspire. Peng Zhaorong provided me
with countless introductions in the field, and Xu Ganli was a constant
source of ideas in Guilin. Zhang Xiaosong facilitated many important
contacts throughout Guizhou. In Guiyang, Guilin, Kaili, Kunming, and
xxixxxx | Acknowledgments
Beijing, I depended upon many old and new friends for places to sleep,
rides, meals, and conversation. I most regret that I am not able to share
this book or my film with Yang Kun, who taught me so much about the
city of Kunming and the art of filmmaking. I am truly lucky to have been
his friend. Finally, I am forever thankful for the friendship of the residents
of Ping’an and Upper Jidao villages. They have accepted my presence and
my questions as just another part of life’s unpredictable changes, and for
that I am utterly grateful. This book is dedicated to the individuals and
families who welcomed me into their homes and lives.
Over the years my thinking has benefited enormously from the perceptive
comments and questions of audiences at the Australian National Univer-
sity, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Duke University, Emory University,
Haverford College, the 2013 Irmgard Coninx Foundation Berlin Roundtable
on Transnationality, Kanazawa University, Macquarie University, National
University of Singapore, University of California-Berkeley Tourism Stud-
ies Working Group, University of Pennsylvania, University of Sydney, Uni-
versity of Victoria, and the University of Western Sydney. Portions of this
work were presented as early drafts at the Society for Visual Anthropology’s
2008 Visual Research Conference and at annual meetings of the American
Anthropological Association and the Association for Asian Studies.
More specifically, I am thankful for the insights, advice, generosity,
and inspiration from Mayling Birney, Ben Blanchard, Tami Blumen-
field, Alexis Bunten, Carlo Caduff, Charles Carroll, Cindy Chang, Susette
Cooke, Jennifer Deger, Devleena Ghosh, Maris Gillette, Samantha Good-
ner, Guo Jing, Yingjie Guo, Zeynep Giirsel, Joyce Hammond, Jonathan
Hassid, He Xiaoxun, He Yuan, Christina Ho, Stephanie Malia Hom, Li
Xin, Jen Lin-Liu, Peter Little, Ling Liu, Lii Bin, Luo Yifang, Dean Mac-
Cannell, Yasmine Musharbash, Pal Nyiri, Tim Oakes, Goldie Osuri, Ou
Chou Chou, Michael Peletz, Luke Robinson, Noel Salazar, Erynn Sarno,
Louisa Schein, Graeme Smith, Julie Starr, Rachel Stern, Liv Stutz, Marga-
ret Swain, Jessica Anderson Turner, Chris Vasantkumar, Eileen Walsh,
Leslie Wang, Wang Xiaomei, Wang Yu, Monique Wollan, Xu Wenkun, Yi
Sicheng, Zeng Han, Li Zhang, and Zhong Jian.
Earlier versions of parts of this book have appeared previously in “The
Internal Expansion of China: Tourism and the Production of Distance,” in
Asia on Tour: Exploring the Rise of Asian Tourism, edited by Tim Winter,
Peggy Teo, and T. C. Chang (New York: Routledge, 2009), 207-20; “China’sAcknowledgments | xxxi
Campaign for Civilized Tourism: What to Do When Tourists Behave Badly,”
Anthropology News (November 2010), 41 (8): 14-15; “Know Yourself: Making
the Visual Work in Tourism Research,” in Fieldwork in Tourism: Methods,
Issues, and Reflections, edited by C. Michael Hall (New York: Routledge,
2011), 209-19; and “The Appearance of the Rural in Chinas Tourism,” Pro-
vincial China (2011) 3 (1): 60-79. A shorter version of chapter 3 was pub-
lished as “Leave the Fields without Leaving the Countryside: Modernity and
Mobility in Rural, Ethnic China,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and
Power (2011), 18 (6): 551-75. Figure 1.5 appeared in “2008 AAA Photo Contest
Winners and Finalists,” Anthropology News (March 2009), 50 (3): 23.1 would
like to acknowledge the publishers for permission to use these materials.
My analysis of Chinese historical ethnographic films in chapter 1 first
began as a coauthored paper, written with John Alexander, whose critical
insights on documentary and ethnicity have been greatly influential on my
own thinking. At the University of Washington Press, I thank Lorri Hag-
man for her encouragement and support for this book, as well as Jacqueline
Volin and Tim Zimmermann for their assistance with publication details
both large and small. Ellen Walker created the map, and Amy Smith Bell
provided meticulous copyediting. I am also grateful for the extensive com-
ments and critiques on the manuscript provided by Stevan Harrell and one
anonymous reviewer. Of course, all mistakes and omissions are my own.
Financial support for research and writing came from the University of
California-Berkeley, and in particular the Department of Anthropology,
the Graduate Division, the Institute for East Asian Studies, and the Center
for Chinese Studies; a Fulbright-Hays research award; the Wenner-Gren
Foundation for Anthropological Research; and the University of Technol-
ogy, Sydney. I also acknowledge generous additional support from Emory
College of Arts and Sciences and the Laney Graduate School in the form
of a faculty subvention, and a grant from the Association for Asian Studies
First Book Subvention program.
My family has visited me in every place I have ever lived, and I am
certain that my interest in travel stems from them. Heartfelt thanks go to
my parents, Amy and Shiu-Shin, as well as to Sandy and Steve, for always
coming to visit no matter how long the flight or how short the trip.
And for everything, I thank John, my partner in life, love, and travel.
With him, these years have been the best kind of journey imaginable, and
I am so glad that we are in it together.A LANDSCAPE OF TRAVELChina, showing Guizhou and Guangxi (shaded) and the locations of Ping’an and
Upper Jidao.INTRODUCTION
Landscape, Mobility, Visuality
From 2006 to 2007, a billboard declaring, “Develop Rural Tourism, Build a
New Socialist Countryside” {Fazhan xiangcun liiyou, jianshe shehui zhuyi
xin nongcuri), stood on the side of the Gui Xin highway—a smooth, recently
constructed four-lane highway linking Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou,
to cities in the southeastern prefectures and beyond (figure I.i). The slo-
gans would have been familiar to anyone following the news in China:
the placement of this particular billboard was clearly timed with the new
state policies for rural development announced in early 2006. The Chinese
government had revealed plans to build a New Socialist Countryside as a
part of the 11th Five Year Plan (2006-2010), with a renewed emphasis on
policies that would help rural people and communities to take part in, and
benefit from, China’s rapid modernization.1 At the same time, 2006 was
deemed the year of “China Rural Tourism” {Zhongguo xiangcun you) by
the China National Tourism Administration (CNTA), thus firmly situat-
ing tourism within new national priorities (Xinhua 2005).
Such slogans promoting rural development and national progress are
common across China, whether plastered on signs in characters large
enough to read from passing vehicles or painted on the sides of buildings,
houses, or schools. As a literal extension of the rural landscape, a billboard
like this was a visible, material sign of the times. In the southeastern cor-
ner of Guizhou, where this particular billboard stood, the ambition was
34	| Introduction
figure 1.1. A billboard in Guizhou promotes rural tourism development and
building the New Socialist Countryside (2006). Photo by the author.
to integrate the region’s participation in the New Socialist Countryside
policies with the development of rural tourism. Attracting tourists to the
area was not a new idea.2 Billboards lining highways and roads in rural
Guizhou before 2006 also advertised particular regions, with the dual goal
of attracting both tourists and investors (figure 1.2). Therefore, while the
promotion of rural tourism development in 2006 was not entirely new
to the area, the deliberate, heavily publicized incorporation of tourism
into larger programs for building a New Socialist Countryside gave rural
tourism an even brighter patina of doing something not only for the rural
communities involved but also for the nation as a whole.
In reality, the national designation of 2006 as the year of China Rural
Tourism was a way for policy to “catch up” with tourism trends in China.
At stake in bringing rural tourism together with rural development was
both the relative success or failure of a New Socialist Countryside as well as
an affirmation of the state’s expectations for what rural China could con-
tribute to the modernizing nation. The campaign to build a New Socialist
Countryside together with the China Rural Tourism year suggested a con-
certed effort to reconceptualize the relationship between rural and urbanIntroduction |	5
figure 1.2. A billboard in Huangping, Guizhou, beckons both tourists and
investors (2004). Photo by the author.
regions in China. Rural tourism was lauded by the CNTA as an ideally
balanced socioeconomic formula that could increase rural incomes while
simultaneously boosting urban leisure. It would help establish the role of
tourism in building a New Socialist Countryside, and it would provide
new destinations for domestic tourism for urban residents who needed
relief from the stresses of modern city living (CNTA 2007, 93). But what
were the assumptions and expectations suggested in this straightforward
association between rural tourism and rural development? What would
it mean to develop rural tourism and build a New Socialist Countryside?
Who were these billboards really addressing, and more important, who
was supposed to actually do these things?
DOING tourism: regimes of labor and leisure
The photographs of the billboards in figures I.i and 1.2 were taken near
Upper Jidao, an ethnic Miao village in southeastern Guizhou, where
provincial government officials, including the tourism bureau, have pro-
moted tourism development as a means of alleviating rural poverty since6	| Introduction
the early 2000s. These plans were developed with the knowledge of how
tourism in other ethnic minority regions of China, including the ethnic
Zhuang village of Ping’an in neighboring Guangxi, which had started
its own tourism industry more than a decade earlier, had benefited local
economies and communities by providing opportunities for rural ethnic
minority households to earn cash incomes closer to home. The corollary
that such development could promote local and national awareness about
ethnic minority cultural traditions while also stimulating a desire to pre-
serve and protect ethnic heritage was touted as a significant reason for
promoting tourism as development in such areas. The question of how
to do all of these things remained unanswered, however. For villagers
in Upper Jidao and Ping’an, the two communities studied in this book,
tourism development has been experienced and understood by village
residents as “doing tourism” (gao liiyou), which involves an ever growing
number of expectations, ambitions, and logistics.
Village residents talked about tourism as an active experience, as a pro-
cess in which they clearly saw themselves playing a part (no matter how
big or small). Their reflections on doing tourism should be understood as
a critical means of asserting their own agency in the building and main-
tenance of their villages as desirable, consumable tourism destinations.
Understanding how tourism is “done” in rural ethnic minority villages
like Upper Jidao and Ping’an exposes the odd configuration of labor and
leisure that creates and sustains tourism in China. To succeed, village resi-
dents have to comprehend not only what constitutes leisure for the rela-
tively new and rapidly expanding domestic tourism market, but they also
need to create ways to translate this concept of leisure into profitable and
desirable forms of labor for themselves. For those individuals and com-
munities who continue to be directly affected by tourism and rural devel-
opment programs, the policies and politics of rural tourism reach deeply
into notions of belonging and community, values and understandings of
rural and urban as categories of place and subjectivity, the social impact of
mobility in postreform China, and, of special importance in Ping’an and
Upper Jidao, the consequences of being seen as rural ethnic minorities in
contemporary Chinese society.
The experience of tourism for village residents extends beyond short-
lived, momentary encounters with tourists to encompass learning how to
be distinctly modern as rural and ethnic Chinese subjects. Tourism as aIntroduction |	7
practice allows the ethnic minority residents to claim belonging in pro-
cesses of national modernization, while reconfiguring the contemporary
value of ethnic distinctiveness. The commodification and mediatization
of ethnic and rural identities reveals a politics of appearance at work in
this complex of labor and leisure, a politics in which an overriding con-
cern with looking good encompasses the range of complicated and often
contradictory developmental impulses in China’s domestic moderniza-
tion policies. Under these conditions, identity becomes increasingly con-
tingent upon processes of visuality, involving not only how people and
places are seen by others but also how people prepare themselves (and
their home villages) to be seen. Residents of Ping’an and Upper Jidao are
very concerned with finding the appropriate and most desirable ways to
present themselves and their village environments (including architecture
and the surrounding landscape) to tourists. Indeed, visuality is especially
significant and consequential in tourism, and the work of “looking good”
doubles onto individual senses of self, subjectivity, and shared cultural
characteristics. Furthermore, the role of rural ethnic minority villagers
in national programs for development through tourism is conditioned by
shared understandings of why tourism is desirable, who should be a tour-
ist, and who should be the “toured.”
Rural tourism development, as the CNTA and other government
bodies readily explain, could help to reverse the recent trend of rural-
to-urban migration. But tourism travel illuminates another side of the
myriad forces propelling internal migration in China. Tourism provides
an analytical counterpoint for understanding rural-to-urban migration;
it encapsulates a context in which to examine how mobility itself can be
rendered both socially meaningful and politically suspect. In a country
that has aimed to control the movement of its population through the
household registration system (hukou; see Chan and Zhang 1999; F. Wang
2005), tourism travel within China has been nonetheless underexplored
in terms of its discursive effects on the social significance of mobility
domestically and among the overseas Chinese diaspora.3 Statistics on
internal migration and domestic tourism attest to the sheer enormity
of how mobility in China has become part and parcel of everyday life.
In 2003, the number of people not registered in their place of residence
in China was 140 million, and 114 million individuals “participated in
internal migration” (Huang and Zhan 2005, 2). Comparatively, in 2004,8	| Introduction
there were 1.1 billion domestic tourist trips taken in China, totaling 84.8
percent of the population (CNTA 2007) and increasing to more than 1.4
billion tourist trips taken in 2006 (CNTA 2008a).4 By 2010, the official
population of China was 1.34 billion. The number of internal migrants,
or rural workers (nongmin gong), in China that year was 252 million, and
the number of domestic tourism trips taken in the country reached 2.1
billion.5
Residents of rural ethnic minority villages like Ping’an and Upper
Jidao have come to negotiate with tourism and migration as elements
of their livelihoods and life experiences; in their everyday musings on
what tourists might want to buy or where they themselves might like to
visit, mobility is part of their participation in contemporary Chinese soci-
ety. In such touristed places, being mobile and being seen are integral
to local senses of belonging and opportunity; mobility and visuality, as
social processes, deeply shape the contested meanings of travel for those
whose lives and livelihoods are most at stake in the tourism industries
and for whom migration away from the village remains a very real, very
imaginable, alternative for achieving some economic stability. By inter-
rogating the social and political arenas in which rural tourism has been
promoted, the unacknowledged frictions embedded in the relationship
between mobility and modernity are rendered more apparent. Ultimately,
tourism has been made meaningful by village residents as a chance to
transform their homes into better places to visit and ideally into better
places to live.
This book is a portrait of the relationships between tourism, politics,
and representation in an era when the freedom of movement has been
declared a universal human right by the United Nations (Article 13).6 In
Ping’an and Upper Jidao, being seen and being mobile are deeply inter-
twined with how individuals perceive their life chances, but any opportu-
nities that emerge remain in tension with national narratives of progress
and development. Doing tourism has become a way for these communi-
ties and individuals to make sense of their contemporary contexts and to
imagine future prospects. By examining, ethnographically, the regimes of
labor and leisure in these two rural ethnic minority villages, it is thus pos-
sible to recognize the risks and opportunities emerging as China grapples
with its rapid transformations and seemingly untold potential. I call this
context a landscape of travel.Introduction |	9
UNDERSTANDING A LANDSCAPE OF TRAVEL
To fully comprehend the extent of what doing tourism entails as well as
to acknowledge that tourism is much more than building roads, serv-
ing meals, and greeting tourists, there is a need to understand how all
of these activities take place under particular material and imagined cir-
cumstances. The transformations occurring in rural ethnic China are
embedded in a landscape of travel, where mobility and visuality as social
processes have come to frame the opportunities, possibilities, and mean-
ings of tourism for village residents. It is within this landscape where
tourists and village residents meet, where one person’s leisure becomes
another person’s labor, and where imaginations and desires materialize as
very real experiences. After all, for residents of Ping’an and Upper Jidao,
mobility and visuality are daily tasks to be reckoned with; they constitute
such mundane activities as sweeping village paths or making sure to be
at the parking lot in time to meet the first tour bus of the day. Although
the physical landscape around a village is largely experienced visually by
tourists, this is a deeply and often troublesome physical matter for village
residents who are expected to perform the labor necessary to maintain an
appropriately rustic, rural appearance to their villages and fields and to
imagine (and try to visualize) what else might appeal to potential tourists.
However, a landscape of travel is more than just the effects of tourism
on the land and its people; this conceptual framework casts a wider gaze
onto the multiple forms of and reasons for travel in China. Tourism is not
just leisure, and travel should be engaged with as discourse, as constituent
of subject formation, and as life opportunity. For village residents, tourism
was merely one of many forms of mobility, and by extension possibilities,
with which they lived. Thus a landscape of travel is not entirely the same
as what has been called tourism landscapes by Claudio Minca and Tim
Oakes (2006) or touristed landscapes by Carolyn Cartier and Alan A. Lew
(2005). Tourism landscapes, following Minca and Oakes, are conceptual-
ized with a greater emphasis on the subjectivity of the tourist; the concept
of touristed landscapes, as described by Cartier (2005, 3), “concerns the
possibilities of landscapes as toured and lived, places visited by their own
residents, the dialectic of moving in and out of‘being a tourist.’” The latter
concept extends landscape to include not only tourists but also all others
present at the site of tourism, but I seek here to draw attention to howio | Introduction
multiple forms of mobility overlap with one another, beyond the limits
of a touristed place. More important, by not focusing on the mobility of
tourists, this serves as a reminder that the agency and subjectivities of
those who live in touristed places may not necessarily have much to do
with the idea of “being a tourist” but they do figure prominently into what
tourism means.
A landscape of travel is an ethnographic effort to take seriously how
travel influences individual understandings of opportunity and identity;
how rural ethnic villages undergo material, structural alterations to better
suit tourism and achieve ideal modern, sanitized living conditions; and
how village residents learn to be touristic in order to successfully build
their village-based tourism industries to attract potential visitors. The
seductiveness of rural ethnic villages in China is rooted in the circuits of a
(trans)national nostalgia for a landscape that appears to embody, nourish,
and sustain a more fundamental relationship between nature and human
society. This desire for a particular form of romantic rurality drives politi-
cal and social calls for international rural development, economic ratio-
nalizations of global and domestic tourism, and cultural celebrations of
“national” ethnic diversity and the subsequent mainstreaming of minor-
ity identities. The resulting landscape is constructed to be generic enough
and specific enough to satisfy the foreign tourist’s desires for the exotic,
the national urban dwellers’ longing for a “simpler life,” the regional day-
tripper’s need for a brief escape, and even the village residents’ aspirations
for a place in modern China.
As a framework for conceptualizing the everyday experience of tour-
ism, a landscape of travel therefore encompasses the physical and material
transformations brought about by tourism development in villages and
also the social changes and cultural politics of leisure, labor, and identity
in China today. In employing landscape as an analytical device, land-
scape should be understood as both a literal component of the tourism
experience (in terms of tourists coming to a village to look at the rural
landscape) and a means for understanding the terrain of experiences,
including migration, embedded in this ethnographic moment of tourism
growth in China’s ethnic minority villages.7 At the heart of landscape’s
complexity is the tension between landscape as a material form and land-
scape as a process. This illuminates precisely how and why landscapes
can become so contested; landscapes are shaped and made meaningfulIntroduction | n
through human intervention, whether directly through agriculture or
symbolically through stories and interpretation, and yet landscapes are
most frequently approached and apprehended as static sights (perhaps
best exemplified by the popularity of “landscape photography”). But the
apparent stability of a landscape is deceptive, and, as Denis Cosgrove
(2006, 56-57) has argued, “it is thus a simple and predictable step from
promoting the pictorial or scenic qualities of specific regions as embody-
ing essential qualities of a nation’s territory and people, to seeking to fix
their origins and preserve and protect them from change.”
The relationship between land and human is equally obscured and
revealed in a landscape; landscape is both a “field” of social action and
agency (following Bourdieu 1977) and an already existing plane of pos-
sibilities and relationships embodied in the copresence of people and the
land. Therefore, a primary goal in utilizing landscape as a framework for
understanding travel is to develop a more comprehensive perspective on
the complex, intersecting, and overlapping dynamics of tourism. Land-
scapes are a symbolic and physical manifestation of the perceived relation-
ships between actuality (lived experiences) and potentiality (expected, or
imagined, possibilities; Hirsch 1995, 5). To negotiate between actuality and
potentiality thus places emphasis on analyzing landscape as “a means of
conceptual ordering that stresses relations .. . acting so as to encompass
rather than exclude” (Tilley 1994, 34) and makes it possible to recognize
the structural forces at work in a phenomenon such as tourism and the
spaces for agency and subject formation within these conditions.
There are multiple forces embedded in any sociopolitical context;
Aijun Appadurai’s oft-cited model of “scapes” that shape global cultural
flows has been influential in highlighting the disjunctures of modern life.8
He contends that “these [scapes] are not objectively given relations that
look the same from every angle of vision but, rather, that they are deeply
perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political
situatedness of different sorts of actors” (Appadurai 1996, 33). Amid these
disjunctures, however, mobility is one underlying constant in this formu-
lation, as Louisa Schein has argued. She writes: “[Appadurai’s] empha-
sis is on the mobility—of persons and of signs—effected through these
contemporary modes and hence on the varied interconnections between
peoples and spaces rather than their homogenous unities. His key point is
not that people live increasingly similar lives under modernity but, rather,12	| Introduction
that they can imagine—and sometimes actualize—more and more dif-
ferent lives through the potentials of media consumption and geographic
mobility” (Schein 1999,362-63). Schein offers an important reminder that
despite all of the apparent connections made possible in modernity, the
consequences may be increased differences and scatter.
For those involved in village-based tourism development—from
tourists to tour guides, government officials, consultants, and village
residents—tourism and landscapes indeed look different from various
perspectives. For example, in analyzing landscapes as an intersection of
social relations in Norway, “rural tourism can be seen as an arena where
landscape views and perceptions are negotiated between farmers and
tourists” (Daugstad 2008, 404). Farmers, in Karoline Daugstad’s study,
viewed the landscape in terms of economic restructuring; tourists saw the
landscape in terms of a romantic, nostalgic external view based on visual
qualities as seen from a distance. In tourism development in northern
Thailand, the “landscaping” of the rural becomes a cultural process of
constructing a desirable, attractive, and pleasurable “Other”: “Under the
influence of an idyllic, traditionalist and nostalgic vision of the country-
side, rural spaces [in Thailand] have been reinvented and transformed
into appealing visual and conceptual archetypes which sustain discourses
on national identity and history. Such ‘landscaping’ processes are quali-
tatively different from those which occurred at the end of the nineteenth
century: while cultural difference was at that time encountered, it is now
sought after; while it was equated with backwardness and danger, it is now
considered as something picturesque and pleasurable” (Evrard and Lee-
preecha 2009, 245). Landscape in this sense suggests an ongoing process
of control and mastery of rural areas and the people who live there, for the
sake of the landscaper’s or the tourist’s (visual) pleasure and enjoyment.9
The construction of a landscape is grounded in the matrix of social expec-
tations it contains and the processes by which these ideas are rendered
as socially acceptable ideas and dominant discourses. This approach to
landscape tacks back and forth between the general and the particular,
the imagined and the real, the similar and the different.
Moreover, through its very materiality, landscape is inextricably tied
to images and representations of the land and human experiences of it.
Given that the English word “landscape” was first introduced by paint-
ers in the late sixteenth century, “what came to be seen as landscape wasIntroduction |	13
recognized as such because it reminded the viewer of a painted landscape”
(Hirsch 1995, 2). The idea of landscape shifts between the representational
ideal of the painted landscape and the reality of the lived experience,
thus allowing for the simultaneous consideration of social relations and
mobility (Appadurai 1996 and Ingold 1993) and of imagery and visuality
(Cosgrove 1984 and Mitchell 2002).10 The power of landscape, as a repre-
sentational form, demands attention to particular ways of seeing and how
the act of seeing engages with and engenders structures of power. W.J.T
Mitchell (2005, 337) glosses visuality as “practices of seeing the world and
especially of seeing other people.” The distinctions between vision and
visuality are important in establishing a fundamental understanding of
how the processes of seeing affect what is seen.
Examining vision as a social process allows for exploring how certain
visions become more socially and politically significant than others. In
other words, “the difference between the terms [vision and visuality] sig-
nals a difference within the visual—between the mechanism of sight and
its historical techniques, between the datum of vision and its discursive
determinations—a difference, many differences, among how we see, how
we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the
unseen therein” (Foster 1988, ix). The significance of understanding vision
and visuality in modernity, which is “resolutely ocularcentric,” as the art
historian Martin Jay (1988,3) has argued, cannot be overlooked.11 After all,
if the term “landscape” stems from pictorial practices of representation—
namely, landscape paintings—then landscapes are by definition subjec-
tively experienced through techniques of observation (following Crary
1990). In this way, landscapes are created and made meaningful through
visual practices and processes of seeing and, in the case of tourism vil-
lages, of literally creating the proper, desired countryside and inhabitants
to be seen.
Images of landscapes straddle the real and virtual; they gain efficacy
and discursive power by virtue of their connection to “real” spaces, which
then are perceived as natural and given. The supposed naturalness of
landscape imagery effectively masks the inequalities, imbalances, and ten-
sions existent in the very relationships engendered by the process of visual
representation. As W.J.T. Mitchell (2002,1-2) reminds us, it is important
not to underestimate how landscape “is an instrument of cultural power,
perhaps even an agent of power that is (or frequently represents itself as)14	| Introduction
independent of human intentions. Landscape as a cultural medium thus
has a double role with respect to something like ideology: it naturalizes
a cultural and social construction, representing an artificial world as if
it were simply given and inevitable. . . . Thus, landscape always greets us
as space, as environment, as that within which ‘we’ find—or lose—our-
selves.”12 The politics of appearance are encapsulated in landscapes and
imagery, and the often virulent debates over who could, or should, control
the literal look of a tourism village—whether it should be government offi-
cials, the village residents themselves, or the media—reveal deeper issues
at stake in terms of political power, social relations, and perceived eco-
nomic opportunities.
By taking into consideration how landscape offers a conceptual frame-
work for tracing social relations, a landscape of travel illuminates the
complex networks of ambitions, expectations, and opportunities that are
shaping transformations in toured places like Ping’an and Upper Jidao.
This approach extends the idea of tourism as the “sacred journey” (Gra-
burn 1989 [1977]). Drawing on Emile Durkheim (1912) and Edmund Leach
(1961), Nelson Graburn (1989 [1977], 24-25) has argued that for tourists,
touristic experiences take place within a structural formation of tourism
and work that is constituted by opposing ends of the sacred (tourism, the
nonordinary experience) and the profane (work, or the ordinary every-
day). People move through phases of the sacred (tourism) and the profane
(work) throughout their lifetimes, sometimes being tourists and some-
times not. As a result, Graburn has asserted, tourism should be under-
stood as an integral part of life experience rather than as an anomaly.13
Pushing these ideas beyond tourists to the people who are the toured,
the residents of destinations, it is crucial to recognize that tourism has not
been an “added-value” project onto a presumably stable “everyday” village
life. Destination communities should not be analyzed in simplistic binary
terms of “before” or “after” tourism because neither the communities nor
the tourism experiences in these communities are static. Rather, tourism
is incorporated into narratives of past experiences, current livelihoods,
and future aspirations for village residents, just as tourism is made mean-
ingful for tourists over the course of a lifetime. There is one major differ-
ence, however; for the residents of tourist villages, experiencing tourism
at home (as the toured, or as hosts) comprises the profane, the mundane
everyday experience of work. The sacred, or nonordinary experience, forIntroduction |	15
these village residents is actually the imagination and fulfillment of a “life
worth living” (a key function of tourism in Graburn’s formula (1989 [1977],
26) through the symbolic, social, economic, and political shifts brought
about by being a tourism destination—which sometimes also included the
possibility of imagining being a tourist (Harrison 2003) rather than doing
tourism, once enough money was earned.
MOBILITY AND VISUALITY IN PING’AN
AND UPPER JIDAO
In many ways, mobility and visuality are as deeply implicated in the expe-
rience of tourism for the residents of tourism villages as they are for the
tourist.14 For residents of rural tourism villages in China, tourism and
migration have become ways of envisioning and mediating current cir-
cumstances. Concurrent surges in domestic urban-to-rural tourism and
in internal rural-to-urban migration since the early 1990s attest to the
point that mobility is constitutive of rural social lives rather than a “dis-
ruption” to an otherwise stable, static condition (Greenblatt et al. 2009).
Tourism and migration are integrated into personal expectations and
ambitions for rural tourism village residents and raise new questions
about the sociopolitical force of imagining being able to travel. But in
many rural tourism development programs, the unspoken expectation is
that village residents will stop being mobile in order to participate in local
tourism industries. Indeed, the entire purpose of rural tourism develop-
ment often seems centered on stopping, or slowing, the “flow” of rural-to-
urban laborers and migrants. Thus mobility becomes a socially ordered
concept of opportunity for the villagers who are valued by the nation-state
and by domestic and international tourists for their potential immobility.
This discursive value of mobility hints at much larger issues of the socio-
political differences between and attributes of being rural or being urban,
being culturally mainstream or ethnically a minority, and being rich or
being poor.
Visuality is likewise as significant as mobility in the lives and liveli-
hoods of tourism village residents. While practices of seeing are deeply
rooted in tourism and the commonplace activity of sightseeing (Adler
1989 and Urry 2002b [1990]) reflects “modern ocularcentrism” (Jay 1988)
precisely because of the value placed on “seeing it for yourself,” the labor16	| Introduction
involved in creating a sight to be seen often goes unnoticed. The close-knit
relationship between visual experiences, everyday life, and dominant ide-
ologies is embedded in what I call the politics of appearance; one means
of understanding this has been to focus on the visual economy of touristic
images and representations.15 However, an even more significant aspect
of the politics of appearance in tourism development is the work, discur-
sive and material, involved in creating representative landscapes, experi-
ences, and appearances for tourism. These are the images and surfaces
created specifically for visual consumption by tourists and, in an era of
ever increasing media outlets and forms, they play a critical role in how
places are made suitable for development into tourist attractions. Such
features promise to communicate knowledge and meaning visually, and
to that end, tourism village residents (among others) debate and work to
create and maintain an appropriate appearance.
This approach to understanding the impact and efficacy of visual
images, following Deborah Poole (1997, 7), “stresses] simultaneously
the material and social nature of both vision and representation,” where
“relationships of referral and exchange among images themselves, and the
social and discursive relations connecting image-makers and consum-
ers” come together to be understood as an “image world.” Examining the
image world of Ping’an and Upper Jidao thus includes consideration of a
range of materialities and technologies—from photographs to architec-
ture to clothing—in order to demonstrate how the visual economy of tour-
ism moves not only among potential tourists but also among those who
work in tourism. Through the labor and imagination of tourism workers,
the visual environments and experiences of tourism are produced. But
whereas visual economy, in Poole’s usage, depends in large part upon the
existence of material images that physically move in circulation, the visu-
ality of tourism includes the opinions and decisions involved in putting
together a view, a scene, or a landscape that has the potential to exude a
meaningful representativeness when made into a material image, such as
a souvenir print or photograph. For those doing tourism, their attention
remains focused on how to look good for tourists, an act that reveals com-
plex processes of exchange, relations, and consumption embedded within
the production of these good-looking villages.16
Proposed programs for rural tourism development in Ping’an and
Upper Jidao almost always begin with and include a significant amountIntroduction |	17
of work directed at improving the “look” of the villages, referencing the
visual features that can be immediately seen from the roadside or parking
lot, with the primary goal of looking good as a tourism destination. This
bias toward visual experience in tourism—especially in these places that
promote sightseeing and ethnic culture as their main tourist attractions—
has led to a heightened attention to the construction and maintenance of
photographic opportunities and visually recognizable differences. Cer-
tain visual motifs and practices are considered expedient to the success
of a village; these visual expediencies draw on a complex of expectations,
beliefs, and representational strategies that are visually rendered in tour-
ism development and that, as a result, shape understandings of place and
identity. The visual expediencies of tourism in rural ethnic villages include
such elements as local styles of architecture, ethnic dress, agricultural fea-
tures like terraced fields, natural decor, as well as general cleanliness and
tidiness in public spaces. All of these things have to look good, not only
outwardly for national or regional media such as television programs,
magazines, and travel guides, but also to express the appropriate notions
of “home” and hospitality. The idea of “looking good” has extended
inwardly into notions of individual character, civilized (wenming) behav-
ior, and modern attitudes. Indeed, village residents are exhorted to “look
good,” not just for the sake of tourists but for their own futures as well.
The question of the “look” of a tourism village is also where a number of
conflicts have risen in relation to the effects of development, progress, and
growth that might damage the “visual impact” of a destination. “Looking
good” is crucial to tourism planning, and there is no shortage of informa-
tion and approaches from the field of landscape architecture on how to
create the greatest visual impact.17 According to the Landscape Institute, a
U.K.-based professional organization for landscape architects, the visual
impact of a landscape is the product of its visual effect and visual amenity;
the assessment of visual impact is frequently a core feature of development
programs and policies.18 In the Strategic Environmental Assessment Study
on tourism development in Guizhou published as part of a World Bank
project for the province, landscape and visual impact in rural tourism
villages are directly addressed in terms of potential positive and negative
effects on the tourist experience (World Bank 2007, 47-48). The archi-
tectural styles of homes, restaurants, and shops in tourism villages are
considered for their compatibility with ideal forms of heritage tourism,18	| Introduction
and highways and road construction or upgrades are specifically cited as
potentially “detracting] from the visual amenity of tourist sites” (ibid.,
47). The implicit suggestion is that tourism destinations are not meant
to reveal their fundamental dependence, or reliance, on transport and
mobility. Roads might suggest that not only can tourists travel into these
otherwise “traditional” destinations, but the residents of these destina-
tions might actually be able to travel out of these places as well.19 However
contradictory, it is perhaps unsurprising that in the discourse of heritage
preservation, the removal or avoidance of the trappings of mobility is con-
sidered desirable and preferable in the ideal visuality of rural tourism.
By approaching visuality as a social process, it becomes apparent that
being seen is not merely a passive, inherently given condition of tourism.
Rather, when considering the consequences of tourism on village architec-
ture, vernacular rural landscapes, and the bodies of the village residents
themselves, being seen is an active, productive process that makes iden-
tity meaningful in certain ways and communicates these notions through
visual means. Identity becomes tied up in the dual nature of tourism as an
act of movement and an act of seeing, where travel and image intersect in
the formation of socially recognizable subjectivities. In Ping’an and Upper
Jidao, one’s cultural and social identities are molded by existing discourses
and new, local ways of imagining being ethnic and being rural. Current
practices and recent histories of image-making, media production, and
tourist photography of ethnic minorities continue to inform and contrib-
ute to the construction of meaningful identities for these communities.
The close study of the relationship between visual images and tourism in
China thus sheds new light on how categories such as “ethnic minority”
and “rural” have been woven into the fabric of the contemporary Chinese
nation through tourism for the purposes of socioeconomic development.
John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (2009, 38; italics in original) have
dubbed this process as “Ethnicity, Inc.,” where in their formula “ethnicity”
is taken as “the equation ethnicity = culture + identity,” which “interpo-
lates itself into the domain of capital, thus constituting the Inc.” Tourism
is just one way in which ethnicity, or as they put it, “identity-as-differ-
ence,” comes to accrue base material value toward the accumulation of
wealth and prestige.
Because appearances are posited as central to tourism success, the onus
of visual representation falls upon village residents to look, and to appear,Introduction |	19
ethnic and rural. In these instances, being seen is politically and materially
important. As the Chinese national government attempts to stem rural-
to-urban migration by promoting urban to rural tourism, it is becoming
increasingly possible to literally see how the rural has been reconceived,
represented, and reimaged as a desirable place for urbanites to visit and
for rural villagers to stay. In this landscape of travel, the visual sensuous-
ness of landscape and the mobile sensibility of travel are intertwined with
village transformations and individual aspirations. Changes to the look of
a particular landscape suggest major changes occurring at larger national
levels (Lewis 1979, 21), and an ethnographic approach to this landscape
allows for the exploration of the wholeness of a phenomenon (such as
national programs for tourism development) and of particular issues of
relatedness occurring within that contextual whole (such as intravillage
conflicts and contests over the consequences of tourism growth).
By participating in a mainstream activity such as tourism, rural ethnic
minority villagers have been learning to imagine and to place themselves
in the whole of China—economically, socially, and politically. At the same
time, however, they need to find ways of promoting their villages’ own
distinctiveness within the national tourism market, and the histories of
tourism development shed light on how these villages have come to their
specific forms as rural ethnic tourism destinations. For village residents,
successfully doing tourism in Ping’an and Upper Jidao means referencing
shared national ideas of what it means to be a rural ethnic minority in
contemporary China and finding ways to represent and to sell these quali-
ties to incoming tourists.CHAPTER 1
SIMILAR, WITH MINOR DIFFERENCES
A Tale of Two Villages
“Doing tourism” in Ping’an and Upper Jidao entails pragmatic and discur-
sive understandings of both being an ethnic minority and being rural in
China today.1 After all, the potential success of tourism in these communi-
ties rests upon their ability to turn a profit from the tourist’s experience
of encountering ethnic difference in a visually and physically distinctive
rural landscape. While similarities between many ethnic tourism desti-
nations around the world speak to the standardizing effects of tourism as
a commercial enterprise, studies of ethnic tourism often emphasize the
role of national government policies and programs that direct and regu-
late ethnic encounters. This regulatory feature of ethnic tourism points
to contestations over the governance of ethnic identity in contemporary
nation-states, including China. For village residents who must do tourism,
their identities as ethnic and rural are more than performative roles to be
enacted in the presence of tourists; these subjectivities provide a moral
understanding of the changes and conflicts experienced in each commu-
nity over the past decades of socioeconomic transformation.
HAVE YOU LOST YOUR ETHNIC IDENTITY?
It took me a few months in Ping’an to work up the nerve to approach Lao,
one of the elder leaders of the village, for an interview. Everyone said I
2122	| Chapter 1
needed to speak with him to get the whole story on how tourism started
in the village. I was worried about not being taken seriously by someone
so well respected within the village, even though I knew his family fairly
well. Trained as a doctor, Lao was a Party cadre and had been privy to the
first discussions on tourism in Ping’an in the late 1970s. He opened the
village’s second guesthouse, named Li Qing after his two daughters, in the
early 1990s. By the mid-2ooos, Li Qing was a veritable brand-name enter-
prise by Ping’an standards, with three guesthouses and a steady stream of
foreign and domestic customers.
The first time I asked Lao if he was willing to be interviewed, he said yes
but he was busy that day; he suggested that I find him another time. Mean-
while, without my prompting, he wrote out the history of the village’s
tourism development for me, and when I returned to interview him, he
read the document aloud and I asked questions to clarify certain points.2
When he reached the end, I asked what he thought about the future of
tourism in the village. Lao pointed out four problems that needed to be
addressed: more equitable monetary compensation for villagers who
worked on maintaining the terraced fields; more public infrastructure,
such as village paths and toilets for tourists; better management of water
resources; and treating tourists with greater respect. On this last point,
Lao said that the Zhuang used to be known for their hospitality, generos-
ity, and cleanliness, but over time, as a result of tourism, these “special
characteristics” (tese) of the Zhuang were fading fast. This prompted me to
ask, as I had started to do jokingly with some of my friends in the village,
if Lao thought that the villagers had stopped “being Zhuang” as a result of
tourism in Ping’an. Many scholars, journalists, and tourists write about
this idea, I added—namely, that tourism is causing people to lose their
ethnic identity. Did he agree? Without a moment’s pause, Lao responded,
“No.”
He elaborated on his point a few days later, when I went back to his
house to pick up a copy of his history of tourism development in Ping’an.
He was at home with his wife and one of his grandsons. (During the week,
Lao’s wife and grandson lived in the county seat, Longsheng, so that the
grandchildren could attend primary school in town. They were back in
Ping’an for a weekend visit.) Lao handed me a carefully rewritten copy
of his account, and I looked through it. Then, Lao suddenly added that
he had thought of something that had really changed in village life andSimilar, with Minor Differences |	23
affected their “folk customs” (niinsu) since tourism had begun twenty-five
years ago: the environment and sanitation in the village were much, much
worse now than before, he declared.
Before a lot of tourism, Lao continued, the surroundings and the water
in the village were “very lovely, very nice,” but with “development, and
doing tourism, the garbage hasn’t been taken care of—the water in the
ravines, streams... now you don’t even dare to wash your hands or feet [in
that water]; the environment is really bad.” This was a matter of custom,
he added, because the environment’s decline directly affected the life and
the look of the village. “The original atmosphere, the original appearance
[yuanfeng yuanmao] of the village has changed,” and he put part of the
blame for this squarely on the villagers themselves. “The people’s habits
are bad—human waste, sewage, animal waste, everything is dumped in
the ravine” to flow down the mountainside to the river below. I suggested
that perhaps it was the numbers of tourists who were contributing to the
environmental problems, but Lao disagreed. To him, the problems of sani-
tation and the decline of the environment in Ping’an were the problems of
the people who lived in Ping’an. The inference was clear: for the Zhuang,
his community, to neglect the environment was a crisis rooted in the core
of their consciousness as a people. To be Zhuang, Lao implied, was to take
pride in the environment and thus to maintain its cleanliness; the degra-
dation of the latter, therefore, was an indication of the decline of Zhuang
identity itself. This was a comment not only on individual behavior and
bad decisions; this was a matter of their collective, shared identity as a part
of the Zhuang ethnic group.
My initial surprise at the apparent disconnect between the changes
Lao associated with ethnic identity in the village and what I assumed
to be “ethnic” reveals both the wide applicability of the term “ethnic” to
describe myriad human behaviors and attributes and the specificity and
the seriousness of these claims. When I joked about “losing your ethnic
identity” with others in Ping’an, the only concrete aspect of Zhuang life
that we usually agreed was being “lost” was knowledge of the Zhuang
language among younger generations. The children now spoke standard
Chinese (Mandarin, putonghua) in school and in their interactions with
tourists; some children even preferred to use standard Chinese instead
of the local, regional dialect (called Guilinhua, named after the near-
est major city).3 Historically, language provided a recognized “bound-24	| Chapter i
ary” (following Barth 1969) between the ethnic identities of the tourists
(who generally were not Zhuang or did not know the northern dialect of
Zhuang spoken in Ping’an) and the village residents.4 How was sanitation
and the treatment of wastewater somehow also an ethnic characteristic,
or at least tied to local senses of collective community and belonging, as
Lao seemed to suggest?
Ethnic tourism has been defined as a type of tourism “marketed to
the public in terms of the quaint’ customs of indigenous and often exotic
peoples . . . [including] visits to native homes and villages, observation
of dances and ceremonies, and shopping for primitive wares and curios”
(Smith 1989 [1977], 4). “As long as the flow of visitors is sporadic and small,”
Valene Smith (ibid., 4) has written, “host-guest impact is minimal.” How-
ever, Ping’an received more than two hundred thousand visitors in 2006,
and by resident reports the numbers have continued to increase since;
for a village of approximately 850 regular residents, the impact of this
many tourists can hardly be minimal. Lao’s concern over the environ-
ment in Ping’an tied his worries about the effects of environmental deg-
radation to the material, cultural lives of village residents and to the ways
in which the Zhuang would be perceived by national and international
visitors. In his assessment, the problems boiled down to ethnicity. He was
proud of being Zhuang but disappointed in the community’s behavior
that reflected poorly on their collective identity. After all, Ping’an was a
Zhuang village—it said so in all of the tourism brochures and on a sign at
the entrance to the village. Beyond the importance of maintaining pride
in one’s own community, even more pressing at the time was the fact that
in response to greater market competition from other tourism villages in
the region, Ping’an residents themselves were actively trying to make the
place more “ethnic” for tourists.
Lao’s perspective on Zhuang ethnicity revealed both a local understand-
ing of ethnic identity that diverged from dominant national discourses of
ethnic minorities (shaoshu minzu) and a cautious eye to the demands and
requirements of the current politics of tourism and development. “Sanita-
tion” and “cleanliness” are keywords of rural tourism and rural develop-
ment more generally, and by linking Zhuang identity to the imperative
to be clean, Lao in turn reaffirmed the significance of Zhuang ethnicity
to both a personal, subjective sense of self and belonging to this place
and to the broader imperatives of the national tourism marketplace. TheSimilar, with Minor Differences |	25
codification of ethnicity in contemporary postreform China, particularly
in cultural productions and place-based naming strategies, has marked
the ethnic as a particular type of commodified characteristic within the
greater national narrative of China’s development since the establishment
of the People’s Republic in 1949.5 These techniques and stereotypes are
fully exploited in tourism today.
MAKING SHAOSHU MINZU
While studies of tourism often emphasize the appeal of the ethnic “Other”
as a factor in tourist motivations, the institutional state history of ethnic
classification and minority identity in China requires a closer examina-
tion of the relationships between ethnicity and national modernization
policies (Sautman 1999), how the state has constructed ethnic difference,
and how these relate to the ways ethnicity is used in Chinese tourism. Two
interlocking aspects of ethnic identity construction and representation
frame the circumstances now faced by rural ethnic tourism villages. First,
early discourses of non-Chinese populations within the Chinese impe-
rial imagination informed modern nationalist sentiments in China, most
notably during the establishment of the Republican government in the
early twentieth century. Second, the Ethnic Classification project (minzu
shibie) of the 1950s and 1960s began the process of formally determining
the number, boundaries, and characteristics of the ethnic minority groups
recognized by the Chinese Communist state.6 The inherent difficulty of
such a project, and the complexities involved in determining a finite
number of ethnicities, are visually illustrated in documentary and feature
films of the 1950s and 1960s that depict ethnic minorities. In these films,
ethnicity was made visually knowable and recognizable, as the country’s
forward-looking development was rendered into visual narrative form.
This emphasis on the visible evidence of ethnicity and modernization has
left lingering traces on how tourism development in rural ethnic minority
regions is expected to unfold and ultimately succeed.
Concern over, or at least an expressed interest in, the non-Chinese
populations at the borders of the Chinese empire has been recorded since
as early as the first century bce, in the Records of the Historian, by Sima
Qian (Harrell 2001, 36). The mythology of barbarian tribes occupying
the empire’s edges and borderlands was also a feature of a Confucian26	| Chapter i
worldview (Dikotter 1992, 2-7). Notions of classification and identifica-
tion already existed in imperial records, and embedded in these writings
were politically driven ideas of barbarian populations as capable of being
“transformed” or becoming “Chinese” (hanhua) (Dikotter 1992 and Lei-
bold 2007).7 Visual representations were significant as a tool for classi-
fying and knowing difference. Ethnological reporting in the Ming and
Qing dynasties generally appeared in one of two genre forms: gazetteer
accounts or pictorial descriptions, such as the “Miao Albums.”8
During the late Qing dynasty, the growing presence and activities of
Western missionaries in China also contributed to conceptualizations
of race, drawn from Western theories of racial types.9 In southwestern
China especially, Western missionaries working in Guizhou and Yun-
nan recorded their own tribal classifications of the local populations (see
Clarke 1911) while adding to local understandings of group identity during
this tumultuous period of imperial decline and revolution (Cheung 1995
and Swain 1995). The effects of these discursive changes were extensive
and deep. By the late nineteenth century, challenges to the Qing empire
increasingly began to be formulated in racialized terms.10 The term minzu
first appeared in China around 1895, as a Chinese pronunciation of the
Japanese minzoku. Minzu was first used to refer to the majority Han peo-
ple, as opposed all other minority groups, and later, by extension, to the
notion of a Han nation-state in the Republican era (Y. Zhang 1997, 76),
glossed by Sun Yat-sen’s principle of nationalism {minzu zhuyi).11
Minzu zhuyi was an inclusive discourse of racial amalgamation, small
in scale yet large in scope, in which, according to Sun Yat-sen, the new Chi-
nese Republic would unite the Han, Manchu, Mongol, Hui, and Tibetan
territories, subsequently uniting these five races into a single people (Lei-
bold 2007, 38). Not surprisingly, these five races were associated with the
territorial boundaries of the new Chinese Republic. As a result, discourses
of minzu shifted from relating to notions of the nation-state, in the politi-
cal sense of autonomous rule and governance, to concepts of ethnicity
and identity, rooted in shared social traits and histories (Y. Zhang 1997,
76). These pre-Communist strategies of knowing and classifying ethnic
difference in the modern Chinese nation-state deeply informed the poli-
cies of the early Chinese Communist government (Harrell 2001, 37; and
Mullaney 2004a and 2011).
The Chinese Communist Party was concerned with ensuring the unitySimilar, with Minor Differences |	27
of the nation while representing the new nation-state as one founded on
the will of people. The granting of autonomy to regions inhabited by eth-
nic minorities—a decision included in Communist policies before the
People’s Republic of China was formally established in October 1949—
meant only that “in regions where one ethnic group exercised autonomy,
a member of that group should head the [local] government” (Mackerras
2004, 304-5; see also Heberer 1989). By 1953, the plan to develop People’s
Congresses at national, provincial, county, and local levels with one rep-
resentative from each minority group in the National People’s Congress
meant that a limited number of minority groups was needed to construct
the congress. However, censuses taken between 1953 and 1954 under an
original policy that allowed groups to self-identity and self-name pro-
duced more than four hundred different ethnic group names nationwide
(Fei 1981, 64; and Schein 2000, 81).12
To determine a more manageable number, at least in terms of the com-
position of the National People’s Congress, linguists and social science
researchers were commissioned to identify and classify the various ethnic
minority groups within China’s political borders in the campaign known
as the Ethnic Classification project. The 1956 text of the drafted policy on
national minorities and the “national question” (Moseley 1966) revealed
the careful and deliberate movements of the young Chinese Communist
Party government toward shifting the significance of minzu from nation-
ality, and its possible corollary of nationhood for minority groups within
China, toward the classification of these groups as “minority nationali-
ties,” or ethnic minorities. The 1950s Ethnic Classification project there-
fore had the effect of relegating minzu to the status of ethnic minorities
in order to assert the political legitimacy of the new government over
minority populations (Tapp 2012). It also sparked ongoing debates over
the definition of the term “nationality” with regard to the unity of the
Chinese state, which was perceived as a national body (Cai 1987 and Wang
Lei 1983).
Although this project was new in the sense that it was justified and
undertaken as a part of the Communist government’s effort to establish
its organizing structures and governing principles, these classifications
were conceptually linked to earlier ideas of sociocultural difference and
imaginations of the new sociopolitical order.13 The Zhuang ethnic group
provides a particularly illuminating example of ethnic classification as28	| Chapter i
ethnic creation (Kaup 2000). Despite relatively low numbers of people
declaring themselves to be Zhuang in the first census of 1953, the number
of individuals identifying as Zhuang steadily increased over the ensuing
decades at a rate of about 1.5 percent annually (ibid., 91). This change was
in large part spurred by the political establishment of the Guangxi Zhuang
Autonomous Region in 1958, the country’s first autonomous region, and
the attendant perceived benefits of this political identity, particularly in
contrast to the neighboring provinces of Guizhou and Yunnan.
Researchers working in the Ethnic Classification project drew upon
Stalin’s 1913 four “common criteria” for the identification of nations—
namely, a common language, a common territory, a common mode of
economic production, and a common culture or psychological makeup
(Gladney 1996, 66-67; Mullaney 2004b, 200; and Schein 2000, 83)—in
order to identify groups and assign each group to a notched rank on a
scale of human social development. This scale was based on a schema of
the evolution of human history and social progress developed by Lewis
Henry Morgan (1963 [1877]).14 The entrenchment of these ideas of social
evolution and economic production in the pursuit of socialism resulted in
ethnic groups being assigned to one of five economic production types—
primitive, slave, feudal, capitalist, and socialist—with the assumption that
the Han ethnic majority was in a state of late feudalism (Schein 2000, 83).
Thus the Ethnic Classification project was not only intended to reduce
the four hundred self-identified ethnic groups into a more manageable
number by emphasizing similarities but also to position the officially rec-
ognized groups along a unidirectional scale of social progress and devel-
opment, under the guidance of the Chinese Communist Party.
VISUALIZING ETHNICITY
The codification of ethnic difference in China was the result of careful
action and policy; studies of these newly classified groups were published
as government reports, scholarly studies, and documentary films. The
films were intended to form a comprehensive visual record of all official
ethnic minority groups, and they reveal much about the intersection of
politics, science, and art at the time (Kruger 2003).15 These films created
and shaped the visually recognizable ethnic characteristics that still dom-
inate media representations today. Production began in 1957, when filmSimilar, with Minor Differences |	29
crews operating under the orders of the central government and with sup-
port from provincial nationalities institutes traveled to ethnic minority
areas. The project was terminated at the onset of the Cultural Revolution
in 1966, although a few films were later completed and released in 1976.16
These films not only contributed to the classification of ethnic groups in
China, but they also contributed to the classification of knowledge about
ethnicity. The production of the films brought into question fundamental
concerns over science, authenticity, aesthetics, politics, and what consti-
tutes “documentary” (Alexander 2005). In 1961, in the middle of the film
production period, a series of evaluation forums took place during which
the relevant teams and scholars involved with the films debated the dis-
tinctions between “general documentary films,” “popular science films,”
and “scientific documentary films.” During this same period, fictional,
narrative “minority films” (shaoshu minzu dianying) were also made by
central film agencies, thus necessitating that the films of the Ethnic Clas-
sification project be distinguished as scientific documents lest they be
confused with their fictional counterparts. The classification project films
were ultimately categorized as “scientific documentary films” and were
intended to be understood as depictions of the social and cultural lives of
ethnic minority groups in their “original” state before liberation by the
Communist Party. While representing the livelihoods, religious beliefs,
and social structures of specific ethnic groups, voice-over narratives in
the films were highly critical of these practices and typically concluded
with statements about the bright futures awaiting these ethnic groups as a
result of Communist liberation. According to an official abstract issued by
the present-day Institute for Nationality Studies, these films were explic-
itly not to address post-1949 conditions. The statement declared: “It should
be confirmed that scientific documentaries are to record the social aspects
before Liberation.... To reflect the new social aspects after Liberation is a
task of documentary films and feature films and other kinds of films, and
not of scientific documentaries” (Kruger 2003, Appendix 1, 44).
According to Karsten Kruger (ibid., Appendix), who has assembled a
range of interviews with some of the filmmakers involved in the produc-
tion of these scientific documentaries, reports, and transcribed discus-
sions about the films, reenactments were used in the films to represent life
conditions before 1949, but any possible contradictions between the use of
reenacted scenes and the production of these scientific films as authentic30	| Chapter 1
documents were cast aside because ethnographers and researchers were
involved in the actual production process, bestowing scientific validity
to the films’ content. Scripts were written and approved by the ethnog-
raphers and film studios before any shooting took place. Teams of cam-
eramen and sound recorders worked with ethnographers, and every film
project was subjected to extensive external editing and review from the
beginning to the end.
After 1961, directors had to come up with a shooting outline, essentially
a visualization of the entire film, before any actual filming could occur.
Most productions were proofed twice, once as a rough edit and once
again after the final cut. Changes could be asked for during either of these
phases. Those doing the proofing were experts, scientists and other high-
level leaders at the studios and institutes. These classification films were
envisioned only for scholarly audiences; they were distributed to universi-
ties, institutes, and museums in the areas where the films had been pro-
duced and kept centrally at the Institute for Nationality Studies in Beijing.
Universities and research groups with scientific and educational purposes
could borrow the films (for example, for classes on Marxism-Leninism
and ethnology, and courses on attaining a socialist society). Ostensibly
the scholarly audiences for which the films were intended would be able to
“see past” the reenacted scenes and therefore be capable of accepting and
analyzing the films as wholly authentic representations of ethnic minor-
ity livelihoods before 1949. The films were not shown publicly to a general
audience, and until 1988 they were not screened outside of China.17
The limited distribution of the Ethnic Classification films belies the
broader context of film production in the early decades of the Chi-
nese Communist government. At this time, as today, film studios were
extremely active due to a belief in the potential of film to serve national
purposes. Although a majority of the films produced during the early
Communist period dealt with such common socialist themes as the pro-
letariat struggle against oppressive bourgeoisie, land reform, and military
might, by 1955 there was also a noticeable number of “minority films” fea-
turing ethnic minority themes and actors (see Li Zhuangming 1997). The
coincidence of the ethnographic film project and of the “minority film”
genre of feature films should not be overlooked. Approximately twenty
minority films were made in the 1950s, and another twenty in the first
half of the 1960s (Y. Zhang 1997, 79-81). For example, Five Golden FlowersSimilar, with Minor Differences |	31
(Wuduo Jinhua, directed by Wang Jiayi)—a film about socialist modern-
ization, agricultural collectivization, and women’s liberation among the
Bai of Yunnan—was released in 1959 (Notar 2006, 47).18
Another popular film from this era is Third Sister Liu (Liu San Jie,
directed by Su Li, released in i960), which is about a Zhuang woman who
seeks liberation from oppressive landlords. Despite the relatively small per-
centage of actual ethnic minority peoples in China, their role in Chinese
cinema was important for the national agenda; minority feature films “pur-
ported to show the way of life of these minority peoples, and their enthusi-
asm for socialism, [and] contributed to the policy of national integration”
(Clark 1987,19). Paradoxically, these minority films were often celebrated for
their commitment to promoting a distinct Chinese “national style” (minzu
fengge), where “the outcome of locating ‘national style’ in ethnic cultural
practices was never a restoration of‘minority’ cultures to ‘majority’ status,
but always a legitimation of minority peoples as part of the ‘solidarity’ of
the Chinese nation” (Y. Zhang 1997, 79-80; see also Gladney 1994).19
The production of scientific documentary and minority feature films
in the early years of Communist China has had a noticeable impact on
contemporary constructions of ethnic minority identity and continues to
legitimate Han cultural and political hegemony. Thus, when considered
alongside the minority films genre, the authenticity of the scientific docu-
mentaries of the Ethnic Classification Project, which used reenactments
to visualize ethnicity and render ethnic difference knowable, is located
precisely in the fact that ethnography at this time was in the service of
the Communist Party—the films are quite reasonably authentic Commu-
nist ethnographies.20 The visual images and socialist narratives of ethnic
minority groups presented in scientific films were produced and circu-
lated alongside a broader trend in “images of minorities” that “melded
surface features of minority customs with various socialist agendas”
(Schein 2000, 87), such as pictorial illustrations of ethnic peoples engaged
in political or militaristic activities or, as in feature films like Five Golden
Flowers, Bai ethnics celebrating their socialist liberation.21
ETHNIC BORDERS AND BOUNDARIES
Although the Ethnic Classification project formally began in the 1950s,
the work of classifying China’s ethnic groups did not conclude until the32	| Chapter i
early 1980s, when fifty-six ethnicities were officially recognized (includ-
ing fifty-five ethnic minorities and the majority Han ethnic group). The
project spanned a number of decades and discursive modes depending on
the political exigencies of each era, which Louisa Schein (2000,80-99) has
defined as the years 1949-57 (the original census and classifications), 1958-
76, and the 1980S-90S. Ethnic distinctiveness was “leveled” during the
Cultural Revolution (1967-76) in favor of socialist unity, Schein (ibid., 86)
argues, a move that began to redraw the borders and boundaries of what
constituted acceptable and unacceptable differences. In the postreform
years, the ways in which ethnicity and ethnic identities are understood
and experienced have continued to shift according to current social and
political conditions.
A collective effect of the Ethnic Classification project was to define
the boundaries and borders of ethnic identity (see Barth 1969). Some
groups were distinguished from each other and assigned different names
to concretize differences, while some self-identified groups were brought
together on the basis on apparent linguistic or shared social similarities
(though, as the Zhuang exemplify, this was politically motivated from
above and below). The classification of ethnic groups relegated each
group’s socioeconomic conditions to a place along a continuum of devel-
opment, based on Marxist-Leninist formulations of class and labor, thus
linking all ethnic groups into a singular historical narrative of socialist
progress. This classification was intended to assist in the direct interven-
tion by government policies for the purposes of socioeconomic reform.
For many ethnic groups, the classifications were quite new; the Miao, in
particular, are noted as an example of a single-name group comprising
communities who speak mutually unintelligible languages and are spread
over enormous distances, from Hunan to Guizhou to Yunnan and even
across the border to Laos and Thailand.22 What bound together various
individuals within a defined ethnic minority group was a more abstract
and broader notion of culture and ethnicity that could extend across huge
swaths of physical land and geography. This formulation of ethnicity did
not need to reflect actual lived networks of exchange and social interac-
tion, but it did provide a useful category for political organization and
structures by the central Chinese state, as well as new areas of study for
contemporary scholars both in China and abroad.23
Of course, it was not only the minority groups who were affectedSimilar, with Minor Differences |	33
by ethnic classification. Certain preferential policies directed at ethnic
minorities boosted the number of self-identified Zhuang in the early years
of the Communist regime, while in more recent cases some Han have
shown a preference toward marrying Hui Muslims to access rights and
privileges for themselves and their families, despite ongoing public criti-
cisms of the perceived government favoritism shown toward minorities
(Gladney 1996, xv-xvi). How ethnicity is deployed as a category potentially
affects all social and political relations; indeed, being ethnic as a “way of
being” (Harrell 2001) illuminates the integral role of and interrelations
between the Chinese state, its official history, and concepts of ethnicity.
For instance, Susan Blum’s work (2001) has recontextualized ethnicity in
China by taking into account majority views of various minority groups.
Examining the language used by the Han to speak about ethnic minori-
ties, Blum (ibid., 13) invokes the idea of “portraits” to emphasize the selec-
tivity of representations of difference.24 She presents four “prototypes” of
otherness at work in Yunnan: the fetishized ethnic other (represented by
the Dai), the resistant, disliked ethnic other (represented by the Wa, Zang/
Tibetan, and Hui), the colorful, harmless ethnic other (the Naxi and the
Yi), and the “almost-us” (meaning almost Han: the Bai). Such typologies
often reveal more about those in charge of creating the prototypes than
those included within them, of course; “the minority nationalities help the
Han to see themselves” (ibid., 176). However, although “minority nation-
alities in general are often lumped together, in distinction to the Han . . .
it is clear upon inquiry that some are more distinct than others” (ibid.).
It is neither sufficient to simply accept the boundaries of difference as
posited by dominant perspectives, nor to refuse entirely the structures
that guide and inform ethnic identity constructions in China today. The
changes and attributes ascribed onto ethnic identity in China are reflec-
tive of mainstream Chinese social imaginaries, and they in turn hold
meaning for the communities involved. These latter significances may be
contested or made complicated by local contexts, as suggested earlier in
this chapter in Lao’s story on cleanliness and Zhuang identity. In another
example, “the Miao... have embraced some of these [external] definitions
in a dialogic accommodation with the modes by which they were typi-
fied,” and therefore “the defining of the Miao is not reducible to a form of
knowledge/power in which external agents script and draw the boundar-
ies of Miao identity for them” (Schein 2000, 62). A number of character-34	| Chapter 1
istics attributed to Miao culture and customs are often raised by Miao
themselves, including the lusheng (a bamboo reed instrument), drink-
ing, song, attire, and conventions of sociality (including “highly codified
norms of reciprocity, offering food with bare hands and drink with two
hands, improvised singing back and forth between host and guest, and
copious amounts of drinking” [ibid., 63] ).25
These internal typologies of Miao identity work alongside external defi-
nitions, sometimes coinciding and sometimes not. The tension between
the multiple possible meanings of “being Miao” render the group name,
Miao, a “composite sign” (Rack 2005, 62-65), where the ethnic way of
being Miao can simultaneously operate as a referent both to the nation
(and national unity) and to local distinctiveness. In Mary Rack’s research,
she found that a regional university in western Hunan highlighted images
of the Miao in its official publicity campaigns, as the university was located
in the capital city of West Hunan Miao and Tujia Autonomous Prefecture.
These “images of the Miao were both an attraction in themselves and an
indication of the role of the university in the development of the region”
(ibid., 63-64) and, by extension, the role of the university in acting in con-
junction with national agendas and imperatives. That said, Rack (ibid., 66)
adds, it is important to recognize and acknowledge that such representa-
tions and references to ethnic identity can be just as frequently ignored
instead of interpreted. The effectiveness of ethnic identity as a composite
sign is reflected in how ethnic difference becomes identified as a resource
for tourism development, as both a marker of what is to be valued in a
tourism destination and of associated conditions and differences that the
central state is poised to address through development. This occurs in a
manner not dissimilar to the scientific films of the Ethnic Classification
period that represented ethnic difference within a narrative of progress
under the leadership of the government. The key objective is to restrict eth-
nic identity into a series of bounded, limited features (“special character-
istics”) that can either be transformed, if needed, or celebrated—or both.
The boundaries and borders of what could or would be acceptable as
ethnic are mutually maintained, internally and externally, as a process of
negotiation between national, mainstream, local, and individual imagina-
tions and aspirations. When being ethnic becomes a part of doing tourism,
how this is actually achieved refers back to and relies upon existing forms
and categories of ethnic identity. In Ping’an and Upper Jidao, the need toSimilar, with Minor Differences |	35
be distinctive and to adhere to certain expected characteristics of ethnic
difference is deeply internalized into local perspectives on doing tourism.
Tourism, development, and ethnicity are thus wound up in overlapping
relations of understanding how identities are forged and what opportuni-
ties are imaginable in China today.
THE ETHNIC IN TOURISM
If ethnic identity is seen as the result of negotiations over the perceived
limits and boundaries of sociocultural difference, then the process of cre-
ating meaningful ethnic experiences for tourists always runs up against
the possibility of disappointment. Jing Li has recounted a case of ethnic
tourism blues: a young, male, non-Dai tourist returned to a Dai ethnic
tourism village in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, in search of the local “Dai
bride” he had met previously. To his dismay, he learned that the “bride”
was doubly false—she was not in fact Dai, and she was not actually going
to marry him. This story became a joke among the local women who
run tourism businesses. Li concludes by suggesting that “the distance
between regret and laughter [in this anecdote] reveals processes of fan-
tasizing the Other by consumers and the simultaneous deconstruction
of these fantasies by hosts” (Jing Li 2003, 52). Indeed, it is precisely this
“distance between regret and laughter” that characterizes ethnic tourism
encounters, which rely upon inherent discrepancies, deceptions (playful
or serious), and deliberate attempts to mold the interaction for the mutual
satisfaction of all parties involved.26
Authenticity in tourism is paradoxical, and this paradox is experienced
in senses of disappointment (Oakes 2006a). In ethnic tourism, the notion
of encountering an authentic, exotic ethnic is impossible; the “Heisenberg
effect is inevitable. The search for the exotic is self-defeating because of
the overwhelming influence of the observer on the observed” (van den
Berghe and Keyes 1984,345-46). Nevertheless, as suggested earlier among
some Miao who adopted with pride certain features of dominant, main-
stream characterizations of Miao ethnicity, the ethnic other in tourism
often must self-consciously construct and maintain an ethnic boundary
so as to sustain tourism activities, often in conjunction with a middleman
travel guide (ibid., 347).27
Ethnic tourism has always been involved in and dependent upon strat-36	| Chapter 1
egies of representation; it is “the marketing of tourist attractions based
on an indigenous population’s way of life” (Swain 1989 [1977], 85). What
drives ethnic tourism are the connections between fantasy and reality
enacted between village residents and tourists at the borders or “contact
zones” (Clifford 1997 and Pratt 2008 [1992]) of tourism destinations, which
are made visible and tangible in the village through material means. The
exotic ethnic other becomes a carrying vessel for the resolution of these
tensions in a popular, positive format that celebrates difference as a form
of entertainment and enlightenment. As Li Yang and Geoffrey Wall (2009,
560) have argued: “With the broad integration of ethnicity into tourism
worldwide, the representation, consumption, and experience of ethnic-
ity have become fashionable. ‘Ethnic’ has become a popular tourist icon,
consumed and produced locally and afar, from ethnic restaurants, neigh-
borhoods, and markets to ethnic museums, theme parks, and tourist vil-
lages.” As an icon of otherness, the ethnic in tourism straddles discursive
conceptualizations of nature and culture (Cohen 2001), past and present,
but ethnic boundaries require constant negotiation and production, how-
ever, by both the tourist and the toured. For example, in Indigenous per-
formances on Wala Island, Vanuatu, “a good performance of the show
is not simply to please tourists, and for them to evaluate. It is a dialogic
encounter which is as much about self-worth and self-evaluation” for
the local performers as well (Tilley 1997, 84). The dynamics of tourism
encounters thus produce “touristic culture,” in which the multiplicity of
meanings made possible by ethnic boundary maintenance allows for iden-
tity to become newly significant in varied ways.28
Ethnic tourism is often folded into more encompassing narratives of
heritage, nationhood, and belonging, and both heritage and ethnic tour-
ism tend to be located in rural peripheries that are perceived as far away
(in time and space) from the modern urban center.29 Indeed, the gulf
between the past and the present prompts tourists to seek authentic expe-
riences in other places, through other people.30 Thus the rural, the ethnic,
and notions of heritage draw upon familiar modernist binaries of tradi-
tional/modern, authentic/fake, real/copy in tourist experiences shaped by
nostalgia and longing. Nostalgia marks the regret of the forlorn groom in
Xishuangbanna, and it is nostalgia, of a different order, that links the envi-
ronmental problems of Ping’an with Zhuang ethnic identity for a village
elder like Lao. Nostalgia provides a meaningful connection between theSimilar, with Minor Differences |	37
search for authenticity, the marketing of ethnic otherness as an enjoyable
experience, and the rural as past and urban as future.31 And while differ-
ent types of nostalgia can be defined in relation to varied perspectives on
tourism, nostalgic longings are central to the pursuit of authentic experi-
ences in modernity (Graburn 1995,167)—an authenticity that is displaced
both physically (onto an “Other,” whose culture and society are not like
that of the modern person) and temporally (onto a pastoral past of “sim-
pler” times) by the modern subject.32
Nostalgia is not merely a passive sort of longing but an active engage-
ment with the world.33 It is inherently social, and shared, which makes
nostalgia all the more ripe for exploitation in the marketing of ethnic
tourism; it is the result of a collective recognition of a temporal “break”
between present and past conditions. This type of memory of the past is a
memory “transformed by its passage through history” (Nora 1989,13) and
a form of remembering that moves history, and habitus, into the realm
of heritage (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006). In ethnic tourism, those who
do the work of tourism bear the burden of producing consumable signs
of ethnic difference that can then be experienced as nostalgic by tourists,
exemplified in “traditional” performances, “local” handicrafts (Graburn,
ed. 1976), or even a rural landscape. The souvenir, in particular, can be
read instantly as a tangible, visible, present thing that is a trace of what is
recognizably (and regrettably) no longer present, just as photography and
photographs have also been understood.34
Nostalgia can also exacerbate social tensions when it takes the form of
a national heritage that is celebrated in and through the representation
of ethnic minorities who may become “fixed” in a timeless, unchanging
state as the object of nostalgic longings.35 As a technology of cultural rep-
resentation, ethnic tourism relies upon these yearnings of nostalgia that
become mediated through icons of the ethnic. But the form and content
of an ethnic icon are never completely open for interpretation. The spe-
cific “ethnic options” available in tourism illuminate the often contentious
relationships between tourism, ethnicity, and the state.36 Ethnic options
are “manifestations of ethnicity that arise from a complex process of sym-
bolic construction” involving multiple social actors, from local commu-
nities and tourism industries to the government representatives (Wood
1997,19). It is possible that new ethnic options may emerge from the con-
frontation of competing discourses and agendas (Cohen 2001, 42), but the38	| Chapter 1
structures of power that determine and enable a particular bounded set of
options, of ways of being appropriately different, are rarely challenged. In
this way, ethnic tourism is often promoted in multiethnic states precisely
for the purposes of fostering social cohesion and national unity through
the guise of celebrating a common national heritage, at a super-structural
level above and beyond the recognition of difference. The ethnic theme
park, in particular, offers an ideal controlled space for the construction of
appropriate national narratives of diversity and unity and the consump-
tion of this knowledge in an entertaining environment.37
The theme park model for ethnic tourism was adopted in China in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, and some of the country’s more well-known
ethnic theme parks include the China Folk Cultures Village (FCV) in
Shenzhen, the Ethnic Culture Village in Beijing, the Yunnan Folk Cul-
ture Village in Kunming, and the Xishuangbanna National Minority
Park in Jinghong.38 Each park is spatially organized by ethnic group; in
each, a number of the fifty-six officially recognized ethnic groups in China
are presented through life-sized model village displays, usually centered
around a typical village house that tourists can enter and walk through,
and each village contains a space for scheduled performances.39 The vil-
lages in the parks are staffed by young men and women, often recruited
from corresponding ethnic minority communities across the country,
and in many parks, native architects were hired to design and build the
villages. To further emphasize the authenticity of the theme park village
structures, some houses include photographs taken by researchers from
central institutes and universities who have visited the regions.40
In these parks, the ethnic options available are exactly, and only, those
made possible in official government classifications. But, as Tim Oakes
(2006b, 181, following Elitchcock, Stanley, and Chung 1997) has written
about the FCV in Shenzhen, “there is much more to FCV than this display
of official nationality ideology. FCV offers a display of a more timeless
and authentic multinationalism in which replication of specific styles and
forms becomes an important principle in and of itself.” The timelessness
of the ethnic options in the Chinese parks reinforces both national ide-
ologies of the linear progression of sociocultural groups toward an ideal
socialist end, but also the authority and unquestionable unity of the Chi-
nese nation-state with all of its diverse constituent parts. The styles and
visible forms of ethnic identity in the parks reduces the “ethnic options”Similar, with Minor Differences |	39
of identity in China to precisely those on display, codifying not only the
names of these groups but also the characteristics associated with each
ethnic identity.
In addition to providing a visual reflection of Chinese domestic politics
and an idealized nationalism, the technologies of display at work in the
ethnic theme park exemplify what has been called “Chinese Style Tour-
ism”—a particular mode of experiencing tourism that weaves together
landscape, architecture, and performance (Stanley 1998, 65). The intended
effect of “Chinese Style Tourism” is a “form of ethnographic realism: the
visitor is invited not only to inspect but to enter the theatrical sense of
the occasion” (ibid., 65). In turn, it is unsurprising that already existing
ethnic villages throughout China have adopted a “Chinese Style Tourism”
ethnic theme park model in their own local efforts. “The village as theme
park” (Oakes 2006b) model potently and poignantly integrates landscape,
architecture, and performance into the three-dimensionality of everyday
life itself. Places such as the Manchunman Dai village in Xishuangbanna,
Yunnan, and Huashishao, Guizhou, in fact have deliberately modeled
their own village tourism industries after the FCV (ibid., 167).41 The notion
of the village-as-ethnic tourism destination is both holistic, in that this
model attempts to frame and include everything about village life as
worthwhile for the tourism experience, and selective, by determining
which features of the village should be highlighted.
The ways of doing tourism in Ping’an and Upper Jidao villages fall in
line with this general formula of “village as theme park” through land-
scape, architecture, and performance, although the emphasis differs in
each place. As relatively self-contained spaces, these two villages are adver-
tised as places to see, experience, and enjoy an ethnic encounter through
a variety of activities, such as watching a song-and-dance performance,
gazing at the landscape, eating a meal cooked by a local resident, stay-
ing overnight in a local family’s home, or, better yet, all of the above. For
tourists, everything about the experience of being in one of these villages
is coated with the veneer of “being ethnic” simply by virtue of being there
in the village. Advertised names of the villages contain an ethnic moni-
ker, such as “Jidao Miao Village” and “Ping’an Zhuang Minority Terraced
Fields Scenic Area,” to further emphasize the “ethnic-ness” of these places.
The categorization of tourism as ethnic, heritage, cultural, rural, or
otherwise is, on the one hand, merely an academic convenience. Ping’an,40	| Chapter 1
for instance, has been variously analyzed as an ethnic tourism destination
(Luo 2006a, 34) and an “agro-tourism” site (Gao, Huang, and Huang
2009, 6).42 Although the exact differences between ethnic tourism and
agro-tourism might be inconsequential for most tourists, they matter
quite a lot in the livelihoods of those involved in maintaining, and seek-
ing benefit from, the tourism industries. Advertising ethnic tourism to a
village places the onus of representation and display on the people them-
selves, whereas “agro-tourism” shifts the focus of attention onto the land
and landscape maintenance. However, as Lao’s comment at the outset of
this chapter about being Zhuang in Ping’an suggested, to him, both the
land and the people were implicated in their community’s identity and
tourism prospects. The “ethnic” in tourism is therefore as singular as the
person or object on display and as all-encompassing as the entire village
scene and surroundings.
But the fundamental motivations for doing tourism in Ping’an and
Upper Jidao have less to do with ethnicity and more to do with econom-
ics; tourism development in these villages has been intended to alleviate
poverty, which is often associated with being both rural and an ethnic
minority.43 The discursive links between the ethnic, the rural, and the poor
continue to frame and structure the tourism efforts in each place. Ping’an
village began its engagement with tourists and tourism as early as the late
1970s, starting with local involvement and investments by village leaders
such as Lao who largely viewed the developments as a means of earning
some income to supplement agricultural and other labor. Upper Jidao,
conversely, was brought into provincial-level plans for tourism develop-
ment in the early 2000s, under the dual goals of poverty alleviation and
heritage preservation. The persistence of dominant discourses of ethnic
minority difference and rural underdevelopment, however, continue to
underscore and, to a large extent, define how village residents have been
doing tourism in postreform China.44
A TALE OF TWO VILLAGES
Ping’an, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region
Ping’an village is located in the northern part of Guangxi, in the Long-
sheng Multiethnic Autonomous County, and is administratively located
within the prefectural level city of Guilin. Although the Zhuang are theSimilar, with Minor Differences |	41
numerically largest recognized ethnic minority group in China with a
total population of about sixteen million concentrated in Guangxi and
neighboring Yunnan, Longsheng is a multiethnic autonomous county
with communities of Zhuang, Yao, Miao, Dong, and Han. Major indus-
tries in Longsheng are talc, timber, and tourism; tourism destinations in
the county include the national “AAAA” rated Guilin Longji Terraced
Fields Scenic Area (shortened here to Longji Scenic Area), where Ping’an
is located, a hot springs resort and vacation village, and Silver Water Dong
minority village (Yinshui Dongzhai).45
The Longji Scenic Area is comprised of a number of villages, four of
which are the most frequently advertised and visited: Ping’an Zhuang Ter-
raced Fields Scenic Spot (Ping’an Zhuangzu Titian Guanjingqu), Jinkeng
Red Yao Terraced Fields Scenic Spot (Jinkeng Hong Yao Titian Guan-
jingqu), Longji Old Zhuang Village Cultural Terraced Fields Scenic Spot
(Longji Gu Zhuang Titian Wenhua Guanjingqu), and Huanglo Yao Village
(Huangluo Yao Zhai).46 The Longji Scenic Area is about ninety kilometers
from Guilin and frequent bus connections link Guilin and Longsheng.
According to local tour guides in Ping’an, the village population is around
850, divided into 180 households.47 In addition to the resident population,
there were an estimated 50 to 100 nonlocal full-time residents in the vil-
lage, including restaurant owners, hotel managers, and other employees
hired from outside regions who were living and working in Ping’an.
This account of tourism development in Ping’an is drawn from a vari-
ety of sources, including Lao’s written history (completed in May 2007);
scholarly studies conducted by Chinese scholars on Ping’an; pamphlets,
brochures, and the website from the management company for the Longji
Scenic Area (figures 1.1 and 1.2); websites from area tour agencies; inter-
views with the scenic area company managers; and conversations with
village residents.48 Because of its long engagement with tourism, Ping’an
is frequently studied by Chinese academics, although the village has
received significantly less attention from foreign scholars (with the nota-
ble exception of Turner 2010).
Tourism to Ping’an and to the Longji Scenic Area as a whole is largely
based on sightseeing and photographing the terraced fields that have been
constructed out of the mountainsides around the villages in the region.
The construction of the terraced fields surrounding Ping’an began during
the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) and was completed during the Qing dynasty42	| Chapter 1
figure 1.1. A brochure for the Longji Scenic Area created by the tourism man-
agement company (2007).
(1644-1911). During the first two decades of Communist rule post-1949,
the village was divided into eight subunits (based on preexisting kin
groups), and land was collectivized. Some village residents recalled trying
to achieve two rice harvests annually during the Cultural Revolution, a
project that failed.49 According to Lao, the first visitor to come to Ping’an
and grasp at the potential for tourism to the village was a government
official from the Longsheng county propaganda department who took
photographs of the terraced fields and the village in the spring of 1976.
Three of these photographs were published in the Guangxi Daily, and the
same official returned later that year with more government representa-
tives from the municipality. Three articles about Ping’an and more pho-
tographs were subsequently published in the same newspaper, and Lao
regarded these visitors as the first three tourists in Ping’an. By the spring
°f 1977, more people came to photograph the terraced fields, and the first
three foreign tourists arrived in 1978.50 A popular phrase used nowadays
to describe the terraces—“Longji terraces are unique under the heavens”Similar, with Minor Differences |	43
figure 1.2. Images of the terraced fields around Ping’an, ethnic Yao performers
in Huangluo, and village scenes are featured on a brochure (top) and entry ticket
(bottom) for the Longji Scenic Area (2007).
(Longji titian tianxia yi jue)—was coined by one of the foreign visitors,
Lao said.
He had been privy to these early visits because of his status in the vil-
lage as a doctor and as a Party cadre. Occupying a higher-status position
within local political spheres, the village cadres in Ping’an were “tipped
off” to tourism plans by the government early on. According to Wen
Tong (2002, 27), as representatives of the Party and the government, vil-
lage cadres were also personally more open to new ideas and regularly
attended local government meetings at the county and township levels,
where they learned about the importance of tourism and the county gov-
ernment’s burgeoning priorities in building tourism industries.51 The vil-
lage secretary built the first guesthouse in the early 1980s offering twelve
beds—when there were more tourists, Lao said, they would simply sleep in44	| Chapter 1
local homes. At the time, there were no roads into the village, so travel to
Ping’an from Longsheng involved a bus ride to Huangluo and then a hike
up into the mountains; staying overnight was necessary. In 1983, an official
from the Longsheng propaganda department published an article in the
Guangxi Daily titled “Mountain People Also Use Foreign Money,” mar-
veling over how Ping’an had become a desirable destination for foreign
tourists and how quickly village residents had picked up on the economic
benefits of tourism.52
In the early years, photography was the primary tourist activity in the
village. Most of the tourists came to photograph the fields in the height
of the spring and early summer, when the terraces are flooded with water
prior to transplanting rice seedlings. Many of these tourist-photographers
sent copies of their pictures back to families in the village, and nowadays
these images (or copies of the originals) are often displayed inside guest-
houses and homes. The aesthetic potential of the terraces for photogra-
phy continues to drive tourism in Ping’an today. Village residents say that
many visitors are drawn to Ping’an by the photographs they have seen
elsewhere, desiring to re-create the photographic experience through their
tourism encounter, and fulfilling what John Urry (2002b [1990], 140) has
called the “hermeneutic circle” of tourism, photography, and “the tourist
gaze.”53 From the perspective of residents, photography brought tourism
to Ping’an by motivating photographers to visit the village repeatedly to
achieve that perfect picture. Villagers, even nowadays, will offer to take
tourists to the place where “that picture was made,” referencing existing
postcards or other widely circulated images of the terraces.54 According
to Xu Ganli (2005, 197) and corroborated in my own conversations with
residents, the terraced fields were never explicitly valued by the villagers
for their aesthetic appeal; indeed, villagers said that they did not “see”
the beauty in the terraces until they saw the photographs taken by tour-
ists. Only after photography and tourism was the value of the terraces as
images introduced into the consciousness of village residents. In discus-
sions with villagers about the beauty of the terraces, people agreed that
the terraces were often considered undesirable because for farmers, ter-
raced fields are much difficult and tiring to work. Accessing some fields
frequently involves a long uphill hike, and many fields are too narrow for
oxen to plow.
Through the 1980s and early 1990s, the economic impact of tourismSimilar, with Minor Differences |	45
was relatively minimal but not unnoticed—in this period, many villagers
worked manual labor or other jobs elsewhere, but with increased remit-
tances, households gradually had more money to invest in remodeling
their homes into hotels (Wen 2002, 27). Lao built his Li Qing guesthouse,
the second family-run guesthouse in the village, in the early 1990s. In
1994, the Longsheng government held a regional conference about tour-
ism development. This meeting coincided with the first wave of national
attention to tourism’s potential contribution to local economies and pov-
erty alleviation in rural areas (see chapter 2). Yet in 1994, there was still no
road to Ping’an. As tourist arrivals steadily increased, the county began
discussing plans to build a road directly to the base of Ping’an in the fall
°f 1995; around the same time, villagers in Ping’an began organizing the
sale of entry tickets, charging domestic Chinese tourists ¥3 and foreign
tourists ¥5. Construction on the road to Ping’an began in the fall of 1997;
the county government provided funds to build the first 3 kilometers,
and the villagers contributed labor to complete the final stretch of about
1.5 kilometers. In 1998, as the road was finished, the county government
restructured its tourism enterprises, creating the Longsheng Tourism
Development Company as a separate business enterprise from the Long-
sheng Tourism Bureau, which remained a branch of the county govern-
ment. The newly formed company took over the day-to-day management
of and ticket sales to Ping’an. According to Wen (2002, 27), between 1997
and 1998, three more family-run guesthouses opened in Ping’an.
The year 2001 was a watershed for Ping’an: the Longsheng Tourism
Bureau created the Longji Terraced Fields Scenic Area, which encompassed
Ping’an and other villages in the area, and sold a 60 percent majority share
of the Longsheng Tourism Development Company to the privately run
Guilin Tourism Company Ltd. This Guilin-based investment company
in turn established the Guilin Longsheng Hot Springs Tourism Company
Ltd., which at the time managed both the Longji Scenic Area and the
nearby hot springs resort. Ticket sales were now handled by the Guilin
Tourism Company, whose branch office in charge of the Longji Scenic
Area is referred to as the Guilin Longji Tourism Company Ltd. The daily
operations of the previous Longsheng Tourism Development Company
were devolved into a local management office for the newly created scenic
area, which was tasked with overseeing relations between the manage-
ment company and villages, as well as working with the government tour-46	| Chapter 1
table 1.1. Visitor numbers to the Longji Scenic Area, 1997-2006
	1997	1998	1999	2000	2001
Visitor numbers’	3,900	4,100	14,100	25,000	47,300
Percent increase	5.4	5.1	243.9	77.3	89.2
	2002	2003b	2004	2005	2006
Visitor numbers	84,700	92,000	143,000	183,000	237,000
Percent increase	79.1	8.6	55.4	28.7	28.8
Source: Guilin Shi Qikexing Liiyou Guihua Zixun Youxian Gongsi 2008.
3 Approximately 65 percent of all visitors to the scenic area go to Ping’an.
b The outbreak of SARS in early 2003 closed tourism to the region for some months.
ism bureau on such logistical issues as public transport, toilets, and other
facilities in each village scenic spot. A large fire broke out in one section
of the village in 2001, damaging nearly twenty houses beyond repair and
spurring many village residents to rebuild their homes as guesthouses in
light of an anticipated rapid growth in tourism. Also in 2001, the Longji
Scenic Area was deemed one of Guangxi’s twenty “Grade A” tourism sites.
The approach to tourism development and management in Ping’an
from the 1990s on reflects a persistent belief that the primary attraction for
tourists would be the terraced fields, and all maps, brochures, and other
promotional materials featured the terraces prominently. But charging an
entry fee to a tourism scenic area named for the terraced fields implied
that the price paid was for the privilege of seeing the terraces and rein-
forced the centrality of the fields, rather than the village, to tourism. This
approach has had serious ramifications for Ping’an. Individual entry tick-
ets to the Longji Scenic Area cost ¥20-30 in the early 2000s, ¥50 in the
mid-2ooos, and ¥80 in 2012.55 Visitor numbers to Ping’an skyrocketed
with the completion of the road in 1998 and the investment of the Guilin
Tourism Company, whose connections with the larger tourism market in
Guilin allowed for increased promotion of the region more widely (table 1.1).
When the local Longsheng government company took over tickets sales
in 1998, a set amount from the annual profits was allotted for distribu-
tion to village residents (table 1.2).56 This amount increased with the entry
of the Guilin-based investors, but nonetheless conflicts over the amount
received by the village from the ticket sales hampered relations between
the company, the county government, and the village. Individual villageSimilar, with Minor Differences |	47
table 1.2. Amounts received by
Ping’an from ticket sales, 1998-2004
Amount Received
Year	by Ping’an (in RMB)
1998	15,000
1999	25,000
2000	30,000
2001	150,000
2002	150,000
2003	150,000
2004	350,000
Source: Data compiled from my interview with
Lao and figures stated in Huang H. 2006.
residents who had contributed either labor or land to help build the road
to Ping’an in 1997 were allotted a certain number of workpoints, which
were then calculated into individual shares of the profits from ticket sales.
Nevertheless, most villagers still consider their cut to be an unequal,
unfair share of the total profits from tickets.
The distribution of profits from ticket sales has been an ongoing source
of tension between Ping’an residents, the company, and the county gov-
ernment; in fact, most people typically did not distinguish between the
tourism company and the government and instead referred to them both
as a single entity. From the perspective of the Ping’an residents, the tour-
ism company and the government were sharing the profits from the Longji
Scenic Area and leaving little for the village residents. The original agree-
ment between the company, the government, and the village in 2001 was
that Ping’an would receive ¥150,000 a year to be divided among residents,
the county government would receive 6 percent of total profits, and the
remainder would go to the company and shareholders (Huang H. 2006,
70). Villagers in Ping’an realized quickly that ¥150,000 was quite a small
percentage of the total earnings from ticket sales, and a protest ensued in
2002 between the village and the company. Ping’an residents told me that
they felt “sold out” to the Guilin-based company, that they had had no
idea of the negotiations between the Longsheng tourism bureau, the local48	| Chapter 1
company (which they perceived as essentially a for-profit extension of the
tourism bureau), and the new investors. The result was that the amount
allotted to Ping’an was raised to ¥350,000 in 2004. Another argument over
profit-sharing erupted in 2005 between the villagers and the company, this
time involving a blockade of the village entrance and, according to village
accounts, the arrest of a few men who protested at the main entrance to
the scenic area.
All of these arguments, from the perspective of village residents,
revolved more fundamentally around the issue of the terraced fields, the
primary attraction for tourists. Two viewpoints (guanjing tai) are located
within the scenic spot, and flat viewing areas were built at these points on
the slopes above the village itself, for tourists to gaze upon the terraced
fields: viewpoint 1 looks down over the Nine Dragons and Five Tigers
(Jiu Long Wu Hu) view and viewpoint 2 onto the view known as Seven
Stars with Moon (Qi Xing Ban Yue). Both names refer to the shape of the
fields, as seen from the respective viewpoints. Tourists come to the region,
Ping’an residents argued, to see these terraced fields, but the labor villag-
ers expended in maintaining the fields was grossly undercompensated by
the company and the government. After all, most families in the village
no longer relied upon cultivating the fields for their everyday consump-
tion needs, but terraced fields require constant upkeep and maintenance,
residents stressed to me, and only they knew how to take care of the land.
In effect, the company, the local government, and outside entrepreneurs
opening businesses in the village were making money as a result of the
labor of the villagers. The villagers kept the terraces attractive as a wor-
thy sightseeing destination, but the company, the local government, and
outside entrepreneurs were not properly compensating the villagers for
their work.
This emphasis on photographing the terraced fields as the primary
tourist activity in Ping’an overlooked the villagers—the focus on land-
scape and photography in the village’s tourism activities minimized the
presence of the villagers who maintained the terraces every year. The ter-
raced fields were considered most attractive when they were flooded with
water in late spring. Dry fields (used for growing vegetables and other
crops) were less attractive, photographically speaking, because they did
not reflect light or provide visual contrast as dramatically as the flooded
fields. As tourism became increasingly central to household economies,Similar, with Minor Differences |	49
the village residents’ actions reinforced the centrality of the terraces.
Residents gradually focused their attention to the fields that were a part
of the named views. The terraces not within the visual scope of the two
main viewpoints were neglected, left uncultivated, and sometimes left to
collapse. During the spring and early summers, when photography tours
were most frequent because of the water in the terraces, residents typically
first worked the fields within the two main viewpoints, only later turning
to the remaining fields as needed.
In 2007, villagers told me that they were now demanding 7 percent of
the total profits from ticket sales, but the tourism company would not
agree to the increase. One resident who was also a Party cadre and had
been involved in many of the conversations commented obliquely that
the company should realize the villagers weren’t stupid; they could do
the arithmetic to figure out that ¥350,000 was a minuscule portion of the
money earned from tickets. A manager within the company explained
that the villagers didn’t realize how much the company had originally
invested in 2001; even with the ticket sales as high as they were, the man-
ager told me, the company was still not earning enough to make up for the
initial investments. There was some discussion among villagers in 2007 of
the Longsheng government buying “back” the majority share, but these
claims were unsubstantiated. By 2011, the company agreed to pay 7 per-
cent of the ticket sales to Ping’an, but this was calculated based off of the
discounted “group ticket” sale price of ¥40 a ticket rather than the indi-
vidual price of ¥80, which meant that the village received ¥2.8 per ticket
sold. This amount was further limited by the number of tickets/tourists
counted at the entry gate to Ping’an, where tickets must be presented, so
that tourists who did not visit Ping’an would not be included in the sum
total of allocated funds to the village.
Within Ping’an, the company and government bureaus did not run
the majority of village businesses, which consisted of guesthouses, restau-
rants, and shops. There were, however, a number of hotels and restaurants
in Ping’an opened by individuals affiliated with the county government
tourism bureau and other tourism business in Guilin, and these establish-
ments were usually much bigger, more modern, and busier than locally
owned ones. Indeed, it has been suggested that the role of government
officials in private businesses in Ping’an lay at the root of many confronta-
tions between the villagers and the government and company representa-50	| Chapter 1
tives, because the latter were perceived as not only earning money from
the scenic area’s ticket sales but also invested in profit-making enterprises
in the village (Huang H. 2006, 70).
Officials who were aware early on of the plans to create the two view-
points and paths through the village shared this knowledge with their
friends and relatives. In turn, these individuals began negotiating for land-
use rights at the most potentially valuable sections of the village based on
their privileged knowledge of the plans before the viewpoints and paths
were constructed. The construction of the platforms were planned to
direct tourists toward viewpoint 2, overlooking the Seven Stars with Moon
landscape, by building a wider walking path from the parking lot through
the village to this viewpoint; some of the biggest and most modern hotels
owned by nonlocals are along this path. Village residents came to believe
that the slower development of the other sections of the village—namely,
those closer to viewpoint 1—was a direct result of these same government
individuals not wanting to create competition with their own businesses.
One of the most successful and earliest large hotels in the village, Ping’an
Hotel (Ping’an Jiu Dian), opened in 2002 and is located right alongside
the path to viewpoint 2. Unlike the family-run guesthouses, this hotel was
opened by a woman who had previously worked for the Longsheng Tour-
ism Bureau, and it was the first to feature en suite bathrooms.
Despite increasing investments by outside individuals, the major-
ity of guesthouses and restaurants in Ping’an are family-run, or family-
owned, although these are significantly smaller in size and scale than
those opened by nonvillage residents. Some villagers have also opened
shops selling drinks, souvenirs, daily household goods (such as oil, crack-
ers, rice, noodles, and sandals), and, more recently, fresh vegetables and
meat brought in from wholesale markets in Longsheng and Guilin. The
other work in tourism for village residents begins at the village parking
lot near the ticket office, where all tourists are dropped off. Here, sedan
chair carriers (two per chair and usually men) offer rides for tourists up to
the viewpoints, and porters (usually but not always women) offer to carry
luggage and supplies up to the hotels and restaurants. Men and women
also offer to guide tourists to their hotels and restaurants or to take them
on longer walks in and around the village. The guides, porters, and sedan
chair carriers have been divided according to a system of three groups
(loosely based on the units created during collectivization, which wereSimilar, with Minor Differences |	51
themselves based on lineages) lettered A, B, and C, rotating every three
days. Only those within a given group on their given day are allowed to
wait at the parking lot and to solicit tourists (la ke).
In 2007, the system was further streamlined to enforce a strict numeri-
cal order within each group. This was developed after a group of village
cadres went on a study tour to Zhangjiajie, a national forest park in Hunan,
sponsored by the tourism company—Zhangjiajie was known for having
very well-organized tourism and sedan chairs carriers. In May 2007, a
new management office was opened at the entrance gate to Ping’an, oppo-
site from the ticket booth. Staffed by representatives of the village leader-
ship committee (cunweiyuan hui), this office oversaw the daily order of
sedan chair carriers and porters at the parking lot. Sedan chair carriers
and porters were individually numbered, and each set of chair carriers or
each porter had to wait for their turn. Previously, villagers and manage-
ment employees told me, people would be so frantic to solicit a customer
that they would undercut each other’s prices and fights often broke out
between village residents. Official prices for luggage porters and sedan
chairs were listed on a board at the parking lot, although bargaining was
still commonplace.
Incomes in the village have increased alongside the growth in tourist
visits; according to one study, prior to tourism (no specific year is given),
annual household incomes were approximately ¥4,000; after tourism, most
households earnedbetween ¥10,000 and ¥30,000 annually (Huang H. 2006).
Similar amounts are reported in the research of Sha Yao, Wu Zongjun,
and Wang Xulian (2007); these authors found that 61.7 percent of those
surveyed reported per capita annual incomes of ¥2,000 (or, in an aver-
age family of five to six, ¥10,000 to ¥12,000 a year).57 In my survey of
fifty households in Ping’an completed in 2007, reported average annual
household incomes hovered between ¥10,000 and ¥20,000, but a num-
ber of households did report significantly greater net incomes (table 1.3).
One young woman used a traditional Chinese saying to describe the ris-
ing incomes in Ping’an: one generation plants the trees in whose shade
another generation rests (qian ren zai shu, hou dai qing liang). After all,
their ancestors had built the terraced fields and now the current genera-
tion of villagers could live off the labor of their forefathers, through tour-
ism of the terraced fields. Of course, many households were in debt to
friends and relatives, as well as to local credit cooperatives, because they52	| Chapter 1
table 1.3. Annual household income in Ping’an as
reported in 2007
Reported Annual House- Number of Households
hold Income (RMB)	(50 total)
Less than 10,000	7
10,000-19,999	20
20,000-29,999	11
30,000-39,999	4
40,000-49,999	2
50,000-69,999	2
70,000-99,999	2
More than 100,000	2
Source: Household survey by author, 2007.
had borrowed money to build their guesthouses, so much of the money
earned was used to payback loans. The cost of building and equipping an
average-sized hotel to sleep thirty to forty, with modern facilities (usually
a mix of en suite and shared bathrooms), was estimated to be anywhere
between ¥200,000 and ¥500,000 in 2007.
In terms of living standards and incomes, tourism to Ping’an had
been unquestionably beneficial for villagers overall. Relatively few people
migrated out to find work by the mid-2ooos, and during busy tourism sea-
sons, many families in Ping’an hired friends and relatives from other vil-
lages to help out both in the fields and in their businesses. New hotels and
shops cropped up on a regular basis; in April 2007, Ping’an had eighty-two
hotels, the majority owned and run by villagers, although as noted before,
a number of large, more well-equipped hotels had been built by individu-
als from Guilin, Beijing, and even the United States. About half of the 180
households in Ping’an were directly engaged in the tourism businesses in
their own homes, but there were many more individual villagers working
as porters, sedan chair carriers, guides, and shopkeepers or simply earn-
ing rental income from the lease of their homes to others. Renovations on
existing hotels occurred constantly as well, as families sought to “catch
up” to the latest designs and tourists’ requirements (which in this period
meant providing en suite bathrooms and air-conditioning and heatingSimilar, with Minor Differences |	53
units). Hotels in Ping’an were modernizing so quickly, however, that by
2010, many village residents told me that they no longer bothered to run
their family guesthouses because, given the option of an en suite, climate-
controlled room in a large, well-appointed hotel, the majority of tourists
simply wouldn’t stay in a village home. The number of non-locally run
restaurants in the village also grew in the late 2000s; by 2012, many fami-
lies rented out one floor of their homes as restaurant spaces for outside
entrepreneurs to run.
To an extent, the situation in Ping’an exemplified and supported the
idea that being successful in tourism is not being mobile; fewer and fewer
residents felt pressured to migrate out of the village to earn an income. This
belief in “staying put” as a marker of achievement permeated throughout
development programs in rural China. However, the idea that successful
tourism development can be equated to an opportunity to stay in one’s
home posits mobility in a negative light and correlates almost too neatly
with the notion of migration-for-work as undesirable or dangerous to
society. For all of its economic success, the problem of tourism in Ping’an
boiled down to a changing relationship between the land and the people.
Tourists came to look at and to photograph the terraced fields, but this
landscape required the constant effort and work of village residents to
remain attractive. Yet the land itself did not directly generate an income
for the village residents; residents needed tourists to spend money in their
guesthouses, shops, and restaurants to really profit from tourism.
Although villagers continued to plant and grow crops in their fields,
for the families engaged in tourism businesses, these harvests only supple-
mented the food they purchased from local markets and vendors. Very few
tourists were satisfied with the selection of locally grown produce, and
to maintain a greater variety in their restaurants, most villagers either
purchased their meats, vegetables, and rice directly from markets in Long-
sheng and Guilin or bought them from village residents who, in turn,
shuttled between wholesale markets and the village with goods. With
chicken, for instance, the vast majority of live chickens slaughtered in the
village had not been raised in the village, although all restaurants adver-
tised them as local chickens (tuji). The same “white he” existed for many
other dishes served as local specialties, including bamboo rice (zhutong
fan: sticky rice, dried fruit, and smoked pork cooked in bamboo), which
was introduced to the village after some residents noticed how popular54	| Chapter 1
it was with tourists at the Longsheng hot springs. That said, when asked
about the invention of bamboo rice as a local, Zhuang specialty, village
residents were quick to explain to me that they had always known how to
cook bamboo rice—they had just never thought of selling it to tourists.
Ping’an residents have gone through an enormous psychological shift
in the past thirty years. From being called poor and backward in the dis-
course of Chinese national development in the 1960s and 1970s, by the 1980s
and 1990s, the village was celebrated for its authentic ethnic customs and
pure natural environment, which became the base of its tourism industry
(Xu Ganli 2005, 197-98). The very features of the village itself—from the
terraced fields to the wooden houses to the bamboo forests—took on new,
cultural values in tourism, and villagers learned to adopt and embrace
these ideas. This was a double value—life in the village became valuable as
an example of minority culture within mainstream China and as a prod-
uct in the marketplace with a price tag. These changing standards were
further reinforced by the continued influx of outsiders into the village,
who also wanted to profit from Ping’an’s success. But the rapid increase in
tourist arrivals and residents in the village prompted new problems, such
as with waste management, as Lao pointed out. Other ongoing concerns
in the village included persistent water shortages during busy seasons
that affected not only household use in hotels and restaurants but also the
amount of water available for flooding the terraces; fires due to shoddy
electrical wiring and the increasing number of propane tanks used with
water heaters and gas stoves; disputes between residents and tour guides
demanding commissions from local businesses; and ongoing debates over
who would do the work of maintaining the terraced fields and how much
the village would receive from ticket sales.58
Some residents suggested, as one possible solution, that Ping’an should
turn itself into more of an ethnic tourism destination. To “ethnicize” tour-
ism in the village meant that tourists would no longer just come to look
at the terraces—an activity from which the village residents earned very
little. Rather, tourists would come to enjoy the Zhuang, which could bring
the people of Ping’an back into the picture. The trickle-down income from
ticket sales was hardly lucrative for village residents, with families report-
ing to receive no more than 200 RMB per person per year as their share.
One concrete move to increase the “ethnic-ness” of the village was to call
the entire village area the Ping’an Zhuang Terraced Fields Scenic Spot,Similar, with Minor Differences |	55
which was printed on a banner at the entrance gate. The potential effect
of this renaming was to shift the emphasis of the village experience away
from the land and onto the residents. “Ethnicizing” the terraces and the
village was important for two reasons: first, some tourists didn’t realize
that Ping’an was a Zhuang village; and second, it would help maintain
their competitiveness and attractiveness in relation to other villages in
the Longji Scenic Area.
Before coming to Ping’an, many of the tour groups first stopped at
Huangluo, an ethnic Yao village along the river, where they would watch
a performance by Yao women. Many Yao women from Huangluo and
neighboring Zhongliu village also came to Ping’an to sell souvenirs,
wearing their ethnic dress (consisting of a black pleated skirt, pink or
red embroidered wrap top, with their hair tied in a prominent topknot
and covered with an embroidered black cloth square), which was distinct
from what the Zhuang women in Ping’an wore. As a result, some tourists
believed Ping’an was a Yao village, not Zhuang. Specifically ethnic tour-
ism activities in Ping’an were therefore envisaged as a way to increase the
range of income-generating opportunities in the village; many Ping’an
residents thought they could do more folk dance performances to attract
tourists (see Turner 2010). There was a group of women who could be hired
for a folk performance (costing between ¥200 and ¥400), and in 2009 a
Longsheng-based performance director brought his show to the village,
although it was ultimately unsuccessful.59 In 2012, competition intensified
even further when Longji village, next to Ping’an, was officially opened
to tourism and in the process of total transformation, complete with new
roads, a museum of Zhuang folk culture, special exhibits and signage
throughout the village, and, eventually, electric carts to shuttle tourists
between sights (see Chio 2013).
Upper Jidao, Guizhou
In Guizhou, ethnicity was at the forefront of the plans for rural tourism
development that had been introduced in the early 2000s, spurred on by
the relative success of ethnic Miao tourism villages in the province. Upper
Langde, for example, had been recognized by Guizhou provincial authori-
ties in 1985 as an “open-air museum,” and Nanhua had been developed
into a tourism village with municipal funds from Kaili (a county-level56	| Chapter 1
city) in 1997 as a competitor to Upper Langde.60 My field site, Upper Jidao
village, is located along the same highway connecting Upper Langde (two
kilometers away) and Nanhua (four kilometers away), in Guizhou’s south-
eastern Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture. Xijiang,
another popular and well-known ethnic Miao tourism destination (rede-
veloped and reopened in 2008) is also close, about twenty kilometers from
Upper Jidao. In the local context of these well-established and heavily
promoted tourism villages, Upper Jidao was expected to benefit from the
existing tourism market (see Cheung 1996, Oakes 1998, and Schein 2000)
and to create something new and different for the marketplace, under the
guidance of the Guizhou Tourism Bureau and with financial support from
a World Bank project loan that was approved in 2009.
Upper Jidao is a natural village (ziran cun) and a part of the adminis-
trative village (xingzheng cun) of Jidao that includes the natural village
of Lower Jidao.61 The two are linked by a concrete road. In 2006, Upper
and Lower Jidao together had a total of 243 households and 1,160 resi-
dents (Kaili Shi Fupin Kaifa Bangongshi 2006,1). But Upper Jidao makes
up less than half of the total population, with 105 households and just
more than 400 people, although village residents said the actual number
of people living in the village was usually between 250 and 300.62 As a
tourism destination, the village is often referred to as Jidao Miao Village
(Jidao Miao Zhai), although as of this writing, all of the tourism develop-
ments and activities occur in Upper Jidao as a result of decisions made by
government officials and consultants in the early 2000s to focus tourism
on Upper Jidao and not Lower Jidao. To that end, there is often no mention
of the difference, spatial or otherwise, between Upper and Lower Jidao in
World Bank publications; in some documents what is referred to as simply
“Jidao” is listed to have 403 residents (see World Bank 2008,18), which can
only be the population of Upper Jidao.63
Average reported incomes in Jidao (including migrant remittances)
have hovered around ¥2,000 per household (World Bank 2008 and 2011),
or, more precisely, the average annual per capita income for the majority
of households in the mid-2ooos was about ¥1,100 (Kaili Shi Fupin Kaifa
Bangongshi 2006, 2). In my survey of forty-five households in Upper
Jidao from 2006 to 2007, the majority of households reported an annual
income of less than ¥3,000 (including remittances; table 1.4). The higher
household incomes included those who received retirement salaries andSimilar, with Minor Differences |	57
table 1.4. Annual household income in
Upper Jidao as reported in 2006-2007
Annual Household
Income (RMB)
Less than 1,000
1,000-1,999
2,000-2,999
More than 3,000
No response
Number of Households
(45 Surveyed)
8
7
12
17*
1
Source: Author survey, 2006-2007.
*(Ten reported incomes were more than 7,000)
those with professional training (including a teacher, a village clinician,
and individuals engaged in carpentry, livestock sales, and construction).
Because of extensive out-migration, households in Upper Jidao were fairly
small at the time, averaging around three to four people; in the mid-2ooos,
approximately 38 percent of the population in Upper Jidao had migrated
out (World Bank 2008, 21). The stated goal in the village’s 11th Five Year
Plan was to raise average village per capita annual incomes to ¥3,500, with
40 percent of this income to be derived from tourism (Kaili Shi Fupin
Kaifa Bangongshi 2006, 5). According to the project agreement document
prepared by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development
(the World Bank unit involved in the loan project) and Guizhou provincial
authorities, the target average per capita income for 2014 in Jidao (Upper
or Lower is not specified) is ¥2,240 (World Bank 2009,12).
Tourism development in Upper Jidao began in 2002, when the village
was selected to be a part of the Bala River Demonstration Project for Rural
Tourism, a provincial program for poverty alleviation through tourism
development (figure 1.3). Tourism to the Bala River area was intended to
capitalize on the ethnic minority customs and crafts of the region’s Miao
population through the development of handicrafts for sale, cultural per-
formances, and general rural sightseeing. The Bala River project included
seven villages, among them Nanhua and Upper Langde. Three of these
villages fall within the administration of Kaili and four within neighbor-
ing Leishan county, a fact that complicated the execution of the program58	| Chapter 1
figure 1.3. A map of the seven villages in the original Bala River Demonstration
Project for Rural Tourism illustrates the idea for a tourism region. The chart on
the right outlines the various tourism resources and attractions in each village,
the transport infrastructure to be constructed, and plans for accommodation.
The dotted line between Upper Jidao and Upper Langde indicates the adminis-
trative division separating Kaili from Leishan county. Adapted from map 5 in
Guizhou Tourism Bureau, Rural Tourism Plan, 2006-2020 (Guiyang: Guizhou
Provincial Tourism Administration, 2006).
as local governments competed against each other for tourists and tour-
ism profits.
Since 2002, the push to turn Upper Jidao into an ethnic tourism desti-
nation has involved a number of different organizations and companies,
both international and domestic. My account of Upper Jidao’s engagement
with tourism development is culled from a number of sources, including
publicly available World Bank publications, interviews with government
officials and NGO directors, discussions with village leaders, published
newspaper articles in the Chinese and international press, published
conference proceedings, local government documents and reports, and
information posted on the websites of relevant groups, funders, and orga-
nizations. The attention paid to tourism, ethnic cultural heritage, andSimilar, with Minor Differences |	59
rural development by the central Chinese state, provincial governments,
and international development agencies has also motivated a wide range
of Chinese academic research on such issues, especially in Guizhou.64
At a provincial level, the goal was (and continues to be) to expand upon
the existing rural tourism industry to address problems of persistent rural
poverty and concerns over heritage loss. With a seed grant of US$360,000
from the World Bank, the first project in 2002 aimed to produce a Tour-
ism Development Master Plan for Guizhou and was implemented by the
World Tourism Organization, a United Nations agency (UNWTO), and
the Ireland International Tourism Company, who won the project bid.
Together with the China National Tourism Administration (CNTA) and
the Guizhou Tourism Bureau, these agencies invited tourism experts
from around the world to help create a twenty-year tourism development
scheme for the province. The Bala River Demonstration Project for Rural
Tourism (see figure 1.3) was one outcome of this project. According to
the UNWTO (2003), “It is believed that the development of the villages
surrounding the river valley, will play an integral part in attracting tour-
ists and improving the quality of life for the local inhabitants.... With a
population of approximately 400-500 people in each of these villages and
an estimated activity rate [or participation rate] within a single village to
be of the order of 50 per cent or greater, it is expected that each village has
at least 200 employment opportunities.” The project acknowledged draw-
ing on the experiences of existing tourism villages like Upper Langde and
Nanhua. The other five villages included in this demonstration project
were Huai’enbao (a former Qing dynasty fortress village originally built
by Han migrants to the region), Upper Jidao, Jiaomeng, Nanmeng, and
Maomaohe.65
With the seed funding, the Irish consultancy firm and provincial gov-
ernment officials evaluated the potential of rural tourism in the selected
villages and developed a set of principal objectives. These included the
development of tourism as a key economic growth sector, sustainability,
increases to revenue and cash incomes, and more effective branding of
Guizhou as a cultural and environmental tourism destination (UNWTO
2003). In October 2004 an international forum on rural tourism was held
in Guiyang, the provincial capital, during which a number of invited con-
sultants and experts went on an evaluation and study tour to some of the
demonstration projects throughout the province, including the Bala River6o | Chapter 1
region (Yang S., ed. 2005). This initial evaluation program was further
bolstered by a grant of NZ$500,000 from New Zealand’s International
Aid and Development Agency (NZAID) for a project titled “Community-
Based Cultural Heritage Tourism Systems,” which was executed by a New
Zealand consultancy firm called Performance Excellence Ltd. (Zhang X.
2005), with the cooperation of the Guizhou Tourism Bureau. This project
ran from March 2004 through April 2006 with the goal of implementing a
community-centered, regional network of village-based tourism associa-
tions between the seven Bala River villages. Again, the focus was to create
practical methods for diversifying tourism in the area and to alleviate
rural poverty (Zhang X. 2005). The key individuals implementing the pro-
gram in Guizhou included Bill Rout, a sociologist from New Zealand, and
Zhang Xiaosong, who has held multiple positions as dean of the School of
International Tourism and Culture at Guizhou Normal University, direc-
tor of the Guizhou Provincial Center for Tourism Research and Public
Outreach (established in 2004 as a unit of the Guizhou Tourism Bureau)
and as a committee member of the Guizhou Political Consultative Con-
ference. Zhang Xiaosong has played a significant role in mediating and
directing tourism plans in the Bala River region, and in 2006, she estab-
lished the Guizhou Rural Tourism Development Center.
According to reports written by Zhang Xiaosong (2005) and Li Zaiyong
(2005), then the vice-governor of Qiandongnan prefecture, the 2004-06
community-based tourism development program sought to construct a
management system for monitoring, controlling, and evaluating tourism
at the village level. As one of the first parts of this training program, rep-
resentatives from each village and a selection of government officials went
on a study tour in spring 2004, traveling to other ethnic tourism sites in
Guizhou as well as to Ping’an in Guangxi. Two residents of Upper Jidao
and three from Lower Jidao went on this trip. The purpose of this tour
was to allow villagers to experience rural tourism, to study rural tourism
businesses such as family-run guesthouses, and to gain new perspectives
on how to do the work of tourism.66
The NZAID-funded community-based tourism project developed a
series of workshops to promote “self-enlightenment” (Zhang X. 2005,17)
among the villagers, who discussed their resources, opinions, and experi-
ences to develop workable approaches to tourism management in their
home villages. Tourism associations (liiyou xiehui) were created in eachSimilar, with Minor Differences |	61
of the seven Bala River Demonstration Project villages, and women in
particular were encouraged to create their own associations to solidify
their role and participation in the tourism industries. Representatives
from these associations held meetings with each other, where they were
to share information about issues such as sanitation, cooperation, and
leadership strategies. In a published report on these workshops, Zhang
Xiaosong notes that the tourism association in Upper Jidao was particu-
larly creative and efficient in using the ten tons of cement provided to
each village as part of the program for the repair and construction of vil-
lage paths by creating cobblestone walkways and a performance space.
Through the ingenuity of the villagers in combining cement with the aes-
thetically more attractive stones, Zhang wrote, in Upper Jidao “an ancient
yet civilized village was appearing before your eyes” (Zhang X. 2005,18).
The basic goal was to make the villagers the “owners” of their tourism
industries. Other responsibilities, such as keeping statistics on the number
of tourist visits and using transparent accounting methods for recording
tourism incomes, were stressed.
The end of this funding program in 2006 marked the beginning of
the economic and industry-building phase of rural tourism development
in Guizhou, coinciding with the declaration of the China Rural Tourism
year and the start of the 11th Five Year Plan, with the focus on building a
New Socialist Countryside. By spring 2006, plans were well under way in
Upper Jidao. Zhang Xiaosong, with the support of the Guizhou Tourism
Bureau, negotiated an agreement for a private firm, the Guizhou Shan
Li Tourism Development Company, to finance infrastructural improve-
ments in the Bala River region and the Libo National Nature Reserve tour-
ism region, another designated tourism development area.67 One of Shan
Li’s projects would be the construction of high-end hotels in both regions,
and Upper Jidao was selected as the location for the Bala River hotel.68 The
relationship between the Guizhou government, village associations, and
Shan Li was viewed as a mutually beneficial arrangement, where Shan Li
leased land use rights from the village for twenty years to build and start
up the hotel.
According to a report by the general manager of Shan Li, Zhang Tan,
10 percent of annual profits would be split equally between the village
tourism association and a “workstation” in the village for experts and
researchers, and another 10 percent would go directly into cultural and62	| Chapter 1
environmental protection efforts in the village. It was anticipated in such
an arrangement that the initial investment would be paid off in fifteen
years, and after twenty years, the entire business would be given back to
the village (Zhang T. 2008,182). In Upper Jidao, land was selected for the
hotel and initial contracts for land use rights were arranged. According
to Zhang Xiaosong in 2006, she envisioned the hotel to primarily attract
wealthy foreign tourists, with rooms priced around ¥200 or more a night.69
She emphasized that the desire for a hotel in the village, instead of fam-
ily guesthouses, had also been expressed by Upper Jidao residents, where
male and female visitors stayed in separate rooms, if not separate homes,
even if married. This cultural norm, they realized, would not suit tourists.
Activities around rural tourism promotion and development flour-
ished at the national and provincial level in this period; another major
international conference on rural tourism was held in Guiyang in Septem-
ber 2006, organized in conjunction with the World Bank and UNWTO,
with another study tour arranged for conference participants. Unfortu-
nately for Upper Jidao, although the original itinerary for this confer-
ence included a stop in their village, construction on a parking lot and
other transport infrastructure had not yet begun, and the conference tour
bypassed them for the more accessible village of Upper Langde. Foreign
press coverage on rural tourism in Guizhou increased over this year and
the next; an article about the Bala River region was published in the Wall
Street Journal (Sesser and Fong 2006), and Upper Jidao was featured in
a Reuters report on the New Socialist Countryside program (Blanchard
2007).70 The Guizhou Tourism Board published a Guizhou Provincial
Rural Tourism Development Plan in June 2006, which was approved by
the CNTA (Guizhou Tourism Bureau 2006), in anticipation of a larger
application for World Bank funding. In the 2006 Guizhou provincial plan,
the original Bala River Demonstration Project from 2002 was renamed
the Bala River Miao Minority Village Community, and Upper Jidao was
again identified as a “demonstration village” (ibid., 40-41). The Guizhou
provincial government eventually submitted an application to the World
Bank for USs6o million to fund a broader project titled “Guizhou Cul-
tural and Natural Heritage Protection and Development Program” (which
was approved in May 2009).
A New Socialist Countryside development program for Jidao (both
Upper and Lower villages) was concurrently produced by the regionalSimilar, with Minor Differences |	63
governments of Kaili and Sankeshu township in May 2006; this program
outlined a variety of infrastructure, construction, and sanitation projects
to be undertaken during the 11th Five Year Plan, much of it directed at
improving the village’s prospects as a tourism destination. This included
building a new bridge directly into Upper Jidao, creating a larger perfor-
mance space, and constructing a cultural center in Upper Jidao (Kaili Shi
Fupin Kaifa Bangongshi 2006). Allocated funds totaled more than ¥8 mil-
lion, with nearly ¥4 million coming as aid from the wealthy eastern city
of Ningbo. According to village leaders in Upper Jidao, Jidao as a whole
would receive ¥500,000 a year for projects that they would be responsible
for executing, such as paving roads and improving water lines. Of these
funds, 80 percent (¥400,000) was allocated to tourism-related projects
in Upper Jidao specifically, such as for building a cultural center, while
Lower Jidao received less aid because, ostensibly, it was not considered
a major part of tourism-related development that was intended to be the
central project in the village.71
As part of the preparations for the larger, provincial World Bank loan
application, a social assessment report on the state of Indigenous and
local peoples included in the project was completed in 2008 by the Cen-
ter for Ethnic and Folk Literature and Arts Development (a unit within
the national Ministry of Culture) with the Guizhou Provincial Center for
Tourism Research and Public Outreach (World Bank 2008). In this par-
ticular document, the authors address in detail the anticipated expendi-
tures and components of the project. Upper Jidao is identified as a village
for tourism development and cultural heritage preservation, focusing on
the well-preserved songs, dances, and old houses (ibid., 40). Moreover,
the process of making Upper Jidao into a tourism destination is noted to
require not only infrastructure but also the creation of appropriate ethnic
Miao song-and-dance performances. This model of tourism was precisely
the idea of “the village as theme park” and had already been popularized
in Upper Langde and Nanhua, which both offered choreographed shows
for tourists.
Unlike in Ping’an, where the “content” of its tourism was primarily
the landscape, from the beginning Upper Jidao was being developed as
an ethnic tourism site. Thus village residents have continually needed to
find ways to display their ethnicity. As early as 2004, plans for tourism in
Upper Jidao included creating various groups that would each practice64	| Chapter 1
and prepare a particular Miao traditional performance. There was one
group for singing traditional “love songs” (qing ge, typically a call-and-
response performance between men and women, although they practiced
separately out of propriety), a group of men who practiced playing the
lusheng, a group of women who practiced lusheng dances, and a group
of older men and women who practiced “ancient songs” (gu ge, also in
the call-and-response style, retelling stories with a moral lesson). Group
practices were originally scheduled to occur every other day, but in 2006,
villagers said without many tourists to perform to, there was no reason to
practice so frequently. Inspiration and influences for these performances
were drawn from a range of sources. For example, the “love song” group
watched locally produced video recordings of other Miao villagers per-
forming the same genre for ideas on how to sing, what to sing about, and
how to dress.72 In 2007, the Kaili municipal government hired a profes-
sional dance troupe to teach the villagers a more professionalized song-
and-dance performance.
The internal leadership structure and tourism organization in Upper
Jidao was complex yet straightforward. As a result of the training ses-
sions from 2004 to 2006, Upper Jidao, like the other six Bala River region
villages, created a village tourism association that included two women’s
representatives (required by the program) and also Teacher Pan, who was
not an elected village subcommittee member but had been involved with
tourism projects from the beginning. The rest of the tourism association
was comprised of the six or seven elected members of the village subcom-
mittee members (xiaozu). When I inquired about this overlap between
the elected village subcommittee and the tourism association, they simply
said that there weren’t enough people in the village to have two separate
committees and that because the subcommittee members were already
elected to be leaders, it made sense that they should also be in charge of
tourism. This meant, however, that every year the subcommittee and the
tourism association might change members, as new people were elected
or others left the village. As a result, those who stayed in Upper Jidao bore
the burden of carrying plans forward each year—namely, Teacher Pan
and a woman named Qin. Both were educated, fluent speakers of standard
Chinese (Mandarin), who also, as some villagers mentioned, had steady
incomes, so neither Teacher Pan nor Qin needed to worry about making
money and could instead give some of their time to the tourism associa-Similar, with Minor Differences |	65
tion.73 Teacher Pan received a monthly retirement stipend, having served
for many years as the principal of the local middle school in Paile village;
Qin was married to a schoolteacher from Upper Jidao who taught at the
school in Nanhua. Qin ran the village clinic, which she regarded as her
primary occupation even though the work carried no wage, only minimal
compensation. She was also the village’s unofficial tour guide and usually
the first called upon by tour agencies and government officials to greet and
host visiting groups.
Teacher Pan was a central figure in Upper Jidao’s tourism plans,
although he was never elected to the village subcommittee. Rather, local
government officials, including Zhang Xiaosong, had approached him
directly to assist with the tourism development in Upper Jidao because
of his previous leadership experiences. In effect, he became the de facto
director of tourism in the village, serving as the coordinator and negotia-
tor for tour groups that wanted to visit (and hosting researchers like me
in his home). Like Teacher Pan, Qin was more educated than her village
peers, having completed postsecondary studies in nursing at a polytechnic
school in Kaili. She spoke standard Chinese with ease, and she seemed to
genuinely enjoy being involved in tourism development. All of the par-
ticipation in tourism was strictly voluntary, although Teacher Pan was
frequently chosen as the village representative for study tours (to Ping’an
in 2004 and to Yunnan in 2007). Qin, along with ten other young adults
from Upper Jidao, participated in a tourism training program at Guizhou
University in the summer of 2006. Upon their return, however, most par-
ticipants said it was not an especially interesting experience. Both Qin
and Teacher Pan were frequently called upon to speak to media reporters
and officials about the village, appearing on domestic television programs
broadcast on Shanghai TV and on CCTV 9, the state-run English-lan-
guage station. Tour guides and government representatives tended to
engage with these two first when discussing tourism plans, thus bypassing
the elected village leadership subcommittee members. When I asked them
about their role in the village’s affairs, both Teacher Pan and Qin agreed
that they felt it was their obligation to help the village as best as they could.
And yet, for Qin particularly, her responsibilities in tourism sometimes
conflicted with her own aspirations to further her medical training.
Ongoing beautification projects in the village were initiated to make
the place look more inviting and to look more like a rural ethnic tour-66	| Chapter 1
ism destination. Concrete and cement walls were covered with wooden
planks, glass windows were covered with decorative wooden frames, trash
cans were made out of straw baskets (later, ceramic pickling vats wrapped
in straw were used as trash cans), and a large wooden gate was raised at the
village entrance along the main highway passing through the Bala River
region. Signs on the highway announced “Jidao Miao Village,” indicating
its status as a worthy tourist destination and marking the village as an
ethnic minority community; large color posters advertising events were
periodically raised next to the road (figure 1.4). A new parking lot was
built in 2010 along the newly constructed highway, further announcing
the village as a tourism destination (see figure 5.6).
Given all of the attention paid to tourism and the village from 2002
on, from the perspective of the residents of Upper Jidao, it seemed like
everyone—locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally—wanted
them to do tourism and to do it well. At first, enthusiasm for tourism was
high, and a number of young adults who had migrated returned to the
village around 2004 in the hopes of participating in the new industry. By
the time of my research in 2006, though, the fever for tourism had waned
somewhat. There simply weren’t that many tourists coming to Upper
Jidao; between the few tour groups that did pass through and a smatter-
ing of independent tourists, village leaders estimated approximately two
thousand tourists in all of 2006. Part of the problem was infrastructure;
without a wide, stable bridge and road that could support a large tour bus,
many potential tourists and tour guides simply passed by without stop-
ping. The seven Bala River region villages did not cooperate with each
other as the NZAID-funded workshops had hoped. Instead, the villages
viewed each other as competitors not collaborators.
A lack of coordination between the county-level governments in Kaili
and Leishan meant that there was no single central clearinghouse for tour-
ist information on the Bala River region; each government only assisted
the villages in its own administrative region. Within Jidao village, the
decision to focus on Upper Jidao for tourism was met with dismay from
the residents of Lower Jidao. By the end of 2006, the Shan Li hotel project
in Upper Jidao had stalled and was abandoned before construction even
began. During a visit to Upper Jidao in December 2006, Zhang Xiaosong
was asked directly by the members of the tourism association what had
happened to Shan Li. Her response was simply that it was not the rightSimilar, with Minor Differences |	67
figure 1.4. Signs along the old highway S308 attempt to capture the attention of
passing tourists. The poster to the left advertises the “Kaili Ecological Minority
Culture Festival-Bala River Summer Tourism Holiday.” The wooden gate to the
right reads, “Jidao Miao Village” (2007). Photo by the author.
project for this place. Later, Teacher Pan explained to me that the Jidao
village Party Secretary, who was from Lower Jidao, had written a letter to
a provincial-level official in 2006, complaining about the unequal alloca-
tion of development funds and resources in the village. This had caused
enough of a stir at the provincial level, Teacher Pan surmised, to prompt
the Guizhou Tourism Bureau and Shan Li to back off from their original
plan to build a hotel in Upper Jidao.
But over time, despite the slow start, things did progress, albeit halt-
ingly. Tour guides seeking new destinations started bringing tourists to
the village in 2007. This was evidenced not only by the villagers’ accounts
but also by the increased presence of photographs of Upper Jidao on travel
blogs and photo-sharing websites. Media publicity increased: Japan Air-
lines’s in-flight magazine published a special issue on Guizhou in 2007
with a multipage color spread on Upper Jidao; the Chinese version of the68	| Chapter 1
fashion magazine Marie Claire published a long story on women’s embroi-
dery in Upper Jidao in December 2011. In July 2008, with the money from
the New Socialist Countryside program, Upper Jidao built a new, larger
performance space, a new cultural center (also used for meetings), and
could now organize performances for tour groups (figure 1.5). All village
residents could (and most would) dress in their festival attire before the
arrival of a tour group and set up tables for welcoming tourists with rice
liquor. Once the tourists entered the village, young men and women per-
formed a series of songs, dances, and lusheng playing. The “ancient songs”
group of older men and women were also part of the performance. They
charged the visiting tour groups anywhere between ¥400 and ¥800 per
reception-performance, depending on how well Teacher Pan negotiated.
After deducting for the costs of alcohol and any food served to the tour-
ists, those who performed and helped with the organization earned at
most ¥5-¥7 each. The money was viewed not as a source of significant
income, because it was practically negligible, but more as shared outcome
to the years of preparation and organization.
After the Shan Li hotel plans fell through, another developer, intro-
duced by the Kaili municipal government, came to Upper Jidao with
plans to build a new hotel using funds obtained by the Guizhou Tourism
Bureau directly from the CNTA. Again, land use rights were arranged,
contracts were signed, and this time construction began. However, by
summer 2008, the hotel’s construction was at a standstill. In March 2010,
the hotel’s wooden frame was complete but lacked windows, fittings, and
internal wiring; Teacher Pan said he had no idea when it would be finished.
The developer had been evasive during their last conversation, Teacher
Pan added.74 Zhang Xiaosong’s organization, Chain Reaction (founded as
part of the Guizhou Rural Tourism Development Center), started a hand-
icrafts training program in 2008 for the women’s association of Upper
Jidao to both preserve the craft and to create a new source of income.75
Older women, with the skilled knowledge to embroider elaborate designs,
were to teach embroidery to the younger women, many of whom had little
experience with the craft. Qin was put in charge of the group, organizing
nighttime meetings, managing the funds, and collecting finished pieces.
The women’s association was provided with fabric, thread, and needles,
and they were given color copies of embroidery designs taken from books
that the development center’s collaborators thought would be marketable.Similar, with Minor Differences |	69
figure 1.5. Qin and Wu of the Upper Jidao Tourism Association orga-
nize village residents before a reception and performance for a tour
group (2008). Photo by the author.
This project was largely funded through the personal efforts of Zhang
Xiaosong and a Hong Kong-based philanthropist, who provided funding
to purchase supplies.76 In my conversations in 2008 with the women in
Upper Jidao about this project, many said that the designs and embroi-
dery styles they were given to practice were entirely new to them; some
women were afraid of doing a bad job and thus reluctant to participate.
Others were unhappy or disappointed when their works were not deemed
good enough to sell or not selected for recognition; gradually some women
stopped participating. The project did not cease entirely, however, and by
2012 the lower level of the village cultural center had been turned into
a small exhibition space, holding some of the embroidered pieces and a
copy of the 2011 Marie Claire issue, while the better works were framed
and gifted by the organization to visiting dignitaries including, in 2010,
the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick.77 As I observed their
meetings and spoke with Qin about this project, I realized that the village70	| Chapter 1
women were not practicing old forms of embroidery so much as learning
new methods and designs for doing it. This seemed a fitting way of under-
standing tourism in Upper Jidao more generally: in the guise of cultural
preservation and doing the work of tourism, the villagers spent the past
decade learning new ways of how to be ethnic.
SIMILAR, WITH MINOR DIFFERENCES
Looking at these histories of tourism in Ping’an and Upper Jidao, there
is an implicit tendency to compare the experiences of both villages. Their
experiences could also be taken as different “stages” within a singular
tourism development process, where Ping’an could serve as a mature
example and Upper Jidao as a young, inexperienced newcomer. Indeed,
village residents in both places often commented that they wanted to see
other tourism villages in order to learn how other rural ethnic minor-
ity communities were doing tourism. But given the sometimes subtle,
sometimes obvious differences in government participation, funding,
local politics, social and cultural norms, and economic options available
in Ping’an and Upper Jidao, what these villages were experiencing was
simultaneously familiar to other rural ethnic tourism destinations and
unique to their own circumstances. Teacher Pan assessed the situations
in Ping’an and Upper Jidao with a Chinese saying: similar, with minor
differences {da tong xiao yi). Having visited Ping’an before as part of the
provincial-level study tour in 2004, and again in 2007 at my invitation,
Teacher Pan did not see the need to differentiate between the two villages;
rather, he suggested that I concentrate on their similarities.
Instead of focusing so intently on the differences between the villages
and, by extension, the classification of each village’s tourism as a stage
of development, exploring the similarities illuminates the deeper and
broader issues at stake in doing tourism while acknowledging the myriad
contextual differences. Understanding the impetus for villagers in Ping’an
and Upper Jidao to learn how to be more ethnic for the tourism market
opens up the question of how they were also learning how to be rural
in particularly touristic ways. For Ping’an and Upper Jidao, this meant
producing (or reproducing) themselves as rural ethnic sites for tourist
consumption. The national agenda for rural development encapsulated in
the campaign to build a New Socialist Countryside explicitly called uponSimilar, with Minor Differences |	71
rural Chinese to learn to be rural and to modernize at the same time. For
both villages, how they were expected to do so in practice also drew upon
the recent history of tourism in postreform China as well as discourses
about rural livelihoods and subjectivities in order to justify national poli-
cies and proposed changes.CHAPTER 2
PEASANT FAMILY HAPPINESS
A New Socialist Countryside
For a few years, the phrase nong jia le seemed to appear everywhere I went
in China. In March 2006, on my first visit to Upper Jidao, a handful of
houses had the three-character phrase printed on woven bamboo plates
that were hung above doorways. Under each of the Chinese characters of
nong fc,jia and le was written “farm,” “-er,” and “inn” (figure 2.1).
Ostensibly, I later learned from Teacher Pan, the families whose houses
displayed these signs had agreed to, or at least expressed interest in, host-
ing tourists who came to the village. I only ever saw one of these house-
holds hosting any tourists, largely facilitated by the fact that their home
was located directly above the parking lot, which was also the village bas-
ketball court. “Hosting,” in Upper Jidao, meant providing a meal or even
just a cup of tea and a place to sit down; at the time, there were no tourist
facilities in the village. These efforts at nong jia le were modeled on nearby
established tourism villages—in particular, Upper Langde (Oakes 2011,
29), where the Leishan county government had provided carved wooden
plaques that read Miao '$) jia le A (& is the character for the Miao
ethnic group) for households engaged in providing rooms and meals to
tourists.
In the following years, I stayed overnight at a nong jia le guesthouse in
Jiankou village, Huairou county, north of Beijing; spent time with friends
in Ping’an whose new guesthouse was called Nong Jia Le in Chinese and
7374	| Chapter 2
figure 2.1. In 2006, households in Upper Jidao that had indicated
they were willing to receive tourists hung nongjia le signs above their
doorways. By 2007, most of these signs had been removed or turned
around, leaving the blank backs facing outward. Photo by the author.
Peasant Family Happy in English; spied small restaurants named Nong
Jia Le in towns and cities across Guangxi and Guizhou; and enjoyed a
postconference dinner at a three-story restaurant in Hefei, the capital of
Anhui, also called Nong Jia Le.1 During that particular evening in Hefei,
I wondered what the people in Upper Jidao and Ping’an would have
thought of this rural-themed restaurant. Would it have been rural enough
for them? The interior was predictably decorated, with a few displays ofPeasant Family Happiness |	75
wooden farm tools in the lobby, tables and chairs made of bamboo and
woven reeds, and blue and white batiks serving as tablecloths and wall
decorations. This was rural tourism, inside out—a taste of the country in
the city. What Ping’an and Upper Jidao were striving for, however, was
rural tourism that could bring the city to the countryside.
In addition to serving as the name of a family guesthouse or a res-
taurant, nongjia le, which I translate as “peasant family happiness,” was
the phrase used in both Ping’an and Upper Jidao by residents when they
would describe the business of running guesthouses and restaurants.2 The
phrase was oftentimes used interchangeably with “doing tourism”—vil-
lagers would talk about doing nongjia le as a way of explaining what possi-
bilities they saw for participating in tourism development. For the village
residents, nongjia le simply meant they would establish and operate their
own guesthouses and restaurants. At a broader, national level, nongjia le
has become a catchphrase for any and all types of “rural” tourism experi-
ences throughout China, typically focused around eating locally grown
foods and participating in other agricultural activities that could take
place in a village.
Throughout the 2000s, the growth of domestic tourism in China
occurred alongside, and in conjunction with, multiple campaigns for
rural socioeconomic development, civilized tourism, and the promo-
tion of rural tourism under the moniker of nong jia le. All of these cam-
paigns merged together in 2006 as part of the national policy to build a
New Socialist Countryside—a key component of the 11th Five Year Plan
(2006-10). The theming of 2006 as the year of China Rural Tourism indi-
cated a renewed energy and attention from the national government on
strengthening and promoting the relationship between rural development
and rural tourism. But these campaigns were only the latest iterations of
previous efforts, including the campaign to Open Up the West (Xibu Da
Kaifa) begun in 2000, and rural ethnic tourism had already been pro-
moted as an opportunity for socioeconomic development in rural ethnic
regions, particularly in Guizhou and Yunnan, in the 1990s (Donaldson
2007, Oakes 1998, and Schein 2000).
The development of rural tourism in ethnic minority communities
during the postreform era has drawn on a set of historical state policies
and shared social discourses that continue to characterize the nation’s
rural ethnic minorities for tourists, government officials, and village resi-76	| Chapter 2
table 2.1. National per capita annual income, 2006-12
	Urban Disposable (RMB)	Rural Net (RMB)
2006	11,760	3,587
2007	13,786	4,140
2008	15,781	4,761
2009	17,175	5,153
2010	19,109	5,919
2011	21,809	6,977
2012	24,565	7,917
Source: All China Data Center 2012.
dents alike. Communist-era documentary and feature films about ethnic
minorities established particular visual representations of peoples in ways
that highlighted how ethnicity was to be known visually and that tied
ethnic identity firmly to strategies of visual recognition and, by extension,
to tourist imaginations that persist to this day. These ideas about ethnic
identity and culture, further codified and communicated in official gov-
ernment reports, scholarly publications, and media representations, now
exist in dialogue with the expectations and experiences of what it means
to be ethnic and to do tourism in Ping’an and Upper Jidao. Moreover, the
designation of Ping’an and Upper Jidao as rural ethnic minority com-
munities intensifies justifications for the need to develop these places and
renders the villages and landscapes even more exotic and interesting as
sights within the nation. To that end, in the first decade of the twenty-first
century, the Chinese state has again turned its attention to the growing
income gap within the national population and the often violent eruptions
of social unrest, which frequently (though not exclusively) occur in less-
urbanized, less-developed regions of the country.
National statistics on average incomes in urban and rural regions in
the 2000s reveal a widening economic chasm and are sometimes used as
statistical evidence for why tourism should be promoted in rural areas as
a means of poverty alleviation (table 2.1). Although these numbers offer a
simplistic, binary view of the Chinese population divided upon only one
axis (the rural-urban divide), they are useful in understanding how andPeasant Family Happiness |	77
table 2.2. Guangxi per capita annual income, 2006
Urban Disposable (RMB)
Guangxi	9,899
Guilin	11,220
Longsheng county	9,770
Rural Net (RMB)
2,771
3,391
2,350
Source: Data compiled from Guangxi Statistical Bureau 2007 and the Guilin Statistical Committee 2007.
why development efforts have been targeted at “the countryside” and at
speeding up processes of urbanization (chengshi hud) in rural areas. This
has been achieved partly through the resettlement of rural communities
in newly built, mixed-use housing complexes closer to main roads and
transportation. Urban annual per capita incomes are calculated in terms
of annual disposable income, meaning the total household income plus
a subsidy for keeping a household diary minus income tax and personal
contributions to social security. Rural annual per capita income is the
net amount, meaning the total income plus the participation subsidy and
gifts from nonrural relatives minus taxes and fees, household operating
expenses, and depreciation of durable goods.3
More specifically, in the regions where Ping’an and Upper Jidao are
located (including province, municipality, and/or county), the urban-
rural income gap is notable in two respects: first, for the relatively lower
incomes overall in Guangxi and Guizhou, as compared to 2006 national
figures, and second, for the disparity between rural and urban incomes
within each region. Table 2.2 provides 2006 data from Guangxi, Guilin
municipality, and Longsheng county (where Ping’an village is located).
Table 2.3 provides 2006 data from Guizhou, including provincial aver-
ages and statistics from Kaili municipality (where Upper Jidao village
is located). While both urban and rural per capita annual incomes in
Guangxi and Guizhou were below the national average in 2006, the dif-
ferences between urban and rural incomes within Guangxi (¥7,128) and
Guizhou (¥7,132) are relatively similar to the difference between national
per capita urban and rural incomes (¥8,i73).4
China’s efforts in the mid-2ooos to build a New Socialist Countryside
where nong jia le could flourish indicated that tourism was not only seen
as an economic force, but that these policies also harbored intentions and
ambitions beyond the purely financial. In these years, domestic tourism78	| Chapter 2
table 2.3. Guizhou per capita annual income, 2006
Urban Disposable (RMB) Rural net (RMB)
Guizhou	9,117	1,985
Kaili	8,366	2,341
Source: Guizhou Statistical Bureau 2007.
numbers and revenue began to overshadow in-bound, international tour-
ist figures; media reports predicted the Chinese domestic tourism mar-
ket was the fastest growing such market in the world (Wang Yongchang
2006). In 2007, domestic tourism expenditures in China comprised about
70 percent of total tourism revenue. The rapid increase in numbers of
Chinese tourists, both at home and abroad, prompted numerous popular
mass media and online reports about the negative effects of tourism on
domestic transport networks and on the environment. There were also
well-publicized complaints about unseemly tourist behavior.
To address these concerns, tourism was transformed into social policy
in a national campaign to create “civilized” tourism (wenming liiyou, see
Chio 2010). While the campaign was intended as part of a larger “civilized
behavior” promotion in the years before the 2008 Beijing Olympics and
the 2010 Shanghai Expo, the impetus for the civilized tourism campaign
was rooted in the increasing number of reports of “bad behavior” com-
mitted by Chinese tourists abroad.5 This campaign drew specifically on
the Chinese concept of suzhi (quality), which has been commonly rep-
resented by the contrast between rural migrant workers and the ideal-
ized middle-class urban individual. Tourism was specifically invoked as
a viable means of promoting economic and social progress, the former
for rural Chinese and the latter for both rural and urban Chinese. Thus
the attention paid to domestic tourists and tourism in 2006 effectively
directed the focus of tourism onto discourses of development and state
contributions to strengthen national unity.6
Nevertheless, for the village communities that receive tourists, the dis-
tinction between domestic and foreign tourists matters relatively little.
What is infinitely more important is how they can harness the poten-
tial of tourism and travel to improve upon their own life conditions and
prospects. Doing tourism involves much more than being a tourist; it isPeasant Family Happiness |	79
a process of negotiation with politics, policies, and shared social prac-
tices. My anthropological analysis of tourism thus contends with preexist-
ing understandings and structures of travel within China.7 Tourism and
mobility more broadly must be approached not only from the subject posi-
tion of the tourist, but also through the various policies and changes that
have affected the lives of those who are in the business of doing tourism.8
DOMESTIC TOURISM IN CHINA
Historically, travel for pleasure in China was limited to wealthy classes of
the ruling elite, and for others, travel was typically for purposes of wage-
earning in urban centers or religious pilgrimage (Gang Xu 1999). The lat-
ter was greatly limited, and essentially forbidden, on ideological grounds
from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s, while wage migration was inten-
tionally hindered through the establishment of the hukou (household reg-
istration) system in the late 1950s (ibid., 72-73). A complex bureaucratic
system intended to concentrate development in urban areas while con-
tinuing the productivity of rural agricultural regions, the hukou system
categorized individuals both by place of residence and means of produc-
tion, categorized as either agricultural (nongye) or nonagricultural (fei
nongye).9 The net effect of the hukou system, coupled with the state-led
sociopolitical mass movements of the Great Leap Forward (1958-60) and
later the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), meant that leisure and pleasure
travel were hardly imaginable, let alone feasible, for the vast majority of
Chinese people.
While contemporary nostalgia for rurality has led to some depictions
of the “sent-down” or “rusticated” youth movement (zhishi qingniari) from
the late 1950s to mid-1970s as infused with a pretouristic golden glow of
discovery and enjoyment, in the early years of reform and opening from
the late 1970s into the 1980s, domestic tourism was openly discouraged in
government policy.10 According to Gang Xu (1999,73), drawing on R. Tang
(1990, 144), “in the early years of the 1980s, policymakers still squarely
insisted . .. that ‘it is temporarily not suitable to promote domestic tour-
ism.’ Obviously, the primary interest of the Chinese government in tour-
ism promotion was to earn hard currency. Plagued by dozens of problems
in the tourist supply system, especially the over-loaded transportation
infrastructure, most tourism planners held that, for the sake of interna-8o | Chapter 2
tional tourism, domestic tourism should be controlled.” This attention to
international inbound tourists was led by the Chinese state’s intention,
beginning in the 1970s, to harness foreign tourism as a means of increasing
foreign direct investments and foreign currency reserves, which served as
the main incentive for including tourism in national economic develop-
ment policies (Ghimire and Zhou 2001, 86-87; Gang Xu 1999,18-22). One
of the first Chinese cities to be opened to international tourism, in 1973,
was Guilin, less than one hundred kilometers from Ping’an.
As a result, “domestic tourism in China was virtually induced by
market demand” rather than by direct state intervention (Ghimire and
Zhou 2001, 97), and early rural tourism developments were “spontane-
ous,” emerging out of villages conveniently located near major sites of
national significance and the implementation of the “household respon-
sibility system” (geti hu) that allowed farmers to pursue nonagricultural,
income-generative activities (Gao, Huang, and Huang 2009, 3). Tourism
as an industry was first addressed in a 1984-85 policy document that set
out an initial framework for private and state-run investments in tour-
ism development and management, and in 1987, the “first national confer-
ence on domestic tourism” was held in Tianjin (Gang Xu 1999, 25 and 75).
Tourism (here meaning both international arrivals and domestic travels)
was formally identified as an industry in the 8th Five Year Plan, which
prompted policy changes at a structural level. Nevertheless, the state pri-
oritized international arrivals, although by the early 1990s, scholars began
to take stock of the domestic tourism industry as more than an economi-
cally beneficial side-project to the supposedly more important interna-
tional tourism market to China.11
Beginning in 1993, the central government took concrete steps toward
the better regulation and management of domestic tourism, including the
establishment of an “insurance deposit” by travel agencies to guard against
potential complaints and claims, improving public security at major tour-
ist sites, restructuring tourist prices, improvements to infrastructure and
sanitation, and environmental protection measures (Ghimire and Zhou
2001, 97-98).12 This increased attention to the business side of domestic
tourism came about after June 1989, when international tourist arrivals to
China dropped steeply after the student protests and violent government
response on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, compelling “large state-owned
travel services to engage actively in domestic tourism” (ibid., 96).Peasant Family Happiness |	81
Local provincial governments quickly realized the potential of tour-
ism as a part of national calls for rural poverty alleviation. Various efforts
emerged to create policies to address poverty alleviation and modern-
ization through rural tourism in the 1990s in Guizhou, Hebei, Sichuan,
and Yunnan (Gao, Huang, and Huang 2009, 3; and Oakes 1998, 125-30).
Nationally, additional structural reorganizations included the establish-
ment of the five-day working week on May 1,1995. The Chinese govern-
ment deemed tourism a new key growth area of the economy in 1998 and
introduced the Golden Weeks in October 1999 (Nyiri 2010, 61-62). The
Golden Weeks were three week-long national holidays, encompassing one
week each at Spring Festival (Lunar New Year), International Labor Day
(May 1), and National Day (October 1). These weeks provided for three
days of paid holiday or time off, and the remaining two working days of
the week were rearranged to the weekends immediately before or after, to
create five full nonwork days.
The Golden Weeks were essential for the success of tourism for Ping’an
and Upper Jidao because of the villages’ distance from major cities and
transport hubs. Both Ping’an and Upper Jidao are a two- to three-hour
drive from the nearest airport, in the cities of Guilin and Guiyang respec-
tively; flights from Beijing or Shanghai to these airports take around two
to three hours. Even with a flight and direct private transportation to the
villages, travel takes at least half a day and can be quite expensive. Most
domestic travelers I met preferred to visit these villages as part of a longer
package tour of the region to make the most economical trip (typically
by flying to the region and then traveling to a number of sites by tour bus
for five to seven days). The Golden Weeks allowed more domestic tour-
ists to undertake longer trips farther away from their places of residence,
but because these holiday periods were national, they created enormous
seasonal demands on transport systems (air, rail, and highways), hotels,
and other related industries. In response, the state revised the Golden
Week holidays in late 2007, and beginning in 2008, the May 1 holiday was
shortened to just one day before or after a weekend, while the National
Day and Spring Festival holiday weeks were left as before. To compen-
sate, the national government established additional one-day holidays for
the traditional Chinese festivals of Tomb-Sweeping Day (Qingming Jie,
in the early spring), Dragon’s Boat Festival (Duanwu Jie, in late spring/
early summer), and Mid-Autumn Festival (Zhongqiu Jie, in autumn). At82	| Chapter 2
the time, the impact of this change to the national holiday schedule on
village tourism businesses was a matter of great concern for residents of
Ping’an and Upper Jidao, whose businesses depended largely upon the
ability and willingness of tourists from Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai,
and other major cities to take a full week off for leisure travel.
Despite the revisions to the national holiday schedule, domestic
tourism numbers continue to increase steadily. Statistically, domestic
tourists now far outpace and outspend international tourists coming to
China; in 2006, there were 124.94 million foreign tourist arrivals (includ-
ing tourists from Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan), as compared to 1.394
billion domestic tourist trips. Similar to how the numbers of incoming
foreign tourists are calculated based on arrival numbers at ports of entry
(i.e., airports and land crossings), Chinese tourism authorities calculate
the number of domestic tourists based on ticket sales at official tour-
ism destinations or scenic areas (Nyiri 2010, 62). In 2008, just during
the October 1 National Day Golden Week, the China National Tourism
Administration (CNTA) estimated there were 178 million tourist trips
taken, a 22 percent increase over the same period in the previous year
(CNTA 2008c). As for tourism revenue, according to CNTA figures, for-
eign tourism revenue in 2006 was USS33.949 billion, compared to the
domestic tourism revenue of ¥622.97 billion, or approximately USS78.8
billion. The dramatic growth and strength of domestic tourism in China
over the 2006-10 period thus reflects and explains, in part, increased
government attention to tourism and its effects, both positive and nega-
tive (table 2.4).
A closer look at the statistics on domestic tourism, however, illumi-
nates the vastness and persistence of economic inequality in China in the
2000s. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBS), the
total population of China at the end of 2006 was 1.314 billion, of which
582 million (44 percent) were registered urban residents and 731 million
(56 percent) were rural residents (NBS 2011). The year 2006 was the first
in which the number of domestic tourism trips taken exceeded the total
population of the country; official statistics state that there were 1.394
billion domestic travel trips taken that year. This number increased to
1.610 billion domestic trips in 2007, or on average 1.2 trips per person. In
practice, of course, this figure indicates that many people may have taken
multiple tourist trips while others, presumably, may not have taken any atPeasant Family Happiness |	83
table 2.4. Comparison of domestic and overseas tourist numbers
and revenue, 2006-10
m = million; b = billion; t = trillion
	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010
Domestic tourists	1.394b	1.610b	1.712b	1.902b	2.103b
Domestic revenue (RMB)	622.97b	777.06b	874.93b	1.018f	1.258f
Overseas tourists*	124.94»z	131.87»z	130.03m	126.48»z	133.76»z
International revenue (USD)	33.949b	41.919b	40.843b	39.675b	45.814b
Source: NBS 2011.
*The category “Overseas tourists” includes those from Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and all other international
arrivals.
all. These figures should be regarded with some degree of critical distance;
within the categories of urban and rural populations there are significant
differences between income levels and travel habits. Rural populations in
China can include peri-urban, or suburban, communities close to such
major metropolitan commercial centers as Beijing or Guangzhou, where
incomes may be substantially higher than in the largely nonindustrial-
ized regions of Guizhou and Guangxi where I conducted fieldwork. These
tourism statistics, taken from official sources, do not acknowledge the
spectrum within each population group.
Table 2.5 disaggregates domestic tourism statistics from 2005 to 2010
for the country as a whole and according to urban/rural population cat-
egories as reported by the NBS.13 For a clearer sense of these numbers in
relation to total national population, table 2.6 provides an extract of the
2007 statistics on population, domestic tourism trips taken, and average
per capita spending by tourists, defined as urban or rural in the reported
figures. Urbanites outspent their rural counterparts by about ¥685, or
three times more, per trip in 2007; indeed, urban tourists that year spent
¥131 more than the urban average from 2006 (¥766.4). Rural tourists,
however, were much more frugal, spending on average a mere ¥0.6 more
per trip in 2007 than in 2006. For further comparison, table 2.7 pres-
ents national and regional data on tourism visits between the country,
Guangxi, and Guizhou. Guangxi receives far more tourists (both domes-
tic and international) than Guizhou, largely because of Guangxi’s earlier
involvement in the tourism industry with the historically famous city oftable 2.5. Major statistics of domestic tourism, 2005-10
Domestic Tourists	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010
Total (percentages reflect the total	1.21 billion	1.394 billion	1.61 billion	1.712 billion	1.902 billion	2.103 billion
number of tourist trips taken against	(92.7%)	(106.1%)	(122.5%)	(128.9%)	(142.5%)	(156.83%)
China’s total population in that year)						
Urban	496 million	576 million	612 million	703 million	903 million	1.065 billion
Rural	716 million	818 million	998 million	1.009 billion	999 million	1.038 billion
Average Per Capita Expenditure						
Total (RMB)	436.1	446.9	482.6	511	535.4	598.2
Urban	737.1	766.4	906.9	849.4	801.1	883
Rural	227.6	221.9	222.5	275.3	295.3	306
Source: NBS 2011.Peasant Family Happiness |	85
table 2.6. Domestic tourism statistics, urban and rural comparison, 2007
	Urban	Rural
Population (by residence)	606,330,000	714,960,000
Number of tourist trips	612,000,000	998,000,000
Average expenditure per trip (RMB)	906.9	222.5
Source: CNTA 2008b and NBS 2011.
table 2.7. Domestic and international tourist statistics for Guangxi, Guizhou,
and China, 2006
	Guangxi	Guizhou	China
Domestic tourists	73,996,700	47,157,500	1,394,000,000
International tourists	1,707,729	321,400	124,942,100
Source: Data compiled from Guangxi Statistical Bureau 2007, Guizhou Statistical Bureau 2007, and
CNTA 2007.
Guilin and later the popular “backpacker” destination, Yangshuo (Oakes
1998, 48-49)-
Tourism statistics alone cannot reveal the myriad problems faced by
rural communities, which by no means are all the same, but tables 2.5 and
2.6 show a continued economic divide between urban and rural popula-
tions in China in terms of tourist expenditures. Granted, in the 2000s,
more and more rural and urban Chinese were taking more leisure trips.
Yet the problem of rural poverty and the uneven pace of development in
rural regions remained unresolved. In terms of income, the gulf between
urban and rural Chinese was stark: in 2006, the per capita urban dispos-
able income was ¥11,760, as compared to a per capita rural net income of
just ¥3,587 (see table 2.1). Of course, within rural regions and even within
villages (as my own data from Ping’an and Upper Jidao showed), there
was a range of incomes and relative senses of wealth or need. These imbal-
ances were meant to be addressed in 2006 through a multipronged effort
to expand the possibilities of rural tourism as a contributor to socioeco-
nomic growth, to enact further rural development policies, and to rebrand
and promote rural areas as a valuable, worthy, and ultimately pleasurable
part of the modern Chinese nation.86	| Chapter 2
A NEW COUNTRYSIDE
The convergence of three national initiatives in 2006 marked tourism-
domestic tourism in particular—as a recognized, valuable avenue for rural
socioeconomic progress and development. Together with the growing
popularity of nongjia le as a type of tourism experience, the nexus of con-
cerns exhibited in CNTA’s China Rural Tourism theme, the campaign to
build a New Socialist Countryside, and the concomitant public campaign
for civilized tourism all pointed toward changing ideas about leisure,
imaginations of the future, and uses of the past in contemporary China.
The social, political, and economic issues at stake, as suggested in these
various programs, ranged from alleviating rural poverty to disciplining
one’s behaviors as a tourist to celebrating the pleasures of rural life. Plans
for using tourism development as a means toward rural economic growth
and modernization were under way well before 2006.14 But significantly,
the prominence of rural tourism in national campaigns in 2006 marked a
particular moment of attention paid to the potential capacity of rural and
ethnic minority communities to contribute to the nation’s overall well-
being. The push of rural development programs went far beyond material
improvements to offer new discourses of rural subjectivity and ways of
imagining and contributing to Chinese modernity.
The campaign to build a New Socialist Countryside, introduced in
late 2005 and officially begun in spring 2006, had its precedents in recur-
ring attempts by the Chinese government to address rural problems. This
extends as far back as Mao Zedong’s call for a Communist revolution in
his 1927 report on conditions of rural life in Hunan (Mao Z. 1975). At the
heart of these problems over the decades has been the question of rural
subjectivity, or the significance of rural Chinese to modern Communist
China’s political, social, and economic narratives of nationhood and prog-
ress. Indeed, “the ‘peasant’ construction of the countryside built cultural
and ideological legitimacy for Mao Zedong’s political and organizational
revolution” (Hayford 1998,150-51). This effectively created the image of an
older, undesirable society that had to be rejected and transformed through
discourses of turning farmers into peasants, tradition into feudalism, and
customs and religion into superstition (Cohen 1993,154; see also Chu 2010,
63-69; and Kipnis 1995).15 The vision and state-authorized classification
of Chinese peasants (nongmin), who are seen as at odds with unforgivingPeasant Family Happiness |	87
nature and burdened by their unequal status in relation to landowning
classes, justified the role of the Communist Party in the nation-state.16
Similar to the Ethnic Classification Project, this vision provided a struc-
ture within which the government could do the work of governing its
population.17 The hukou system was one such national policy that cre-
ated distinctions between populations, creating “a veritable paper barrier”
between rural and urban areas and limiting the mobility and opportuni-
ties of state-classified peasants (Chu 2010, 64).18
In the postreform era, rural underdevelopment has been frequently
glossed as the “three rural problems” (san nong wenti): agriculture
(nongye), peasants (nongmiri), and villages (nongcuri).19 As China’s domes-
tic and regional economies have diversified, however, rural residents are
no longer bound to agricultural labor and engage in an increasingly wide
range of income-generating activities, even while they may continue to
hold land-use rights and produce food for their own consumption. Some
may be large-scale farm owners or migrant farm laborers (Zhang and
Donaldson 2010); others, such as the guesthouse owners and restaura-
teurs in Ping’an who are still classified as rural, may run their own busi-
nesses that are only tangentially related to agricultural labor but remain
dependent upon certain administrative and historical conditions (such
as inherited family land) to exist. Nevertheless, despite these realities, the
category of the Chinese peasant persists to this day, particularly within
contemporary development and modernization plans including rural
tourism.20
The 2000 campaign Open Up the West (Xibu Da Kaifa) set the stage
for many of the policies and programs that followed in 2006. According
to David Goodman (2004, 3), “the stated goal was the development of
the interior and western regions of the PRC, in distinct contrast to the
emphasis of regional development policy since 1978 that had favored its
eastern and southern parts.” Both Guizhou and Guangxi were included,
the rhetoric of which suggested that “the west” was bounded and charac-
terized by “economic underdevelopment, a lack of economic infrastruc-
ture and large number of minority nationalities, as well as being in the
far interior of the land mass” (ibid., 6). Guangxi, of course, actually has a
southern coastline, and as Goodman points out, the sheer range of areas
and situations covered by the general designation of “the West” discur-
sively elides the many significant differences between these administra-88	| Chapter 2
tive units and cultural regions.21 This campaign, like the New Socialist
Countryside campaign to come later, had a basic double aim: to increase
opportunities for rural residents in rural places (thereby ideally revers-
ing the flow of internal migrants from the western interior regions to the
eastern coastal cities) and to rewrite the discourse of “going West” in
terms of contributing to a positive, desirable pioneering spirit and activist
sensibility (ibid., 13).
The campaign to Open Up the West drew the attention of many Chi-
nese scholars to the potential of tourism in rural western China as a means
of socioeconomic development.22 Rural tourism could address and solve
the “three rural problems” of agriculture, the peasant, and the village by
developing the “nonagricultural” possibilities in rural regions, including
specialty products, service and hospitality, and small businesses—all in
service of rural tourism (Yang and Hui 2005, 52). The region designated as
“the West” in the campaign included all five ethnic autonomous regions—
a designation that implicitly collapsed, to an extent, ethnic minority
identity with socioeconomic underdevelopment.23 Furthermore, ethnic
minorities make up two-thirds of the total population of the western
regions, and of the fifty-five officially recognized ethnic minority groups
in China, forty-nine of these ethnic groups reside primarily in the region
designed “the West.” All of this corroborated a general perspective that
rural tourism could be beneficial and viable in these areas by emphasizing
folk ethnic traditions as tourism resources (ibid., 51).
The justification for promoting tourism in rural ethnic minority
regions thus illuminated the assumption that tourism as development
could perform a double duty in China by addressing a range of socioeco-
nomic problems attributed to both rural and ethnic communities.24 New
economic opportunities could also combat the “small farmer mental-
ity” by regulating and regularizing rural economies. The idea of a “small
farmer mentality” was commonly associated with notions of subsistence,
or semisubsistence, modes of production which were, as Tim Oakes (1998,
148) has written, “thought to prevent modernization as [the subsistence
farmers] persist in their ways of self-sufficiency and ad hoc participation
in local markets.” Furthermore, this mentality was perceived to mean that
“such peasants are not sufficiently entrepreneurial” (ibid.). Suggestions on
how to use rural tourism in the development of western China as a new
form of business opportunity therefore implicitly addressed not only eco-Peasant Family Happiness |	89
nomic underdevelopment but also a perceived social and psychological
lack of progress.
Another parallel arena of state-promoted social development has been
the public campaign to increase the “quality” (suzhi) of the Chinese popu-
lation.25 Contemporary discourses of suzhi were first linked to notions
of population quality (renkou suzhi) from the early years of economic
reforms in the mid- to late 1970s, which in turn were reevoked in the
1980s to spur development and progress at a national scale by changing
population discourse from issues of quantity (manifest in birth restric-
tions) to quality (Anagnost 2004). Rural regions were specifically marked
as “low quality” in an effort to explain poverty and the slow pace of mod-
ernization in these areas; gradually, however, ideas of population qual-
ity were taken up “more broadly as a general explanation for everything
that held the Chinese nation back from achieving its rightful place in the
world” (ibid., 190). Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, in this era of
rapid privatization and economic growth, suzhi became a positive attri-
bute associated with the new ideal type of the rising middle-class, urban
Chinese individual. From representing an apparent lack of progress in the
body of the Chinese nation, suzhi was now taken as a personal characteris-
tic of high-achieving individuals within Chinese society. Suzhi discourse
gained common acceptance as a reflection of the relationship between
“two figures: the body of the rural migrant, which exemplifies suzhi in
its apparent absence, and the body of the urban, middle-class only child,
which is fetishized as a site for the accumulation of the very dimensions
of suzhi wanting in its ‘other’” (ibid., 190).26
Within this context the campaign to build a New Socialist Countryside
took shape as a key component of the 11th Five Year Plan from 2006 to 2010.
Paired with two core concepts promoted in this plan—namely “scientific
development” (kexue fazhari) and “harmonious society” (hexie shehui)—
this campaign explicitly sought to address and improve social and economic
aspects of rural lives through five areas: enhanced production, higher liv-
ing standards, a healthy and stable lifestyle, neat and clean villages, and
democratic town and village management (Su 2009,121).27 Notably, within
these five areas, only two are directly targeted at economic goals—enhanced
production and higher living standards. “Enhanced production” meant an
increased focus on modernizing agricultural technologies to achieve higher
yields and, importantly, greater food security for the nation as a whole.90	| Chapter 2
Higher living standards were to be achieved through higher rural incomes,
by increasing rural productivity and access to markets but also through
increased social security programs and educational opportunities. In Upper
Jidao, for example, throughout 2006 and 2007, villagers often mentioned to
me the elimination of previously mandatory school fees at the primary level,
the end of the rural agricultural tax, and the newly introduced cooperative
rural health insurance scheme as beneficial recent changes. Of course, resi-
dents also noted local corruption, the lack of more modern infrastructure
(in particular, outdated water and sewage systems in the village), and overall
low incomes and resultant pressures to seek wage labor far away from home
as ongoing struggles in their daily lives.
Less overtly discussed in the village, and yet widely present in public
media discourse, were the remaining three areas of the campaign that
focused on social development: a healthy and stable lifestyle, neat and
clean villages, and democratic management. Indeed, the theme of cleaner
and neater-looking rural places became a cornerstone of the visual repre-
sentation of a New Socialist Countryside. As David Bray (2012) has shown,
the planning and ostensible “urbanization” of one community in Jiangsu,
Qinglong (an administrative village southeast of Nanjing), as part of the
New Socialist Countryside program began with efforts to clean up and
modernize the built environment in 2006. In Qinglong, village leadership
implemented the “six clean-ups and six set-ups” (liu qing liu jian), which
included cleaning up rubbish, manure, straw, waterways, industrial pollu-
tion, and chaotic construction practices. By mid-2007, “Qinglong leaders
were able to report . . . [that] the former ‘dirty, chaotic, and backward’
local environment had been given a ‘new look’” (ibid., 12). Many villages
underwent extensive rebuilding and reconstruction efforts, tearing down
existing residences and buildings to construct new units that looked more
modern (Lora-Wainwright 2012 and Oakes 2011), and entire village com-
munities were moved into newly planned residential areas (Bray 2012 and
Guo Henqi dir. 2010). Many of these developments were perceived as mere
vanity projects, however, and duly criticized by government officials as
such (Wu N. 2007).28 The implementation of a new urban-rural planning
law in 2008 thus aimed to increase rural urbanization and to better over-
see the ways in which rural buildings and spaces were being transformed,
physically, under the guise of development.29
Tourism, conceived as a means of development, provided villages andPeasant Family Happiness |	91
government offices with a ready-made agenda that could encompass the
three goals of income generation, “tidying up” village spaces, and social
progress. But as Oakes (2011, 28) has pointed out in an overview of the
New Socialist Countryside transformations in Guizhou, “village based
beautification assumes an urban-based aesthetic eye,” and, as a result, “the
problem lies in an urban aesthetic that reinvents the villages as a reposi-
tory of soon-to-be-lost heritage” and not necessarily as a. productive space
for wage-earning, let alone farming or food-raising.30 The conceptual con-
nection between space and subjectivity is apparent: cleaner, neater, and
more modern living spaces could create civilized, higher-quality people.
Upper Jidao was “planned” for tourism by various government construc-
tion bureaus from the township (Sankeshu), to the municipality (Kaili), to
the province (Guizhou). Changes laid out in the 2006 New Socialist Coun-
tryside plans for Upper Jidao included building a new decorative “wind
and rain” bridge (fengyu qiao) into the village, a common-use garbage
incineration area, a bigger “song and dance” space (tiao ge chang), and a
tourist reception office (jie dai shi).3i In 2007, funds were provided to build
single-purpose pens behind the village’s central residential area to house
pigs and oxen instead of raising them directly underneath a household’s
living space (something noted also in Bray 2012 in Jiangsu and in Oakes
2011 in another village in Guizhou), in the name of cleanliness and com-
fort. Ping’an had already implemented a similar rule in the early 2000s
that required pigs and oxen to be kept in pens separate from houses. But in
Upper Jidao this particular change was met with some resistance, as many
older village residents were unhappy at having to carry heavy buckets of
slop and bundles of hay across the village, multiple times a day, to feed
their animals. While some of the new pens were eventually used, other
families continued to raise animals underneath their homes.
A NEW (CIVILIZED) TOURISM
Travel and travel experiences were another component of the pursuit
to create “high quality” Chinese subjects, even before the New Socialist
Countryside campaign; as part of Open Up the West, for instance, “the
rural population was encouraged to acquire new skills and a more modern
mentality by migrating to cities” (Nyiri 2010, 84). Likewise, tourism was
viewed as a positive contribution to improving suzhi; parents in the city92	| Chapter 2
of Kunming, Yunnan, invested in summer travel opportunities for their
children in an explicit effort to raise the suzhi of their sons and daughters
(Kuan 2008). The contribution of tourism to increasing collective national
levels of suzhi was evoked further in other state plans and projects.
Analyzing the competing visions for development and nature tour-
ism along the Altai Road, which crosses the China-Russia border, Pal
Nyiri and Joana Breidenbach (2008) have argued that for China, nature
tourism in this region fit into current discourses of travel, suzhi, and the
general uplifting of China’s “spiritual civilization.” “The state-driven
tourism boom has not only been a major tool of increasing domestic con-
sumption,” write Nyiri and Breidenbach, “it also fits into the Chinese
state’s use of tourism development as a tool of both ‘material and spiritual
civilization’ that should strengthen national pride and ‘raise the quality’
of the rural population and especially of ethnic minorities” (ibid., 131).
The appeal of tourism to the Chinese state and Chinese tourists in the
postreform era echoes what Anne Gorsuch (2003) has called a “ritual of
reassurance” in the context of the late-Stalinist era tourism in the Soviet
Union.32 There, tourism “offered a means of producing socialist-minded
citizens focused internally on the advantages of the Soviet system. It may
also have been a ritual of reassurance for Soviet citizens in so far as tour-
ism offered hope that life post-war would be an improvement on what
they had thus far endured” (ibid., 785). Certainly for many domestic Chi-
nese tourists I met, as well as for the villagers in Ping’an and Upper Jidao,
the new opportunities for tourism and leisure were seen as proof that
life conditions were much improved now as compared to thirty or even
twenty years ago.
Increased mobility across the nation also has brought more and more
diverse communities in contact with one another, and yet migrant work-
ers continue to be regarded frequently as “low quality,” despite the sup-
posed modernizing influence of mobility and travel. But the emergence
in the early 2000s of reports and stories of the “ugly Chinese tourist”
both domestically and abroad put a damper on this new positive asso-
ciation between travel, individual quality, and potential (Chio 2010). The
China Central Spiritual Civilization Steering Committee33 took this mat-
ter of unattractive tourist behaviors very seriously, issuing a document
in August 2006 entitled, “Plan to Raise the Civilized Tourism Quality of
Chinese Tourists” (“Tisheng Zhongguo gongmin liiyou wenming suzhiPeasant Family Happiness |	93
xingdong jihua”) (CNTA and Zhongguo Wenming Xie 2006). Further-
more, the Spiritual Civilization Steering Committee and the CNTA
jointly issued a call for stories and submissions on “uncivilized tourist
behavior” (the article subtitle read: “Zhongguo gongmin liiyou bu wen-
ming xingwei biaoxian”) and “suggestions for quality tourist behavior”
(“Tisheng Zhongguo gongmin liiyou wenming suzhi jianyi”); by Septem-
ber, they reported having received more than thirty thousand entries and
three million hits (Zhongguo Wenming Wang 2006c).
An article from the Beijing Youth Daily newspaper, published in Sep-
tember 2006, ran the headline “How Do Foreigners View Chinese Tour-
ists?” and recounted the unbecoming antics of Chinese tourists as reported
in Thai, Malaysian, and American media outlets (Zhongguo Wenming
Wang 2006a). Amid much publicity and attention from both domestic
and international news outlets (Macartney 2006, Xinhua News 2006a and
2006b, and Zhang R. 2006), specific guidelines for tourist behavior were
published as booklets and posters. These guidelines were made public on
October 2,2006, during the October 1 National Day Golden Week holiday.
One set addressed issues for outbound Chinese tourists (traveling interna-
tionally) and another set of guidelines was directed at domestic Chinese
tourists.34 Travel agencies were responsible for giving each of their tourists
the appropriate guidelines before commencing a tour, and posters with
the guidelines were displayed as late as 2008 in airports, airline ticketing
offices, and other relevant travel industry locations.
According to the guidelines, civilized quality improvements in tour-
ists could be made through small changes to everyday behaviors; among
other regulations, outbound Chinese tourists were reminded to “be polite
and respectful,” “wear appropriate clothes and don’t spit,” “let women and
the elderly go first,” and to “be quiet while eating” (Zhongguo Wenming
Wang 2006b). For domestic tourists, the guidelines included an emphasis
on environmental protection and admonishments against littering and
spitting, as well as reminders to protect ancient heritage objects, respect
religious traditions, and not to insist on taking pictures with foreign tour-
ists (ibid.). According to an article in a Beijing newspaper, tourism—and
by extension the “quality” of Chinese tourists—was matter of image man-
agement and represented the quality of individuals and of the nation as a
whole. Therefore, only when domestic tourists were civilized would out-
bound tourists also be civilized (Xin Jing Bao 2006).94	| Chapter 2
This push to civilize the tourist thus coincided with the deployment of
tourism to civilize the toured in China following the joint proclamation
of the China Rural Tourism year and the beginning of the national New
Socialist Countryside campaign. The theme of China Rural Tourism was
to establish, according to its slogan, “new villages, new tourism, new expe-
riences, new customs” (xin nongcun, xin liiyou, xin tiyan, xin Jengxiang).
Numerous reports and scholarly articles published around this time pro-
claimed with great insistence the positive role of rural tourism within
the larger challenge to build a New Socialist Countryside.35 In a widely
circulated article written by the CNTA director Shao Qiwei, the relation-
ship between the year of China Rural Tourism and the national campaign
to build a New Socialist Countryside is extolled for its multiple advantages
for both tourists and rural people (Shao 2007).36 Titled “Develop Rural
Tourism, Promote Building a New Countryside,” Shao makes explicit in
his argument that the role of rural tourism development is not only to
increase the types of work and income-generating activities possible in
rural areas, but also to contribute to the improvement of rural suzhi. The
key strategy behind rural tourism and rural development, Shao writes, is
to “use tourism to help peasants” (yi you zhu nong). He lists five specific
ways in which rural tourism contributes to positive development. Besides
assisting in the creation of rural products for sale and the improvement of
rural livelihoods, Shao explains in his third point that rural tourism “ben-
efits the raising of rural people’s quality and countryside civilization.”
Increasing “civilization” in the countryside, Shao continues, includes the
introduction of new ideas and concepts from the city, better education,
learning to speak standard Chinese and foreign languages, and learning
to use computers. All of these specific features of “civilization,” Shao con-
cludes, will benefit the suzhi of rural residents.
Shao (ibid.) also stresses the need for local governments to incorpo-
rate rural tourism development directly into their own programs and the
importance of increasing opportunities for rural residents in rural areas,
evoking the Chinese slogan “leave the fields without leaving the country-
side” (li tu bu li xiang). To make the shift from agriculture and subsistence
farming to enterprise, rural people must incorporate the charm and soul
of rural traditions and livelihoods into their tourism efforts, Shao writes.
Although rural tourism can be a part of the new countryside, he contin-
ues, it should not “be that as a result of development, the new villagesPeasant Family Happiness |	95
are built without agriculture, vernacular architecture, peasants, or (other)
unique characteristics” (ibid.). He emphasizes the necessity of adequate
governing structures in rural tourism and of paying attention to local
opinions; while community participation should be encouraged, rural
residents cannot be forced to do tourism, he notes.
PEASANT FAMILY HAPPINESS
How, exactly, were rural communities supposed to do tourism in this
case? The business model called nong jia le is generally associated with
spending leisure time in a village household, usually a family home or
guesthouse, eating locally produced “simple” foods, possibly engaging in
agricultural activities such as harvesting fruit, and perhaps staying over-
night. By one account, nongjia le first emerged in 1987 in the village of
Long Quan Feng outside Chengdu, Sichuan, although the phrase has also
been used for holiday villages near Beijing, Shanghai, and other larger cit-
ies (Yang Y. 2007,1). In ethnic minority regions, the first character, nong,
is often changed to the ethnic name of the particular community.37 The
capacity of the phrase to be rewritten or revised to accommodate different
ethnic names points to the centrality of the body of a rural, and/or ethnic,
person as the provider of the experience for tourists. It is therefore critical
to acknowledge that nong jia le, as it has been envisioned to take place in
rural villages in China, anticipates and indeed demands the participation
of rural people in this touristic encounter.
The emphasis of nong jia le tourism is on the experience of rural life:
through enjoying the proverbial fruits of farm labor and through the pro-
vision of the romantically uncomplicated, unassuming pleasures of the
idealized countryside. In this way, nongjia le tourism relies upon the dis-
cursive category of the Chinese peasant, which operates here in a cultural
mode as the ultimate “Other” to the modern Chinese citizen.38 Beyond
the commercialized desirability of a rural experience for potential tour-
ists in contemporary postreform China, as a concept and a commodity,
nong jia le also deliberately and self-consciously ignores the increasing
diversification of rural livelihoods and economies in favor of a timeless,
stable rural folksiness that exists in contrast to the existential whirlwind
of the city (Williams 1975).39 Nongjia le thus promises an experience of
the happiness of peasant family life, and this experience dominates nong96	| Chapter 2
jia le advertisements and promotions. For village residents, however, the
intersection of peasant discourse with nong jia le tourism opportunities
has resulted in “tourism entrepreneurship [becoming] an entanglement of
a moral and a capitalist economy,” as Hazel Tucker (2010, 928) has shown
for “peasant-entrepreneurs” in a Turkish destination.
As a business model for private enterprise, nong jia le arguably could
be integrated into the policy of “using tourism to help peasants”; the
national agricultural bureau published a handbook on how to run a nong
jia le business, which gave detailed instructions on the elements of such
endeavors, such as how to set prices, how to publicize businesses, and how
to be proper hosts (Yang Y. 2007). According to the handbook, nong jia
le businesses are characterized by low overhead costs and rapid returns
on investments. The model emphasizes participation (from both village
residents and tourists) and celebrates the rural, agricultural, and tradi-
tional cultures. In chapter 1 of the manual, the character nong is discussed
in relation to its role in nong jia le businesses. The book explains that
nong jia le is based on agriculture, village and rural materials, and rural
sightseeing, in which the village itself provides the resources for tourism
development (ibid., 3). But perhaps even more important than a village’s
rural environment is the role of rural familial affect (nongjia qinqing) in
building successful rural tourism (ibid., 4). The invocation of affect, and
kin affect no less, serves to acknowledge the significance of rural people
in China’s development and utilizes the category of “the rural” to jus-
tify particular policies and programs, shifting the significance of what is
rural from the economy (and modes of production) to the realm of social-
ity and interpersonal relations. Indeed, the true goal of nongjia le is “to
make the guest a family relation” (ba keren dang qinreri) by stressing that
even though the tourist is a consumer, the service provided should be at
the level of the familial. This is how rural people are to participate in the
modernizing effects of tourism—namely, by sharing their social identities
as peasants in ways that bring tourists into the fold; the guide emphasizes
that through “personable, familial service, guests will experience a feeling
of‘coming home’” (ibid., 4).
Chapter 2 of the manual details the concepts and methods related to
the development of tourism resources, first by outlining the different
types of cultural tourism resources that exist, including landscape, water,
animals, architectural/historic, relaxation/activity-based, and shoppingPeasant Family Happiness |	97
experiences (ibid., 18). Opening the market for tourism requires a compre-
hensive understanding of the tourist desires and the available resources,
and for nong jia le businesses, the manual stresses that potential owners
must consider such factors as safety, low overhead, environmental protec-
tion, and the potential for tourist participation. After all, the handbook
instructs, “nong jia le tourism products should consider the ability for
tourists to experience, to see with their own eyes, to use their own hands,
to both play and work” (ibid., 29). As an experiential trope, the idea of
participation thus creates the opportunity for rural communities to con-
tribute to national development and for (presumably) urban tourists to
cope with the stresses of modernity. Both groups, of course, would in turn
raise their respective suzhi levels as productive Chinese citizens.
In an article entitled “Philosophical Thoughts on the Era of Nong Jia
Le,” Lin Hesheng (2007) muses over the potential negative effects of nong
jia le enterprises on rural people. Recalling an anecdote about a seeing a
nong jia le business owner who grew organic produce only for consump-
tion by his family and served chemically fertilized vegetables to tourists,
Lin asks, rhetorically, if this state of affairs had been brought about by
the city tourists or by the corruption of rural peasants (ibid., 89). Using
nong jia le as a conceptual fulcrum to consider the social and psychologi-
cal effects of modernization and development, Lin nevertheless voices his
support for the positive potential of this industry but concludes with a
call for a “postmodern” form of nong jia le—one where the urban tourists
can enjoy the countryside, but the rural hosts participate not only for eco-
nomic profit but also out of their own enjoyment of this type of business
and lifestyle (ibid., 90), thus rendering the subjectivity of the rural hosts
completely in line with modern, developed, and effectively urban perspec-
tives on labor, leisure, and mobility. Indeed, national government plans
for rural tourism extended well beyond the year of China Rural Tourism,
presumably in pursuit of precisely such goals for the social development
of rural people. In 2007, the CNTA signed an agreement with the Min-
istry of Agriculture “to jointly promote rural tourism development and
the construction of new socialist rural communities” (Gao, Huang, and
Huang 2009, 443).
Such policies aimed at rural communities were never to be just about
the money: tourism in China was bound tightly with explicit attempts to
construct a new Chinese countryside, a new Chinese tourist, and a new98	| Chapter 2
rural Chinese subject. In this way, contemporary tourism in rural China
has made claims on the rural as a social identity, whether by commercial-
izing a shared nostalgia for rural lifeways or, in many regions, by high-
lighting ethnic minority traditions as a valuable resource in creating and
sustaining the appeal of tourism to these areas. Tourism should be able to
perform a double duty: as an effort to increase rural incomes and also to
raise the suzhi of ethnic minorities by modernizing them through tourism
as development.
To participate in these efforts, however, residents of tourism villages
like Upper Jidao and Ping’an were expected to look, perform, and behave
like their counterparts in urban ethnic theme parks, only in a rural setting
that would, in theory, make the experience of meeting an ethnic minority
and watching an ethnic performance even more authentic. For both vil-
lages, rurality and ethnicity were equally promoted as attractions. Never-
theless, most residents I spoke with emphasized that their less-developed
socioeconomic status as compared with the domestic and foreign tourists
they encountered was a result of their rural location in relation to China’s
rapid growth in urban centers along the southern and eastern coasts, and
not a consequence of their ethnicity. Upper Jidao and Ping’an residents
were proud of their ethnic identities and cultural traditions, even or per-
haps especially in the contemporary Chinese marketplace that encourages
certain ways of appropriately producing and consuming ethnic difference
(McCarthy 2009). In the case of these two villages, because they were
promoted as ethnic and rural tourism destinations, village residents felt
a particularly strong connection to making tourism succeed since they
were literally being asked to sell themselves in the postreform tourism
marketplace. Therefore, residents had to reconcile with the current ben-
efits and disadvantages of being different, ethnically and rurally, or as
Sara Friedman (2006) has dubbed it in her study of the “Hui’an woman”
in rural Fujian, the “power of difference.” Understanding the power of
difference in China is crucial for unpacking how tourism as development
has become meaningful for village residents, and the history and condi-
tions of difference in China, between ethnic minorities and the majority,
between rural and urban, have affected not only how Chinese travel but
also why and who travels at all.
The synergistic effects of national policies on and mainstream dis-
courses of the rural and the ethnic in contemporary China informed thePeasant Family Happiness |	99
everyday experiences of communities and individuals living in rural eth-
nic tourism destinations and shaped the ways in which village residents
could envision their own roles and participation in doing tourism. A select
number of residents in Upper Jidao learned what tourism meant partially
by attending internationally funded training workshops on tourism and
heritage preservation and hosting visiting World Bank consultants and
experts. Villagers in Ping’an reacted and responded to changing demands
and expectations from tourists, as well as to the influx of outside entre-
preneurs, government officials, and investors. Yet at a more immediate,
personal level of experience and reflection, residents in both Upper Jidao
and Ping’an increasingly drew upon their own travel experiences and
their opinions about tourism as gleaned from media sources and personal
encounters. For most villagers, their previous travels were undertaken as
migrant laborers, in search of income and wages by working as labor-
ers in factories, farms, and construction sites around the country. Iheir
stories, told in chapter 3, thus mapped the myriad paths, opportunities,
and desires over time and for diverse reasons of a landscape of travel that
influenced why tourism was significant, what they envisioned they could
do in tourism, and perhaps most important, what tourism might eventu-
ally do for them.CHAPTER 3
LEAVE THE FIELDS
WITHOUT LEAVING THE COUNTRYSIDE
The Orders of Mobility
In February 2007,1 was roaming the paths of Upper Jidao to complete a
household survey in the village. By this time, I had lived there for more
than five months, and I thought most everyone knew who I was, given the
small size of the village. But starting in November of the previous year,
the population of Upper Jidao had suddenly “boomed.” Over the course of
a few weeks, people began returning to the village to celebrate Miao New
Year (held the middle of the tenth month of the lunar calendar). Mostly
adults between the ages of eighteen and forty, they came back from manu-
facturing districts in Guangdong and Zhejiang in the south and east but
also from as far north as Heilongjiang, bordering Russia.
While I walked around the village on this particular day, I heard voices
from a house I had not yet approached. I knocked on the door and began
my customary introduction, shouting, “Is anyone there? {you ren ma?)”
Some children peered out over the second-floor railing, and after recog-
nizing me, said to come upstairs; they were watching television. Once
inside, I asked if the head of the household was available, and a teenager
sauntered into a back room and came back with a middle-aged man whom
he said was his uncle. The uncle seemed reluctant at first to talk; it was
only after he realized that the children already knew me that he agreed
to answer my questions. By this point in my fieldwork, the man’s hesita-
tion no longer surprised me—every year, researchers from prefectural,
101102	| Chapter 3
provincial, and national government offices came to Upper Jidao to collect
data on rural livelihoods by interviewing village residents. Internation-
ally prominent organizations such as Oxfam and (the now defunct) China
Development Brief had also previously sent people to gather information
about rural life in Upper Jidao. It was clear that some residents were tired
of being studied.1
The man spoke slowly and carefully as I asked questions about his
educational background, his opinions on tourism development, and his
annual income. In his fifties, he was an example of why the well-inten-
tioned tourism development plans for Upper Jidao simply might not work
out—he was neither keen to participate in tourism nor particularly enthu-
siastic about the idea of having tourists in his home village. He had been
working outside of Upper Jidao on and off for about fifteen years, once
going as far as Xinjiang to work on a tomato farm. To get to Xinjiang,
the man said, he had traveled with a group of migrant laborers through
the cities of Chongqing, Chengdu, and Urumqi. Before that trip, he had
worked in construction in Guangdong. Now he was working nearby in
Kaili, also doing construction. The wages he earned went toward the costs
of his sons’ schooling—from room and board to supplies and other neces-
sities. As we reached the end of the survey, I commented that he had trav-
eled quite a lot. I concluded with my final question: Where might he like
to go next if he had the chance to be a tourist? To this he replied, with no
small degree of exasperation, “You can go anywhere as a migrant worker,
but as a tourist you need money!”
In his statement lay the crux of this chapter’s analysis: how travel and
the idea of mobility can become valued in terms such as “freedom” and
“lack.” By “mobility,” I am referring to both the ability to travel and to
all of the attendant desires and notions of agency associated with this
capacity to envision travel as a socially significant element of one’s subjec-
tivity and life experiences. What do these qualities that are so frequently
attributed to mobility reveal about conditions in contemporary, mod-
ernizing rural ethnic China? This man’s cogent assessment of his own
travels prompted me to reconsider the consequences of mobility for tour-
ism, development, and rural socioeconomic livelihoods. His exclamation
hinted toward an approach to mobility that could capture the social, eco-
nomic, and political potentialities at work and at stake in China today. By
making the distinction between the mobility of migrants and tourists inLeave the Fields without Leaving the Countryside |	103
terms of possibility (going anywhere) and economy (needing money), he
highlighted precisely how travel and movement are integrated into emerg-
ing forms of imagination, opportunity, and modern subjectivities.
For many returned migrants in tourism villages, tourism and migra-
tion have become interlocking ways of envisioning identity and mediating
their current economic and social circumstances. After all, in both Upper
Jidao and Ping’an, migrant workers were returning to find their homes
in the process of becoming tourist destinations for urbanites from some
of the places the migrant workers had just left. In the ways that returned
migrants recounted their own travels, it thus becomes possible to under-
stand how villagers see, and one might say assert, themselves and their
village in rural ethnic tourism. Moreover, from these individual stories of
travel, potential, current, and former migrants were making sense of con-
temporary conditions. Travel was doubly positioned as a personal experi-
ence of growth and as a shared potential chance for an entire community
to enter into modernization processes through tourism.
The case of tourism in rural China has much to contribute to analyz-
ing the orders of mobility, or how different types of mobility come to be
resignified in times of immense social change and the consequences of
these symbolic shifts on local understandings of ethnic identity and rural
livelihoods. In this chapter I draw attention to how mobility and immo-
bility together generate the conditions of possibility for understanding
economic opportunity, identity, and inequality in rural ethnic tourism
villages. I do so by examining how mobility orders social relationships
and how certain forms, such as tourism or migration, become valued in
relation to each other. These understandings of mobility were ordered by
residents in such a way as to provide the social structure within which
individuals negotiated their situations and identities, even for those who
did not, or could not, actually travel.
As I discovered during the winter in Upper Jidao, there were a lot of
people from the village who no longer lived there on a regular basis. But
in the weeks immediately prior to Miao New Year, as the village filled up
with people, I wondered what kinds of stories they would tell about the
city and what kinds of stories they would tell about their home. What
did a familiarity with “the urban” contribute to ethnic minority people
and rural places, especially when what constituted “the rural” was being
re-presented and rewritten for tourism? As they spoke about their experi-104 | Chapter 3
ences elsewhere and returning to the village, their comments hinted at
a developing sense of “traveler’s knowledge,” or a tourist’s subjectivity,
which could be employed and integrated with the plans for rural tour-
ism development. How did they formulate a tourist’s subjectivity toward
understanding tourism development that was based, in part, on their own
travel experiences? Iheir travels as migrants provided a mirror, albeit
asymmetrical and imbalanced, for these individuals to reflect upon why
and how travel as tourists could be desirable and enjoyable. In trying to
promote tourism in their villages, the main question facing residents was,
“What do tourists want?” What could village residents rely on to formu-
late an idea of what urban tourists might want from a rural village?
Memories of travel among residents of Upper Jidao of course predated
the most recent phase of rural-to-urban migration. During the Great Leap
Forward in the late 1950s, for example, some young men had been sent
from Upper Jidao to work in factories in urban areas near Guiyang but
also as far as Chongqing, then part of Sichuan. Other culturally specific
patterns of travel include patrilocal marriage practices in Miao communi-
ties around Upper Jidao, in which the bride moves into the groom’s family
home, often in a nearby village. More recently, given increased transport
links and opportunities to meet new people through school or work, the
distances traveled by young women for marriage have been increasing;
in Upper Jidao, I met young wives who were not ethnically Miao from
other areas of Guizhou. In Ping’an, where it is common (though not uni-
versal) for a husband to join his wife’s family after marriage, I encoun-
tered young men from all corners of Guangxi who had met their brides in
vocational school or while working in Guilin. But, overall, the increasing
distances traveled by residents of Upper Jidao and Ping’an were largely the
result of labor migration—village residents had left to seek paid work and
now returned with their new lives and new opportunities (made possible
through their mobility) in tow.
LEAVING THE FIELDS, AND THE COUNTRYSIDE
By examining what “travel” means to village residents, it is possible to
explore how domestic and global networks of labor and leisure are chang-
ing rural Chinese society and individual senses of possibility. Travel,
for many villagers, was defined by its practical purpose to earn money,Leave the Fields without Leaving the Countryside |	105
hence the interviewee’s comment that while migrant workers may have
the apparent “freedom” to travel anywhere, tourists are “limited” by the
possession or lack of money. Although it would be a denial of the very real
existing inequalities, structural biases, and social stratifications in China
to suggest that by traveling as migrant laborers, rural people were also
somehow the same as tourists, travel as migration could be, and indeed
was, integrated into understandings of travel as tourism. The ability to
make sense of travel was especially significant for residents of rural tour-
ism villages, who by necessity had to contend with the mobility of tourists
in order to make tourism profitable and worthwhile for themselves.
At the same time, discourses of rural “peasants” rooted in the land
continued to shape policies promoting rural tourism, despite the paral-
lel concern by the state to use tourism development as a means of social,
economic, and cultural modernization. Indeed, from the perspective
of tourism development, the assumption seemed to be that residents of
Upper Jidao and Ping’an would simply be at home, ready and willing to
participate in tourism.2 In the dominant framework of tourism, develop-
ment, and Chinese modernity, urbanites were expected to want to travel,
to obtain release from the pressures of city life; rural people were expected
to want to stay home, to develop ways to not have to migrate as laborers.
The different expectations of mobility for different groups thus make it
critical to explore the orders of mobility, or how mobility comes to shape
social experiences and identities, by beginning with an exploration of how
migration functions in the lives of village residents. Only in this way is it
possible to situate the experiences of tourism village residents within a
larger landscape of travel in contemporary China.
The dramatic and massive phenomenon of internal migration in the
postreform years has had enormous consequences for the country and
its growth.3 Official statistics report that there were 242 million migrant
workers nationwide in 2010 (Zhongguo Wang 2011). Analyzing the experi-
ences and reasons for migration necessitates a variety of perspectives on
the social, economic, and political aspects of migrant labor in order to
understand the impact of migration on rural socialities and subjectivi-
ties.4 Coupled with the explosion in internal migration has been a signifi-
cant increase in international migration, bolstering national discourses
on the significance of Chinese diasporic communities in constructing
and maintaining a contemporary Chinese identity around the world. Xinio6 | Chapter 3
Liu (1997, 96), writing about perceptions of space and power by Chinese
rural villagers and overseas scholars, outlines a structure of “social-spatial
hierarchies” in China within which particular strategies of spatial mean-
ing-making emerge. This hierarchical structuring of space/place through
access to mobility characterizes everyday imaginings of social difference,
and “travel and movement have reordered the power relations between
different groups of people, and their identities are reworked according to
the shifting images of various kind of selves and others” (ibid., 110).
Pal Nyiri (2006, 99), in assessing Xin Liu’s argument, points out how
the modern “Chinese subject was linked to mobility” through national
discourses of being “‘advanced’ (xianjiri), ‘civilized’ (wenming), ‘cul-
tured’ (you wenhua), or ‘high-quality’ (you suzhi),” resulting in notions
that “[overseas] migrants are symbolic figures because they represent the
vanguard of modernity, not only by virtue of their connection to more
‘advanced’ nations, but also by the very fact of their mobility.” Here, dis-
courses of the “new migrant” in China, celebrated as a modern Chinese
figure who successfully “makes it” overseas (Nyiri 2001, 2003, 2005a, and
2006), run parallel to the situation in villages where returned migrants
are also considered to be a positive contribution to the community and its
future. That international migration is so broadly celebrated while inter-
nal migration is largely presented as a problem in need of solution only
further emphasizes the imbalances of mobility, particularly as a problem
of socioeconomic class in China. It also mirrors, in a reversed way, the
explosion of domestic tourism and the relatively more cautious approach
of the Chinese government to international outbound tourism (see Arlt
2006).
These varying frameworks of mobility in postreform China illumi-
nate how mobility can be ordered in ways that reveal particular desires,
inequalities, and power relations. While overseas migrants may be per-
ceived as vanguards of modernity, some forms of mobility are negatively
assessed in development and modernization projects. In a 1983 study on
rural development interventions undertaken between the governments
of developing nations and international and national aid organizations
and donors like the World Bank, Richard Rhoda (1983, 34-35) set out to
examine the “common belief that improved conditions in rural areas
will reduce rural-urban migration and consequently reduce the growth
of urban poverty.” Implicit in this belief is the idea that rural-to-urbanLeave the Fields without Leaving the Countryside |	107
migration is undesirable and potentially harmful to urban economies
and living conditions. This type of mobility is seen as a social ailment
in need of treatment, ideally by eliminating the mobility of rural people
into urban spaces. Rhoda (ibid., 60) concludes that rural-urban migration
appears inevitable, however, and that policy changes ought to focus on
urban conditions rather than continuing to target rural areas as the only
places in need of development.
A similar desire to keep the rural “in place” is present in the Chinese
slogan “leave the fields without leaving the countryside” (li tu bu li xiang),
in which there is an attempt to conceive of modernity without mobility—
in other words, an immobile modernity. This linguistic sleight of hand
suggests that rural people ought to move “away” from the unmodern (the
fields) but simultaneously reinforces the idea that rural people are best left
unmoving (not leaving the countryside). While modern development is
apparently available to all, mobility and immobility are rendered absolute,
paired to map neatly onto an urban-rural binary. This idea has been fur-
ther reinforced for rural ethnic minority communities, where women in
particular are seen as doubly bound to the land within a set of discursive
practices Louisa Schein (2000, 100-31) has called “internal orientalism”
(see also Gladney 1994), in which class and gender are asymmetrically
structured in commonplace representations of ethnic minorities as rural
women and majority Han as urban men.
The notion of travel as a social force is indeed so pertinent and so obvi-
ous that it is perhaps, as Schein (2006, 213) has argued, “a banal common-
place to note that people in China are on the move.” More attention is
needed to the particularities of movement—the questions of when, where,
why, and what for—as well as the specific forms of travel engendered by
rapid economic development at a national level and in response to China’s
increasing political economic links with the global marketplace. In this
way, mobility must be understood as a scalar practice “in which the ‘local’
is positioned in relation to urban, provincial, national, and global scales”
(ibid., 214). Schein discusses the experiences of Miao women who were
“jumping scales” by living in Beijing as purveyors of Miao handicrafts
for an urban market, by opening modern beauty salons offering urban
styles in rural Miao villages, and by “marrying up” the scale from an
ethnic minority village to a Han (more mainstream) location. But rather
than abandoning the “lower scale” through their mobile transgressions,io8 | Chapter 3
these women actually demonstrated an increased sense of the “local” (or
ethnically Miao and gendered female) as they simultaneously courted
the mainstream, male, non-Miao “Other” (ibid., 233-35). Subsequently,
translocal Miao women not only moved up and out of certain political
“scales,” they also fostered new lateral connections between scales as they
themselves embodied multiple social positions. How individuals under-
stand social stratification, hierarchy, and change in the forms of migration
and tourism is a key to conceptualizing the symbolic and social import of
travel in contemporary China.
MIGRANTS AND TOURISTS
A critical approach to tourism and migration is an intervention toward
breaking apart the persistent, commonplace expectation of rural com-
munities and people as ideally immobile and, by extension, as relatively
unmodern. This is a move toward unpacking how mobility is resignified
in processes of modernization. As modernity and mobility are increas-
ingly equated with one another, the converse has dominated policy per-
spectives on rural development. But even if rural villagers were to leave
the fields without leaving the countryside, what would they draw on to
formulate their new modern subjectivities?5 The emphasis on civilized
behavior, high-quality individuals, and “neat and clean” villages encom-
passed in the campaign to build a New Socialist Countryside attempted to
provide precisely these shared social and cultural meanings in addition to
increasing rural incomes and economic productivity.
By addressing mobility as variously constructed through the particular
“desires and emotions that drive migration and tourism” (Lindquist 2009,
150), the stories of travel told by returned migrants in Ping’an and Upper
Jidao reveal how village residents learned to be touristic to better adapt
their village-based tourism industries to potential visitors. To consider
migrants and tourists together means attending to mobility’s failures and
its productive qualities, particularly in such contexts as contemporary
rural China, where the socioeconomic conditions between tourists and
local villagers are often quite unequal and many village residents have not
(yet) had many opportunities to travel for leisure. In some cases around
the world, migrant laborers have sought out work in tourism destina-
tions, and in turn, their labor experiences in the tourism industries haveLeave the Fields without Leaving the Countryside |	109
engaged them in direct, face-to-face contact with tourist desires for educa-
tion, relaxation, adventure, or enlightenment.6 This type of contact with
tourism and tourists has the potential to change the values and mean-
ings of migration and tourism.7 Travel becomes a practical way of finding
employment by migrating and a discourse necessary to comprehend when
developing tourism activities.
Whether labor or leisure, the act of travel comes to signify new con-
ceptualizations of belonging, aspirations, and identity. For certain classes
of wealthy individuals, tourism labor has become a way for them to seek
employment as migrant laborers while enjoying the benefits of being in
a tourist/leisure environment.8 Instances of “privileged travel and move-
ment” (Amit 2007), perhaps best embodied by the figure of the contem-
porary expatriate, point to the social and class asymmetries unveiled in
mobility. What is analytically important, however, is to resist elevating
these privileged travelers to the level of symbolizing modern existential
themes of displacement (following Clifford 1997, 2), because “what links
various forms of contemporary travel are not global convergences but a
host of asymmetries” (Amit 2007, 8). Likewise, the imbalances revealed
by a “grounded” analysis of mobility at the specific places where tourism
happens also shed light on how tourist village residents in less-developed
places contend with migration and tourism as equal opportunity partners
in their livelihoods and life chances.
The “asymmetry of tourism” as mobility is not only limited to the dif-
ferences between tourists and migrants in a tourism destination; it also
extends to the social relations between local residents, where individual
mobilities affect community relations precisely because of the values
associated with travel experiences. Hazel Tucker (2003 and 2010), who has
conducted long-term research on tourism in Goreme (near the UNESCO
World Heritage site of Goreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cap-
padocia in central Turkey), notes that in many ways migration buttresses
Goreme’s tourism enterprises and development. With the rise of tourism,
some returned migrant workers found their economic and social places
in the village bolstered by their familiarity with the cultures and societ-
ies of the non-Turkish tourists. “[Migration] has blurred the boundaries
demarcating the Goremeli community [and the tourists], and it has con-
currently forced the villagers to reconsider their place in the world and
to open their lives to ‘other’ possibilities” (Tucker 2003, 89). But locallyno | Chapter 3
the consequences of out-migration in Goreme include great variations in
wealth, leading migrants to disparage or “look down” on those who have
stayed and prompting some of those who have not left the community to
view migrants with bitterness as sellouts (ibid., 88).
STORIES OF TRAVEL
In the landscape of travel for Upper Jidao and Ping’an, the two forms
of mobility of greatest concern for villagers were tourism and migration,
linked by the expectation that through successful tourism development,
more tourists from urban centers would arrive and village residents could
(and would) stop being migrants. Networks of travel, migration, and lei-
sure tourism thus shaped the lives of these villagers through the efforts
to construct rural China as a tourist destination. As international and
domestic tourist flows intersected with the socioeconomics of rural liveli-
hoods, mobility became a crucial concept to integrate into understand-
ings of contemporary conditions. Both migration and tourism suggest the
limits of possibility for rural villagers. And both restructure individual
notions of self and identity (to be a migrant or to be a tourist “object”),
especially in these villages that had to capitalize on the ethnic minority
heritage of the residents to sufficiently attract tourists.
Some migrant workers returned home knowing what it was like to
visit someplace else, knowing what was famous or which scenic spots
existed in other parts of the country, and intrinsically drew comparisons
between what they have by way of tourism resources at home and what
other places are offering. This maybe quite practical; Tim Oakes (2006b,
167) has described a case from the mid-1990s in Hainan, where two eth-
nic Li villages were transformed into “village theme parks” for tourists;
the founder of the company managing these villages was himself a local
who “had traveled extensively throughout China and had been impressed
by the tourists sites in the urban centers of Beijing and Guangzhou. He
had modeled his villages on these tourist displays. Displaying village tra-
ditions was, perhaps, one way of making villagers seem more modern.”
To do the work of tourism properly, villagers participated in mainstream
models of what tourism, leisure, and rural ethnic identities entailed—and
by seeing it firsthand elsewhere, as the man from Hainan did, he could
literally bring tourism back to his village. Returned migrants also broughtLeave the Fields without Leaving the Countryside	| in
back ideas about who is a tourist, or what is needed to be a tourist versus
another kind of mobile subjectivity—such as the assessment that migrant
workers could go anywhere, because they were looking for money, whereas
tourists needed to have money at the outset to go somewhere. This kind of
experiential knowledge often was perceived as a form of social capital; in
interviews, migration was always retrospectively considered for its poten-
tial benefits, despite the hardships that might have prompted the decision
to migrate and the difficulties endured during the migration experience.
Four recurring themes emerged in my interviews with returned
migrants: first, the advantageous notion of “experiencing the world” (typi-
cally expressed in the phrase jian shi mian, literally “to meet the face of
the world”); second, the ability to articulate an opinion on what tourists
want from a rural ethnic tourism experience; third, a confidence in one’s
own entrepreneurship and business savvy (often described as “business
brains,” jingji tounao); and fourth, a sense of dissatisfaction with the “way
things are” in rural China and other difficulties in reintegration to village
life. Of course, discussions about these four themes were not only limited
to the experiences of returned migrants; however, their travel experiences
contributed significantly to a new sociality in rural tourism villages, one
that centralized the role of travel in assessments of individual identity,
leadership, and ability.
These individual travel experiences were often first mentioned to me
during the course of a household survey. In total, I video-recorded inter-
views with twelve individuals specifically about their travels. From these
recordings, I selected five representative interviews for closer analysis—
the stories of Ze, Fa, and Hua from Upper Jidao, and those of Mei and
Feng from Ping’an (table 3.1). Of these individuals, Ze and Fa are male,
both in their early forties; Hua, Mei, and Feng are female, and Hua is in
her early forties while Mei and Feng are in their early thirties. All inter-
views lasted about an hour and were conducted in standard Chinese
(Mandarin), a language skill that is explored in the following analysis.
I began each interview by asking the individuals to tell their story, from
beginning to end, and I posed clarification questions throughout.
Between them, their travels had taken them to the following cities and
provinces of China: Beijing, Guangdong, Hainan, Heilongjiang, Shan-
dong, Shenzhen, and Yunnan. Spanning from the very northern reaches
of the country to the southern tropics, the travels of these individuals rep-table 3.1. Details on returned migrants interviewed in Upper Jidao and Ping’an
Name, Gender	Age	Village	Interview Date	Places Traveled	Occupations
Fa, male	Early forties	Upper Jidao	December 18, 2006	Guangdong, Hainan	Factory worker; orchid farm worker
Hua, female	Early forties	Upper Jidao	December 1, 2006	Heilongjiang	Agricultural farm worker
Ze, male	Early forties	Upper Jidao	December 22, 2006	Beijing, Shandong, Guangdong	Quarry, construction worker; farm worker
Feng, female	Early thirties	Ping’an	March 2, 2007	Guangdong, Shenzhen, Zhong- shan, Guilin	Factory seamstress; shopkeeper; beautician
Mei, female	Early thirties	Ping’an	March 3, 2007	Guangdong, Shenzhen, Yunnan,	Office clerk; lumber salesper-
Zhejiang, Beijing	son; factory worker; live-in
caretaker
Source: Author interviews, 2006-7.Leave the Fields without Leaving the Countryside |	113
resent the vast distances and differences traversed these days by rural Chi-
nese. Some worked in cities, such as Ze, who was a construction worker on
the Beijing West Railway station; Mei, who worked as a live-in helper for
an elderly Beijing couple; and Feng, who sewed suits and undergarments
at a factory of six thousand workers in Shenzhen. Others had left their
rural villages for agricultural areas elsewhere, such as Fa, who worked at
an orchid farm in Hainan, and Hua, who did seasonal farm labor in Hei-
longjiang. Most people I spoke with had years of experience as migrant
laborers, and many had done a combination of all types of work—in a fac-
tory assembly line, in industrial agriculture or forestry, or in the service
sector, such as working as a nanny or in a salon. Some said they were back
for good; others left the village shortly after the interview in pursuit of
further opportunities and incomes.
The five stories, while unique in their own terms, intersected in mean-
ingful ways to suggest a movement of ideas and impulses that contributes
to the driving forces in rural ethnic village tourism today. Iheir stories
shed light on some of the problems these communities are facing. In all
of the interviews, the common thread linking migration and tourism was
opportunity—for Fa, Feng, Hua, Mei, and Ze, migration meant oppor-
tunities for addressing immediate economic needs. As tourism devel-
opment became further entrenched in the villages, migration was also
an opportunity to understand what tourism was all about and how to
be more successful in the industry. Of course, the interviews were pre-
mised on my interest in their travels, but each person’s assessment of his
or her experiences and histories revealed how mobility factored in their
life choices, social identities, and future opportunities. Iheir mobilities
were tempered by the social significance associated with differing forms of
travel—from the compulsion to migrate as a means to meet family obliga-
tions to returning for a chance at success in village tourism.
TO MEET THE FACE OF THE WORLD (jIAN SHI MIAN)
A slogan painted on a wall about a mile away from Upper Jidao plainly
announced that rural villagers should prioritize continued education at
home over migration (figure 3.1). However, the slogan could also be read
in a different light—if it was precisely the urban familiarity, an urban per-
spective in other words, that was valued in migration, then able-bodiedii4 | Chapter 3
figure 3.1. A slogan painted on a wall in another village about a mile
away from Upper Jidao reads, “Not pursuing an education is really bad;
migrant workers, come back home” (2006). Photo by the author.
rural residents could give precedence to “an education in the city” before
coming home. The educational opportunities afforded by out-migration
were emphasized in a number of interviews I conducted; the ones who
leave, people said, return with a better understanding of the world (in Chi-
nese they used the phrase jian shi mian, which generally referred to hav-
ing experienced life in the world outside of the village). Every interviewee
mentioned the idea of having experienced the world when speaking of the
positive advantages gained from migration. Other villagers would occa-
sionally use a negated version of the phrase (meijian shi mian, not having
experienced the world, or not having seen the world) to describe people
who were perceived as being less educated or having less common sense
and worldliness.
For example, in Upper Jidao, Fa was widely regarded as one of the more
capable men in the village. I interviewed him in late 2006, when he and
his wife had just returned from Guangdong. Other villagers had repeat-
edly suggested I talk to Fa about the village’s tourism plans, because he
had been a part of the village leadership subcommittee (xiao zu) in 2002,
when the provincial government obtained the initial seed grant from the
World Bank and consultancy services from the World Tourism Organiza-
tion (UNWTO). Invited experts and planners from all over the world hadLeave the Fields without Leaving the Countryside	| 115
come to assess the tourism potential of Upper Jidao, and as a part of his
leadership position, Fa attended most of the training courses and went on
the study tour to regional rural tourism destinations, including Ping’an,
which was organized by the provincial government. When I arrived in
Upper Jidao in 2006, Fa and his wife were in Guangdong, having left the
village in 2005.
Years before, Fa had worked on an orchid farm in Hainan in the late
1990s; he returned to Upper Jidao in the early 2000s, when tourism devel-
opment plans were in the beginning stages, participated a bit in village
affairs since he had been elected to be a village leader, but he left again in
2005 to find work in Guangdong. Despite government plans, he said, there
just wasn’t any money to be earned in the village from tourism yet. For
him, the advantages to be gained from experiences away from the village
were less of a pull factor; rather, the push factor of very few opportunities
to earn an income in Upper Jidao prompted his second migration. Com-
ing back in 2006 was a big deal for him and for the other villagers; Fa was
banking on tourism really being something soon. After our interview in
December 2006, village residents again, in January 2007, elected him to
lead the Upper Jidao subcommittee. But by June 2007,1 was told Fa had left
again for Guangdong. The reason was simple: he had a wife, children, and
parents to take care of, and there was little money to be earned by serv-
ing in the village leadership. Fa returned to Upper Jidao in 2009, working
again as a member of the village subcommittee as the accountant, keeping
track of the village’s burgeoning tourism income. He kept being elected
to the village committee because to the other villagers Fa had “seen the
world” and knew what to do—they saw him as someone who could go
between places, literally and symbolically.
Here migration and tourism coincided in conflicting ways. Fa felt
pushed out of the village because of increasing financial obligations to his
family; the village residents, by reelecting him to the leadership commit-
tee, tried to pull him back in because of his proven experience and abil-
ity to walk the line between urban and rural environments, perspectives,
and even languages. For Fa, travel was thoroughly woven into the fabric,
the expectations and possibilities, of his livelihood. He acknowledged the
contradictions inherent in trying to develop tourism in Upper Jidao; the
problem, he told me, was that overall in the village, residents’ education
levels were too low. Too few people had experienced the world enough ton6 | Chapter 3
understand what would make tourism successful and what wouldn’t. The
conundrum was obvious: without enough education and experience in
the world, the village residents would never get tourism off the ground.
Without steady sources of income in the village, those who had more
responsibilities and family pressures would leave. Without people in the
village, there would be no one to do the tourism work. Thus, in Fa’s formu-
lation, leaving was beneficial—if you eventually came back.
In Ping’an, Mei expressed the educative value of migration in more
personal terms. I asked her about how she had found work during her
years in south China and Beijing. “From 1999 onwards,” she said, “I just
went looking around to see if there was any suitable work; I just looked
around—it was like doing research, researching myself.” Unlike most of
the others I met, who tended to travel in groups with relatives and friends
from their home villages or regions when they migrated, Mei had struck
out on her own. She had worked a number of jobs, from selling lumber
to taking care of an elderly couple. In retrospect, she assessed each job as
a chance to develop her skills, to see what she was good at and what she
liked to do.
Villagers often pointed out certain practical skills and behaviors
gained from experiencing the world. First and foremost, those who had
migrated to other parts of China learned to speak standard Chinese.
Being able to speak standard Chinese is critical for doing tourism; it is
the first step to simply being able to communicate with tourists and other
nonlocals, such as consultants, government officials, and potential inves-
tors. In Upper Jidao, for instance, much of the tourism work fell upon
the shoulders of Qin, Teacher Pan, and Fa, when he was around—all of
whom were well spoken in standard Chinese and therefore considered
good candidates for interfacing with the outside world. Speaking stan-
dard Chinese comfortably was also a social distinction that was made
immediately apparent to me as I conducted my household survey in both
villages. As an outsider in Upper Jidao and Ping’an, standard Chinese
was the lingua franca between myself and the villagers; it was taken for
granted that I would not be able to understand, let alone speak, regional
dialects and minority languages. As a result, the first people in each place
whom I met were those who spoke standard Chinese. It wasn’t until I was
able to understand the regional Chinese dialects in each place that my
networks expanded in a more meaningful way beyond those individualsLeave the Fields without Leaving the Countryside |	117
who spoke standard Chinese because of their education or experience in
other parts of China.
When asked what she had learned while being a migrant worker, Feng,
who ran a shop and family guesthouse in Ping’an, replied: “I learned some
sewing, standard Chinese, Cantonese, and a little bit about the outside
world.” She had even purchased tapes and books to teach herself Canton-
ese when she first went to Guangdong; in the mid-1990s, when she was
there, many factories required their workers to speak or at least under-
stand some Cantonese. She attributed her relatively good job in Shenzhen
partly to her ability, upon hiring, to speak Cantonese; the factory manager
was a Cantonese-speaking woman from Hong Kong who had taken a lik-
ing to Feng. Now, back in Ping’an, Feng said that Cantonese was some-
times useful as the village did receive a lot of tourists from Guangdong.
However, she added, nowadays “most young people from Guangdong
speak standard Chinese anyway.”
Experiencing the world, and learning how to negotiate it, was crucial
for these individuals, and the relevance of this education to working in
tourism was not overlooked. Fa and Mei were both considered two of the
more capable people in their respective villages: Fa’s election to the village
subcommittee was proof enough of the village’s opinion. Mei, whose time
out of the village she considered as personal research, was approached in
mid-2008 by a representative of the Guilin municipal government about
possibly becoming a Party cadre and serving in the local village and town-
ship government administration. When she asked this representative how
he had heard of her, he replied that the other villagers had mentioned her.
WHAT DO TOURISTS WANT?
Upper Jidao residents were extremely concerned with making sure they
could appropriately and adequately address the perceived needs of tour-
ists—this was the focus of many training sessions organized by the
Guizhou provincial government as well as a frequent topic of conversation
between myself and residents. Since most villagers said they had never
actually been tourists before, they referred to media representations of
tourism from television and magazines, as well as to firsthand encounters
with tourists, tour guides, and government tourism bureau officials in the
village, to frame their understanding of what tourists want. In Ping’an,n8 | Chapter 3
because tourism had become a steady industry and source of income in
the 1990s, village residents generally expressed a fairly confident grasp of
tourist desires and needs. However, in both villages I noted that many of
these opinions and perspectives had been developed from the personal
experiences of returned migrants, who had come back with their own
stories about visiting scenic spots, having seen something different while
outside of the village, or perhaps having befriended (or at least interacted
with) urban middle-class Chinese while working in cities.
Hua, in her mid-forties, was unusual because she exuded a boisterous,
contagious personality even when speaking standard Chinese, which she
had learned only by virtue of having gone to Heilongjiang to work on a
large farm. She had left Upper Jidao just as the government tourism plans
were getting under way in late 2002, so she had not had much firsthand
exposure to tourism in the village. While in Heilongjiang, Hua said she
would occasionally see television programs about Guizhou and ethnic
tourism in Miao villages in particular; she thus came to equate ethnic
identity with tourism in a one-to-one correspondence based on the lack of
tourism she had seen in rural Heilongjiang, which was largely Han. “Once
you come to our Miao home,” she explained to me, “there is tourism; the
Han don’t have tourism.” She continued, describing how one evening “on
television there were our Guizhou [people] wearing Miao clothes; they
were dancing, and the northeastern people [dongbei ren] said, ‘Oh, this is
Guizhou; it says so on TV. Wow, they are wearing such beautiful clothes.
Is that your home?’ And I said, ‘It is.’”
Later, Hua recalled, the others asked her to bring some of her own Miao
festival clothes back to Heilongjiang sometime: “They said, ‘you bring the
clothes and we’ll try them on and take a picture!”’ Hearing about the
changes in Upper Jidao from her daughter who had remained in the vil-
lage to attend the local middle school, seeing ethnic Miao visually repre-
sented on television, and being the ethnic “Other” herself in another part
of China (rural Heilongjiang) taught Hua some of the things that potential
tourists might enjoy or want in Upper Jidao. Her understanding of tour-
ism was highly visual and based largely on what she had seen on television
and the reactions people had to these images.9
Hua experienced tourism through television representations, where
she literally became identified as the ethnic “Other” to her friends and
neighbors in Heilongjiang. Other migrant workers occasionally had theLeave the Fields without Leaving the Countryside |	119
chance to be tourists while away from home. Ze was one of a few individu-
als in Upper Jidao who had been to Beijing. He had gone in the mid-1990s,
and when he mentioned his experience as a migrant worker there during
my household survey, I told him that I was interested in hearing about his
time there. Only many weeks after the survey did I manage to find Ze with
a bit of time to sit down and talk about his experiences in Beijing (and in
many other parts of China as well). He began by saying that the trip had
happened a long time ago and he didn’t remember much, but as soon as I
began recording with my video camera, Ze recalled fluidly, “It was night-
time when we got on the train [bound for Beijing]. It wasn’t as easy back
then. We didn’t have much luggage, there were a couple of us men from
the nearby villages traveling together, we climbed through the windows
of the train to get inside the carriages.”
At first, Ze worked in a quarry outside of Beijing; after a year, one of his
traveling companions returned to Guizhou, but he and another decided
to go into the city to search for new jobs. They found some temporary
construction labor—one of the biggest projects he worked on during that
time was the construction of the Beijing West Railway station. On the
rare off days that they had (and these might have numbered one or two
a month at most, he said), or in between jobs, they went sightseeing. Ze
visited the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs, the Fragrant Hills, the Temple of
Heaven, the Temple of the Earth, and the Beijing Zoo. When I asked him
about what he thought of his village’s tourism prospects in light of his own
tourist experiences, Ze thought for a moment and then said there could be
some sightseeing—“like here, at our place it’s to see the scenery [fengjing],
to get up in the mountains and see the scenery.” He compared it to going
to the Fragrant Hills just outside of Beijing in the autumn to see the red
foliage; it’s what you do in the autumn in Beijing. He understood what the
tourists who come to Upper Jidao village are looking for; like sightseeing
in Beijing, where you go specifically to see a particular site (the Forbid-
den City, the Temple of Heaven), tourists come looking for something in
Upper Jidao—namely, the rural landscape, a small village, a glimpse of
the subsistence farming lifestyle of ethnic Miao people. Ze had a tourist’s
eye for Upper Jidao.10 All of this, he said, would need to be consolidated,
signed, and marked to facilitate the tourist’s encounter, much like the
famous sites of Beijing, where the significance of the sights is promoted,
named, and explained. Ze’s take on Upper Jidao’s tourism prospects was120	| Chapter 3
informed by his own experiences visiting tourist sites outside of the vil-
lage, which had provided him with firsthand knowledge of where tourists
come from and what tourists do.
Besides sightseeing, experiences with different places, lifeways, and
(more often joked about) foodways—such as eating rice versus eating
bread/wheat products or salty versus spicy flavors—were considered a
part of the necessary knowledge required to do rural tourism properly.11
Like Ze’s knowledge of tourist activities, such as sightseeing, a familiarity
with mainstream appetites and tastes was also considered vital for tour-
ism success. Some villagers in Upper Jidao had taken part in a training
program organized by the Guizhou Tourism Bureau in the summer of
2006. A portion of their training, they said, was to learn how to cook for
Han tourists, who, they were told, preferred to eat stir-fried foods rather
than hot-pot style (where all vegetables and meats are cooked together in
a broth at the table), which was the common way of eating in both Ping’an
and Upper Jidao villages. Being able to cook other types of food besides
their own cuisine could also be learned from experiences as a migrant
worker; one evening, for example, I was invited to a friend’s home for
dinner in Upper Jidao, where her husband prepared Sichuanese dishes for
me. Some Sichuanese migrant workers he had befriended in Guangdong
had taught him, he explained.12
In Ping’an, guesthouses and restaurants hosted tourists from all over
the country and the world, and being able to offer a diversity of food choices
was a crucial part of each establishment’s advantage in the village’s com-
petitive tourism industry. Feng said that her experiences in Guangdong
and Shenzhen had helped a little in running her family business because
she recognized the names of dishes and foods that tourists might some-
times want to order. Otherwise, she added, “some of the tourists come and
order certain dishes that local people don’t know, or that local people can’t
understand what they are. Local people don’t know these dishes; they stay
at home and are rigid [in their ways; si ban, literally ‘dead wood’].”
ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND BUSINESS SAVVY
Innovation was a critical component of being successful in tourism, and
many ideas developed out of the personal experiences of individuals who
had left the village for some time. In Ping’an, as competition increased,Leave the Fields without Leaving the Countryside |	121
some residents created their own opportunities to improve how they could
do tourism. The need and desire for this kind of knowledge was firmly
integrated into understandings of how to run a successful business. In one
instance, Lao’s family, who operated three very successful guesthouses
particularly popular with European and American tour groups, went for
a time to Yangshuo, a popular tourist destination south of Guilin famous
for its “West Street” lined with restaurants catering to foreign travelers.
There, they said, they worked in the kitchen of a cafe, learning how to
cook Western foods and eventually returned to Ping’an with a new menu
and new food suppliers, from whom they bought items such as processed
cheese, hamburger buns, frozen chicken cutlets, and frozen deep fried
pork to expand their menu and offerings.
Creative business ideas extended beyond food. Mei, who had done
“research” on her own skills and abilities during her time outside of
Ping’an, was entrepreneurial through and through. Her mother, who was
from Ping’an, married Mei’s father, who was from Guangdong, and the
family lived in Guangdong for a while when Mei was a child. She returned
to Ping’an at the age of eleven when her mother passed away. From that
time on, she was raised by her maternal grandparents in the village until
she graduated from middle school at age sixteen. Mei joked to me that she
was like her grandmother, who had a real head for business (jingji tou-
nao)—once, Mei said, her grandmother noticed that billiards was popular
with kids in the village. She promptly purchased two billiards tables and
had them delivered up the mountainside to the village where she charged
local kids a few mao (cents) a game. Mei’s middle school teachers recog-
nized her academic potential, and through a complex web of personal
networks, they managed to find her a family in the city of Liuzhou, in
Guangxi, who provided her with room and board while she attended a
vocational school for two years.
At the suggestion of another teacher, Mei left Liuzhou in 1999 for
Guangzhou, where she worked as an assistant to a factory manager for a
few months. Over the next three years, she traveled from Guangzhou to
Kunming and around Yunnan (where she tried to start a business buying
and selling lumber), Zhejiang, and eventually to Beijing in 2000.13 Mei
explained that a factory owner in Zhejiang had recruited her and some
other young migrant laborers to go to Beijing with him to work in his
company. Mei said they were taken to Beijing’s Zhejiang village (Zhe-122	| Chapter 3
jiangcun), a migrant neighborhood in Beijing composed of mainly labor-
ers and small business entrepreneurs from Zhejiang (L. Zhang 2001). She
described the community as extremely corrupt and disreputable (het). Mei
left Zhejiang village with one of the other recruited migrant laborers after
a few months, but they only managed to leave after they twice phoned the
police and convinced an officer to demand that their ID cards, which the
company owners had kept, be returned to them.
Mei stayed in Beijing for two years; her second job there was as a per-
sonal assistant/live-in caretaker for an elderly couple who ran a small busi-
ness. Because their children had all moved away, Mei served as a stand-in
filial daughter—cooking, cleaning, and generally caring for the couple at
home and at work. During these years, Mei said, she kept in touch with
her relatives in Ping’an through letters and occasional phone calls; in 2001,
her uncle in Ping’an began sending her newspaper clippings on the rapid
tourism development in the village. They wanted her to return, with her
knowledge of business and her good command of standard Chinese, to
open a guesthouse. Mei admitted that she was hesitant to return; although
her job in Beijing was not particularly exciting, it was stable and well-
paid. Her uncle insisted, and in 2002, Mei went back to Ping’an, where she
immediately opened a souvenir shop at the parking lot and applied for
permission from the local postal bureau to sell stamps. Hers was the first
shop to officially sell stamps and mail postcards, bringing in quite a lot of
new business and garnering the envy of many residents, who, Mei said,
simply hadn’t thought to offer this kind of service. Not much later, other
families applied for postage licenses and, according to Mei, because the
local county postal bureau did not want to foment anger in the village,
every applicant was granted permission to sell stamps, thus diluting Mei’s
advantage of being the first (and for a time only) seller of stamps.
Mei never described her travels through China as tourism, yet her
experiences outside of Ping’an clearly shaped her ways of thinking about
tourism and business. More than the other village residents I knew, Mei
regularly invited outside entrepreneurs (some of whom lived part-time in
Ping’an) over to her house for dinner and attempted more collaborative
projects with them. In 2007, she started building a new hotel in a joint-
ownership agreement with a travel agency manager from Shenzhen, who
invested in the construction materials and labor costs while Mei was to be
in charge of design and management. Mei and her husband had alreadyLeave the Fields without Leaving the Countryside |	123
built one guesthouse in 2002, but rapid growth of hotels in Ping’an meant
that this first one, with its shared toilets and simple rooms, was no longer
competitive. She made it a point to meet as many researchers and scholars,
including myself, as she could; she actively sought out information about
other rural tourism destinations in China and even subscribed to the offi-
cial newspaper of the China National Tourism Administration (CNTA).
Of course, other individuals in Ping’an also demonstrated business savvy,
often through their connections with domestic and international tour
agencies. The guesthouse owners who had learned how to cook Western
foods in Yangshuo worked closely with major travel agency operators and
tour companies from across China and western Europe, using these con-
nections to increase their own profits and ensure a steady business.
Being a migrant worker did not necessarily require one to be entrepre-
neurial, but for Mei, in retrospect, it gave her the chance to think outside
of her known ways.14 She saw herself as a businesswoman, able to engage
in any type of enterprise. Having been exposed to life in the cities, Mei felt
that she understood what tourists wanted in a rural destination—namely,
the convenience of the city (such as being able to buy stamps for postcards)
and the rustic “feel” of the countryside. Her new guesthouse, for example,
was one of the first in the village to feature individual balconies off each
of the rooms. Likewise, in Ping’an, Feng said she’d opened a shop sell-
ing drinks, snacks, cigarettes, and soap next to her family’s guesthouse
because she had had some experience in shop-keeping while working
in Guilin for a few years between stints in Shenzhen and elsewhere in
Guangdong. For these women, migrating had meant not only working in
industry but learning about industry. When they returned to live in the
village, they brought some of this industrial “spirit” into their work in the
tourism businesses.
RETURN AND REINTEGRATION
While returning to the village was almost always considered positive by
other villagers and in public discourse—largely because the returnees could
bring back their newfound knowledge, experiences, and (ideally) savings—
it was not without problems as well. In Upper Jidao, returned migrants
faced the difficulty that there simply wasn’t enough to be earned from tour-
ism yet. By 2008, tour groups visited Upper Jidao with some regularity, but124	| Chapter 3
Teacher Pan lamented that there weren’t enough young people to do the
performances properly. School-age children were not allowed to perform,
he said; they had to attend school and could only participate if tour groups
arrived on weekends or during school holidays. As a result, performances
for tour groups in Upper Jidao included three segments featuring the vil-
lage’s elderly men and women. They took some pride in being different in
this way, saying that by incorporating older songs and dances (and people)
into their performances, Upper Jidao offered something that the other
nearby tourist villages did not. Nevertheless, the other parts of the perfor-
mances did not necessarily achieve the exuberance or scale of similar shows
in nearby villages such as Upper Langde, where performances were often
staffed by a professional dance troupe from regional towns.
As far as remaining in the village, Fa felt pushed and pulled between
serving the village in a leadership capacity and seeking further income
for his family. He opted for the latter, left Upper Jidao in late 2007, but
returned in 2009; by 2012, however, although Fa was living in the village,
he was no longer involved with the tourism plans, choosing instead to raise
and sell vegetables. Hua left Upper Jidao in early 2007, fewer than three
months after she’d returned from Heilongjiang, and had not returned on
a more permanent basis by 2012. Ze, because of health problems, said he
wasn’t planning to leave Upper Jidao anymore, but if he were able to, he
would; he did not, however, participate in the village’s tourism activities.
In Ping’an, competition rankled relations between some locals and
some returned migrants. For Mei, her lengthy time away from the village
community limited her belonging in Ping’an, partly because she was more
determined than most in attempting and succeeding at new business ven-
tures. She occupied a peculiar social place because of her relatively recent
“reintegration” into the village, and she was often derided by other vil-
lage residents as not “really” from Ping’an—despite the fact that she spoke
and understood Zhuang, was related on her mother’s side to families in
Ping’an, and married to another local Ping’an resident. Mei’s education,
her experiences outside of the village, and her entrepreneurial spirit set
her apart from many of the other village women of her generation who
had grown up in Ping’an with the tourism development and did not nec-
essarily question the status quo. The knowledge and opinions Mei gained
while traveling as a migrant were thus considered an advantage and a
detriment. Some villagers scoffed when I mentioned I would be interview-Leave the Fields without Leaving the Countryside |	125
ing Mei about tourism in Ping’an: “What does she know?” one man asked
bitterly, adding, “She’s not even from here.”15
Mei’s first business innovation (selling stamps), along with her absence
from the village during the early years of the tourism boom, marked her
as an outsider to many local residents. To the villagers who started orga-
nized ticket sales and tours in 1996, Mei’s entrepreneurial attitude was not
very different from any other outsider coming into Ping’an around 2001 to
do business, when the investments by the private management company
radically increased tourism to the village. As these outsiders raised the bar
for service and accommodations in Ping’an, village families, with their
limited resources, struggled to compete. Copying Mei’s innovations was
seen as simply the next step in running a business in Ping’an. In small
rural communities, copying can be a means of social and economic equal-
ization; it “is another tactic in business competition, tending to ensure
that one’s business will at least remain equal with the others, even if it does
not manage to achieve a higher level of success” (Tucker 2003,111). Perhaps
this is also what the local postal bureau considered when deciding to offer
anyone in Ping’an a permit to sell stamps; the effect, from Mei’s perspec-
tive at least, was to admonish her for being creative.
The key problem facing younger returned migrants and young people
in the villages more generally was the problem of being a peasant in the
nong jia le rural tourism formula, while the countryside was, discur-
sively, still the “emaciated other” to the modern city in China (Yan 2008,
44). This was especially contentious in Ping’an, where the terraced fields
required constant labor in order to be maintained. Because the fields were
advertised as having particular aesthetic looks in each season, they had to
be used and worked as fields, with crops that required plowing, seeding,
planting, and watering. Someone had to do the agricultural labor to keep
tourism afloat. To this, Feng, in her straightforward manner, said simply:
“If I had the chance, I would go back to the city because I don’t want to
plow fields!” Most young people felt the same way. She added, “Nowadays,
everyone is afraid of having to plow fields; they want to go out and see
the world. Young people want to go with the modern world” and not be
forced to stay and be farmers. If staying in the village means having to
live a farming lifestyle, taking care of pigs, and waking early to go to the
fields, Feng concluded, then “if I had the chance to live in the city, I would
absolutely be willing [to do so].”126	| Chapter 3
THE MONEY TO BE A TOURIST
Rural ethnic tourism, particularly in the model of nong jia le, cannot occur
without someone in the role of the peasant, but it was precisely the rural
Chinese person, as the “peasant,” who was intended for change through
development. To grasp at what rural tourism as development meant to the
communities involved, these stories of travel provide necessary analytical
and contextual depth to the experiences and imaginaries that influence
and shape how tourism develops in a village community. Encounters with
other, sometimes urban, places became stories told by village residents as
they participated in national development and modernization programs
like the New Socialist Countryside and efforts to create tourism businesses
in their village. In all these stories of travel, the common thread link-
ing migration and tourism was opportunity. For Fa, Feng, Hua, Mei and
Ze, migration meant opportunities for addressing immediate economic
needs, but also, as tourism became further entrenched in Upper Jidao and
Ping’an, migration was an opportunity to understand what tourism was
all about and to be more successful in this business.
Moreover, the nong jia le model of rural tourism emphasized the idea
of home and the family, paralleling the idea promulgated by the national
government that migrant workers ought to either return home or perhaps
be able to establish a home where they now are.16 More important, in the
case of rural tourism, it is the idea that rural homes are worth returning
to and worth visiting that is nicely packaged in the idea of celebrating the
happiness of peasant life through leisure travel. This is a way of envision-
ing rural life that is distinctly urban. Rural residents thus come home to
see their villages through “urbanized” eyes, to see their homes as a des-
tination, rather than as a starting point. In part, this is the result of the
villagers’ own exposure to seeing tourism (perhaps best exemplified by
Hua watching Miao people on television while working in Heilongjiang)
and their experiences as tourists and sightseers as well.
How Fa, Feng, Hua, Mei, and Ze came to talk about their experiences
away from home exemplifies what is happening to rural places in China
that are being drawn into national and global tourism industries. Rural
tourism relies upon the distinction and juxtaposition between the urban
and the rural in order to succeed. Rural village tourism necessarily writes
this difference upon the bodies of the rural villagers; unlike a historical site,Leave the Fields without Leaving the Countryside |	127
such as the Forbidden City, tourism in Upper Jidao and Ping’an demands
that there are people living in the village to make it succeed and “worth vis-
iting.” This, in turn, is reinforced when villagers look to returned migrants
as a resource and as valuable, necessary assets to successful tourism devel-
opment. In Ping’an, a newer, younger generation of adults is poised to
change the social, economic, and political conditions in the village. This
next generation of guesthouse owners is comprised of the twenty or so
college-educated young adults—many of whom are returning to Ping’an
after finishing university (or during holidays) to help out with the family
business. Increasingly, they are setting out new hotel and business plans for
their families. Some of these younger residents, familiar and comfortable
with computers and the Internet, have taken to advertising their hotels in
local chat rooms and with dedicated websites, and the effects of this group
of individuals on tourism in Ping’an should be observed, as they bring new
methods, expectations, and interests to the fabric of village life.
As the younger village residents traveled for education, in recent years
a group of older residents in Ping’an hired a local travel agency to orga-
nize group tours to Beijing in 2006 and to Shanghai in 2007 (figure 3.2).
The cost of the trips was relatively affordable, about ¥1,300 per person
all-inclusive for five days and four nights. For the participants and their
families, this represented a significant step forward—finally, they were
not only the toured but the tourists as well. Of course, this was not the
first time that these individuals had left the village; some had been labor
migrants in the past, and many still traveled to Guilin regularly to buy
goods, visit relatives, and conduct business. But these trips were distinctly,
and strictly, organized leisure. They were proper holidays with tour buses,
photographers, and even a videographer who recorded the entire trip and
then presented each participant with a set of video recordings once they
had returned to Ping’an. It was not just the travel that was so exciting,
although admittedly many people told me they did enjoy the flight, which
was the first for most of them. The social distinction of being able to be a
tourist, after two decades of being visited and seen by tourists, was equally
memorable. Of course, only those families who were doing well enough in
Ping’an’s tourism business had the extra money to send their grandmoth-
ers and grandfathers on vacation. It is perhaps only mildly ironic then that
these same rural communities relied on the tourism industries to make
the money needed to be a tourist.128	| Chapter 3
figure 3.2. A souvenir group photo of Ping’an residents who visited Shanghai
hangs on the wall of a house in the village (2007). Photo by the author.
Returned migrants influenced tourism developments in their home
villages by bringing their personal experiences in travel to bear on the
future of their village tourism industries. Within this landscape of travel,
mobility played a formative role in giving order and meaning to the iden-
tities and economic possibilities available. Through the stories of travel
of five individuals, it is clear that the topics of experiencing the world,
knowing what tourists want, entrepreneurship, and reintegration were all
pertinent to the ways in which tourism was perceived as a livelihood and
opportunity, much as out-migration was also already so understood. It is
by tracing these changes in mobility that a more nuanced understanding
of social transformation and modernization programs in rural tourism
villages can be pieced together, thereby allowing for a closer examination
of howboth discourses of and experiences in travel operate in conjunction
and in competition with each other.Leave the Fields without Leaving the Countryside |	129
ORDERING MOBILITY
By examining how mobility orders social relationships and how certain
forms of mobility, such as tourism or migration, come to be valued in rela-
tion to each other, I have drawn attention to how mobility and immobility
are integrated into how individuals make sense of economic opportunity,
identity, and inequality in rural ethnic tourism villages. This “differen-
tiated mobility” (Massey 1993), understood as “the uneven and unequal
position of different groups and persons in relation to various flows and
movements” (Chu 2006, 401), uses travel experiences and discourses to
understand social relations and subjectivities. But as the stories reveal,
different forms of mobility are not necessarily perceived as independent
of each other; rather, tourism and migration as well as other travels are
structurally ordered in meaningful ways, each informing the other and
gaining greater significance as a result of their relationships. Such an
approach to mobility studies is what John Urry (2007, 46) has dubbed the
“mobilities paradigm”—a conceptual framework in which using mobility
as an analytic and social process thus acknowledges that “all social rela-
tionships should be seen as involving diverse ‘connections’ that are more
or less ‘at a distance.’” The mobilities paradigm “forces us to attend to this
economic, social and cultural organization of distance, and not just to the
physical aspects of movement” (ibid., 54) because, after all, global “scapes
and flows [or, the mobilities of people and things] create new inequalities
of access” (Urry 2003, 5).17
Anthropological attention to the social formation of mobility can illu-
minate how different types of mobility and immobility are variously val-
ued in relation to one another, the differences of these values for different
social groups, and what the consequences of these values might be on lived
experiences and social relationships. Urry (2002a, 264) has explained that
“for many social groups it is the lack of mobility that is the real problem,
and they will seek to enhance their social capital through access to greater
mobility”; yet in rural China, mobility and immobility are understood
in conflicting, though nonetheless desirable, ways. To start, rural ethnic
tourism required village residents to be immobile. To that end, returning
was highly regarded in tourism villages, but at the same time, experience
outside of the village was considered imperative to doing tourism. Once
tourism was successful enough for families and households, a new form130	| Chapter 3
of mobility was desired—travel as tourists. As such, mobility was ordered,
and it was through these orders that returned migrants in tourism villages
made sense of their past travels, anticipated the future arrival of tourists,
and envisioned their place in present-day village life.18
In discourses of mobility, some subjectivities appear to be considered
as more amenable to being mobile while others are viewed in terms of
stasis and immobility. Immobility is not always discursively constructed
negatively; in some instances, a “sedantarist metaphysics” works in rela-
tion to nationalistic discourses of refugee populations, where “in the
national order of things, the rooting of people is not only normal; it is also
perceived as a moral and spiritual need” (Malkki 1992,30). The same claim
for the moral need fulfilled by immobility may be applied to the develop-
ment of rural regions as tourism destinations for domestic national and
international tourists, who seek their own moral uplifting through the
experience of the immobility of rural peoples and communities. If the
tourist is a model of “modern-man-in-general” (MacCannell 1999 [1976],
1) partially by virtue of her or his mobility as a tourist, then the rural tour-
ism village resident seems clearly positioned as the ideal unmodern-man-
in-general. What links these notions of modernity and mobility together,
then, is the particular order of mobility that allows for and encompasses a
socially meaningful way of making sense of the inequalities produced by
differing forms of mobility. Within this order, migrants and tourists each
come to play a part in maintaining social stability, although differences of
power, access, and perceived value still persist.
As the stories of travel reveal, there are important inequalities inher-
ent in different forms of mobility. To consider the ordering of mobility is
to acknowledge that choices about mobility, such as whether to migrate
or to stay, hold consequences that extend beyond the economic or strictly
functional but rather double back onto the very identities and social sub-
jectivities of the individuals and communities themselves. Any ordering
of mobility is always based on inequalities and certain inaccessibilities.
Tim Cresswell (2006, 177) has argued, in examining migration policies
and histories in the United States, that “the ways in which mobility is
given meaning and then enacted is intimately tied to notions of sameness
and difference.” This creates the unavoidable entanglement of the politics
of mobility and the politics of difference, encapsulated in the orders of
mobility, which holds very real consequences for the persons who mustLeave the Fields without Leaving the Countryside |	131
negotiate these conditions. From the four common themes raised in the
migrants’ stories, the landscape of travel in which these individuals con-
sider, deliberate, and make decisions can be seen as one in which mobility
is simultaneously considered as an expression of potential, an assertion of
place in the process of modernization, and as constitutive of unexpected
inequalities. One’s mobility can be an asset and a skill toward participat-
ing in new tourism industries, while remaining a threatening possibility
vis-a-vis leaving the village community entirely.
In rural China, modernization plans are rendering ever more apparent
the intrinsic contradictions of mobility by implicating subjectivities such
as tourist/migrant within the lived experience of tourism as development.
However, the aversion within tourism planning, as a modern phenom-
enon, to acknowledging the consequences of mobility (exemplified in not-
ing that a highway in rural Guizhou could detract from the region’s visual
amenity), is similar to the impossible notion of “leaving the fields without
leaving the countryside.” It is a failed attempt to pretend that mobility is
not somehow inherently shaped by differences, inequalities, and social
distances. In taking up mobility as a conceptual framework, there must be
a commitment to acknowledging and exploring reverse flows and stopped
traffic—the problems created by mobility. This means taking seriously
how migration can be both liberating and constraining in rural China, in
this instance; how returning to the village can create new conflicts as well
as provide for novel innovations toward solving old problems; and recog-
nizing that sometimes some people may want to leave both the fields and
the countryside, all in the name of being (and becoming) modern. Within
the villages, however, ideas about tourism were often debated in terms of
“the look” of the village and how residents negotiated the visual expedien-
cies of tourism, which were changing personal opinions on tourism and
altering the very appearance of each place. By tracing these changes, both
experiential and visible, a more nuanced understanding of social transfor-
mation in rural ethnic tourism villages can be pieced together.CHAPTER 4
“TAKE A PICTURE WITH US"
The Politics of Appearance
One day in late September 2007, I left Upper Jidao with Qin, the village
clinician and frequent de facto tour guide, and Wang Xiaomei, a journalist
at the Guizhou People’s Daily. Xiaomei had recently completed a master’s
thesis for which she conducted a comparative study of tourism develop-
ment in Upper Jidao and its more well-established, well-known, and well-
touristed neighbor, Upper Langde (Wang X. 2007).1 Xiaomei and I were
headed back to Guiyang, via Kaili, after spending a few days together in
Upper Jidao sharing notes and ideas. Qin was on her way to attend a medi-
cal training workshop in Kaili. The three of us walked toward the highway
that linked the village to the city. Unusually, no buses passed us as we
strolled along the road, which hugged the winding Bala River, and we
continued about a kilometer to Paile village before we stopped to wait.
Eventually a bus came careening by, and Qin, Xiaomei, and I scrambled
on board as the driver hustled us to sit down.
As the bus zipped into the township of Sankeshu twenty minutes later, I
saw that the town’s formerly drab concrete and tile three-story shop fronts
were now encased in bamboo scaffolding. Fresh planks of wood were piled
high along the sidewalks. New tiled roofs with decorative features had
been carefully set upon the previously flat tops of the buildings, and the
wood planks were in the process of being nailed to the facade of the build-
ings. The remodeling project in Sankeshu had started during the summer,
133134	| Chapter 4
but I hadn’t noticed it as closely on my way to Upper Jidao a few weeks
earlier. “What’s going on here?” I asked Qin. She replied that the Kaili
municipal government had given some money to Sankeshu, in a cost-
sharing agreement, to renovate the buildings. Sankeshu was to become
the “gateway town” to the Bala River tourism area, and to achieve this,
it needed to look the part. Qin used a four-character Chinese phrase to
describe the changes: chuanyi dai mao, which translates as “to get dressed
and put on a hat.” In short, the town was wearing new clothes.
VISUAL EXPEDIENCIES
All over Guizhou, and indeed across China, villages and towns have
been getting dressed. In Sankeshu, this latest phase of renovations was
part of a regional response to the directives of the campaign to build a
New Socialist Countryside, which explicitly promoted building reno-
vations in achieving a “neat and clean” appearance. As domestic tour-
ism in China has become integrated into economic development plans,
efforts by local governments, village leaders, business entrepreneurs,
and media producers to create or at least improve “the look” of a vil-
lage or town were, and continue to be, considered an absolutely critical
component of tourism success. Around Kaili and Sankeshu, located in
the Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture in Guizhou,
ethnicity was being carved into the visible, physical environment—from
wooden houses to bus stops and sports stadiums. This overriding con-
cern with improving the visual appearance of rural places and people
revealed a range of complex and contradictory impulses, illuminating
the politics of appearance in contemporary China. It was precisely the
critical importance of visual appearances in tourism—whether of build-
ings, landscapes, or people—that rendered the visual work of tourism so
expedient to tourism success.
The expected visual experience of tourism for tourists is thus inte-
gral to how host communities and governments grapple with the visual
expediencies of tourism. Given that the act of sightseeing in tourism is
an established cornerstone of the modern tourist experience, it is crucial
to examine how Upper Jidao and Ping’an have been planned, built, and
maintained as rural and ethnic sights/sites.2 Critically engaging with the
visual world of the villages as it was being debated and created is centralTake a Picture with Us” |	135
to understanding how sightseeing is anticipated, directed, and turned into
a category of knowledge through the manipulation and representation of
the environment (built and natural) by tourism bureaus, village residents,
and media.3 Tourists are expected to approach their experience in Upper
Jidao and Ping’an visually and to leave the villages with images (including
postcards, photographs, or videos) as evidence of their encounter. Stake-
holders in the tourism endeavor therefore have to know how to do tourism
in a way that can fulfill these expectations.
Knowing what tourists expect to see constitutes the visuality of tour-
ism, but this visuality must be rendered into material, physical forms.
Renovations, such as the new shop fronts and facades in Sankeshu, are
both pragmatic and symbolic. Such visualizations of rural ethnic lives and
identities are not simply fake or inauthentic; rather, these visual appear-
ances are central to the process of creating knowledge about the self and
the other that is inherent in and vital to doing tourism. Renovations play
a central part in China’s efforts to develop and modernize rural ethnic
regions. There are political and social ramifications to having a look—the
ways of using the visual to determine and define the meaning of a place
and a people. After all, “appearance is knowledge, of a kind. . . . Visual
knowledge (as well as other forms of sensory knowledge) provides one
of our primary means of comprehending the experience of other people”
(MacDougall 2006,5; italics in the original). How residents of Upper Jidao
and Ping’an worked to make their villages “look good” for tourists thus
demonstrates how knowledge of and about rural ethnic China is being
formed under the guise of tourism. Through the implementation of pres-
ervation programs, exterior building codes, and other mechanisms to
consciously control the visible surface of tourism villages, residents were
learning how to understand both tourism and themselves through these
changes.
Renovating the architectural style and physical appearance of a tour-
ism destination is frequently justified under the guise of “preserving”
traditional environments, styles of vernacular architecture, and indig-
enous methods of construction (AlSayyad 2001). The popular tourism
destination of Lijiang Old Town, in the center of Lijiang city in Yunnan,
provides a case in point.4 After a devastating earthquake hit the region in
1996, a massive rebuilding project was undertaken to recreate the atmo-
sphere and appearance of the old town district. Following that, with the136	| Chapter 4
old town’s inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list in 1997,
locals rushed to renovate their homes into homestay guesthouses (Yu
Wang 2007, 792). This required major, and expensive, physical changes
to the structure of existing homes in order to maintain the “traditional”
exteriors while installing flush toilets, bathtubs, TVs, telephones, and
soundproof walls. Tourist desires guided these efforts; many households
built “big windows in the guest rooms even in a break from Naxi tra-
ditional houses in which no windows were allowed in the middle room
(the living room for a Naxi family)” (ibid., 793). Beyond the immediate
impact of these changes for the local residents, the visual presence of
objects like televisions and toilets marked these guesthouses as comfort-
able and suitable for tourists. After all, for most tourists, flush toilets are
considered a wholly practical amenity. The overall visual effect of these
renovations also held social and subjective ramifications for locals, who
had to learn, understand, and be able to negotiate the physical and visual
changes in their living environments. More broadly stated, and in line
with the New Socialist Countryside promotion of “neat and clean vil-
lages,” as lives changed on the outside, in terms of the built environment,
residents were expected to transform (or be transformed) on the inside.
The politics of appearance embedded in architectural renovations are
not limited to rural regions, of course; in urban environments, the trend
in constructing self-consciously visual sites as a statement of presence,
potential, and profits is encapsulated in the rise of “starchitecture”—brand
name, mega-architectural projects by internationally famous architects
that take on iconic status as emblems of modernity, wealth, and prog-
ress.5 Pre-2008 Beijing Olympics building projects, such as the National
Theatre, the Water Cube, and the Bird’s Nest stadium, were part of the
city’s, and the country’s, desire to assert itself as a formidable emerging
world power that would not be ignored or overlooked (Broudehoux 2007,
385). These buildings were intended to be viewed not by human eyes from
below, but from above, through the mediated perspective of a machine—
as Anne-Marie Broudehoux has noted: “This global-scale architecture,
meant to be seen from a helicopter, and experienced on large television
screens, is symptomatic of the media-based economy of the new entre-
preneurial city, and is entirely at the service of the spectacle” (ibid., 385).
Creating an experience best enjoyed through modern visual technolo-
gies such as cameras and televisions suggests that the camera is no longerTake a Picture with Us” |	137
an intrusion or a thing to be merely tolerated. Instead, the camera itself
becomes the primary reason for building, changing, or maintaining the
landscape, urban or rural. It becomes the main justification for looking at
a place or even a person.
Landscapes are made to be seen, and the ability to be seen is a crucial
part of the visuality of tourism; determining what becomes valued as a
sight constitutes the visual expediencies of doing tourism. Constructing
or finding a way to be worth looking at, therefore, was one of the greatest
challenges; villages, towns, and cities had to “change their clothes” so as
to attract more attention and, by extension, additional investments and
potential profits. In Upper Jidao and Ping’an, looking rural and looking
different has become increasingly important because it is their look that
enables these communities to pursue status and success in the booming
Chinese tourism industry and national rural development efforts. Empha-
sizing “rural-ness” and “ethnic-ness” is a part of visually increasing the
exotic “otherness” factor so often expected in tourism and represented
in travel media. In some cases, the features and characteristics constitut-
ing “otherness” have been drawn from existing models, such as ethnic
theme parks, which have codified the experience of ethnic performance
and display.
Accordingly, tourism villages have attempted to rebuild, repackage,
and renovate themselves by referencing already present typologies of oth-
erness. In this way, in order to succeed, rural ethnic Chinese commu-
nities must necessarily engage with national mainstream discourses of
modernity and development. As Tim Oakes (2006b, 167-68; emphasis in
the original) has written:
Such [ethnic tourism] villages replicated (or hope to replicate) across
space the urban theme park model of what is often regarded in China
as advanced or modern tourism. In doing so, they have become places
where the newly acquired mechanisms of tourist display have generated a
self-consciousness about identity conditioned by the broader networks of
travel to which locals are now linked. Travel, in other words, fundamen-
tally shapes the ways places are made and remade by encouraging villag-
ers not just to welcome and perform for paying visitors but to replicate
themselves in newly self-conscious ways.138	| Chapter 4
Indeed, as demonstrated in their own stories, villagers’ travels, whether as
migrant workers or as tourists, influenced how they understood tourism
and how they perceived the value of being rural and ethnic. Village resi-
dents were learning to “be themselves” for tourists (to paraphrase Stanley
1998) and to be more like themselves than ever before (Bunten 2010). The
visual environment in which they negotiated and managed these identities
played a critical role in making the practice of doing tourism meaningful
for village residents. In some instances, this resulted in a straightforward
application of visual, touristic motifs within a village setting, by bringing
in ideas of theme park displays and stylized performance choreography.
In other cases, visuality was comprehended more obliquely—for exam-
ple, by conceptualizing the “scenery” of one’s home village as potentially
desirable to tourists. Overall, however, a significant part of the process
of replication in ethnic tourism villages included a renewed emphasis on
belonging by residents.
In a study of an ethnic Dai village park in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan,
Sun Jiuxia and Bao Jigang (2007b, 33) describe how the women who
hosted tourists deliberately stressed their personal connections to what
tourists saw: the house tourists visited became “my home,” the people in
the house were “my family,” and of course, all the products for sale were
“locally made.” But the initial step in foregrounding one’s place in a vil-
lage community, for the purposes of increasing profits and profitability,
was for residents to learn how to visually assert themselves. The concrete
ways in which this process of visualization unfolded thus illuminate the
visual expediencies of tourism and the attendant politics of appearance.
Power and knowledge intersect and interact in highly charged contests
over who and what may constitute the appropriate and desired look of a
place. In the remainder of this chapter, I analyze the creation and pro-
motion of Upper Jidao as a village of wooden houses for tourism and for
visual media (including films and advertising). Next I examine, ethno-
graphically, the contentious maintenance of the terraced fields for pho-
tography and the role of “minority models” in the tourism business in
Ping’an. Visual knowledge and visuality are embedded in the experience
of tourism, for both tourists and village residents, and the move toward
visual coherence in rural ethnic tourism villages has spurred unintended
social and economic consequences.Take a Picture with Us” |	139
BUILDING THE LOOK:
THE WOODEN HOUSE PHENOMENON
As described in chapter 1, the efforts from 2002 on for tourism devel-
opment in Guizhou were led by the provincial government, which, after
many years of planning and consultation, in 2009 successfully obtained a
US$60 million project loan from the World Bank to fund a project titled
Guizhou Cultural and Natural Heritage Protection and Development.
The provincial government’s involvement in rural tourism development
was meant to limit the potential negative effects of commercial tourism
development on ethnic cultural heritage practices and environments by
mandating community-led tourism development and local input. Other
regional government administrations embarked on related tourism devel-
opment projects at the same time, driven by parallel desires for economic
growth and political prominence in these years of national attention to
rural tourism and rural development.
The renovations in Sankeshu township were funded, in part, by gov-
ernment units in Kaili, the prefectural capital. As a part of Kaili’s own
transformation, the city built some of the nicest looking bus stops any-
where in China. These structures carried a visual theme of Miao-eth-
nic-minority-ness, with plinths and decorative elements that mimicked
the silver-horned headdresses and necklaces worn by the region’s Miao
women during festivals (figures 4.1 and 4.2). A new sports stadium, bus
station, and the municipal administration offices all “put on hats” in the
shape of ethnic Dong drum towers. These structures in Kaili served as a
visual reminder of the prefecture’s claim to fame as the homeland and
spiritual heart of the Miao and Dong ethnic minority groups in China.
The horn-shaped adornments, curvy tiled roofs, and, most important,
wooden buildings (or wooden-looking buildings) alluded to the rural aes-
thetic of local village life. As I noticed passing through Sankeshu that day,
one of the most pressing tasks was to cover the concrete walls of the shop
fronts and buildings with wood planks in an effort to symbolize rural-
ness through the use of natural materials.
These types of exterior renovations are typical of tourism development
plans; the World Bank’s 2007 “Strategic Environmental Assessment Study”
for Guizhou, prepared before the approval of the project loan, addressed
a number of issues facing the region, such as biodiversity, environmental140	| Chapter 4
figure 4.1. Women wear their Miao festival clothes and headdresses (sheng
zhuang) when performing for tour groups in Upper Jidao (2008). Photo by the
author.
protection, and the question of what landscape architects and tourism
consultants call “visual impact” (Landscape Institute 2002). According
to the assessment study, “tourism development may also cause direct
and indirect landscape and visual impacts. . . . [T]ourism development
demands amenity infrastructure such as hotels, shops and recreational
facilities that may result in landscape and visual impacts where their sit-
ing, architectural style or colour are inconsistent with the surrounding
environment. This impact will become particularly significant for heri-
tage-based tourism development, if new constructions are not compatible
to host environment and cultural costumes” (World Bank 2007, 47). The
authors recommend that visual impact be taken into account at a state or
provincial level in all further environmental impact assessments, as their
research revealed a lack of communication between various government
departments involved in the promotion and management of scenic tour-
ism areas, in addition to a total lack of regulations in parts of the provinceTake a Picture with Us” |	141
figure 4.2. Bus stops in Kaili are visually themed to resemble Miao headdresses
(2007). Photo by the author.
not specifically deemed scenic tourism areas (ibid., 48). The gradual visual
transformations in Sankeshu and Kaili clearly aimed at constructing and
standardizing the “visual impact” of the prefecture for tourism.
The assessment study offers few details about village architecture, how-
ever, simply suggesting that villagers should follow “traditional architec-
tural style,” using “local style and local materials to minimise potential
negative visual impact” (ibid., 47-48). Upper Jidao had been slowly taking
steps toward a total makeover ever since it had been formally selected to
be a part of the province’s new tourism project. The ideal vision for Upper
Jidao was a village of “wooden houses,” but from the very beginning, con-
flicts arose about how to actually do this. This image of wooden houses
stemmed from the fact that, as village residents repeatedly stressed to me,
the appearance of their village was the reason why Upper Jidao and not
Lower Jidao (only a few hundred meters away) had been chosen for tourism
development. The excess use of concrete in Lower Jidao, both for village142	| Chapter 4
paths and houses, was often cited as part of its unsuitability for tourism;
village paths in Upper Jidao had been made of river stones set in concrete.
When it came to determining the tourism resources within Upper Jidao to
be promoted and marked with signs, the village’s “hundred year houses”
(bainian guwu) and the “hundred year granaries” (hainian liangcang), had
been selected as features, so these structures took priority when it came to
figuring out how to make the village into an attractive tourist destination.6
One household in Upper Jidao found itself at odds with both the village
subcommittee leaders and government officials from the provincial tour-
ism bureau precisely because of the look of their house. During my first
stay in the village in 2006, after learning that I’d met with Zhang Xiaosong
of the provincial tourism bureau, the two adult brothers of the household
implored me to carry a message back to her. It took some convincing to
explain that I was not directly working for the provincial government and
therefore had little influence on the provincial-level plans. Nevertheless,
the brothers described how they had been criticized and later verbally
threatened for beginning to build a block of three concrete rooms directly
in front of their house, which was right on the riverbank and which could
be seen from the highway on the other side of the Bala River.
At first, the brothers explained, the rooms were meant to be akin to
tearooms in the city, where tourists could play cards and relax while gazing
at the river and surrounding scenery. This was how they had envisioned
tourism in Upper Jidao, basing it on models of leisure popular in cities and
bringing it to the countryside. It wasn’t “rural ethnic tourism” in the mode
of the ethnic theme park and, unfortunately for this household, it was not
exactly the nong jia le model of tourism championed at the time by the
tourism bureau or international consultants engaged in the development
plans because it did not involve any specifically rural or ethnic Miao ele-
ments. But because tourism had not taken off as quickly as they had hoped,
the brothers said the rooms would now be used as pigsties and a new toilet
for the household. Whatever the intended purpose of the rooms, the Kaili
tourism bureau demanded they stop construction, and village leaders put
pressure on the brothers to remove the offending cinderblock and concrete
walls. The concrete was ugly, they were told, and it didn’t fit the image of a
rural ethnic village, where wooden houses should be the norm.7
Wood was designated the visual key to making Upper Jidao a more
traditional village for tourism. Every building had to be made of wood, orTake a Picture with Us” |	143
made to look like it was made of wood.8 In 2005, the Kaili municipal gov-
ernment used wooden planks to cover up all concrete sides of the houses
that could be seen either from the highway or from the main walking paths
in Upper Jidao. Most village homes, if not all, were built around a wooden
frame with wooden planks fitted as interior and exterior walls and some-
times floors. However, cinder blocks and concrete were commonly used for
the foundation; as walls for ground-level storage and animal pens; in and
around the kitchen; for building flat roofs and outdoor spaces for drying
unhusked rice and beans; and for general work areas inside a home. Fire
prevention made concrete desirable; the threat of fire is imminent in such
a densely populated village, where many families divide a single house
into two by using wooden planks to create new rooms and a new kitchen
area when households split {fen jia).9 With the introduction of electricity,
gas stoves (usually using propane tanks or biomethane), and other mod-
ern accoutrements, concrete was also practical and safer. But concrete was
not considered an appropriate material for looking good in tourism; when
asked about the further developments desired for Upper Jidao’s tourism
to succeed, one man, a migrant laborer in Shenzhen who had returned to
the village for a short stay, said that of the changes he wanted, one was “to
finish up the village appearance, the outside appearance.”
When asked about the boarding up of concrete walls, residents’
responses were always pragmatic—most said that they didn’t mind since
the government had paid for it, and in fact, many of the families whose
houses were covered up weren’t even home when it happened. Another
man I interviewed in late 2006 said he was frequently away from Upper
Jidao as a bridge engineer; when people began covering up the concrete
and brick walls in 2005, he had no idea they were working on his house. “I
didn’t do it. I wasn’t at home,” he explained, but he thought the final result
was beautiful. “And the wood benefits me,” he added. “It blocks out [more]
wind and rain and protects the house; I’m not opposed to it.” However, he
added one caveat: “There have been a lot of changes, and I think they’re all
very good, but I don’t have time to participate in it, they [have to] do it.”
Villagers worried that they would later be asked to spend their own money
on wood planks or on the upkeep of these covered walls. The initial “cloth-
ing” had been a fairly haphazard effort, and within a year of being put up,
some planks had warped in the wind and rain and fallen off of the walls
of many houses, exposing the concrete beneath (figure 4.3).144	| Chapter 4
figure 4.3. Wooden planks were used to cover up brick and concrete
walls in Upper Jidao, but over time they warped and fell off (2006).
Photo by the author.
Keeping up appearances did not stop at just the wood planks. In the
words of Wang Qiao, Party Secretary of the Kaili Tourism Bureau in 2006,
Upper Jidao needed “new packaging” to promote its local, folk-ethnic
look. During a weekend trip through the prefecture with five members
of the Kaili Tourism Bureau in December of that year, people commented
repeatedly on the concrete that had been used to build new houses and
shops in many villages we passed; these places, they said, would never
make it as tourism destinations because they looked too modern, despiteTake a Picture with Us” |	145
the spectacular surrounding scenery of mountains, valleys, and rivers. In
Upper Jidao, every building was “getting dressed” in wood, and the vast
majority of the changes to the village’s appearance were being paid for
by local and provincial government units as a part of the tourism prepa-
rations in line with the New Socialist Countryside plans. This included
boarding up the houses, and in 2007, it extended to adding decorative
window frames to the houses closest to the new cultural center and per-
formance space. Further efforts to beautify the village by making it more
wooden included more carved wooden frames for all windows, two wood
pagodas designed like wind-and-rain bridges (fengyu qiao), and in 2012,
the existing “hundred year granaries” were dismantled and being rebuilt
with new wood as part of their preservation. Of course, in the schematic
plans for the village, “dressing up” wasn’t just for the buildings; when
tourists would come to Upper Jidao, every body would get dressed too.
Part of the tourism program for the village included, predictably, song-
and-dance performances by the villagers themselves. The village houses
changed their clothes, as would the village residents—all in the name of
doing tourism.
AN EXCEPTIONAL PLACE: FILMING UPPER JIDAO
The process of how Upper Jidao became a wooden village illustrates how
the visual experience of tourism was expedient for village residents, espe-
cially as they grappled with competing ideas of what tourism could, or
should, entail. The visual side of tourism had to be created and antici-
pated; village residents were preparing themselves to be seen. It began
with the physical built environment (such as houses and paths) and
extended to the physical body (changing clothes to suit the audience), as
these elements became a part of one’s understanding of howto do tourism.
One’s knowledge of what looked rural, what looked ethnically Miao, and
ultimately what looked correct became tangibly and materially visualized
in the choices made about the appearance of the place and the people. In
tourism, these visual differences were expected to be communicated and
consumed through visual media, such as photography and film.
Knowing how to make a place and a people visually coherent with
the expectations of tourists, government officials, anthropologists, and
consultants is critically important, but this knowledge is also rife with146	| Chapter 4
competing power relations and ambitions. Qin, the village clinician,
and I often joked that it would be a lie to keep promoting images in the
media of Miao women in their traditional festival dress (sheng zhuang),
complete with the large silver horn-shaped headdresses, because tourists
would come to expect to see this when they actually visited the village.
In reality, other than during the days of Miao New Year when there was
lusheng playing and dancing, tourists had to prearrange or otherwise spe-
cifically request to see women in festival clothes. This little white he of
Miao women always in exquisitely embroidered and silver-adorned festi-
val clothing was amusing for us to discuss in theory, but it was a very real
issue for Upper Jidao.
Tour guides frequently asked Qin and other women at short notice to
put on their festival clothes, including the full headdress, so that tourists
could take pictures. While most women obliged, the process of dressing
in festival attire was time-consuming. Moreover, since the vast majority of
women only owned one complete set of festival clothes, they were very con-
cerned about damaging the fabric, especially the embroidered sleeves and
trim, through overuse and general wear. Over the years, Teacher Pan, the
retired school teacher who often served as the first point of contact for tour
guides, began preemptively asking guides if their tourists would like to
photograph a woman in festival dress, and if so, one or two women would
appear at the appointed time. The fee, Teacher Pan said, was about ¥10 to
¥20, depending largely on what the tourist was willing to pay.
Looking different, or at least distinctive, in visual representations was
imperative, at all levels of the tourism experience. Ms. Chen, a host from
the China Central Television program “Travelogue” (broadcast on the
English-language station CCTV 9, now CCTV International), said that
once in 2007 when she and her crew went to an ethnic Tujia village in
Guizhou, “the entire time we went to film, we didn’t see anyone in a local
costume. No one’s going to go there if they don’t see anything different.”
Having recently returned from the province, where she filmed part of
a series about China’s ethnic minorities, Ms. Chen said she had found
Guizhou attractive because of the “combination of ethnic minorities and
location,” implying the visual effect of the people and the landscape.10
From the perspective of media producers and tourists, as outsiders, dif-
ferences in the built environment arguably included expectations of dif-
ferences in the people. I once observed a group of people from Kaili whoTake a Picture with Us” |	147
had come with a few women dressed in Miao festival clothes, but not from
Upper Jidao, who then proceeded to use Upper Jidao village as the back-
drop for photographs for a record album. The production and subsequent
circulation of such imagery meant that tourists and other outsiders often
expected to see people in visibly distinctive, Miao ethnic clothing inside
the perfectly preserved “wooden” village houses as part of the scenery.11
Upper Jidao was being imaged ever more frequently in national media
projects. In 2005, a young graduate of the prestigious Beijing Film Acad-
emy, Chou Chou, used Upper Jidao for on-location shooting for her first
feature film, Anayi (released in 2006). Almost all of Anayi was shot in
villages throughout Qiandongnan, Chou Chou’s home region and where
she’d spent her childhood, and she was proud of her accomplishment
in using these places as a backdrop for a love story about a young Miao
woman and a young Dong man. When I interviewed her in 2007 about
the film and her time in Upper Jidao, she said she’d found Upper Jidao
to be very natural and very original {yuan shenglai)—but in some places
there were too many walls made of concrete, she thought, and her team
had had to find bark planks and such to cover them up. In the film itself,
Upper Jidao was mostly used for long establishing shots and a few close-
ups of houses.
Qin was the first person to tell me about the film Anayi. Because she
was comfortable speaking in standard Chinese, Qin was frequently the
spokeswoman for the village when media reporters or government offi-
cials came. In 2007, when she was about to be interviewed on camera by a
Reuters television reporter, Qin rushed off to change her clothes, but not
before asking me if I thought she should do so. I hesitated, trying to defer
my reply, and Qin hurried back to her house anyway; when she returned
wearing a black velvet shirt featuring an embroidered flower in the middle,
a side bias seam, knotted buttons, and her hair twisted up into a topknot
{jiujiu) with a large fabric flower pinned to the front, she said it was more
“representative” {daibiaoxing, literally, “it had more Tepresentative-ness’”)
that way. Local women often referred to this kind of outfit simply as Miao
clothes {Miao yifu), as opposed to the full festival dress {sheng zhuang):
a thick jacket of shiny blue fabric with embroidered pieces on the sleeves
and around the entire body, a black skirt, another skirt worn on top made
up of multiple long, embroidered pieces sewn into a waistband, large silver
necklaces, and a silver headdress with horns (see figure 4.1).148	| Chapter 4
Full festival dress was limited to use during Miao New Year and,
increasingly, for tourism purposes, and these clothes held deep signifi-
cance because some of the embroidered pieces (particularly the dragons
on the sleeves) would be hand-embroidered by one’s mother or other
female relations. Miao clothes were worn at more everyday gatherings,
such as celebrations for the birth of a baby, a family wedding, or when
going to public markets in the nearby village of Paile or in Kaili. Younger
women, like Qin, tended to wear Miao clothes and festival dress made out
of synthetic materials bought from specialty tailors and traders; much
of the embroidery on the festival skirts as well as on the frontispieces
for Miao clothes was machine-sewn. Older women in the village, when
dressing up for tourism receptions or Miao New Year celebrations, more
often wore festival clothing they had received years earlier, in their home
villages, which tended to include more handmade components, includ-
ing hand-woven cloth and hand-embroidered trim. As far as I could tell,
however, women in the village did not place different values on whether
festival dress was “old” or “new,” although there was a collective apprecia-
tion of the time and effort that went into hand-embroidery.
Gendered expectations also played a role in who would (and who would
not) put on festival or markedly ethnic dress for tourists. Interestingly,
though perhaps not surprisingly, when the same Reuters reporter inter-
viewed the 2007 village subcommittee leader, Fu, he did not make any
move to change out of his jeans and leather jacket—but that interview did
not end up being used in the final Reuters story package sold through the
news agency’s service, whereas Qin’s interview did. Perhaps Qin’s sound
bite was better suited to the report than Fu’s, but in conversations with
television producers from China Central Television and the Beijing bureau
of the American network CBS, they all stressed the utmost importance
of finding something that “looks good” for TV. For the report by Reuters
TV, what “looked good” included a “dressed up” Qin but not the male vil-
lage leader in everyday, un-ethnically distinct clothing. Later that month,
a photographer from Reuters came to Upper Jidao to shoot pictures to
accompany the written news report (Blanchard 2007). He had a number
of places to go and quickly grew frustrated at how “uninteresting” his pic-
tures of Upper Jidao were. No one had expected his arrival, so villagers
were wearing their everyday work clothes, and no effort had been made
on this particular day to “dress up.” In the end, to get more pictures, theTake a Picture with Us” |	149
photographer went down the road to Upper Langde, which, as a popular,
well-known tourism village, offered daily song-and-dance performances.
Tourists expect, and are expected, to recognize what is rural and what is
ethnic first by looking. The contradictions, criticisms, and controversies that
emerge—such as the case with the half-finished concrete rooms—point to
the symbolic fissures between what a place is and what it is supposed to look
like. The same goes for the people, and the implications are manifold—if
rural places and people are not supposed to look like modern urbanites, can
they still enjoy the creature comforts of modernization such as flushing toi-
lets, Internet access, and other amenities that are desired by today’s tourists?12
As tourism demanded a certain visual look to a place, the consequences of
such demands were located in the ways different stakeholders came to under-
stand what was appealing and attractive about that site, and eventually where
and how money was spent. It was also about how village residents, like Qin,
came to see themselves as needing to be a little more, or less, “representa-
tive”; how photographers came looking for something “interesting”; and how
government tourism bureaus decided when and where to pressure village
residents to build their homes in a certain way—in effect, molding the expec-
tations and desires of the residents. Together, these decisions, made at both
local rural and national levels, came to shape what would be known about
rural ethnic places like Upper Jidao through their tourism.
TAKING CARE OF TERRACED FIELDS
Similar debates occurred in Ping’an, which was and remains the most heav-
ily visited village within the Longji Scenic Area. In Ping’an, residents had
similar troubles and arguments over the building of “wooden” houses that
could also function as hotels, and in 2007 the county government opened a
new office called the Longji Construction Bureau to oversee village build-
ing projects. According to villagers, however, the building codes changed
almost every year, and any rule could be bent or simply dismissed with
enough financial leverage. Because tourism revenue for the residents of
Ping’an depended largely upon their earnings from family-run guesthouses
and restaurants, with income from carrying sedans and luggage only sup-
plemental, most families with enough money expanded or rebuilt their
homes to feature larger dining areas, a bigger kitchen, and better appointed
guestrooms. The general rule of thumb regarding construction and archi-150	| Chapter 4
tectural style was that houses in Ping’an must be made of wood or look
so—a widely accepted guideline was that building an “old house” (lao fang),
which meant no more than two stories tall and completely made of wood,
did not require permission from the construction office.13 But to build a
guesthouse or hotel with modern conveniences such as flushing toilets,
on-demand hot water, en suite bathrooms, and heating and cooling units
required concrete and lots of it. The completed building had to adhere to
certain height restrictions (generally said to be three stories, but there were a
handful of buildings with five stories by 2007, and by 2012 many more large
hotels were under construction). Furthermore, the building must, in the
end, be covered in wood. The goal was to maintain the look of the village,
while at the same time allowing for increases in business. The enforcement
of these rules waxed and waned over the years, causing much anger and
resentment among the villagers. Many families simply ignored the rules or
the complicated permissions system, figuring that it would be difficult for
the government bureau to take down an already built house, but it would
be very easy to lose an argument about a house that had not yet been built.
As the number of tourists and competition intensified, however, it
became clear that the busiest, most successful accommodations were
always the newer, more recently renovated hotels with en suite bathrooms,
enough height for a good view of the terraces, and screened-in windows
to keep out mosquitoes and other creatures. The view of terraced fields
was central; after all, Zhuang minority architecture was merely an added
bonus in a visit to Ping’an. Tourists came to the Longji Scenic Area to see
the fields, and the terraces encapsulated yet another instance in which the
visual expediency of tourism determined the decisions and choices made
available to village residents. Many tourists were openly, and loudly, dis-
appointed when the terraces did not look good. “Good” meant the fields
had to resemble the dramatic images widely circulated in the mainstream
media—from television advertisements to glossy photo books. Because of
existing imagery and marketing campaigns, there were very specific looks
for the terraces in each season (snowy white in winter, sparkling silver in
spring, lush green in summer, and golden in autumn), which the villagers
were expected to re-create by keeping up an annual cycle of rice planting
and harvesting. When the terraces did not look like these images, such as
in the late autumn or early spring when they were dry and mostly bare,
many tourists complained that there was nothing to see.Take a Picture with Us” |	151
A large segment of tourist arrivals in Ping’an is comprised of amateur
photographers who often come as part of package tours during the most
“photographable” seasons of the year—the late spring and early summer
flooding of the fields and then the autumn “golden” fields of ripening rice
just before harvest. According to the history of tourism in Ping’an, as writ-
ten by village elder Lao for me, the first tourists to Ping’an were photog-
raphers, and the links between Ping’an and photography run deep. One
local guesthouse owner told me that her main customers were photog-
raphy groups from Guangzhou, and through these various connections
her husband had even worked for a while with a China Central Television
crew whom the couple had met in the village. Her business centered on
catering to photographers; inside her hotel, the walls were covered with
poster-size photographs of the terraces and pictures of the guesthouse
owner herself taken by photographers who had hired her as a guide and
model. She had hung up a sign on her hotel that read: “friends of photog-
raphy” (she ying zhi you). Although photographers are not good tourists,
many villagers told me, because they tended not to buy much in the way of
souvenirs, they were good for business: they kept the image of the terraced
fields in circulation, especially online. Their pictures attracted more tour-
ists to Ping’an, village residents believed, and many photographers came
year after year in search of that perfect shot.
Thus, according to the local logic, without the terraced fields there
would be no photographers or other tourists in Ping’an. But terraced
fields require constant upkeep—they have to be maintained annually,
with the earth and stone walls regularly repaired, and they have to sustain
wet-rice cultivation practices to match existing images. Village residents
complained that they did not have enough time to do both agricultural
work and tourism work; some families hired day laborers (from inside and
outside the village) to do the plowing and planting for them, and other
families, such as the one I lived with, tended to only maintain their fields
that were within sight of the two major viewpoints (also reported in Xu
Ganli 2005). A lot of physical and mental effort went into maintaining
how the village and the terraces looked—and many of the struggles over
control of the tourism profits, distribution of employment opportunities,
and political leadership responsibilities were explained to me in terms of
“we the villagers work the fields, but it is the outside entrepreneurs and
government officials who earn all of the money from tourism.”152	| Chapter 4
Many villagers perceived themselves as being overlooked in the local
political economy of tourism, with all the care and attention paid only to
the terraced fields. But underlying these expressions of discontent, there
was the agreed-upon reality that without terraced fields that are worth
being seen, no one (or very few) would care about, let alone come to and
spend money in, Ping’an. In an interview with a young woman who was
a popular guide in the village, I asked what kind of photograph of the
terraces she thought photographers should take, expecting a response
about lighting, seasons, or other landscape features. Instead, she replied:
“Photographs with people in them.” When I asked her to elaborate, she
explained that if there were people in the pictures of the terraced fields,
tourists would know that people made these terraces and that terraced
fields aren’t naturally occurring. This latter point was a common miscon-
ception. Some tourists, she said, would even ask if the terraces “had always
been there,” ignorant of the labor involved. The tourists’ desire for beauti-
ful photographs of the terraced fields meant that tourists often perceived
of the terraces as static and natural. But terraced fields require continuous
human effort. Keeping the people in the picture was this guide’s way of
addressing the politics of appearance in Ping’an today.
THE PEOPLE IN THE PICTURES:
PHOTOGRAPHING MINORITY MODELS
There were some people in Ping’an whose explicit job was to be in the
picture. As tourist arrivals increased throughout the 2000s, a number of
souvenir photography businesses sprung up along the heavily used path
to viewpoint 2, which looked down upon the Seven Stars with Moon land-
scape. These businesses were made by building a concrete or wooden plat-
form extension that commanded an expansive view of the terraced fields
below, allowing tourists to stop and look at the fields without blocking
the narrow walkway that led to the viewpoint. Because of their location
and perspective, tourists posing on the platforms could have their picture
taken with the full view of the fields behind them. Tourists could also
pay to pose with “minority models”: attractive young women dressed in
a variety of stylized ethnic minority costumes specifically designed for
performances and display (figure 4.4).14 The outfits worn by the minority
models were visually brasher and more ostentatious than the ethnic ZhuangTake a Picture with Us” |	153
figure 4.4. This photograph cost the tourist ¥30 in total: ¥10 to each of the two
models, plus an additional ¥10 for the printed and laminated souvenir photograph
(2007). Photo by the author.
clothes worn by women in Ping’an (see figure 4.6), and they were specifi-
cally manufactured and purchased as costumes to be worn for tourism
performances or shows, including national ethnic minority dance per-
formances.15 The ethnic minority costumes worn by the models were also
the same types provided to tourists who wanted to dress up in costumes
for a fee, so they were designed to be easily slipped on over one’s cloth-
ing. Conversely, the festival attire worn by women in Upper Jidao and the
ethnic clothes worn by women in Ping’an were used both in nontouristic
contexts as well as repurposed for tourism over the years.
The work of the minority models involved beckoning tourists to take
a picture with them.16 As tourism, and domestic tourism especially, was
embraced as a sign of modernity and progress, these models were a part
of the particular configuration of power, photography, ethnicity, and
economy permeating China’s rural ethnic villages. Put simply, their job154	| Chapter 4
was to wear ethnic minority costumes and to pose with tourists for souve-
nir pictures. The models used their visual appearances and their skills at
creating interpersonal relations to become meaningfully ethnic and eco-
nomically successful during their encounters with tourists. This encoun-
ter was a moment of image-in-the-making, mediated by photography as
a social act in which the misconceptions, incongruities, and deliberate
deceptions involved in processes of producing visual representations
highlight just how political appearances can be.17 To understand their
work and the ramifications of “looking ethnic,” it is thus important to
tease out the ways in which knowledge of and about rural ethnic China
was visually formulated and constituted in the encounter between models
and tourists.
Practices and processes of visuality are vital to doing tourism, and
the microlevels of interactions, assumptions, expectations, and pay-
ments involved in souvenir tourist photography reveal the contours of
the politics of appearance that emerge between the moments of what is
actually seen (before a photograph is taken) and what is shown in the
resulting picture. Of course, power relations in photography are com-
plex, and to that end, by drawing on the work of Sandra Hyde (2007), I
consider the work of modeling and of being photographed in Ping’an as
“transactional.”18 The work involves a monetary transaction of payment
between the models themselves and tourists, and for this to take place,
the transaction invokes the subjectivities of the tourist, the model, and
the “uneven relations of power structuring the possibilities of such an
exchange” (ibid., 129).19 A transactional perspective integrates subjective
identities and experiences into broader discourses and desires. Being, or
looking like, an ethnic minority woman can be advantageous in certain
situations; during her research in Jinghong, Yunnan, Hyde learned that
most sex workers were ethnic Han women migrant workers dressed in
ethnic Dai clothes for the purposes of attracting customers by playing off
the stereotype of ethnic minority women as sexually promiscuous. Here,
ethnicity was made meaningful in its display and subsequent consump-
tion via sex—a process that in itself became a sign of personal progress.20
In such a context, being ethnic “entails performing specific bodily signs
rather than being specific bodies” (ibid., 119).21 Ethnicity becomes sim-
plified, reduced to a few key items of clothing, a linguistic inflection, or
isolated physiological features.Take a Picture with Us” |	155
Simultaneously, ethnicity is also made more visible as a mechanism to
promote a particular vision of multicultural, multiethnic modernity that
can assuage concerns over national unity. To domestic tourists, the mod-
els in Ping’an were familiarly, even reassuringly, “other”; they looked like
the popular images of stylized ethnic minorities frequently seen in main-
stream media and in ethnic theme parks. The actual encounter between
models and tourists therefore relied upon a mixture of duplicity and com-
plicity that functioned because of existing potent discourses of uneven
power relations between ethnic minority women and mainstream Han
men. This “internal orientalism,” as Louisa Schein (2000,101) has argued,
“denotes a set of practices that occur within China, and that in this case
[ethnic tourism among the Miao of Guizhou] involved, not international
tourism, but the fascination of a more cosmopolitan-identified Chinese
with ‘exotic’ minority cultures in an array of polychromatic and titillat-
ing forms. This intense fascination spawned encounters and images that
were most commonly structured by a class/gender asymmetry in which
minorities were represented chiefly by rural women, while Han observ-
ers appeared characteristically as male urban sophisticates.” In Ping’an,
models were ethnic in certain familiar ways that emphasized inequality
in order to fulfill mainstream stereotypes, and tourists complied by pay-
ing for the experience of meeting, and being photographed with, a “real”
ethnic minority woman.
The presumed unbalanced nature of the social positions held by each
party in the photographic encounter was negotiated and exploited by
both the models and the tourists through tactics of “sweet talk.” The
models’ sweet talk lured tourists into a world of appearances that reaf-
firmed existing power asymmetries and that was tinged with a par-
ticularly modern desire for the commoditization and consumption of
ethnic minority identity in China. The payment received by the models
symbolically redressed this social inequality through economics, achiev-
ing a momentary balance of a kind. All of this occurred within known
national narratives of ethnic unity and harmony promoted by the Chi-
nese state, but the economy of ethnicity in minority model photogra-
phy also affected social relations within the village. The models were,
by and large, migrant laborers from other villages who had entered the
economic sphere of Ping’an in search of work and wages, competing with
the villagers themselves.156	| Chapter 4
“There Is Nothing Special about It”
The appearance of the minority models in Ping’an referenced a web of
preexisting expectations, images, and idealizations of ethnic minori-
ties. Images of performers wearing highly stylized ethnic minority cos-
tumes are common in contemporary Chinese media and popular culture,
including at ethnic theme parks, and the presence of women in such dress
is nearly ubiquitous with China’s ethnic tourism. Watching performers
in ethnic costume has arguably become constitutive of how to appreci-
ate China’s ethnic diversity. Nowadays, ethnicity is consumed and made
meaningful, first and foremost, through visual means in domestic tourism
and high-profile national celebrations. Indeed, a minor scandal erupted
during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when it was revealed in foreign press
reports that the children wearing stylized ethnic costumes in the opening
ceremony were mostly, if not all, not ethnic minorities, and by no means
were these children members of the ethnic minority group whose costume
they were wearing.
The Western press leaped to attention—the “fakery” was reported by
Reuters, the AP, and in the Wall Street Journal. But when asked about
the apparently “fake” ethnic children, Games vice president Wang Wei
explained that “there is nothing special about it. . . . [Performers] will
wear different apparel to signify people are friendly and happy together”
(quoted in Goldsmith 2008). The children in costume were not faking their
individual identities, Wang’s response implied. Rather, the viewing audi-
ence was supposed to understand that they were really signifying Chinese
ethnic and national unity in a familiar visual way. Jianbin Guo, who has
written on television viewing in a rural ethnic Dulong village in Yunnan,
reported that when the children in ethnic costume appeared on the televi-
sion broadcast of the Olympics opening ceremony, the Dulong audience
in his research village began looking for a performer in Dulong costume.
Even though “villagers were unable to find the child as they watched the
broadcast!,] • • • they still believed that it was a special moment when they
felt a connection to the four-hour ceremony” (Guo 2012, 99). For an audi-
ence cognizant of Chinese national visual discourses of ethnic identity,
seeing the children in costume was very meaningful indeed.
The Olympics scandal raises two important analytical points about
the meaning of ethnic identity and visual appearances in China. First,Take a Picture with Us” |	157
the wearing of stylized ethnic minority costumes by performers or other
public figures is not necessarily unusual or unexpected for mainstream
Chinese audiences. To follow the logic of Vice President Wang, there is
nothing special about it. Second, as he implied, what really matters in a
situation like this is the fact that the performers are wearing these cos-
tumes in a highly public venue to be seen. The children wearing differ-
ent ethnic minority dress were intended to visually signify that people in
China are friendly and happy together. Thus, having the right look can
be infinitely important when being seen in an ethnic costume is meant
to carry certain shared, social understandings and meanings about the
nation and its people.
An Economy of Ethnicity: Duplicitous and Complicit
Just wearing an ethnic costume was not a business in and of itself, how-
ever; basic infrastructure and capital investments were required to run
a profitable photography booth where the owners could make money by
selling souvenir photographs and the models could earn a wage. First,
photo booth owners had to obtain the land-use rights, either through
personal connections or by leasing the land from a local family, for the
fields alongside the path to the viewpoint that offered the best views of the
terraces below. In the case of the photo booth discussed here, the own-
ers were local Ping’an residents, so they built their platform on land that
belonged to their relatives. Once a platform was built, owners purchased
computers, cameras, printers, ink, and a laminating machine, as well as
a selection of ethnic minority costumes either to lend to models to wear
and/or for tourists to dress up in themselves. Models said they were usu-
ally recruited from nearby cities and tourism destinations—some had
been approached somewhat randomly on the street, while others had been
offered jobs in Ping’an while working as minority models at other booths.
This configuration created a literal and symbolic economy of ethnicity, in
which people who could “look ethnic” circulated for the purposes of cre-
ating a commodity that was both experiential and material: the souvenir
photograph. For the multiple stakeholders involved in making a profit
from the production of and trade in images of ethnic “Others,” there was
nothing fake about this work.
As migrants into Ping’an, the models were considered outsiders (waidi158	| Chapter 4
reri), a category whose increasing numbers included hotel and restaurant
owners who leased local homes for their businesses and the owners of
most, but not all, photo booths. The success of Ping’an as a tourism desti-
nation had inverted its history of out-migration into a contemporary prac-
tice of in-migration, as more and more people sought to benefit from the
tourism boom. The models described their work as dagong, employing the
same term that is commonly used to describe the work of migrant factory
laborers (see Pun 2005). By describing their work in this way, the women
implicitly acknowledged that they were not local, and in practice, the mod-
els were double outsiders—they were ethnic minorities to the tourists, the
majority of whom were Han, and they were nonlocal, often non-Zhuang,
outsiders to the ethnically Zhuang Ping’an residents. I knew of one excep-
tion, a young woman from Ping’an who modeled for a short period, but of
the six models I became acquainted with and interviewed, she was the first
to leave the job and, soon after, the village. The other five models were not
from Ping’an, although one was from a neighboring Zhuang village within
the Longji Scenic Area. All six women did self-identify as ethnic minori-
ties, although only two were Zhuang. The other four were ethnically Dong
or Yao. They were all between the ages of fifteen and twenty; some had
completed some high school, but others had stopped their formal educa-
tion after finishing the compulsory middle-school level.
In 2007, it cost ¥10 to pose for a picture with a model (or to simply take
the model’s picture), with the money paid directly to her (figure 4.5). Tour-
ists could pay to dress up in an ethnic costume for an additional ¥10. A
printed, laminated souvenir photograph cost another ¥10. Depending on
whether the model owned her own costume, she earned a percentage of
the ¥10 charge levied for posing. A costume, purchased from a specialty
ethnic costume tailor or shop, typically cost anywhere from ¥200 to ¥500
depending on its complexity and accessories. Each costume represented
a different ethnic group, although the models I knew would often swap
headdresses just for fun.22 If a model owned her costume, at the particular
booth I observed, she paid the owners ¥25 a day as an overhead fee. If not,
she paid a percentage (50 percent to 70 percent) of her daily earnings to
the photo booth owners to cover the use of the costume plus overhead. In
a very good month, models said they could earn as much as ¥1,500, but
more average earnings hovered around ¥500 to ¥700 per month.23 As part
of the employment agreement, the owner provided accommodation in aTake a Picture with Us” |	159
figure 4.5. The minority models are paid directly by tourists who want to photo-
graph or pose with them. At the end of each day, the models pay the photo booth
owners a percentage for overhead costs (2007). Photo by the author.
shared house and two meals a day to the models—a relatively customary
arrangement in China for migrant workers.
The models were less focused on the actual moment of posing with, or
for, a tourist, and more involved in engaging with tourists before a poten-
tial transaction to secure business. This encounter between the models
and tourists was duplicitous because the models knew it was important
to come across as “ethnic” and even “local,” and the tourists who were
willing to pay for photographs knew that these women were wearing cos-
tumes, regardless of whether they identified as ethnic minorities. This
duplicity was made clear in the signs stating the prices for posing with
a model and for purchasing a souvenir photograph, which reminded the
tourists of the economic foundations of the encounter. However, the entire
exchange—from the models approaching the tourists who walked by to
the tourist’s final payment—was tinged with complicity because for thisi6o | Chapter 4
type of commercial photography to function, all parties on both sides of
the camera had to understand how to exploit, for personal gain, the pre-
existing ideas and expectations attributed to “being ethnic” in rural China
today. Tourists participated in these duplicities and complicities by being
tourists who were willing to do what tourists are expected to do: take
photographs and spend money.
The models always stated that their best customers were male domestic
Chinese tourists, reinforcing the pervasiveness of China’s “internal orien-
talism” in rural ethnic tourism. Female Chinese tourists typically wanted
to dress up themselves in costumes rented from the photo booth, thus
leaving the models with nothing to earn.24 Foreign tourists were more
difficult to convince because the models lacked enough English skills to
approach them, and furthermore, most foreign tourists were not well-
versed enough in mainstream Chinese discourses of ethnic tourism, let
alone ethnic minorities, to participate fully in the encounter. Some tour-
ists balked when informed that they would have to pay to photograph a
model; these tourists did not understand the situation, the models com-
plained. They were either entirely duped into believing the models really
were “just” friendly ethnic women, or they were ignorant of the appropri-
ate role of tourists in a village destination, where tourists were expected
to comply with the locals’ need for income generation through tourism.
Although the models felt they could understand the tourists’ desires and
demands (for beautiful, obliging, young ethnic women to photograph)
and they were quite willing to comply with national narratives of ethnic
harmony and gendered expectations of ethnic identity for the right price,
at the question of economics, some tourists did not live up to their end
of the equation by attempting to photograph the models surreptitiously.
One such encounter took place between the models and tourists in
early summer 2007, the season for flooding the terraced fields with water
for rice cultivation, which was generally considered the best condition for
photographing the terraces. Many photographers came as part of group
tours during these months, stopping for a night or two in Ping’an before
going to other villages in the Longji Scenic Area. One morning, a small
group of domestic and overseas Chinese tourists walked up to the pho-
tography booth with their tripods, SLR digital cameras, and telephoto
lenses in tow. They set up their gear on the concrete platform at the photo
booth, effectively blocking the view of the terraces for other passing tour-Take a Picture with Us” |	161
ists. Usually the photo booth owners would discourage the more serious
photographers from lingering too long, since the owners had built the
concrete viewing platform for their own photography business. Despite
this, since it was overcast and not very busy yet this day, the models and
the owners did not object even though these photographers were techni-
cally hindering the booth’s business by obscuring the view of the terraces
with their equipment.
The photographers largely ignored the models’ initial requests, con-
centrating their lenses on the terraced fields below. Seeing that this group
was uninterested in hiring them to pose, four models climbed the hill-
side behind the viewing platform and sat together, chatting and giggling,
behind a thin patch of knee-high foliage. The models were savvy to the
photographers’ intentions and knew that some might nevertheless try to
take their picture without paying. Therefore, while they sat on the hill
behind the photographers, they used colored paper umbrellas to visually
shield themselves. As I began recording the scene with my video camera,
some of the models called out to me: “Jenny! Hello! Over here!” Hearing
their voices, and seeing me with my video camera, two male photogra-
phers in the group pivoted around to shoot the models, who continued to
hide behind their umbrellas. Half joking, but with noticeable exaspera-
tion, one photographer exclaimed: “You’re worth a lot of money if I take
your photo, I’m telling you. Don’t block the photo.”
From his outburst, this photographer deftly expressed his opinion—the
models were acting inappropriately because if he took their photo, they
would be “worth a lot of money” as visual images. Tellingly, he did not
say that the photographs themselves would be valuable, but he directly
attributed the potential value of these images to the models themselves, as
visual objects. For the models behind the umbrellas, however, this situa-
tion was worthless to them because the photographers were not willing to
pay for the production of these potentially valuable images. Ideally, minor-
ity model photography in Ping’an operated by maintaining an asymmetri-
cal equilibrium between these two parties. These models worked firmly
within certain expected, popular notions of social inequality and power
imbalances in order to engage tourists in a deliberately lopsided encounter
until payment was made, which then “equalized” the experience. When
arguments erupted over cost and payment, or when photographers simply
refused to pay, the fissures in the dominant discourses of ethnicity, rural162	| Chapter 4
livelihoods, gender, and social power were made most apparent. Without
payment, the encounter was too unbalanced for it to be “worth it” to the
models to allow these photographers to take their picture. In this case,
the photographic act failed to sufficiently redress the inequalities between
the tourists and the models because the ethnic appearance of the models,
while acknowledged as desirable and of worth by the photographer, was
not linked to an economic value that would, in effect, balance out the situ-
ation for the models.
Sweet Talk: The “Commodified Persona”
Referencing the social inequalities associated with ethnic minorities and
ethnic women in particular was a part of the “commodified persona”
(Bunten 2008) presented by the models as a means of luring in tourists.
The “commodified persona,” a concept developed by Alexis Celeste Bunten
(ibid., 381), is an analytical perspective on processes of self-commoditization
that takes into account the limits of cross-cultural models and, as such,
suggests that this persona is a productive space in which “emotional labor,
identity construction, and the politics of representation” converge. This
process goes beyond “identity management” because it implicitly involves
value adjustments, and, in Bunten’s research based in Sitka, Alaska, it
also referenced specific political expressions of identity and resistance to
hegemonic, normative expectations associated with Native peoples in the
United States. The converse was at work in Ping’an; here, the models con-
structed a deliberately depoliticized, almost generic image of the ethnic
“Other” in their work, which was reflected in the stylized costumes they
wore. For these models, their commodified persona was different, but not
necessarily alienated, from their ethnic identities (e.g., one Zhuang woman
typically wore a Miao ethnic costume on most days for no other given
reason than that she liked it and she found this costume was quite popular
with tourists). When it came to doing tourism in this way, these women
were to be what they looked like—thoroughly modernized, stylish, and
reassuringly familiar ethnics who spoke standard Chinese without hesita-
tion and knew what tourists wanted. Their self-commoditization was a
modern practice, and their commodified persona as modern ethnics was
already known to Chinese tourists through mass media imagery. This per-
sona entailed being a playful, entertaining ethnic “Other” in ways familiarTake a Picture with Us” |	163
to contemporary Chinese discourses—perhaps being like the ethnically
attired performers at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics who
symbolized happiness and friendliness, if they came to life as their cos-
tumed selves.
The models’ immediate task was to lure tourists into posing with them
for a souvenir photo, thus bringing business both to themselves and to the
photo booth owners. Sometimes the models asked tourists directly if they
wanted to have a photograph taken together, but frequently the models
would simply wait in plain view. In conversations with tourists, the mod-
els would present the encounter as a serendipitous, “once-in-a-lifetime”
chance that created the “tourist moment” (Hom Cary 2004). The inequali-
ties between the female models and the male tourists were most open for
exploitation through “sweet talk” (tian zui, literally “sweet mouth”). Sweet
talk typically involved flirty joking that directly referenced the perceived
social inequalities attributed to gender, wealth, and ethnic minority iden-
tity. From the outset, the models referred to themselves as a’mei, a generic
form of address for a young girl containing the character for “younger sis-
ter,” thereby creating room for a feeling of kinship between the speakers.
They typically called male tourists “boss” (laobari) or “Mister” (xiansheng),
setting the stage as a conversation between unequals.25 When asked why
there weren’t any men working as models at the photo booth, the models
explained that men weren’t as good at sweet talk, although they said that
in some places there were occasionally male models, referred to as a’ge (or
“elder brother”).
From the models’ perspective, “sweet talk” meant putting forth a will-
ing, obliging persona when responding to questions and curious inqui-
ries—the models who were impatient or uninterested in chatting with
tourists were generally ineffective at this line of work. From the perspec-
tive of male tourists, sweet talk typically revolved around mildly sexual
comments (usually jokes about being married to a model after being
photographed together), tying marriage into conditions of rural under-
development (by suggesting that these women had no prospects and were
just waiting to get married), and references to the general lack of socio-
economic opportunities for rural women.26 Sweet talk negotiations could
also involve the models not saying anything at all, but rather condoning
jokes and comments through smiles and silence to build an atmosphere
amenable to getting the tourists to agree to a photograph. The models’164	| Chapter 4
silence contributed to preexisting stereotypes of ethnic minority women
as obliging, socially disadvantaged, and willing to defer to the economic
power of the urban male tourist.
By paying to pose with a model, the tourist thus has the power to equal-
ize this otherwise unbalanced relationship. That said, this end result is
only possible through each model’s physical appearance in costume and
her command of sweet talk to lure tourists into a social relationship.
When one side of the equation refuses to participate in the equalization
of this encounter, the fine balance of the unequal status quo is upset, as
was the case with the photographers who attempted to take the models’
picture after they deliberately hid behind umbrellas. Photography, and the
photographic act, is the fulcrum for all of these exchanges, which pivots
on the open, joking recognition of social inequality.
A House of Pigs
In another exchange I video-recorded, one model, Yuan, successfully
negotiated a brief period of sweet talk with a couple of male tourists
through joking about rural lives, life chances, and marriage. Yuan was
acknowledged by all of the other models as the best at the job; she was bold
and knew when to speak and when to stay silent for the greatest effect. The
two middle-aged Chinese men, whom I’ll call Hei and Bai, paused at the
platform one afternoon to catch their breath and wait for their friends who
were still climbing the steep stairs up the hillside. Yuan saw Hei waiting
by the platform railing and went to stand near him, without speaking.
Hei noticed Yuan and turning to her, he asked (in standard Chinese),
“You all speak Zhuang [minority language]?” Yuan responded simply,
“Yes.” Hei repeated, “You can speak Zhuang?” Yuan said again, “Yes.” She
paused and added, “Take a picture with us.” Hei, looking a bit flustered
but smiling, said, “A picture with you? Then you’re engaged to me?” Yuan
looked down. With a small smile she murmured, “Um... no.” “No? You’re
not engaged then?” Hei asked, jokingly.
At this point, Bai sauntered over to Hei and Yuan. Yuan repeated her
suggestion to “take a picture with us,” and Hei walked off a bit to join his
companions, saying, “There’s no need,” while waving Yuan away. Yuan
next turned to Bai, who was chewing on a leaf. Pointing, she exclaimed,
“Mister! What are you eating?” Without replying to her question, BaiTake a Picture with Us” |	165
asked Yuan how much a photo would be. She responded, “Ten RMB,”
but quickly corrected herself, “Ten for the a’mei-, ten for the souvenir
photograph. It’s twenty all together.” Bai agreed to this price, and Yuan
immediately called out to the photo booth owner, who hurried over with
a digital camera. Yuan struck a pose next to Bai, gathering up a corner of
her long skirt in her left hand and placing her right hand on the small of
her back. This particular pose was used by many of the models when pos-
ing with men to ward off the possibility of any “wandering” hands while
being photographed together, which was one of the potential problems
they faced on the job.
As Bai and Yuan posed, Yuan motioned to Bai’s friends, saying, “You
can use your camera too.” Bai called Hei and his friends back over. Cam-
era in hand, Hei said to Bai, “I’ll take your picture; now you’re married.”
Then Hei laughed, exclaiming, '‘A’mei wants two pigs, you know! Here
they want pigs!”27 Bai retorted, “I’ll give her pigs and cows!” At this, Yuan
dipped her head a bit, smiled, and said nothing. Soon thereafter, Bai paid
Yuan her fee and went to look at the printed souvenir photograph. The
exchange was a success for both parties in this instance: by condoning
the stereotypes evoked by Hei, Yuan positioned herself as a willing ethnic
woman with “something to offer” to the male tourists, and Bai received a
souvenir of his ethnic encounter. Concurrently, Yuan never directly con-
tradicted herself, nor did she have to pretend to be anything except for
what Hei and Bai saw—a young woman in ethnic costume, waiting for an
opportunity to present itself.
Both the work of being a minority model and the social relationships
created and reinforced between the tourist and the model were contingent
on the mutually agreed upon importance of the photograph as a souve-
nir that documented the encounter of the tourist with the ethnic minor-
ity. The knowledge produced by this encounter was visually embodied in
the photograph, but despite the fact that Yuan clearly stated the price she
expected for posing and that Bai immediately complied, the range of asso-
ciations elicited remained duplicitous, framed by joking and sweet talk.
Likewise in the earlier example, by hiding behind umbrellas, the models
made known their expectation to get paid in exchange for being photo-
graphed, although they never explicitly said so to the photographer who
grew exasperated at their duplicity.
In the very moment of any encounter mediated by photography, a rela-166	| Chapter 4
tionship is forged between the individuals involved, even if a photograph
is not taken (or taken without express permission).28 For the minority
models, this relationship undulates between economics and ethnicity.
Technically, the encounter between models and tourists is built upon a
simple, straightforward economic exchange of money for a picture. This
is not unique to Chinese tourism, of course. As Erik Cohen, Yeshayahu
Nir, and Uri Almagor (1992, 224-25) have written of women dressed in
ethnic minority or classical Thai costumes in Thailand who pose with
tourists, “the commercialization of picture taking reaches it peak with the
emergence of posing as a full time occupation. ... A relationship started
in a chance and often mistrustful encounter evolves into a routinized and
obliging commercialized service.” However, even when photography is
transformed into a commercialized, routinized service, the contours of
this act remain potentially ambiguous, shaped by a politics of appear-
ance that is rooted in shared social expectations. In fact, it was precisely
the commercialization of ethnicity, and of photography, that irritated
the photographer who tried to take the models’ picture without paying
them. After all, “the role of the routinized tourist is generally understood
to include the Tight’ to take photos at liberty” (ibid., 226). But if the mod-
els’ work is routinized as a economic transaction in tourism, can tourist
photography still be considered a “right” without due consequence? What
happened before the picture was taken—namely, the social relationships
established and stereotypes evoked before the snap of the shutter—thus
infused the material picture with the densely layered realities of gender,
ethnicity, and inequality in China today.
MIGRANTS AND MODELS
Photography in Ping’an is full of contested values—value to the tourists,
value to local villagers, and value to the migrants who come to Ping’an in
search of employment and profit from the village’s tourism industry. For
the models discussed in this chapter, their work was entangled in broader
social values that shaped their knowledge of when to speak sweetly and
when to simply smile. This knowledge translated directly into symbolic
interactions of power and social status between the models and the tour-
ists, but in this relationship built around the act of photography, the mod-
els retained a measure of control and understanding over what the touristsTake a Picture with Us” |	167
wanted and how they, the models, would provide or withhold it. To the
photographers unwilling to pay, the models simply physically removed
themselves from the camera’s frame of vision. To the male tourists who
were game for a bit of joking and play, Yuan needed only to create the
illusion of agreement for the transaction to be completed as she desired.
Whereas the relationship between models and tourists fluctuated
around conditions of duplicity and complicity, the models’ relationships
to other village residents also played a part in the village’s economy of
ethnicity. This context of models, local women, and tourists in Ping’an
outlines the complicated, multifaceted networks of labor and leisure
shaping rural tourism in ethnic minority China. Images of the terraced
fields around Ping’an circulate widely in domestic and international mass
media, and after nearly thirty years of engagement in China’s contempo-
rary tourism industry, village residents know that they are being photo-
graphed, and they know that their images are used to sell other products
(figure 4.6).29 As such, village residents are highly cognizant of the poten-
tial value of allowing themselves to be photographed.
The ethnic Zhuang clothes worn by the women in figure 4.6 are much
less stylized than those worn by the models who worked at the photo
booth. Local women consciously wore these ethnic Zhuang outfits and
terry-cloth headdresses when engaged in tourism activities that would
have them in direct engagement with tourists, such as guiding or carrying
luggage up from the parking lot. There was a shared knowledge among
women in Ping’an that this Zhuang attire was suited for tourism work,
and even non-Zhuang women who lived in Ping’an and worked at local
guesthouses would wear these outfits. However, local women, with the one
exception mentioned earlier, did not work at the kind of modeling that
involved sweet talk. Women from Ping’an offered to be models usually
when they were also hired as guides for photographers, a role that empha-
sized and prioritized their local knowledge of the village and their belong-
ing to the community. They would often be photographed in their homes
or in the terraced fields, physically extending their claim to this village.30
The visible distinction between locals who modeled for photographers
in the fields and the models who posed “for” tourists in more fanciful cos-
tumes all reinforced the models’ outsider status in the village. The mod-
els were migrant laborers, outsiders who had come because tourism had
turned Ping’an into a regional economic center with opportunities. TheCONRAD PHILLIP KOTTAK
Anthropology
The Sxploration of Human Diversity
TWELFTH EDITION

figure 4.6. Images of Ping’an circulate worldwide, including this one, which
appears on the cover of an anthropology textbook (Conrad Kottak, Anthropol-
ogy: The Exploration of Human Diversity, 12th edition [New York: McGraw Hill
Higher Education, 2006]). See also Aaron Podolefsky, Peter Brown, and Scott
Lacy, Applying Cultural Anthropology: An Introductory Reader, 8th edition
(New York: McGraw Hill, 2008).Take a Picture with Us” |	169
young models, however, could not rely on being local to earn an income,
so they found work by drawing on nationally circulated representations
of the sweet, willing, and harmonious ethnic minority.31 Their brighter,
more stylized costumes marked them even more pointedly as objects only
to be looked at; these stylized outfits visually linked them to the highly
choreographed and mass-circulated images of ethnic minorities seen on
national television programs and variety shows in China (such as the Bei-
jing Olympics opening ceremony).
These young women’s work opportunities as models were made pos-
sible because of the particular configuration of China’s rapid economic
growth, rural development, ethnic classification policies, and tourism
industries. As young, undereducated women in rural China, the models
arguably were empowered by the availability of this job over, for instance,
going to work in a factory. When I asked them about other jobs they had
held or wanted to pursue, they justified their choice to be models, however
temporarily, on the grounds that the work was easy. It didn’t require long
hours, tedious manual labor, or even much overtime.32 They could chat
during the day and spend the evenings hanging out with each other and
sometimes with the other young people in the village. However, in gain-
ing this power to choose modeling over other employment options, these
young women were also entrenched in reiterating other unbalanced power
relations based on gender, class, and social status. To make their business
work, these models not only had to look like ethnic minorities in a recog-
nizable way, but they had to participate in popular conceptualizations of
what ethnic minority women are like. Similarly, as discussed in chapter 3,
Ping’an resident Feng’s remark (that although she had returned to the vil-
lage, she did not want to plow fields) echoes the same conundrum: to do
rural ethnic tourism successfully, one had to accept and embody being a
peasant, just as the models had to be ethnic, in specific ways.
When tourists leave the photo booth, taking with them a printed, lami-
nated souvenir of themselves posing with a model, they carry with the
material photograph their visible evidence of having “been there” with
the ethnic “Other.” The copresence of the tourist and the model reinforces
narratives of national unity and harmony across ethnic distinctions.33
Nevertheless, this unity is only made possible by the existence of recog-
nizable and familiar forms of ethnic difference worn on the models’ bod-
ies. What matters is not necessarily if the models “are” ethnic in a genetic,170	| Chapter 4
or corporeal sense, but rather if the models can successfully be visually
and presentably ethnic. Photography thus becomes the occasion for cre-
ating a familiar and believable shared social relationship between ethnic
minorities and mainstream citizens in present-day China by playing to
expectations and stereotypes, which could reinforce national discourses
of social harmony.
The models’ ability to work thus depended on their capabilities in
looking the part. New complexes of belonging emerge when ethnicity is
mainstreamed into familiar types and categories that are reproduced in
tourism marketing and promotions. When ethnic identity begins with the
visual moment of apprehension and appearance, it is vital to take seriously
the process by which visual knowledge is communicated and translated
into ideas, stereotypes, and expectations. Approaching photography as a
moment of encounter therefore sheds light on the ways in which knowl-
edge is socially produced through visual means. This pushes beyond the
politics of representation to consider a politics of appearance that takes
seriously the potential significance of “looking the part” and that illumi-
nates the efficacy of the visual in preempting, prompting, and promoting
social relationships. Visual knowledge is created and reinforced every day
in the economy of ethnicity; for the models working in Ping’an village,
appearing ethnic was their primary means of being employed. Iheir other
options as young, undereducated rural women in today’s China were less
attractive or desirable. Therefore, for these women, when it came to wear-
ing stylized ethnic costumes and sweet-talking tourists, there was nothing
special about it at all.
The economy of ethnicity in tourism demanded that all stakeholders
in Ping’an village’s tourism—including local residents, models, and gov-
ernment officials—needed to negotiate and control the image world they
sought to present to tourists, including the houses, the terraced fields,
and the people. Frequent arguments and ongoing debates in the village
around issues of architectural coherence, cleanliness, and the mainte-
nance of the terraced fields all contributed to the prioritization of the vil-
lage’s appearance, which needed to be, first and foremost, appropriate for
photography. The expectations brought to bear by the visual expediencies
of tourism were inscribed onto the visible surfaces of rural ethnic lives in
both Ping’an and Upper Jidao. The minority models were perhaps the cul-
mination of the tourist’s search for visual difference, a concrete means ofTake a Picture with Us” |	171
ensuring that in every picture, in every image, there would be something,
or someone, different—so long as the tourist is willing to pay. These expec-
tations thus created a value-laden framework of visuality, a scaffolding of
good or bad looks, right or wrong clothing, correct or incorrect appear-
ances. The extension of these values beyond the surface of rural ethnic
livelihoods is clear: perhaps some places and people were simply better
at being different than others. Beyond a single village, however, success
at creating and showing difference also factored significantly in the rela-
tionships between local tourism villages and neighboring non-tourism
villages. The differences between rural communities, and the ability to
be different “correctly,” has resulted in a number of unintended social,
economic, and political consequences between villages as tourism has
developed unevenly across rural China.CHAPTER 5
THE ABILITY TO BE DIFFERENT
Socialities and Subjectivities
Doing tourism in Ping’an and Upper Jidao involved not only visible modi-
fications, such as changing one’s clothes or renovating houses to cater to
perceived tourist desires, but also transformations in socialities and indi-
vidual subjectivities of village residents, migrant or local. As the previ-
ous chapters have shown, rural ethnic tourism pivots around more than
just the relationship between “hosts and guests” (Smith ed. 1989 [1977]) or
“tourist-tourate” (Ness 2003), which are the binaries commonly evoked as
analytical frames for understanding tourism. Rather, it is vital to map how
tourism villages are embedded in intervillage and intravillage networks
shaped by myriad connections of kinship, politics, shared histories, and
economics. In both Ping’an and Upper Jidao, as tourism has become more
and more entrenched in local experiences, a range of unintended social
and political consequences has emerged that deeply affects local lives and
livelihoods. These consequences have often been made known through
instances of physical violence and frustration.
SABOTAGE STORY NO. l: UPPER JIDAO, 2006
On the morning of October 2,2006, around 7:30 a.m., Chun, the village sub-
committee leader that year, made an announcement from his house, which
shared a wall with Teacher Pan’s home where I lived. Using a bullhorn,
173174	| Chapter 5
Chun hollered: “Announcement! Announcement! (Tongzhi! longzhi!')” The
announcements were always made in Miao, and I could only understand the
few standard Chinese (Mandarin) terms occasionally interspersed within,
such as “tourist (youke).” At breakfast later, I asked Teacher Pan what Chun
had said, and he explained that the village had been preparing for a week to
host an anticipated onslaught of tourists during the October 1 National Day
Golden Week. There had been announcements nearly every day to remind
the men in the lusheng performance group to practice in the evenings, to
reiterate the importance of keeping the village clean and litter-free (which
included not hanging laundry in view from the paths or laying it out on
the riverbank, a common practice during the sunny and dry autumn), and
generally to exhort villagers to maintain a positive, friendly, and accommo-
dating outlook toward the expected visitors.1 This morning s announcement
was a reminder to village residents about tidiness and, Teacher Pan added,
about clearing the road into Upper Jidao. Someone had piled a number of
concrete cinder blocks and other materials on the road into Upper Jidao
during the night, preventing any cars from entering village. The road lead-
ing into Lower Jidao had not been affected. Teacher Pan, in his usual no-
nonsense way, made no suggestion as to who might have done this.
Two weeks later, while conducting a household survey with a fifty-five-
year-old woman in Upper Jidao, I received a more candid assessment of
these events. Three middle-school-aged girls from the village were pres-
ent during the survey, and together the five of us shared a conversation on
tourism in Upper Jidao. When I asked for their thoughts on the potential
negative consequences of tourism development, one of the girls quickly
responded, “Lower Jidao is against tourism; they came and ruined the
road.” “They,” meaning people from Lower Jidao, the girls declared, had
also slashed the sign on the main highway that advertised the 2006 China
Kaili International Lusheng Festival that had taken place in July (figure 5.1).2
The older woman concurred, saying that the “relationship was never very
good [between Upper and Lower Jidao]” and that tourism development in
Upper Jidao had exacerbated preexisting tensions. Teacher Pan’s earlier dip-
lomatic refusal to point a finger at individuals from Lower Jidao reflected
the depth of the troubles between the two villages. These isolated cases of
relatively minor but very pointed physical retaliation directed at tourism-
related events demonstrated the degree to which someone nearby was not
in agreement with Upper Jidao’s development into a tourism destination. ItThe Ability to Be Different |	175
figure 5.1. A poster advertising the 2006 International Lusheng Festival in
Upper Jidao was slashed and damaged (2006). Photo by the author.
was only later, in 2007, that Teacher Pan eventually told me about the letter
written by the Jidao village Party Secretary to the provincial government,
which had effectively halted the original plans to build a hotel in Upper
Jidao and signaled the ongoing tensions between the two communities.
SABOTAGE STORY NO. 2: PING’AN, 2007
While relations between the residents of Ping’an, the county government,
and the management company of the Longji Scenic Area could only be
described as mutually suspicious at the best of times, on occasion these
tensions also manifested into material destruction. Many villagers told me
of collective attempts in 2005 to stage public protests over the allocation
of profits from ticket sales, which were managed by the company not the
village. They first protested outside the ticket office on the road leading
into the entire scenic area and later at the entrance to Ping’an, blocking
the entry of any tourists into the village. The local government’s response176	| Chapter 5
was unsurprising and swift. According to the villagers, government rep-
resentatives turned away all journalists and arrested a handful of young
men as an example of what might happen to other such “troublemakers.”
After that incident, protests by villagers against perceived inequalities
and unfair conditions took a decidedly more surreptitious, though no less
confrontational, form.
For example, throughout 2005 and 2006, villagers had begun con-
structing one-story shop fronts and restaurant stalls along the wide path
leading from the parking lot into the central part of the village. Many of
these spaces were then rented out to migrant entrepreneurs or run as sec-
ond businesses by relatives; shopkeepers sold a familiar variety of mass-
produced souvenirs, specialty teas, fruit, snacks, and sometimes products
brought in from other markets (including, for a while, dried snakes and
lizards supposedly bearing medicinal properties). As the buildings kept
being constructed, some villagers told me they thought the rows of wooden
shops along the path were ugly and distracting. Moreover, the buildings
blocked the view of the lower terraced fields around the village, and, as
one village resident remarked, the view was technically for everyone.
Apparently the management company also shared this village resi-
dent’s opinion, and in late 2006, representatives from the company began
putting pressure on villagers who had shops along the path to take down
their buildings. Some residents believed that the company wanted to
remove all structures in the village that were not either hotels, restaurants,
residential homes, or constructed by the company (such as the toilets at
the viewpoints). The stated goal was to improve upon the visual continu-
ity of the scenic area. But this was impossible, residents said, because so
many small shops were already up and the land-use rights were granted to
individual households who could legally lease these rights to others. The
management company didn’t own the land, villagers stressed. Buildings
continued to be constructed at an even more rapid rate, it seemed; one
young shopkeeper said it was because villagers knew that if the buildings
along the path were eventually banned, they would receive compensation
for anything already constructed. Nonetheless, perhaps by way of mak-
ing a point, the company sent in a couple of men to forcibly take down a
few half-finished shops by the entrance ticket booth in early April 2007.3
The retaliation was equally quick. Overnight, the men’s toilets at view-
point number 1 were destroyed (figure 5.2). The choice of this particularThe Ability to Be Different |	177
figure 5.2. Urinals in the public toilet at viewpoint number 1, in Ping’an, were
smashed as a retaliatory act against changes proposed by the management com-
pany (2007). Photo by the author.
site seemed deliberate: the toilets at the two village viewpoints had been
built and paid for by the management company, but viewpoint number 1
was much less visited than viewpoint number 2 (where the more well-
known view of Seven Stars with Moon could be seen), so the damage would
have a lesser impact on tourists.4 Inside the toilet facilities at viewpoint 1,
the countertops, urinals, and tile floors were broken, apparently hit with
a blunt, heavy object. I asked a number of individuals in Ping’an about
this incident. Everyone remained silent about the perpetrators, but most
concluded that it had happened because the company had taken down
the shops along the path. One feeling going around the village, a shop-
keeper told me, was that if the government or company wasn’t happy with
the way things were changing in Ping’an, they should just get out and let
the villagers go back to selling the tickets and taking care of the business
themselves as they had done in the past. It was clearer than ever before
that the line had been drawn in Ping’an, and that the ongoing tit for tat178	| Chapter 5
between village residents, the government, and the management company
was far from resolution.
WHERE THE LINE GETS DRAWN
These anecdotes from Upper Jidao and Ping’an serve as a poignant
reminder of the complex motivations, demands, expectations, and desires
involved in tourism development. At the scale of everyday life in a rural vil-
lage, the impact of these isolated cases was arguably more prominent than
perhaps it would have been in an urban context. The past three decades
of economic reform, paired with national policies for rural development
in China, were experienced by residents of Ping’an and Upper Jidao in
ways that reveal the pervasive uneasiness and uncertainties plaguing con-
temporary rural livelihoods. Outbursts of anger coupled with frustration
over the slow pace of becoming a “successful” ethnic tourism destination
exposed the disjointed relationship between ethnicity and economy, par-
ticularly in a country governed by strict definitions of ethnic belonging.
The intersection of physical distances, socioeconomic differences, and cul-
tural distinctiveness invoked by, and inherent in, ethnic tourism practices
thus provide a focal point for understanding just how village residents
negotiated with the consequences of doing tourism. The two sabotage sto-
ries suggest that these acts of willful destruction must be considered as a
part of examining how discourses of tourism and travel exert pressure on,
and influence change within, destination communities. In Upper Jidao,
the perpetrators were perceived, by village residents at least, to be people
from Lower Jidao; Upper Jidao was targeted because it had been selected
to get rich first, to use the famous quotation by Deng Xiaoping from the
beginning of China’s reform-era economic and social policies. In Ping’an,
the perpetrators were village residents, and their anger was directed at the
county government and management company, who were perceived as
working together to stifle and strangle local tourism profits.
The stories point to the importance of examining intervillage and
intravillage relationships in tourism development. While conflicts
between policy makers and community members are often examined
in studies of China’s domestic tourism industry, critical tourism studies
more broadly continues to be primarily framed around the relationship(s)
between tourists and the toured.5 The charge to decenter tourism studiesThe Ability to Be Different |	179
from its underlying theories and concepts based on the wealthy West-
ern tourist (as argued in Winter 2009, 317-18) should be coupled with a
willingness to consider the possible blind spots of current tourism schol-
arship—including the division between tourism management studies
research and tourism theory. In Upper Jidao, it was provincial policy that
drove tourism to take on the role of a wedge, causing the Upper and Lower
village communities to feel more distant from each other than ever before.
The relative success of tourism in Ping’an meant that more and more par-
ties, including regional government bureaus, were trying to find ways to
profit from the industry, leading to conflicting opinions and regulations.
Emotional expressions of jealousy, envy, and anger reveal the depth to
which rural tourism development programs and China’s plans for a New
Socialist Countryside were opening old wounds and creating new disap-
pointments while simultaneously aiming to bring these rural areas into
the fold of national modernization goals.
The lines drawn between rival parties in tourism businesses and
development cut across villages, counties, and provinces, as tourism was
entangled in the range of imaginable possibilities for local residents. The
sabotage stories from Upper Jidao and Ping’an map out the margins of
the landscape of travel in which these villages are situated and how they
are connected with national forces, provincial goals, and local aspirations.
While domestic tourism in Ping’an and Upper Jidao was intended, in large
part, to be “involved in a pacification of the relations between the center
and the periphery,” as Olivier Evrard and Prasit Leepreecha (2009, 245)
have written about Thai domestic tourism to the northern city of Chiang
Mai, there were also multiple consequences at a range of other, more local
scales. The parallels between Northern Thailand and Southwest China are
useful here. Drawing on scholarship about ethnic minority communities
in China, Evrard and Leepreecha (ibid., 245) have argued that as a result
of domestic Thai tourism to the north of Thailand, “the Northern Thai
turned themselves into objects of desire for mobile urban dwellers and at
the same time also enacted the same process towards their own margins,
the so-called ‘Hill Tribes’ (cao khao').” The effects of tourism, they argue,
thus changed relations in the North between the Northern Thai and the
“Hill Tribes,” as well as between the Northern Thai and their mainstream
urban counterparts to the south.
Similarly, just as tourism villages like Ping’an and Upper Jidao had toi8o | Chapter 5
develop and maintain ways of looking different from mainstream major-
ity urban Chinese and foreigners to appeal to these tourists, individuals in
each place also had to contend with transformations in their relationships
with other residents, migrants, nearby villages, and local government
and business entities. The landscape of travel, therefore, encompassed the
physical distances traveled by tourists and migrants, the socioeconomic
differences evoked as part of development programs or experienced
within a village, and the forms of cultural distinctiveness demanded of
tourism villages as a part of their potential success as destinations. All
of these, ultimately, contributed to undulating waves of connection and
separation at multiple scales—from the national center to the periphery,
between villages in a particular region, and among households and busi-
nesses in a village. The tensions resulting from tourism development thus
outline how communities and individuals are increasingly alienated (or
differentiated) from one another, but also how their lives and livelihoods
are evermore interconnected, interdependent, and lived in response to
each other. In these changing relationships, the conceptual figure of “the
tourist” plays an influential role in everyday village social relations.
At the scale of the local, conditions in Ping’an and Upper Jidao exem-
plified two differing dynamics that were set in motion by rural tourism
development. In Ping’an, more and more outsiders were drawn to the vil-
lage, in a centripetal force, thereby challenging local claims to belonging,
profits, and knowledge. Conversely, in Upper Jidao, village leaders and
regional government officials were driven to construct more apparent and
more obvious differences between villages in the Bala River Demonstra-
tion Project, arguably creating a centrifugal effect in the region. Villages
in the area tried to create symbolic distances between each other to distin-
guish themselves from their neighbors and to satisfy a presumed tourist
need for recognizable, consumable differences, but not without negative
consequences as the case between Upper and Lower Jidao shows. Such
attempts are part of the “touristic cultures” of places where tourism is
everyday life, and these new systems of values and expectations are logi-
cal, functional, and meaningful on their own terms (e.g., Cohen 2001,
41-43; and Picard 1996).
At a national level, the goal of tourism as development has been to
decrease the economic differences between rural and urban populations,
but paradoxically at the local level, the unequal distribution of develop-The Ability to Be Different |	181
ment funds and different strategies of income generation have increased
the socioeconomic distances between neighbors and villages. Thus what
was transformed included not only the different products offered in tour-
ism to satiate the supposedly ravenous appetite of tourists for something
“other” than their quotidian lives, but also the ideas and discourses about
the usefulness and meanings of things such as land, people, and ethnic
identity. These shifting concepts created new connections and power rela-
tions, and the systems of meaning generated in Ping’an s and Upper Jidao’s
tourism illuminate the socialities and subjectivities that have become val-
ued, and devalued, in contemporary China.
DISTANCES AND DIFFERENCES
Tourism does not merely create hard and fast differences in the name
of diversifying tourist experiences; indeed, the differences (ethnic, eco-
nomic, social, and political) so often invoked in understanding tourism
might be better understood as distances, where the lines that are drawn
(between Upper and Lower Jidao, for instance, or Ping’an and the Longji
Scenic Area management company) symbolize increasing disparities as
well as ongoing acknowledgments of mutual reliance and dependencies.6
Situations or contexts that may be more easily brushed aside as simply
“different” actually reveal more complicated truths when these circum-
stances are considered as distant from one another, but not altogether
unrelated. After all, distances separate and connect, while differences are
often perceived as absolute. In tourism studies, the importance of differ-
ence has been well studied.7 For tourists, tourism is a contemporary prac-
tice that engages, maintains, and produces differences through promoting
travel across great physical distances. It appeals to the discovery of societ-
ies that are temporally or culturally distinctive from the tourist, such as
through the trope of the “primitive” (N. Wang 2001, vii).
In China, as elsewhere of course, even as tourism promotions emphasize
the appeal of traveling to distant, far-flung destinations, with improved
roads, new airports, and competing transport companies, people in China
are moving closer to one another more frequently and meeting in more
of what James Clifford (1997), drawing on the work of Mary Louise Pratt
(2008 [1992]), has called “contact zones.” For Clifford (1997,192; italics in
original), museums are contact zones because their organizing structure182	| Chapter 5
as collections reflect “an ongoing historical, political, moral relationship—
a power-charged set of exchanges, of push and pull.” Likewise, tourism
villages can be considered as contact zones, highlighting the need to ana-
lyze the relationships enacted by the copresence, following Pratt (ibid.,
6), of tourists, village residents, and other stakeholders in the tourism
enterprise. Moreover, this framework enhances the understanding of the
organizing structures and principles of tourism at work in contemporary
China.
But while actual travel times have decreased in China because of
advances in modern transport, the two sabotage stories make clear that
some types of distance are increasing.8 The experience of shortening
physical distances as a result of modern transport can inversely prompt
the expansion of perceived socioeconomic and cultural distances between
groups and communities, as the exotic and different become known and
categorized as such. This may be one consequence of what Arjun Appa-
durai (1996, 70-71) has called the “cultural economy of distance” created
by spatio-temporal processes of seasonal consumption that emerge from
“the driving force of merchants, trade, and commodities, especially of the
luxury variety.” Rural tourism development has been ideally conceived
as equal parts leisure and labor, desired by urban and rural Chinese,
respectively. It is possible, then, to conceive of the simultaneous expansion
and shortening of distances in China as the result of ongoing processes
of mobility as a consumption practice in which tourism allows some to
consume more of the nation, while others seek to become consumers
(and tourists) through their efforts in producing the consumed experi-
ence. Such consumption practices necessarily are intended to assert both
belonging to a particular group and social distinction from others, but the
real effects of mobility as a consumption practice are much more unequal
and stratified.
In tourism villages like Ping’an and Upper Jidao, the figure of “the
tourist” comes to assume the role of the consumer, and all village activities
are ideally intended to satisfy the needs and wants of this particular sub-
ject. Who is the tourist, however, and how does she or he figure conceptu-
ally into village social relations and socialities? Although village residents
in both Ping’an and Upper Jidao recognized differences in desires, pref-
erences, and behaviors between domestic Chinese and foreign tourists,
at certain practical levels, they also regarded all tourists as the same—The Ability to Be Different |	183
as potential consumers. It mattered less, in the big picture, whether the
tourists who arrived were foreign or domestic and more simply that the
tourist kept coming, day after day. The permanent presence of tourists,
ultimately, was the sought-after goal, and in this way, the figure of the
tourist is conceptually akin to the idea of “the stranger” as conceived by
Georg Simmel (1950) in his oft-cited essay.9 Simmel (ibid., 402) wrote that
“the stranger is thus being discussed here, not in the sense often touched
upon in the past, as the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow,
but rather as the person who comes today and stays tomorrow.”
From the individual tourist’s perspective, she or he is more like the
wanderer, coming one day and leaving the next. But from the perspec-
tive of tourism village residents and other stakeholders in the business
of receiving tourists, Simmel’s stranger is precisely the ideal archetype
of the tourist as someone who comes and stays. The tourism industry is
concerned with the tourist, counted and calculated in terms of arrivals.
According to Sally Ann Ness (2003, 23): “From the industry’s point of
view, arrival is the single most important act of consumption, prerequisite
for all subsequent acts. A tourist is generally classified as an ‘arrival’ in the
discourse of the industry. A single person becomes a series of arrivals on
a tour as he or she moves to new destinations in the matrix. The act dis-
figures the individual, in rhetoric if not in fact. The thing done displaces
the being.” Or, in other words, what matters in tourism is not necessarily
who is on tour but simply that the tourist arrives. In this way, Simmel’s
conceptualization of the stranger as someone who comes today and stays
tomorrow illuminates the notion of the tourist as an arrival; as a subject,
the tourist comes to a place and with this arrival, the receiving location
changes in expectation and anticipation of the continuous presence of
these, and future, tourists.
The stranger, Simmel (1950, 403) suggested further, is both near and
distant to the host society as a result of being placed in a restricted posi-
tion limited to “intermediary trade . . . [or] pure finance.” Fixed in his
wandering to be purposeful only as an economic go-between, the stranger
formalizes a relationship with the group as “being inorganically [unnatu-
rally] appended to it... yet an organic [necessary] member of (it)” (ibid.,
408). The economic value of the stranger also sheds light on the figure
of the tourist. The stranger’s mobility, the ability to be near and distant,
creates a relationship of closeness and distance, or copresence, not just184	| Chapter 5
between the stranger and the host community but also in relationships
between host community members, who may come to question their own
closeness to each other. Simmel (ibid., 406) wrote: “The stranger is close
to us, insofar as we feel between him and ourselves common features of
national, social, occupational, or generally human nature. He is far from
us, insofar as these common features extend beyond him or us, and con-
nect us only because they connect a great many people.” It is precisely
these expectations and potentialities made possible by the simultaneous
relationships of nearness and distance that characterize the socioeco-
nomic, ethnic, and political differences so often evoked in tourism.
Three types of distance are at work in motivating, and mobilizing,
tourists: distance in time (suggesting evolutionary, linear time and prog-
ress), distance in space (which is often apprehended visually in the built
environment), and distance in culture (including categories of the exotic,
the unusual, or even the unexpected) (N. Wang 2001, vii). These distances
serve as hurdles for the tourist to overcome, to embrace, and to evoke, and
they validate the experience of travel as something sufficiently different
from the quotidian, as in effect a “sacred journey” (Graburn 1989 [1977]).
The consequences of these types of distances for destination communi-
ties like Ping’an and Upper Jidao, however, is that village residents and
other stakeholders must address, satisfy, and perpetuate these ideals. The
“distancing work” demanded of tourism holds immense consequences
for the relationships between residents, villages, and management or
political bodies involved in tourism development. To fully comprehend
the “economic, social and cultural organization of distance” (Urry 2007,
46) in tourism, it is necessary to understand the ethnographic, everyday
substrate of distances—not only between the tourist and the host but also
how host communities such as Ping’an and Upper Jidao are negotiating
the new forms of closeness and nearness brought about by tourism. Who
is present in the villages, and who is absent? What happens when tourists
regularly visit one village but not another just down the road?
Intense local-local tensions in Upper Jidao and Ping’an are apparent
in the two sabotage stories; these conflicts reflect ongoing social and eco-
nomic transformations in these years of increased mobility for villagers
and for (potential) tourists alike. The tourist, in the role of the bearer
of economic growth, comes to figure in both stories as the harbinger of
modernization and progress. And yet, the undesired, unintended con-The Ability to Be Different |	185
sequences of tourism are equally a sign of the times. The distance from
the potential riches of tourism felt by residents of Lower Jidao (expressed
through small acts of rage and retaliation against Upper Jidao) exem-
plify the “distancing” effect of state policies and programs that target
one, or just a handful, of villages in a given region. Conversely, the sec-
ond sabotage story illustrates the uncomfortable nearness of the county
government and the management company in the Longji Scenic Area as
perceived by residents of Ping’an village. The prickly relations between
the village and the government-company complex were made manifest in
an outburst of destructive acts on company property, yet it was precisely
Ping’an’s success in tourism that created the centripetal force that drew
more and more entrepreneurs to the village. Ultimately, by closely analyz-
ing the distances and differences in Ping’an and Upper Jidao, it becomes
possible, and necessary, to reconceptualize understandings of how doing
tourism (as development, as leisure, and as work) not only brings indi-
viduals in contact with one another but also constructs, divides, and dif-
ferentiates between communities in accordance with supposed tourist
demands and actual economic realities.
ping’an: competition in contact zones
Conflicts in Ping’an were rooted in complicated layers of social inequali-
ties and corresponding feelings of envy and discontent, spurred by com-
petition and changing resident perceptions of what constituted progress,
wealth, or poverty. In general, the tensions described by Ping’an residents
fell into three categories. First, there was the distance between tourists
and local residents, which was economic but also sociopolitical in terms
of education, access to resources, and status. Second, there was a perceived
distance between neighboring households pitted in competition against
one another and with incoming entrepreneurs from other cities and
towns, major metropolitan areas, and even from the United States. Third,
there were distances between the villages in the scenic area where tourism
was unevenly distributed. Whereas there was relatively little that village
residents could do about their status vis-a-vis tourists, they were actively
worried about and engaged in trying to overcome the distances between
themselves and their competitors in the village and the area more broadly.
At the core of these concerns was the fact that the net success of tourism186	| Chapter 5
in Ping’an was by and large centripetal, drawing potential competitors
into the village, from minority models to hotel owners and restaurateurs
from across the country and overseas. More and more tourists were com-
ing to Ping’an as well, further thickening the “copresence” of these myr-
iad stakeholders in tourism. The increased proximity of all these parties
added to the unease, uncertainty, and dissatisfaction among village resi-
dents regarding the management and experience of tourism in Ping’an.
Simultaneously, the entrenchment of local livelihoods into the tourism
industry solidified the reliance of these households and businesses on the
permanence of tourism and tourists. In the summer of 2008, when foreign
and domestic tourist numbers to Ping’an dropped (as they did across the
country because of the rippling effects of the May earthquake in Sich-
uan and the summer Olympic Games in Beijing), many Ping’an residents
took advantage of the unexpectedly slow traffic in tourists to begin new
construction projects for hotels, restaurants, and shops. Most residents I
asked no longer considered it feasible not to be engaged in doing tourism.
In numerous household surveys, respondents pointed out that tourism
had brought about the negative social consequence of greater wealth dis-
parities between families in the village and that although the vast major-
ity of residents did participate in some way in tourism, the distribution
of wealth was highly unequal. Families who could afford to build hotels
and guesthouses did so; families whose land was located farther from the
viewpoints or designated paths or who did not have enough resources to
obtain a loan to invest in materials and labor to construct bigger guest-
houses were consigned to small sales, carrying luggage or sedan chairs, or
working for wages as staff at another business. The thirty-year-old female
owner of the hotel popular with photography groups from Guangzhou
and, at the time, the head of a performance group, assessed the situation in
plain terms, saying, “Now that there’s tourism, everyone is in competition
with each other, right?” Another twenty-eight-year-old man, who along
with his wife ran one of the Li Qing guesthouses started by Lao, one of
the village elders, explained it this way: “Some have gotten rich,” he said,
“and there’s a bit of selfishness; it’s very difficult to manage this—everyone
thinks about themselves, and no one thinks about everyone.” The infer-
ence was that the sense of community had been dispersed by a feeling
of estrangement from each other because of competition in the tourism
industry.The Ability to Be Different |	187
A younger local hotel owner, Bo, echoed these sentiments but went
even further one evening over dinner. He said that the selfishness of vil-
lagers extended to their perspectives on management and control—village
residents neither paid much attention to each other’s concerns nor heeded
the rules and regulations of the management company and government
construction office. Bo had returned to Ping’an to open a guesthouse
after studying English at Guangxi Normal University in Guilin, and he
said he had tried to generate a communal effort toward improving village
infrastructure. “I want to invest a little money [into village projects],” he
explained, “but it can’t be that I do something helpful and no one is there
to support me, and in fact, [they] still talk about you behind your back.”
Bo added that “no one is willing to stand up” and discuss these problems
openly. In fact, in 2008 he tried to organize some of the young adults
in the village to create their own volunteer work group (yztvu gongzuo
fuwu dui) to counteract what he saw as the inefficiencies of the official vil-
lage leadership. He admitted that he had the time to organize this group
because his hotel had burned to the ground that past winter, leaving only
the concrete walls of the kitchen and bathrooms standing. Bo had been
away when the fire happened and did not think it would be possible to find
enough money to rebuild.
Mr. Chou, an investor from Shenzhen who was funding a new hotel
in the village, was at dinner with Bo and me that evening. Hearing Bo’s
comment about the volunteer group, Mr. Chou opined that what really
mattered in Ping’an was that the younger generation, like Bo, would con-
tinue to work the terraces, insinuating that Bo’s idea for a village volunteer
work group was ill-conceived. Good-looking terraced fields were arguably
the foundation of future success for Mr. Chou and his hotel business. Bo
retorted that others could be hired to do the manual agricultural labor of
maintaining the terraced fields; what matter for him, as someone born
and raised in the village (tusheng tuzhang), was the loss of village social
unity and the protection of their tourism profits. Bo added that he had
never worked the terraces anyway; his generation was the first to be raised
almost entirely on profits from tourism, not agricultural labor. The line
was drawn, clearly, in this conversation between Bo, a local Ping’an resi-
dent, and Mr. Chou, an outsider in Ping’an, each with a particular invest-
ment in the tourism industry and each with his own sense of purpose.
Whereas Bo viewed himself as similar to Mr. Chou in his shared concern188	| Chapter 5
over tourism in Ping’an, Mr. Chou’s comment suggested that from his per-
spective, the village residents were really not part of the tourism business
in Ping’an; instead, they were mostly useful for keeping the attraction—
namely, the terraced fields and the village itself—looking good.
Like Bo, other Ping’an residents framed their comments around the
socioeconomic tensions that had an impact on their community, their
opportunities, and their assessments of what constituted a good life.
Mr. Chou was only one of the many investors who had come from other
parts of China to profit from the tourism industry in Ping’an. The vil-
lage of Ping’an was a social and economic hub; residents of other villages
within the Longji Scenic Area came to Ping’an to work as agricultural
laborers, shopkeepers, and hotel staff. Indeed, the village of Longji, just
a half hour away on foot from Ping’an, served as a reminder to Ping’an
residents of just how far they had come. Longji was linked by kinship to
Ping’an through generations of intermarriage, but prior to 2011 the village
had little in the way of tourism infrastructure, let alone tourists. Accord-
ing to residents in both Ping’an and Longji, the latter village had chosen
not to give up its land for road construction in the mid-1990s; as a result,
it remained less accessible and far less visited than Ping’an. As the scenic
area developed during the 2000s, Longji became referred to as Longji
Ancient Zhuang Village (Longji Gu Zhuang Zhai) in signs and in every-
day speech—a fitting descriptor that emphasized the relative modernity
of Ping’an next door. The rise of tourism in Ping’an had expanded the
gulf between these two villages to the point whereby one village was by
name relegated to the past, while its neighbor faced the new future of the
Chinese countryside.
Despite their geographic proximity, the economic and material differ-
ences between Longji and Ping’an were stark; up until late 2011, there were
no gift shops, no Internet cafes, and no substantial tourism jobs in Longji.
Yuan, one of the minority models who posed with tourists in Ping’an,
was from Longji village and had come to work in Ping’an after she had
completed her compulsory education through middle school. Yuan’s
mother also worked in Ping’an at a family guesthouse. While differences
and disparities in incomes and wealth jarred relationships in Ping’an and
engendered feelings of discontent and envy between households, relations
between Longji and Ping’an villages were much more clear-cut and well-
defined, with everyone in unanimous agreement that Longji was very farThe Ability to Be Different |	189
from Ping’an: developmentally, materially, and economically. Attempts
to promote tourism to Longji village emerged in fits and starts; in the
summer of 2008, construction began on a direct road to Longji from the
main scenic area road, and there was talk of an outside investor turning
the entire village into an “ecomuseum” (shengtai bowuguari), loosely fol-
lowing the model of village-based ecomuseums in Guizhou funded by the
Norwegian government.10
By 2011, Longji was deemed an official “scenic spot” within the Longji
Scenic Area and renamed as the Longji Old Village Cultural Terraced
Fields Scenic Spot (Longji Gu Zhuang Titian Wenhua Guanjingqu) (see
Chio 2013).11 Its touristic transformation was complete with a parking
lot and entry ticket gate, financed largely through the efforts of a local
Longsheng county government official. Other changes to Longji village
included the construction of two viewpoints above the village proper,
as well as directional signs throughout the village pointing toward the
parking lot, an ecological museum (housed in the former school), a water
wheel and mill, and “the oldest home in Longji,” which was labeled a “Cul-
tural Model Home of Longji Ecomuseum.” In the home, farm tools and
other material objects were labeled and displayed for tourists to examine,
and tour groups were hosted by a local woman, who would prepare oil tea
in advance of their arrival. Actual tourist visits were still relatively low,
however, compared to Ping’an, according to a few shopkeepers in Longji
who sold water and other snacks at one of the viewpoints, but they were
hopeful that over time the village would become a popular attraction in
its own right. The heavy emphasis on Zhuang culture and traditional life-
ways in Longji village was intended to mark this village’s difference from
its more well-known and more modern neighbor Ping’an.
Another visual reminder of the opportunities in Ping’an were the eth-
nic Yao women who came every morning from the neighboring villages
of Zhongliu and Huangluo, which were also within the Longji Scenic
Area. They wore black pleated skirts, red or pink shirts, and their long
hair wrapped in a topknot covered with an embroidered black cloth
square. These women sold souvenirs, posed for photographs, performed
folk songs on request, and would offer to take tourists on hikes through
the mountains to other villages, including Dazhai (which was located in
the Jinkeng Red Yao Terraced Fields Scenic Spot, another main scenic
spot within the Longji Scenic Area). Other residents from Longji, Zhong-190	| Chapter 5
liu, Dazhai, and neighboring villages would come to Ping’an on occasion
to sell goods such as tea, bamboo shoots, pork, and beef to guesthouses,
restaurants, and tourists. Ping’an was the region’s biggest market, given
the number of hotels, tourists, and higher amounts of disposable income
among its residents. Relations between the Yao communities in the sce-
nic region and the Zhuang in Ping’an were generally sympathetic but not
entirely welcoming; the naming of the scenic spots as Zhuang terraced
fields in Ping’an and Yao terraced fields around the village of Dazhai is
only one reminder of how important clear ethnic distinctions are to tour-
ism. Separate ethnic designations of what are essentially similar systems
of terraced fields suggests that in the competitive tourism economy, any
and every difference is potentially valuable.
As stated earlier, it was not only area locals who moved to Ping’an for
economic opportunities; a number of entrepreneurs from other parts of
Guangxi (such as Longsheng, Guilin, Yangshuo) and from farther places
like Beijing, Shenzhen, and even Seattle were a noticeable presence in the
village. The increasing arrival of people, from tourists to migrant workers
and investors (who are migratory in their own way), exacerbated com-
petition and senses of a growing sociopolitical gulf between all of these
stakeholders in the tourism enterprise. One notable case was a Chinese-
American travel agency owner and professional photographer based in
Seattle who opened a luxury hotel in 2007. Until this point, the most
expensive rooms in the village cost, at most, ¥300 a night during the high
season (the Golden Weeks) and less during the rest of the year, but the
new hotel reported its prices at around ¥2,000 or more per room (inclusive
of meals). Many village residents were curious to see exactly how a hotel
room could cost so much, but unfortunately for the people of Ping’an, the
hotel came complete with a locked front gate, accessible only by buzzer,
security cameras, and a raised construction that allowed guests inside a
sweeping view of the terraced fields but those outside only a glimpse at the
stone railing around the elevated balcony (figure 5.3).12
The construction of the hotel reflected, perhaps, a desire to achieve
visual, photographic domination over the landscape. Much like how
the “starchitecture” of pre-Olympics Beijing was constructed to be seen
from above, through a mediating lens, in Ping’an many hotels and bal-
conies, including the photography booths, literally placed tourists above
the landscape, which could then be viewed as static and subordinate. InThe Ability to Be Different |	191
figure 5.3. Hotels in Ping’an are clustered along the path to the viewpoint for
looking at the Seven Stars with Moon landscape, which is the more well-known
view; the last large building on the upper left is the most expensive hotel in the
village (2007). Photo by the author.
effect, “such photographic practices [of landscape] thus demonstrate how
the environment is to be viewed, as dominated by humans and subject
to their mastery” (Urry 2000, 87). These spaces only reinforced an ongo-
ing problem, however; village residents felt excluded from the celebration
of their landscape, which they considered the product of their ingenuity
and labor. The photographic “domination” of the landscape in Ping’an
by the gated balcony of a hotel owned by an outsider to the village sug-
gested yet another external exertion of power over the community. Within
a few months of this hotel’s opening, villagers remarked to me that no one
except the staff (at first only one of whom was a local woman, hired as a
cleaner) and guests could enter. The villagers who were hired as porters to
carry luggage up from the parking lot were allowed only as far as the front
door. This total exclusion from the hotel space was new to the village resi-
dents. Family-run guesthouses were more typically a semiporous border192	| Chapter 5
zone between the public and the private, the home and the hotel; the tour-
ist’s dining room often also served as a family living room. Friends and
relatives would relax, chat, watch TV, and otherwise use their hotel and
restaurant spaces whenever tourists were not around, although it was tac-
itly agreed that when tourists were present, village residents would move
out of the center of a room, either to one side or go outside. The physical
distance created by the new luxury hotel’s construction reinforced for the
villagers the socioeconomic differences between them, the tourists, and
the nonlocal business entrepreneurs who came to Ping’an.
By offering such an exclusive secluded space for tourists who wanted
to “get away from it all” within a village as densely populated yet geo-
graphically small as Ping’an, the inference was that perhaps Ping’an, the
terraced fields, and rural Zhuang minority life were best experienced from
a distance, from an elevated, walled-offbalcony. As a symbol of power, the
balcony and the hotel reinforced the social inequalities of tourism. The
visuality of the balcony can be traced back to mid-nineteenth-century
Britain, and perhaps not entirely coincidentally with the rise of the Euro-
pean Grand Tour and modern tourism, when “the upper class ... [stood]
visibly on their balconies and [overlooked] the ‘other.’ The balcony took on
special significance in nineteenth-century life and literature as the place
from which one could gaze but not be touched, could participate in the
crowd yet be separate from it. . . . According to [Walter] Benjamin the
balcony demonstrates superiority over the crowd, as the observer ‘scruti-
nizes the throng’ [1969,173]” (Urry 2000, 94-95). In Ping’an, the balcony
had a recent history and was a relatively new feature of tourism in the
village. This luxury hotel’s balcony was unique in its exclusivity and posi-
tion in the village, but many other hotels in Ping’an also had balconies by
2008 (figure 5.4). Indeed, by this time, having a balcony for guest use was
considered a necessary element of a successful hotel-restaurant business.
While most houses in Ping’an traditionally included a flat outdoor space
(usually made of bamboo poles strapped together and propped against the
roof or side of the house) for drying foods and doing other chores, the first
balcony for tourists was built in the late 1990s by Ying, the owner-manager
of the original Li Qing guesthouse, who was one of Lao’s sons-in-law. Ying
explained that he decided to try to build a balcony outside the guesthouse
after seeing how popular they were with foreign tourists in Yangshuo;
however, as the Li Qing guesthouse was perched over a steep slope, heThe Ability to Be Different |	193
figure 5.4. Balconies in Ping’an compete for views, space, and tourists. The
smallest, lower-middle balcony was the first to be built in the village, attached to
the old hi Qing guesthouse (2008). Photo by the author.
had trouble at first with designing a balcony out of wood that would be
structurally sound but still maintain the look of the village. Eventually,
Ying devised a way to use steel rebar and concrete to construct supports
for the balcony and then wrapped the concrete pillars with wooden planks
to cover up the original material. When the balcony was complete, he said,
income at the Li Qing guesthouse nearly doubled in one year.
By 2008, almost every new hotel-restaurant construction project
included a balcony, if not for general shared use then for private guest
use directly attached to guestrooms. Families who were building new
guesthouses would often first build a large, flat space over the hillside’s
steep slopes if they didn’t have a wide enough plot of land to use as the
foundation (see figure 5.4; the large unfinished concrete surface in the
middle right of the image is one such newly constructed flat space). The
idea would be to first use the flat, open balcony as an outdoor restaurant
and then, when they had enough money, to build a hotel on top. The194	| Chapter 5
balcony was a fitting architectural manifestation of how Ping’an should be
experienced, touristically, since the village’s main attraction was looking
at (and more precisely looking down upon) the terraced fields. This type of
sightseeing tied a particular behavior to notions of how the land should be
experienced and consumed: visually.13 Therefore, construction projects in
Ping’an centered on how to make the experience of looking more enjoy-
able for tourists and profitable for business owners. The outdoor balcony
restaurant and private balconies attached to guestrooms were obvious
solutions, where tourists could enjoy the view while also spending money.
Just as guesthouses were often also living spaces for village residents, when
there were no tourists present, most balconies were also public-private
spaces for playing cards, eating meals, and even hula-hooping. But with
the increase in more professionally run hotels and guesthouses, usually
started by experienced entrepreneurs from other places, some balconies
were gradually regulated to be for tourist use only. The luxury hotel bal-
cony, gated off from the village paths and raised above eye level, marked
the limits of the “contact zone” in Ping’an, where the “thick co-presence”
(Urry 2002a, 259) of tourists and locals, residents and outsiders, even
neighbor and neighbor, was wearing quite thin.
UPPER JIDAO: FINDING SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS
The situation in Upper Jidao was equally tense and rife with unmet
expectations and frustrations, though around different issues. Unlike in
Ping’an, instead of a process of in-migration from neighboring regions
and villages, the residents of neighboring Lower Jidao simply seemed to
be left out of Upper Jidao’s developments. Indeed, provincial-level govern-
ment plans and funding specifically targeted Upper Jidao as the tourism
destination. From conception these projects, including the World Bank’s
eventual Guizhou Cultural and Natural Heritage Protection and Develop-
ment Program, aimed at separating selected villages according to certain
features and characteristics. But they effectively left out, or left behind, the
other villages and communities in the area. In the Rural Tourism Plan,
2006—2020, published by the Guizhou Tourism Bureau (2006, 41), a “con-
trol plan” for tourism in Upper Jidao outlined specific aspects of intended
development, including the protection of natural resources, construction
of infrastructure, and marketing of tourism products.The Ability to Be Different |	195
Mention of Lower Jidao was made in passing within the document,
which gives only brief acknowledgment to the existence of Lower Jidao
when reporting village population: “The village is divided into two parts:
Jidao Upper Village and Jidao Lower Village. The total population of the
village [here referring to Upper and Lower Jidao] is up to 1,037, including
220 families, all of which are Miao minority” (ibid., 41). The description
of the control plan continues by outlining the various components of the
changes to be made in Upper Jidao. In every provincial-level government
publication on tourism in the Bala River region I obtained, only Upper
Jidao village is mentioned in the development plans, and often Lower
Jidao is simply left off the map. Some documents referred to Upper Jidao
as “Jidao village,” altogether ignoring the existence of Lower Jidao, or sim-
ply by the destination name “Jidao Miao Village,” which lumped them
together but did not acknowledge how funding or plans were allocated.
The problems of selecting one village out of many for tourism develop-
ment was not unnoticed by government officials; Xiao Qianhui (2005,213),
Party Secretary and director of the newspaper office for China Tourism
News, said in a paper given at the 2004 International Forum on Guizhou
Rural Tourism (later published in the forum proceedings) that while
“there may be over 10,000 natural villages in Qiandongnan Prefecture;
yet there may be only 50 out of them that would have the conditions to
develop rural tourism, which is a very small number among them. . . .
When rural tourism grows vigorously in Nanhua Village, how about
the other over 9000 villages?” His proposed solution was to implement
a “division of labor”—to allow for and facilitate the migration of villagers
from one village to another “to be their assistants, actors, logistic service
base for providing farm productions and the like for the front-line vil-
lages” (ibid., 214). This is precisely what happened, somewhat organically,
in Ping’an over time. After all, Xiao continued, many young people from
the popular tourism village of Upper Langde migrated to urban centers
like Beijing, Guiyang, and Shenzhen for work (and “such a migration is
a normal phenomenon,” he noted), leaving behind a tourism destination
without a “backbone performing team” (i.e., only the elderly and infirm
are left). Xiao suggested simply inviting other villagers from Nanmeng or
other nearby communities to perform and share in the profits (ibid., 214).
For tourism villages with a “permanent presence” of tourists like
Ping’an, the in-migration of potential employees was possible because as196	| Chapter 5
established destinations, these villages could reasonably expect tourist
arrivals. For Upper Jidao, however, because it was just beginning to par-
ticipate in tourism and had yet to really earn any profits from it, the notion
of sharing labor and earnings with any other village was counterintuitive,
to say the least. The net result was a doubling of the social tensions in
Upper Jidao: first, to mitigate, to some extent, the unhappiness of their
neighbors (in many cases, their relations) in Lower Jidao lest this anger and
resentment cause more damage to their own tourism; and second, to con-
tinually strive to be different from the other villages earmarked as tourism
destinations along the Bala River. Since Upper Jidao is extremely close to
the most popular and well-known tourism villages in the region, if not in
the entire province (Upper Langde, Xijiang, and Nanhua), this physical
nearness had to be combated with the creation of greater differences from
the tourist attractions offered in these well-known villages.14 Moreover,
after 2008, their greatest competition came from Xijiang, which is not in
the Bala River area. Xijiang, technically a township, had been redeveloped
with provincial and county funds into a scenic area, and was now managed
and run by a tourism development company in conjunction with govern-
ment offices; it has since obtained a national “AAAA” rating as a tourism
region.15 With Xijiang on the map, so to speak, tourists simply went there
and no longer passed through the Bala River area, villagers said.
As I learned through my household survey in Upper Jidao in 2006, vil-
lagers overwhelmingly agreed that they were interested in doing tourism
as a source of income and wages. When it came to what kind of tourism
activities they considered best or most suitable to them, people expressed
a sincere desire to be different from Upper Langde and Nanhua, both of
which relied upon prearranged dance performances and charged flat fees
of ¥300 to ¥800 to tour groups who booked shows in advance. Upper Jidao
should not become a song-and-dance village like Upper Langde or Nan-
hua, I was told repeatedly, because there was no need for another such
attraction in the Bala River area. The 2006 village subcommittee head of
Upper Jidao, Chun, summarized the situation in more proactive terms:
what they needed to do, he said, was “get out the special characteristics”
of Upper Jidao (ba tese gao chulai). “When other villages are a step ahead
[of us],” he added, “we’re behind them; [therefore] we can’t follow the old
road, and instead we need to find our own special characteristics.” This
feeling of the need to be different was pervasive throughout tourism devel-The Ability to Be Different |	197
opment programs but especially in the marketing of rural ethnic places
for tourism.
This ability to be different, or characteristically special, was emphasized
early on in the original plans for the Bala River Demonstration Project for
Rural Tourism. According to a paper prepared for the 2004 International
Forum on Guizhou Rural Tourism by the (then) vice governor for Qian-
dongnan, Li Zaiyong, the Bala River project delineated very specific, dif-
fering tourism “characteristics” for each of the seven villages involved (Li
Zaiyong 2005). Table 5.1 is adapted from the published version of his paper
(note that Jidao and Langde in the table refer to the upper villages of each,
respectively). According to Li Zaiyong (ibid., 185), the principles behind
this table included “seeking differences from the same group of tourism
attractions; demonstrating special features through comparison; and pin-
pointing the key points through selection.” The purpose of creating a table
like this one was therefore to explicitly make these seven villages be more
different from each other.
Table 5.1 is a visual reminder of how villages were to draw lines between
and keep their distance from each other. An interview with Wang Qiao,
Party Secretary of the Kaili Municipal Tourism Bureau in 2006, revealed
a similar approach to tourism development; Wang repeatedly emphasized
to me that the Bala River villages must not be the same. Even national-
level tourism officials pointed out the “problems” of sameness. In his
paper given at the 2004 International Forum on Guizhou Rural Tour-
ism and published in the forum proceedings, Xiao Qianhui (2005, 212),
from China Tourism News, described the situation as follows: “When we
came in Guizhou, we found there were too many common points existing
between different ethnic villages and different ethnic groups here. Only
the professionals could see where the differences [were] between them;
yet it was difficult for the ordinary tourists to find the differences between
them.... The greatest threat in our rural tourism would be the sameness
in a thousand villages. If all the villages should have the same face, it is
unnecessary for tourists to visit them one by one.”
Being recognizably the same as your neighbors becomes a burden
within the tourism worldview, where the perpetual search for difference,
between tourist and toured, or this tourist village and that one down the
road, necessitates a distancing of self from the others. But finding and
developing the necessary differences between these villages was easier saidtable 5.1. Characteristics and work divisions planned for the Bala River
Demonstration Project Area, 2005
Work Division and
Village Name	Characteristics	Positioning
Huai’enbao	Ancient postal road built in late Ming and early Qing dynasties and located at the entrance to the Dem- onstration Project Area	Providing comprehensive tourism services
Nanhua	Miao songs and dances	Displays of the Miao songs and dances
[Upper] Jidao	Ancient building struc- tures, history and culture	Showing tourists the hundred-year granary and the hundred-year path; performance of ancient (hundred-year) songs
[Upper] Langde	Miao songs and dances; ancient building com- plex; liquor-drinking customs	Showing tourists the ancient traditional Miao buildings; performances of the Miao songs and dances
Jiaomeng	The Miao Copper Drum Dance; specialty agricul- ture; water-buffalo fights; cockfights, bird fights	Specialty agriculture for sightseeing; services at the spots along the hiking route of Maomaohe- J iaomeng-N anmeng- Langde
Nanmeng	Homeland of lusheng art	Performances of lusheng-, services at the spots along the hiking route of Jiaomeng-N anmeng- Langde
Maomaohe	A village famous nation- wide for its good sanita- tion; the entrance to the Demonstration Area	Exhibition of Miao embroi- deries; leisure tours and holiday making; com- prehensive supporting services
Source: Adapted from Li Zaiyong 2005,185.The Ability to Be Different |	199
than done; an official from Maomaohe village reported in 2006 that tour-
ism to his village had decreased since 2002. When asked why, he said it was
because promoting seven tourism villages was too much—“We are all the
same,” the official exclaimed, “so why would any tourist go to seven of the
same places? Historically, socially, culturally, we are all the same Miao!”
The vision of tourism development proposed by government tourism
bureaus and consultants required that the villages along the Bala River,
considered by scholars and residents of the region to be cut of the same
Miao ethnic minority cloth, now had to create differences not only between
themselves and mainstream Han society but also between each other as
well. This problem of “sameness” was not unique to China, of course, and
potential solutions have been created in other rural tourism programs,
such as the One Village One Product movement that originated in Japan.16
This approach focused on creating one specialty product per village to
encourage tourists to visit multiple villages, thus expanding the tourism
map by creating consumable differences between villages. The economic
success of this project in certain regions of Japan is well-documented on
the program’s website. Particularly in Asian tourism contexts, the “one
village, one product” model fits within already existing ideas about the
desirability of local specialties and gift-giving (Graburn 1983).
Chinese tourism promotions and marketing were awash in the lan-
guage of special characteristics (tese) and special products (techari). In
2006, the Guiyang-based Highland Research Institute (Gaodi Yanjiu Suo)
funded seven villages in Qiandongnan, including Upper Jidao, to create
their own special products as part of a program to develop local economies
and promote local goods in regional marketplaces. Some villages used the
¥10,000 grant to improve upon and advertise a product they were already
known for, such as paper-making in Shiban village. Others, like Upper
Jidao, used the funds to purchase new items, in this case multiple large
lusheng for use in their tourism performances. Chinese domestic tourists
visiting both Upper Jidao and Ping’an frequently asked for special prod-
ucts, especially foods, so villagers also developed standard replies to these
inquiries. In Upper Jidao, the local specialty was sour-soup fish (suantang
yu, a tomato-based fish hotpot); the sour-soup flavor was widely associ-
ated with the Miao ethnic group, to the point where even the international
fast-food chain KFC once offered a Miao Mountain Sour Soup Double
Chicken Burger (figure 5.5).17 In Ping’an, the foods named by residents as200
Chapter 5
figure 5.5. A KFC advertisement for the Miao Mountain Sour Soup Double
Chicken Burger inside the Xizhimen subway station in Beijing features a back-
ground image from Upper Langde, Guizhou (2007). Photo by the author.
local specialties included bamboo rice and smoked pork. In both villages,
the local alcoholic brew was also evoked as a specialty. In Upper Jidao, it
was distilled from rice or corn; in Ping’an, it was usually made from sweet
potatoes, and many families also made their own sweet rice wine.
In general, Upper Jidao needed to offer something different from the
other tourist villages nearby, but it also needed to adopt certain features to
meet and fulfill expected tourist demands. As a result, villagers struggled
with the double-edged sword of sameness: while wanting to differentiate
their own attractions from the similar Miao cultural performances and
festival attire in nearby villages, the village also needed to look more like
a “real” tourist village to attract more tourists. Tourists arriving in Upper
Jidao sometimes complained that they couldn’t see what was so unique
about the place—a complaint that led to the occasional refusal of tour-
ists to pay entrance fees or to stay for a meal. The village needed more
obvious, familiar elements to explicitly signal to tourists that this was a
place that could be visited. Even as some plans detailed how Upper Jidao
would be different, village residents were nevertheless encouraged to prac-
tice and prepare folk song-and-dance performances, despite the fact that
such shows were already commonly offered in Upper Langde and Nanhua.The Ability to Be Different |	201
These performances, in efFect, made Upper Jidao into a real tourism vil-
lage. Residents of Upper Jidao often emphasized that their shows were dif-
ferent, however, because they included “ancient songs” (gu ge) performed
by elderly village residents. This was partly the result of out-migration and
a lack of younger adults in the village, but this circumstance was reshaped
as an advantage in the current tourism market. Ultimately, Upper Jidao
sought to be similar enough to existing tourism models to participate in
the industry but unique enough to offer a slightly different experience.
The selected Bala River villages also had to be immediately recogniz-
able visually as destinations. To start, the provincial and municipal gov-
ernments erected matching road signs on the highway through the region
and placed wooden placards at the entrance to each village to visually
brand the Bala River region as a tourism destination. Because the original
road into Jidao was tucked in a bend, however, residents worried that the
village would be missed. Thus they increased the number of signs on the
highway (see figure 1.4). When the highway was rebuilt in 2008 and 2009,
new decorated parking lots were built as a part of the entrances to the
tourism villages in the Bala River area that fell within Kaili municipality;
these visually similar areas signaled even more strongly to passing traffic
that these particular villages were worth visiting (figure 5.6).
There were other visual elements, or recognizable architectural styles
and structures that indicated the presence of a village for tourism in
Guizhou.18 These included wind-and-rain bridges (fengyu qiao, which
Nanhua and Upper Langde both had), an arched entryway into the vil-
lage (zhaimen; at first, one was constructed only at the entrance to Upper
Jidao by the riverside and was not visible from the highway), a large danc-
ing ground for lusheng performances (the original space was renovated in
2004; in 2006 and 2007, additional fields were appropriated for the con-
struction of a larger one that was completed in 2008), a parking lot, and a
village museum. Much of the money from the New Socialist Countryside
program and development funds from Ningbo were spent on building
these features in Upper Jidao. The new, larger performance space came
first, and the village museum/cultural center shortly thereafter. But by
the summer of 2008, tensions between Upper Jidao and Lower Jidao had
worsened, spurred on by the increased number of tour groups visiting
Upper Jidao. One woman from Upper Jidao told me that she had heard
rumors about leaders from Lower Jidao renting a digger to start construe-202	| Chapter 5
figure 5.6. A new decorative parking lot for Jidao was completed as a part of the
2008 highway project along the Bala River. This lot was located at the roadside
entrance to both Upper Jidao and Lower Jidao, and the wooden gates displayed
the name of the village (“Jidao” on the smaller, right side, and “Jidao Miao Vil-
lage” on the larger, left gate). The carved stone wall features a mural of Xijiang,
Jidao, and other villages promoted as tourism destinations in the Bala River area.
In the carving, wooden houses are tucked in among tall trees and steep hillsides
(2010). Photo by the author.
tion on their own performance ground in their village to compete with
Upper Jidao.
Nonetheless, the plans and ideas imagined for Upper Jidao went even
further than a museum and performance space. As early as 2006, my host
in Upper Jidao, Teacher Pan, envisioned “rafting on the river, covered huts
on the riverbank, and also more things for sale in the village along a com-
mercial street, or small bars and shops, so when tourists arrive and are
thirsty or tired, they can have a cup of tea.” He declared that a tourist
village needed “something to look at, something to buy, and something to
be entertained by” for the tourist, with the ideal end result that “villagers
can have some income.” Tourism to Upper Jidao was not entirely focusedThe Ability to Be Different |	203
on landscape appreciation, as in Ping’an, because its landscape was by and
large no different than that surrounding every other village along the Bala
River. Therefore, Upper Jidao would have to develop its own products to
address tourist expectations, who hoped to see and enjoy a rural ethnic
Miao cultural environment—but in ways different from how Miao cultural
life could be seen and enjoyed in nearby villages like Nanhua or Upper
Langde.
Upper Jidao was still going to be a Miao village for tourists, just with
different activities and “special characteristics” to demonstrate its Miao
identity. The work chart (see table 5.1) of characteristics and divisions
planned for the area was intended create these specific differences, while
suggesting that these seven villages were all worth a visit. After the rede-
velopment and opening of the Xijiang Thousand Households Miao Vil-
lage in 2008, however, tourist numbers to the Bala River region villages
dropped significantly, to the point that by 2012, one Upper Jidao resident
who taught in the elementary school in Nanhua said that Nanhua had
stopped doing tourism almost entirely. Tourist numbers to Upper Jidao
had also declined by 2012, although because of the influx of funds from
the World Bank project and from private donors, there were still a num-
ber of construction projects ongoing in the village, including the building
of additional guestrooms in local homes and a new parking lot, and the
creation of an exhibition of embroidery inside the cultural center. A very
large, multistory building was also under construction in Lower Jidao
along the riverside in 2012, which some Upper Jidao residents surmised
would be turned into a hotel.
Being a recognizable part of a recognized ethnic minority group
remains important for political representation in a centralized state sys-
tem that maintains an exact count and decisive role in naming the nation’s
constituent ethnic communities. On the ground, however, tourism devel-
opment and maintenance requires a negotiation of difference. The resi-
dents of Upper Jidao and Ping’an are officially acknowledged by the state
as ethnic minorities, and the cultural traditions of each village are pro-
moted as part of the tourism experience in each place. Ethnic and rural
identity thus becomes an integral component of how differences are pro-
duced in tourism, ostensibly for the economic benefit of the destination
communities. For Ping’an and Upper Jidao, tourism has brought not only
new enterprises and economies but also new ways of thinking about com-204	| Chapter 5
munity, belonging, and the future. In Ping’an, tourism and its relative suc-
cess has introduced psychological distances between families, neighbors,
and other stakeholders crowded into the village’s tourism industry; in
Upper Jidao, however, the tensions with Lower Jidao and the emphasis on
creating differences between villages has demonstrated that a certain kind
of distance is necessary for tourism development. Nevertheless, because of
tourism, both of these communities are evermore interlinked and inter-
dependent with their neighboring villages by virtue of being destinations.
As villagers expressed a sense of distance from their neighbors or their
ethnic communities, these perceived distances continued to impart very
real implications for village socialities and subjectivities.
KEEPING YOUR DISTANCE
Rural ethnic tourism in China revolves around three primary axes of dif-
ference: rural-urban, ethnic minority-mainstream majority, and poor-
rich. These binaries were experienced and expressed in various ways as
they came to bear on local, regional, and national relationships between
individual, community, and ethnic identities within and beyond Ping’an
and Upper Jidao. Of course, these binaries of socioeconomic difference
are not unique to China, but they have been increasingly adopted for pro-
moting tourism and rural development, and more often than not, at the
same time. In the discursive construction of what constituted develop-
ment and progress in China, extending Louisa Schein’s concept of “inter-
nal orientalism,” rural, poor, and ethnic minority existed at one end of the
apparent one-way street toward urban, rich, and mainstream. Indeed, as
the examples of Upper Jidao and Ping’an show, the process of tourism as
development functioned to mainstream the ethnic minority, not to erase
or eliminate ethnic distinctiveness but rather to render it into popular,
nationally shared forms and variations (such as sour soup-flavored dishes
and standard expectations of rural vernacular architecture).
This distancing of populations (rural-urban, minority-mainstream,
poor-rich) within the scope of the nation also affects tourist behaviors
and the perception of tourists by destination community residents. In
Joan Laxson’s (1991) study of tourist opinions at Native American sites in
the U.S. Southwest, she found that rather than being a contact zone across
differences, museum and other public cultural performances becameThe Ability to Be Different |	205
ways for tourists to reinforce their original ideas and beliefs about Native
Americans. Some tourists were well aware of the differences between
themselves and Native cultures and admitted to feeling more comfort-
able at a distance: a young woman at the Pueblo Cultural Center in Albu-
querque, New Mexico, told her: “The only way I feel comfortable learning
about it (Pueblo culture) or knowing about it is through something like
(novels by Tony Hillerman). Something that lets you keep your distance”
(Laxson 1991, 367). Distance becomes a desired aspect of consumption for
this tourist, much as the popularity of balconies in Ping’an allows tour-
ists to “control” the land through possession of a privileged viewing posi-
tion. Other tourists might feel more comfortable “looking at, buying, and
being entertained by” rural ethnic minority life through a front-row seat
at the edge of a performance ground (to evoke Teacher Pan’s formula).
In response, given the concerns of village residents in Upper Jidao over
being able to provide an appropriate and satisfactory experience for tour-
ists, they were worried about not being different enough to fulfill tourist
desires.
Whether it was people in Ping’an talking about who was responsible
for the maintenance of the terraced fields or government officials and resi-
dents in the Bala River region wondering how to increase tourist flows to
all seven villages, their comments reflect a shift in senses of identity, com-
munity, and connectedness among rural ethnic minority populations in
China. This shift is part of a more fundamental transformation of how
differences are being experienced and categorized in meaningful ways.
The logic of this shift reveals the underlying assumptions of projects such
as the work chart for the Bala River villages (see table 5.1) and the insis-
tence of Ping’an residents on their need to become more ethnic in light of
competition from their neighbors (see chapter 1). But this means of ratio-
nalizing difference into a handful of tourist activities or naming strate-
gies in order to create distinctions illuminates how differences become
instrumentalized within certain forms and assertions of power. By sys-
tematically organizing differences and labeling them as such, in a method
not unlike that of natural history (Pratt 2008 [1992], 24-36), differences
themselves became naturalized as universal types and forms, rather than
as cultural or historically contingent.19 In this way, Upper Jidao becomes
the village of Miao ancient songs; Ping’an becomes the village of Zhuang
terraced fields.206	| Chapter 5
Ethnic identity is malleable to the politics and, increasingly, to the eco-
nomics of an era. During China’s Ethnic Classification project of the 1950s
and 1960s, the purpose of distinguishing between ethnic minority groups
was to reduce difference into a finite number of governable groups with
the goal of integrating all into a seamless map of national progress and
social development. Nowadays, however, differences (visual differences in
particular) are invoked to keep ethnic communities apart for purposes of
economic growth via tourism. For tourism purposes, once the basic fact
of difference is established along ethnic lines and usually through nam-
ing, the “repertoire” or “options” (Bunten 2008, Waters 1990, and Wood
1998) available in these cultural and ethnic identities gradually became
“filled up” with meaning through very material means, such as architec-
ture, performance, clothing, and landscape. Ultimately, the desired end
result is that the “Other” in tourism—village residents—is supposed to be
somewhat close to the tourist (by leading a modern life through the suc-
cessful execution of national development programs and able to provide
acceptable eating and sleeping conditions to tourists) but distant enough
to render culture and customs into acceptable varieties of song-and-dance
performances, a few “local” flavors at dinner, and traditional handicrafts.
Domestic tourism in China continues to seek out and codify the inter-
nal “Other” to expand tourism industries and opportunities. For tourism
village residents, the process of doing tourism was also a process of being
able to be different in ways appropriate to national discourses about tour-
ism, belonging, and identity. More than just development, this is a project
in understanding how and why tourists come to a rural ethnic minor-
ity village and in negotiating what happens when tourism comes to one
or two villages but perhaps not to others. The sensation of the distances
between communities increases as a result of concrete social, economic,
and political changes while these very communities are simultaneously
becoming more and more interdependent on one another for economic
growth and social progress. In both Ping’an and Upper Jidao, socioeco-
nomic development meant increased opportunities to not stay in one’s
natal village, or at least to imagine a life elsewhere in China. With this, the
ability to be mobile took on increasingly significant resonances in terms
of productive labor (as a migrant worker) and consumption (as a tourist).
In Upper Jidao and Ping’an, “the cultural economy of distance” (Appa-
durai 1996,71) traded socialist narratives of unidirectional social progressThe Ability to Be Different |	207
and development for an ethnic identity that could be enjoyed, shared cul-
tural traits for consumable local specialties, and income-earning oppor-
tunities for the imagination of a life that would allow for leisure travel. The
transformations taking place in Ping’an and Upper Jidao were not only
internal. Incidents of sabotage raised questions of competition, unmet
expectations, jealousy, and disappointment that involved stakeholders
from the village to the nation. The significance of tracing these relation-
ships beyond the limits of the village is apparent. For tourism to succeed
in Ping’an and Upper Jidao, these villages depend upon provincial and
national funds, support, and infrastructure. If these tourism industries
are to fail, it would also be through the combined failure of the many
parties involved.
By understanding the interaction between physical distances, socioeco-
nomic disparities, and cultural distinctiveness, the desire for difference
in tourism—or as one travel magazine editor in Beijing put it, “tourism
that can be different” (chayi xing de liiyou)—translates into the ability to
be different on the part of tourism village residents. Whereas tourism in
Ping’an drew increased numbers of “outsiders” into the village’s socioeco-
nomic sphere, thereby forcing all parties to take stock of how to distin-
guish themselves, Upper Jidao struggled to establish its purpose within
the forces of rural ethnic tourism plans and discourses that demanded
difference. Both sets of circumstances strained social and personal rela-
tions, and the resultant changes were noticeably manifest in visual prac-
tices in each village. Hotel and restaurant owners in Ping’an competed to
lure tourists with the best views via balconies, while officials and leaders
in Upper Jidao, Kaili, and Guizhou planned and constructed new facili-
ties to make the village look more like a tourist destination while trying to
imagine a different way to attract tourists. The distances and differences
at play in these villages provide the guiding outlines of the landscape of
travel in China today, which above all is about the connectivity of these
communities to national goals of progress and modernization.CONCLUSION
Upper Jidao, Meet Ping’an
In June 2007,1 invited the members of the Upper Jidao Tourism Associa-
tion to visit Ping’an; it would be a second trip to the Longji Scenic Area
for Teacher Pan and Fa, and the first for the other association members.
Through this trip, I came to fully realize how complicated tourism is as a
lived practice. As I spent time with the Upper Jidao residents in Ping’an,
listening to their observations and taking note of their questions, I saw
how doing tourism was reconfiguring the social, cultural, and political
values of being ethnic and being rural for them. Participation in tourism
had become not only a new means of earning an income, but another way
of taking part in the construction and creation of one’s own modern iden-
tity. Of course, this process has not been without problems.
National campaigns to Open Up the West and to build a New Social-
ist Countryside articulate current discourses of rural socioeconomic
development and national unity among (and between) the country’s
officially recognized ethnic groups. Beyond national cohesion, however,
these programs also have sought to transform individual subjectivities,
most noticeably in the push for a “quality population” (suzhi renkou) and
“civilized tourism” (wenming liiyou). They tapped into, and drew upon
for justification, shared, dominant discourses on mobility, where domes-
tic migrants are disparaged and domestic tourists are desirable.1 These
policies have had the effect of encouraging rural ethnic Chinese people
209210	| Conclusion
to learn how to be rural and how to be ethnic in very specific ways. My
analysis in this book has focused on how various discourses and experi-
ences of learning to be rural and ethnic have been negotiated through
the accumulation and communication of visual knowledge, resulting in a
particular politics of appearance at work in tourism villages. Thus tourism
has become the actual context in which learned identities are displayed,
performed, and commodified for economic gain and personal growth.
By exploring the effects of mobility and visuality across scales—from
the personal to the public and from the village to the nation—being mobile
and being seen are clearly shown to be integral to local understandings of
the perils and possibilities latent in tourism. But as a lived experience,
tourism is a messy business in which individual aspirations may collide
with communal plans. Undulating tensions between collective ambitions
for rural tourism and individual goals for a life worth living punctuated
the often fraught relationships between the myriad stakeholders involved.
Tourism development programs such as those undertaken in Upper Jidao
depended upon the assumption that a village could, and would, work
together as a cohesive social, political, and economic unit. Perhaps out
of practicality, these plans frequently overlooked the range of individual
opinions, perspectives, desires, and interests that exist in any one village.
Admittedly, as the history of tourism in Ping’an demonstrates, once tour-
ism becomes a steady and predictable source of income, most families
and households will choose to participate in the industry, but not without
exacerbating some, and sometimes new, inequalities. The landscape of
travel in which these village communities seek out their place in contem-
porary China has been continually outlined by the negotiation of oppor-
tunities and ambitions by individuals and within social collectivities.
The study tour I organized in 2007 illustrated in real time the com-
plexities of tourism in rural ethnic China. I offered to pay for the members
of the Upper Jidao Tourism Association to visit Ping’an. Here, my role as
a foreign ethnographer shifted from being an active participant-observer
to a proactive initiator. After months of seeing “the other” village in my
video footage (Chio 2011a), I hoped that some residents of Upper Jidao and
Ping’an would finally get to meet each other in person and discuss tourism
in face-to-face conversation. I imagined the trip would include a signifi-
cant amount of interaction between villagers, without the agenda of an
international development program, consultants, or government officials.Conclusion |	211
Much of what I anticipated never came to light. In the end, the short
two-day trip showed me how mobility, visuality, and the learning curve
of tourism are deeply complicated in Ping’an and Upper Jidao. Residents
of both villages are juggling the expectations for better tourism posed by
government and industry stakeholders alongside their own aspirations
for better lives. After the trip, I began to better comprehend how mobil-
ity and immobility are two sides of the same coin, how ethnicity can be
simultaneously creative and formulaic, and how tourism is always both
sacred and profane. Indeed, the trip forced me to remember that from
the perspective of the villagers, it was the potential of tourism to improve
upon their everyday, normal, and ordinary lives that mattered the most.
YOUR MOBILITY DEFEATS YOUR TOURISM
My idea to invite people from Upper Jidao on a trip to Ping’an was hardly
new, given that Teacher Pan and Fa had both gone on a government-
sponsored study trip in 2004, which had included a stop in Ping’an.2
Sharing my video footage from Ping’an with residents of Upper Jidao
only increased our mutual enthusiasm for another study trip. In spring
2007, I told Fu, that year’s village subcommittee leader and the head
of the tourism association, that I would provide ¥4,000 for transport,
lodging, food, and incidental costs for the trip. A manager in the Longji
Scenic Area management company generously agreed to waive the entry
ticket fees for the group. Fu arranged for a driver and a van. Everyone in
the tourism association was enthusiastic and excited about the trip, Fu
assured me.
The first problem was with scheduling. It had been a very busy year for
Upper Jidao, as the village was at the center of a number of government
projects, including the ongoing provincial rural tourism plans and the
concurrent New Socialist Countryside development program. Upper Jidao
was also involved with a rural development NGO that held occasional
retreats and conferences for village representatives. Individual opportuni-
ties and obligations placed additional demands on residents. Qin, the most
active female member of the tourism association and the village clinician,
had been offered an office job with a company that sold the flavor base for
“Miao” sour-soup fish hotpot. This would give her the chance to live in
Kaili, where she had lived as a child and teenager and where her mother212	| Conclusion
still resided. Qin left Upper Jidao with her daughter in March 2007, think-
ing it would be a good way for her daughter to attend preschool and for her
to save a bit of money. We talked on the phone occasionally, and I asked her
about the job and living in the city again. The work was fine, if a bit boring,
Qin opined; she mostly just answered the phone. Her daughter was doing
well in preschool, but Qin claimed she wasn’t saving much money at all
since there were too many things to buy in Kaili.
In addition, Qin said, people in the village kept calling her back. Like
many young adults in rural communities, she desired more than what a
village livelihood could provide. But her education and communication
skills, developed largely because she’d grown up and gone to school in
Kaili, were now her greatest assets to the village. Everyone in Upper Jidao
village relied on her when tour groups or government officials requested
a local tour guide. Over the May 1 Golden Week holiday that year, she
recalled, she was told to return to the village; one tour guide specifically
requested Qin to show a group around, adding that if Qin wasn’t there,
the group would not come. Since Kaili was only about forty minutes away
from Upper Jidao by public bus, Qin felt obliged to return as often as
possible, even though the travel back and forth disrupted her office job.
Another time, she said, someone called Teacher Pan to say that a group of
tourists was going to visit the village and wanted a local guide, but Teacher
Pan was in Guiyang attending another meeting. So Teacher Pan called
Qin; she was in Kaili but Teacher Pan nonetheless told her to return to the
village to “take care of it,” she said.
Qin and Teacher Pan were always in the middle of arrangements for
tourists coming to Upper Jidao. Their absence from the village simply did
not figure into the tourism plans from the perspective of tour agencies
and local government officials. By late May 2007, Qin told me that she
was thinking about quitting her job in Kaili and moving back to the vil-
lage, but her boss wanted her to stay and offered her a raise of somewhere
between ¥300 and ¥500, on top of her ¥800 monthly salary, meals, and
housing. The village women begged her to return, she added, saying they
needed her to be a tour guide and to resume her services as the village cli-
nician. Some women in the village had said, “Don’t leave, we need you for
shots, and for tourism; we’ll tie you up and not let you go,” Qin recalled,
laughing.
After this conversation with Qin, I realized that for the residents ofConclusion |	213
Upper Jidao, their mobility was defeating their tourism. The increased
ability, and desire, among residents to leave was a problem in sustaining
village tourism. To be fair, both Qin and Teacher Pan had gained their
abilities to do the work of tourism through their extensive experiences
outside of the village. They both had “seen the world.” But now, if they
weren’t “there” in the village, the ability of the entire village to do tourism
suffered because the current arrangements depended heavily upon just
a few individuals. If Teacher Pan was in Guiyang at a conference, Qin in
Kaili at her job, Fu (the village subcommittee leader in 2007) in the town-
ship at a government meeting, who was left to do tourism? When tour
guides wanted to bring groups to the village or government officials were
showing off the village as a successful demonstration project to visiting
delegates and consultants, they would contact Teacher Pan a day or two in
advance to arrange their visit. This advance notice was more convenient
for both the village residents and the visitors; Teacher Pan would organize
a few people to be prepared on the given day (such as Qin to guide the
tourists, a few women to wear Miao festival dress, and perhaps a meal to
be served in someone’s home), and the visitors could then be certain of
having a more satisfying experience in the village through an encoun-
ter with local hosts. As was implied by the tour guide who threatened to
not bring a group if Qin could not guide them, only certain individuals
within the village were considered suitable for certain tasks. Neither Qin
nor Teacher Pan wanted to disappoint the tourists, the guides, or the other
village residents, who in turn accepted these separate roles as the status
quo. In the way that these arrangements were made, the expectation was
that rural villagers were simply always “there.” All of the programs and
plans for tourism development rested on a fundamental assumption of
rural immobility; Teacher Pan, Fu, and Qin were never expected to actu-
ally go anywhere.
If it was difficult to find the right people in Upper Jidao, it was nearly
impossible to find a few days during which the entire tourism associa-
tion was available for a trip to Ping’an. I hadn’t expected such scheduling
conflicts, and I humbly realized that I also attributed immobility to the
village residents by assuming that it would be fairly straightforward for
them to find time for the trip. Fu and I traded dates constantly. Fu was
often at local government meetings or in other villages installing satellite
dishes and telephone lines for his day job with China Telecom. Teacher214	| Conclusion
Pan frequently was called to meetings with the tourism bureau in Kaili
or Guiyang. Qin had not yet decided if she would stay in Kaili or return
to the village and kept to her scheduled work hours in the office. By mid-
June, we still had not settled on a date. In a state of minor desperation, I
called everyone I knew from Upper Jidao on June 19 and suggested meet-
ing in Ping’an in two days. I left messages for Fu and Teacher Pan; in the
evening, Fu returned my call and said he would check the dates with the
others. Teacher Pan said that he and Qin needed to be in Guiyang by June
24 for a meeting with the NGO but otherwise were free. If the others could
come, it would be a short two-day trip to Ping’an.
On the morning of June 20, Fu called and confirmed that everyone
would be able to make it. There were a few more people than expected,
he said—about eleven instead of six or seven. Was that okay? I agreed,
knowing that the question was more of a statement anyway. Fu sent a
text message to me around 8:30 a.m. on the morning of June 21; they were
on their way, having left Upper Jidao by hired van at 6 a.m. I exchanged
multiple text messages with Fu and with the supervisor at the scenic area
management company to arrange for the group’s entry to the region. I
began making arrangements for rooms in the guesthouse where I stayed,
for dinner that evening with the guesthouse family, and for another din-
ner the following evening with a few members of the Ping’an village com-
mittee. The people I spoke with about joining the Upper Jidao Tourism
Association for a meal were all individuals who knew about my research;
I envisioned a few interesting conversations between the groups. What I
had perhaps not wanted to admit to myself was that the people from either
village might not be that interested in talking to each other.
The group from Upper Jidao arrived around 8:30 p.m. on June 21,
exhausted from their fourteen-hour drive across two provincial borders
(having taken a wrong turn into Hunan), with little luggage but two lusheng.
As we walked up the dark path from the parking lot to the guesthouse,
Jian, the father of the family who owned the place and whom I knew quite
well, declined to join us for dinner, saying he had been invited elsewhere.
Jian’s sons showed the group their rooms, and we proceeded to dinner in
the small restaurant run by the family a few steps away. Disappointed at
Jian’s absence and my failure to make more of an effort to include him, I
concentrated on the meal, which did not impress the visitors from Upper
Jidao. The chicken hotpot and bamboo chicken weren’t very flavorful, QinConclusion |	215
confessed, and the “wild vegetables” (yecai), promoted as a local specialty
in Ping’an, was what they fed to pigs (zhucao) in Upper Jidao, she whis-
pered.3 The men found the local liquor, distilled from sweet potatoes, to be
far too weak for their taste and asked to buy a few bottles of commercial
Erguotou (a common brand of liquor) instead.
Su, the girlfriend of Jian’s eldest son, had prepared the meal and stayed
to chat. When I asked her where the rest of the family was, she said per-
haps they felt too embarrassed, or simply out of place, to join. Jian’s two
sons did appear as the meal ended, and I tried to direct Teacher Pan’s and
Fu’s questions about Ping’an to them. Qin asked me how much a meal like
this cost, and I replied around ¥200. Shocked, Qin said she couldn’t imag-
ine a meal like this costing that much. In Upper Jidao, she mused, for ¥200
you would be served chicken, homemade sausage, smoked pork, fish if
available, scrambled eggs, plus cabbage and spinach. Rice and liquor were
also included, she added, not charged separately like in Ping’an. Later, Qin
and Teacher Pan asked Su about the souvenirs she sold at the side of the
restaurant. The various training programs and meetings held in Guizhou
about rural tourism always emphasized the importance of selling hand-
made, locally crafted items. Teacher Pan asked Su if the things she sold
were handmade. She replied, evasively, that some were, but some were not.
It was nice to have handmade products to display, Su continued, but they
were harder to sell because handmade goods were too expensive for most
tourists—a problem that Upper Jidao had also encountered.4
Before turning in for the night, I chatted with Qin about her first
impressions of Ping’an. She was a bit disappointed, she admitted. Here,
Qin said, they “really know how to make money” (hen hui zhuan qian).
Besides the overpriced food, she explained, the bathrooms in this par-
ticular guesthouse lacked sinks or buckets for collecting water, the water
from the tap was a bit musty, although the price of the room (about ¥20
per person) seemed fair to her. I tried to explain that this was a more
basic family-owned guesthouse; tomorrow we would walk past some of
the higher-end, more modern hotels. I asked Fu for his opinion of Ping’an
thus far, and he said what I had surmised. The food was passable (mama
huhu) but not great, and the portions were quite small. The weakness of
the alcohol, however, he realized was a good thing—it meant that more
people might be willing to try it, especially the sweet rice wine, because it
wasn’t so potent. Since the businesses here charged for alcohol separately,216	| Conclusion
he reasoned, the more people who drank, and the more they drank, the
more money a restaurant could make from selling it.
THE ECONOMICS OF BEING ETHNIC
The next day started promptly. By 7 a.m., everyone was awake and ready
for breakfast. Su had also gotten up early to prepare breakfast for the
group: stir-fried rice noodles and oil tea, a concoction of green tea leaves
stir-fried in oil, then steeped in water and poured over puffed rice. Fu
offered to cook the rice noodles, partly I suspected because of his dissatis-
faction with the food from the previous night but also because of his own
personal interest in cooking. No one from Upper Jidao had ever tasted oil
tea before, a dish commonly advertised in the village as a local specialty,
and the verdict was not positive. Reluctant to offend Su, their hosts, and
me, the men spoke in Miao to each other. When I asked directly what
they thought of it, Teacher Pan hesitantly answered: “They say the tea is
too bitter.”
After breakfast, we headed off toward viewpoint 2 to see the landscape
known as Seven Stars and Moon. The morning was already clear and
sunny, indicating a very hot afternoon to come. As we walked through
the village, we passed the guesthouse where I’d arranged for dinner that
evening. It was the home of an extended family whom I’d gotten to know
quite well, and who were related to the women’s representative of the
Ping’an village committee. I confirmed with them that a few members of
the village committee, including perhaps the village leader, would join us
for dinner. I added that the group from Upper Jidao had brought along
two lusheng and might even be willing to perform, in hopes of increasing
the village committee’s motivation to stop by. Other villagers in Ping’an
had seen the lusheng the previous night, and throughout the day many
people stopped to ask if the group from Upper Jidao would give a perfor-
mance. I replied it was up to them; a performance was not scheduled into
the visit, but they must have decided to bring the instruments along for
a reason.
While we walked, Teacher Pan and Fu paid close attention to the
houses and architecture in Ping’an, finding the general “look” of the vil-
lage acceptable. Qin pointed out that there was less visible concrete in
Ping’an than in some of the other tourist villages near Upper Jidao, and weConclusion |	217
examined the ways in which the concrete hotels were covered in wooden
planks. She added that as they’d driven into the area yesterday afternoon,
she had not thought much of the villages they passed on the road because
they looked shabby and not particularly attractive, so she was impressed
by how big and modern the hotels in Ping’an were. Then she mentioned
that she was no longer going to Guiyang for the NGO meeting right after
this trip; instead, Teacher Pan and Fu had enrolled Qin in a two-week-long
training program for tour guides in Kaili organized by the prefectural
government, which was taking place at the same time.
When we reached the photo booth, where the minority models I knew
worked, we paused for a bit to admire the terraced fields and take pictures.
The models were getting dressed and made up for the day, and when Qin
realized what they were there for, she asked them if they didn’t feel embar-
rassed (buhao yisi) when charging tourists to pose with them for pho-
tographs. The models replied by asking, rhetorically, how anyone could
possibly feel embarrassed by work. Qin marveled to me at how openly
commercialized tourism work in Ping’an really was. She said to the mod-
els that she should learn how to make money when photographed, since
tour guides frequently asked her to pose. Once, she recalled, a tour guide
had come to Upper Jidao with a group and asked her to put on Miao festi-
val attire so the tourists could take pictures. The guide offered to pay, but
Qin was quite busy that day and didn’t really want to do it—however, she
felt obligated and agreed anyway. Afterward, Qin said, the guide handed
her ¥10, which she felt was so little for the amount of effort and time she’d
expended that she didn’t want the money after all.
Realizing that Qin and the others from Upper Jidao were ethnically
Miao, Yuan, the model who wore a stylized Miao costume, asked Qin
questions about Miao customs. Yuan wanted more information so that she
could give better descriptions of Miao culture to tourists who asked her
questions. Qin animatedly began describing traditional festivals, such as
Miao New Year, and styles of dress as I had heard her do before for tourists
in Upper Jidao. If Qin felt any sense of surprise by the fact that she was
describing her own cultural traditions to a non-Miao woman whose job
it was to pose in a stylized Miao costume, she did not express it. In fact, I
realized while listening to Qin describe being Miao to these models that
truly there was nothing special at all about looking, posing, or appearing
to be ethnic in this configuration of tourism, ethnicity, and economy. Qin218	| Conclusion
was learning from the models how to better commercialize her work in
tourism, as the models learned from her how to be more ethnic.
The rest of the group milled around the photo booth area, and the own-
ers of the booth were quick to suggest that we take a group photograph
with the models. Teacher Pan and Fu hesitated, and I offered to buy photo-
graphs for each member of the group as a souvenir (figure C.i). Afterward,
some of the men decided to pose individually with a few of the models as
well. I watched as the residents of Upper Jidao became tourists—sightsee-
ing, enjoying the view, taking pictures, and joking with each other about
their pictures. Fu had borrowed a digital camera from his brother for the
trip, and Teacher Pan had brought along a point-and-shoot film camera
I’d given him early on in my fieldwork as a thank-you present.
Once our photos were taken, we continued on to the top of viewpoint
2, where Fu and Teacher Pan glanced at the range of souvenirs for sale
(postcards, photo books, key rings, snacks, and other trinkets), before
leading the group along the path connecting viewpoints 1 and 2. The path
wound between and above the terraced fields, and Qin commented this
kind of walking through fields must be what tourism consultants meant
by “real” ecological tourism (shengtai liiyou). In Upper Jidao, the local
government tourism bureau, with funding from the province, had erected
a few wooden signs that read, in English and Chinese, “Ecological Path”
(shengtai budao) along the farmer paths above the village to encourage
tourists to explore the hillsides. There had also been talk of creating walk-
ing trails between all seven villages in the Bala River tourism zone, and
by 2012 one path between Nanhua and Lower Jidao was nearly complete.
For Qin, this walk in the fields around Ping’an village was her first real
experience of what constituted an “ecological” tourist activity.
Before long, a group of Yao women from the nearby village of Zhongliu
passed us; they were on their way to Ping’an for the day. When I explained
that these women had walked about an hour and half to get to Ping’an, Qin
asked, “Why do they come here?” I could only reply, “To make money.”
Teacher Pan, Fu, and the others reached viewpoint 1 first and waited there
for Qin and me to catch up. As it was close to 11 a.m., when the majority of
tourists on day tours from Guilin typically arrive in Ping’an, a number of
other Yao women were also at viewpoint 1 waiting for tourists. They recog-
nized me and suggested that I pay for a performance for my friends; they
would unravel their long hair and sing a few traditional folk songs, theyConclusion |	219
figure c.i. During their visit to Ping’an, members of the Upper Jidao Tourism
Association pose for a souvenir photo with the models and the author (2007). The
Chinese text on the right reads, “Longji Terraced Fields Souvenir Photo,” and
in the box, “Guilin Souvenir.” At the bottom it reads, “Seven Stars with Moon.”
Courtesy of the author.
said. I agreed after negotiating on the price. The women lined up in a row
and began explaining how the Yao valued long hair on women, cutting it
only once as a woman approaches marriage (around eighteen, these women
said) and often keeping it covered until marriage. I wondered how interest-
ing this was to the group from Upper Jidao, where women also typically
kept long hair and would also wind it up into a topknot for special occasions
(though, of course, the types and styles of head coverings, as well as the
techniques for securing the hair, were different). But a show was a show, and
the Yao womens performance was punctuated by the Upper Jidao group,
as individual men posed for pictures behind the Yao women (figure C.2).
When the Yao women began to sing traditional folk songs (shan ge,
literally “mountain songs”), some of the men from Upper Jidao lined up
opposite them and responded to the Yao songs with their own Miao ones.
Call-and-response singing (dui ge) is frequently attributed to traditional220	| Conclusion
figure c.2. Members of the Upper Jidao Tourism Association pose for a photo-
graph with Yao women who come to Ping’an daily from the neighboring village
ofZhongliu (2007). Photo by the author.
ethnic minority courtship practices in southwestern China, and it is com-
monly performed in ethnic shows and films. Part of the preparations for
tourism in Upper Jidao included organizing groups of men and women to
practice and perform call-and-response singing for tourists in the forms
of courtship songs (qing ge) and “ancient songs” (gu ge). It was a moment
of parallel ethnic forms meeting face to face. Both the Yao women and the
Miao men knew that such songs were evoked in the mainstream media as
representative parts of their own traditional practices; they knew how the
performance of these songs was valued in tourist experiences; and they
knew that they were each singing in languages and styles unfamiliar to
the other (figure C.3). Nevertheless, “being ethnic” in this touristic context
became a total sensory experience for everyone involved—“ethnicity” here
was entertaining and deeply personal, as each group drew upon its own
practices and skills to participate in the encounter.
As we chatted with each other at viewpoint 1, the men from UpperConclusion |	221
figure c.3. Men from Upper Jidao sing in response to the Yao women’s song
(2007). Photo by the author.
Jidao jokingly referenced familiar storylines of love and sex in their con-
versations with the Yao women—from winking at the notion of women
not being allowed to “show their hair” to asking if Yao young men were
allowed to “visit” young women at home, in an allusion to another well-
known ethnic stereotype of “free” love among some minorities in China,
such as the Mosuo, or Na, of Yunnan (Walsh 2001 and 2005). The jovial-
ity from both sides was reminiscent of the “sweet talk” of the models.
But unlike the models whose interactions with tourists are decidedly, and
deliberately, unbalanced and unequal, in this instance I wondered if the
performances of the Yao women and of the Miao men somehow could
cancel out the staged nature of their encounter. These men seemed quite
pleased to be able to contribute something to the performance, just as they
had perhaps thought that they could do by bringing a few lusheng with
them to Ping’an. They were not simply performing ethnicity but in fact
anticipating and planning ahead for how they could, and would, be ethnic222	| Conclusion
in Ping’an. Singing with the Yao women and carrying two lusheng in case
they might perform were ways for the group from Upper Jidao to be a part
of the economy of being ethnic in tourism, whether it was in their home
village or another tourism destination.
It was past noon when we returned to the village, and I went with Fu to
find a place that could prepare lunch for us. I wanted to eat somewhere run
by another local, Ping’an family, but because I hadn’t arranged anything in
advance, the guesthouse we ended up at was overwhelmed by our order to
feed eleven people. It was a long and tedious wait lasting well over an hour.
We sat down to eat shortly after 2 p.m., with Fu and the others frustrated
from hunger but also cognizant of the amount of work required to feed a
group of hungry tourists. Qin and I discussed why prices for food surprised
her—costs were high here due to overhead (such as having a space large
enough for a restaurant and purchasing furniture, dishes, and disposable
chopsticks). Combined with relatively low volume per household (most
family guesthouses, I explained, served at most one or two groups of tour-
ists a day), the simple reality was that for the residents of Ping’an, tourism
was difficult to manage and sustain at a household level. It wasn’t worth it
to keep a lot of fresh food on hand, if you weren’t certain you would have
tourists on any given day. As a result, if a group of tourists did arrive (as
we did on this day), it was difficult to prepare everything in a reasonable
amount of time. During lunch and dinner time, guesthouse owners often
ran to their neighbors to borrow (or buy) food to serve to guests—an extra
pot of rice, a chicken, tofu, or even just some vegetables. Some families had
begun making and selling bamboo rice for other restaurants in the village.
The constant uncertainty, as well as the ebb and flow of tourists, reinforced
for Qin what she knew already: it would be nearly impossible to hold a
salaried job and run a tourism-related business or, in her case, to always
be available as a tour guide. In Ping’an, the prices are higher than in Upper
Jidao, I continued, because here they calculated the cost of the materials
and their time into the amounts. In Upper Jidao, the cost of the food and
beverages consumed by tourists thus far was seen as relatively minor and
insignificant because in Upper Jidao they generally only served what foods
they had available in the village. Guesthouses and restaurants in Ping’an,
however, regularly purchased meat and vegetables, and by 2012 a number
of small shops in the village sold foods brought in from wholesale markets
in Longsheng and Guilin, to provide a greater variety of dishes to tourists.Conclusion |	223
The food at lunch was disappointing again, and I wondered if the
Upper Jidao group would leave thinking that the food in Ping’an was
simply inedible. I suggested, half-heartedly, that perhaps we should wan-
der around the village a bit more, but the heat and the early start left us
all feeling sluggish and unmotivated. We returned to our guesthouse to
rest, and around 5:30 p.m., three of the models came over to drop off the
printed, laminated group photographs we’d taken earlier that morning.
They asked to see Miao clothes, some of which Qin had brought with
her. The models’ keen interest in learning more about Miao culture was
contagious. For them, knowing more about the people represented by the
ethnic costumes they wore would be good for their business, which, after
all, relied on sweet talk and being able to be what tourists saw. For the
group from Upper Jidao, the models’ interest in Miao cultural traditions
reinforced their confidence in being interesting and desirable for tourism.
Qin described the Miao New Year festival, explaining how the women
sew silver adornments onto the fabric of the jackets worn as a part of the
festival attire, men play lush eng, and the whole village gathers to dance
during the three days of celebration. Without missing a beat, the men
who had brought lusheng to Ping’an and who were known as talented
lusheng musicians pushed aside the table they were using to play cards
and proceeded to demonstrate lusheng dancing. Their transformation was
astonishing: they went from quietly smoking and playing cards to being
light-on-their-feet lusheng musicians and dancers. The second floor of the
guesthouse became a stage as the men played and the models tried to
emulate their footwork (figure C.4).
The piercing sound of the lusheng drew Jian’s sons upstairs. One of
Jian’s sons began explaining construction techniques to Fu, who asked
how the guesthouses were built to accommodate so many guestrooms
upstairs. The son said that the actual frame of the house was altered to
allow for additional walls and rooms to be built on the upper floor. Fu
wanted to learn more about architecture and construction because two of
the biggest projects happening in Upper Jidao at the time included a cul-
tural center that would also provide some office space, as well as renewed
plans to build a hotel in the village (which ultimately was not completed),
supported by funds obtained from the China National Tourism Admin-
istration (CNTA) by the former director of the Guizhou Tourism Bureau.
They discussed the high cost of such materials as wood, furniture, and224	| Conclusion
figure c.4. Lusheng musicians from Upper
Jidao perform in a guesthouse in Ping’an
(2007). Photo by the author.
bedding for guestrooms. When it was time for dinner, I reminded the
group that we were eating with some of the local leadership from Ping’an.
Before dinner, Qin decided to change into her Miao clothes and put her
hair up in a topknot with a flower. Then we trooped off to the other guest-
house where I had arranged for the meal.
“where are you?”
Earlier that afternoon, I had gone to replace my order of “wild vegetables”
at dinner with cabbage and other greens, having seen the reaction of the
Upper Jidao group to the dish the previous night. When we arrived for
dinner, three tables were set and the food nearly ready; this particular
family frequently took in large tour groups and ran a very well-organized
operation.5 But the only people present were the guesthouse family mem-
bers. Seeing the women’s representative from the village committee, I
asked her where the other committee members were—perhaps they wereConclusion |	225
on their way? She replied, half-apologetically but in a matter-of-fact tone,
that they were not coming; she would represent the entire committee. Dis-
appointed, I pressed her for a reason, thinking that I could still go out and
personally ask individual committee members to come over, even just for
a short while. She responded in vague terms that the committee was din-
ing with the management company. I offered to wait, if they were finishing
up a meeting, and finally she stated in no uncertain terms that no one else
was coming. They weren’t going to have dinner here, nor were they going
to stop by later to meet the group from Upper Jidao; they had other plans,
she said. It wasn’t necessarily to be interpreted as a deliberate slight to me
or the Upper Jidao group, but more so the simple fact that when it came to
priorities for the Ping’an village leadership, the tourism association from
Upper Jidao and I were less important than the scenic area’s management
company. Embarrassed, I told Teacher Pan and Fu that the committee
members would not be joining us. Since there was plenty of food, I invited
the family running the guesthouse as well as the restaurant entrepreneur
from Henan, who leased the lower floor of the house and ran a large res-
taurant there, to join us.
Despite my own frustrations, the conversation between the Upper
Jidao group and the guesthouse owners was lively and spirited. Everyone
toasted each other’s success in tourism and talked about how to make
tourism work in a village. Fu was particularly enthusiastic, first because
the food was finally to his liking but also because the atmosphere was talk-
ative and engaged. Toward the end of the meal, Teacher Pan’s cell phone
rang, and he answered—it was someone from the Kaili Tourism Bureau
calling to make sure that the tourism association would be back in Upper
Jidao tomorrow. After he hung up, Teacher Pan said that an official from
the bureau had called in the afternoon as well and had been shocked to
learn that no one, or more specifically no one from the tourism associa-
tion, was in Upper Jidao. Everyone was here in Ping’an.
The tourism bureau planned to bring a group of Japanese tourism con-
sultants to a number of demonstration villages tomorrow and had called
Teacher Pan in the afternoon as a courtesy to tell him to be prepared
for their arrival the following day. Fu interrupted Teacher Pan, chuck-
ling, and said that the conversation Teacher Pan had had was farcical.
“Where are you?” the official had asked Teacher Pan. Teacher Pan had
replied, “I’m in Guangxi.” “What about Fu?” they had asked. “He’s also in226	| Conclusion
Guangxi.” “What about Qin?” the official had countered. “She’s here with
us too,” Teacher Pan had responded. Fu doubled over with laughter as he
exclaimed: “Every single village leader [from Upper Jidao] is out of the vil-
lage right now!” The tourism bureau of Kaili did not find this at all amus-
ing and demanded that they, the villagers, figure out a solution. Teacher
Pan had no choice but to promise to be in Upper Jidao by the evening of
the next day to meet the consultants. It meant that they would have a very
early start to their long journey back tomorrow.
Most of the group from Upper Jidao returned to our guesthouse after
they finished eating; only Teacher Pan, Fu, Qin, and I stayed behind.
When the others had left, Fu turned to me and said that some of the others
from the tourism association “didn’t know how to ask questions” as he put
it, but the experience of being here in Ping’an was still good for them, even
if they were quiet and kept to themselves. Fu knew I was disappointed at
the lack of interaction between the group from Upper Jidao and residents
in Ping’an, and he was trying to reassure me of the trip’s overall value to
them. We eventually headed back to our rooms, where we talked briefly
with Jian’s family. Qin wanted to purchase some souvenirs and asked Su
to show her what was available. Fu and I settled up payments and receipts;
because I’d paid for the meals and rooms in Ping’an, I gave him what he
owed the driver, as well as money for meals on the road. When I went to
bed, exhausted, the men were playing cards and smoking.
Everyone woke up early the next morning, and by 6 a.m. the group
was at the parking lot, getting settled into the van for the long drive back
to Upper Jidao. Qin called me a few days later to say that the tour guide
training program in Kaili was going well and that many of the instructors
had also visited Ping’an before, so they had a lot to talk about. She had so
many questions to ask now that she had experienced what tourism was
like in Ping’an, she said. The trainees would take a certification exam in
two weeks, and afterward she wanted to teach some of the other women
in Upper Jidao how to be guides.
THE TOURISM LEARNING CURVE
The abrupt end to Upper Jidao’s study tour in Ping’an was, in retrospect,
quite fitting to the circumstances faced by the tourism association in 2007.
They were busy—busy attending meetings about tourism, busy workingConclusion |	227
out plans and budgets for tourism, busy being trained and taught about
tourism, and busy demonstrating to government officials and policy mak-
ers how the village residents were doing tourism. Qin’s enthusiasm for the
tour guide training program in Kaili partially reassured me that the trip
hadn’t been a total waste of time and effort for the eleven people who had
ridden in a van for nearly twenty-five hours to visit Ping’an for just thirty-
six hours. Nevertheless, I wondered what they had learned, and I worried
that the people in Ping’an would consider the whole thing no more, and
no less, than any other group of tourists stopping by to take a photograph
of the terraces and eat a meal or two.
After all, could doing tourism really be learned? What would one study
if one wanted to study how to do tourism? Qin had honed in on the pric-
ing mechanisms at work in Ping’an—on how every single item or service
was calculated in terms of costs and benefits. Fu wanted to learn how to
build guesthouses that still resembled “wooden houses” but could accom-
modate more rooms. But, somehow, their hurried departure from Ping’an
left me feeling unconvinced that learning all of these things could make
tourism work in Upper Jidao. Surely, I thought, what Upper Jidao needed
was more basic infrastructure, such as a sewage system, hot water heaters,
and a bridge structurally sound enough to hold the weight of a tour bus.
My skepticism nagged at me. Learning how to price souvenir handicrafts
they didn’t have, build rooms for tourists who didn’t stay the night, or
prepare for meetings with consultants who didn’t know what life was like
in the village could hardly be useful at this point.
However, from the conversations I had with Qin, Teacher Pan, and Fu
after the study tour, I understood that what stayed with them about their
trip to Ping’an was the experience of seeing people do tourism in ways
that were somewhat different from what they had been told about and
practiced in Upper Jidao. Many aspects of tourism that had been planned
for Upper Jidao existed in Ping’an, such as posing for photographs, per-
formances, and preparing meals. That said, everything in Ping’an differed
slightly from what Upper Jidao was expecting. People in Ping’an didn’t
work together as a village; rather, it was each family, and each business
owner, for themselves. Qin’s attention to the differences between what
she experienced in a tourism village like Ping’an and what she expected
from tourism in Upper Jidao made me aware of the fact that tourism was
no longer just something that happened when tourists arrived; instead, it228	| Conclusion
was something to be actively created and constructed. Thus, my study of
Upper Jidao and Ping’an has focused the various ways in which tourism is
done and understood—from individual stories of migration and return,
to the efforts expended on making a village “look good,” to the unin-
tended conflicts that arise throughout the process. All these are happen-
ing during a moment in contemporary, postreform China in which ethnic
differences are continually made over as reassuringly familiar forms, lei-
sure and travel are considered a part of raising the quality of the Chinese
people, and rural development is envisaged as a critical component of the
nation’s future.
As the study tour made clear, tourism is a messy business—for Upper
Jidao and Ping’an, their tourisms fundamentally rested upon a commonly
assumed structure of urban mobility and rural immobility. When the
entire tourism association for Upper Jidao was away, they were told to
hurry back to be there for the visitors, who wanted to have a full expe-
rience of “being there” in the village with villagers. Rural ethnic tour-
ism thusly conceived could not function if rural people continued to be
mobile; that was why, from the national and provincial governments’ per-
spectives, tourism was intended to increase wage-earning opportunities
in rural villages so that rural people would stop leaving their home vil-
lages. In this kind of tourism, mobility depended upon immobility; hav-
ing tourists travel to a village meant village residents could not, or should
not, travel away. But in this formula lay an inherent contradiction, because
as these villages modernized and developed along the lines espoused by
the state, the residents found and desired more chances to travel. Mobility
was ordered by these opportunities and logics, and it was through these
imagined possibilities of who could and could not travel, and for what
reasons, that certain structures of belonging and opportunity took shape
and were made meaningful.
When examining the constituent parts of tourism, it is crucial to
understand that for the residents of these villages, their experiences in the
mainstream economies of tourism reach beyond the momentary encoun-
ter with tourists to encompass learning how to be distinctly modern as
rural and ethnic subjects in contemporary China. This was a part of their
own experiences in travel, their mobility in other words, but also their
engagement with the visual practices of tourism. Visuality becomes not
only learning how to recognize what “looks good” but also a process ofConclusion |	229
determining the limits and range of the value of ethnicity and identity.
When ethnic identities are literally worn on one’s sleeve, it is vital to take
seriously the process by which visual knowledge is communicated and
translated into ideas, stereotypes, and expectations. New configurations
of belonging emerge when ethnicity is mainstreamed into familiar types
that are easily reproducible in tourism marketing and promotions. New
senses of cultural ownership and pride may come to shape new ways of
being, and looking, ethnic. More critical ethnography needs to be done
on the efficacy of the visual and the politics of appearance in preempting,
prompting, and promoting social change. An analytical focus on mobil-
ity and visuality thus unravels the tangled knot of economic imperatives,
social aspirations, and cultural celebrations of ethnic tourism that is
implicated in the lives and livelihoods of rural ethnic minority Chinese
villagers.
Indeed, village residents made tourism meaningful to themselves
because of its potential to transform their everyday, ordinary lives and
livelihoods. In 2012, tourism in Ping’an was as strong as ever, to the point
where more and more local families were leasing out their guesthouses
and restaurants to outside entrepreneurs or building bigger, more modern
hotels. The building boom was partly the result of a county-level direc-
tive to build a series of concrete houses throughout the village as a means
of fire prevention, in response to a fire that had broken out in the center
of the village in September 2010.6 Fortunately, that fire caused no inju-
ries to people, but it was enough to convince villagers and the county
government that something had to be done. The density of buildings in
Ping’an, coupled with increasing use of and demand for hot water, elec-
tricity, and propane (for cooking and on-demand hot water), meant that
the risk of another fire was extremely high. The county sketched a plan to
take down a number of older wooden houses in the center of the village,
to be replaced with concrete ones, and provided some financial support to
families to complete these constructions. The family I always lived with
in the village was one such household who received some financial assis-
tance. With the support, they finished five new en suite guestrooms on the
bottom level of a large concrete structure, and I was the first guest to stay
overnight. Amusingly, the rest of the building was unfinished; the rooms
were on the first level, above which was a tile and concrete area used as a
restaurant. Although a third story had been built (providing a ceiling for230	| Conclusion
the restaurant), the top level was entirely exposed, without walls or a roof.
But the family had invested so much money in their new building that
they had to continue serving meals and offering rooms to tourists in the
unfinished building in hopes of saving enough to complete the top floor.
Car ownership, which was practically nonexistent during the early 2000s,
was now common in 2012, and for the first time, instead of waiting for the
public bus, I negotiated a ride with a local family when I needed to leave
the village.
In Upper Jidao, the village was again under construction in 2012, but
this time with funds from the World Bank project. Tensions between
Upper Jidao and Lower Jidao had been somewhat overshadowed by other
uneasy situations within Upper Jidao: through a private donor, money and
furnishings had been provided to two households in the village to build
guestrooms. Qin’s new house was thus designed to suit her dual roles in
the village, as clinician and tour guide. The ground floor was given over
to her clinic, with a separate room for storing medicines, a computer and
printer for keeping track of village residents’ cooperative health insurance
dues and benefits, and a third room intended as an examination room.
The middle level was her living space, with the kitchen, living room, a
modern bathroom with indoor plumbing and hot water, and bedrooms.
The top floor featured six double rooms, plus a large bathroom with a
flushing toilet and shower stall. In 2011 she began hosting overnight tour-
ists, many of whom were American students introduced to Upper Jidao
through Zhang Xiaosong, who had coordinated many of the early efforts
to develop tourism throughout rural Guizhou and was now based at
Guizhou Normal University. Qin’s home was even more frequently vis-
ited by an ever expanding network of friends and relatives—often friends
of friends or colleagues of friends of friends from Kaili—who had heard
that she was now running a nongjia le and who would, Qin complained,
simply show up on short notice and expect to be treated to a meal. When I
asked if they paid, as tourists at a nongjia le are expected to do, she simply
sighed and said she wouldn’t feel right asking friends to pay.
The other family who received money to build guestrooms in their
house worked much more slowly and had yet to complete their rooms in
mid-2012. It took time, they said, and they had to do all of the construc-
tion work themselves. There were a number of personal and communal
concerns and disputes circulating in the background—from envy at theConclusion |	231
relative success of Qin’s guestrooms (and the money that she was pre-
sumed to be making from hosting foreign tourists) to exasperation over
the overall lack of tourists coming to the village (and thus the reluctance
of some villagers to do more tourism) to the pressing, quotidian need for
sources of income. Although community participation was lauded as a
key component of the development programs since 2002, many village
residents were averse to investing their time and labor into something
that did not necessarily address their immediate economic and family
situations. Tourism had noticeably waned in recent years, with the rede-
velopment of Xijiang nearby, and many of the village leadership I knew in
2007 had left Upper Jidao or stopped doing tourism by 2012. Fu now lived
in Kaili, selling construction materials, Fa, who had been involved with
tourism in the mid-2ooos after he returned to the village, was busy grow-
ing and selling vegetables for local markets, and Teacher Pan had stepped
out of tourism work entirely. Nevertheless, the World Bank project was
pushed forward, funding continued to arrive, and village paths were dug
up to lay pipes for a more integrated sewage system, a new parking lot was
under construction by the riverside, and computer-generated images cir-
culated of the new fanciful wooden decorative coverings that each house
would receive to make the village look even better for tourists.7
In sum, this ethnography of Ping’an and Upper Jidao villages is a study
of the learning curve of tourism, in which the end goal of tourism is to
construct not only a better place to tour but also, and more important, a
better place to live. This objective aligns with the discourses of economic
development and poverty alleviation espoused in tourism plans promoted
by local, provincial, and national governments, international agencies,
and academics alike. But in practice, from the perspective of village resi-
dents, tourism has been about much more than just economic develop-
ment. Their understandings of tourism reached deeply into their senses
of belonging and opportunity, and in turn, it was through tourism that
these communities found ways of asserting, and contesting, their place
in contemporary China. I have argued for the necessity of situating tour-
ism within the complex of relationships imaginable and possible in China
today—what I call a landscape of travel. Entangled in tourism are intricate
interdependencies between ethnicity, imagery, economy, and travel that
shape contemporary rural social lives and livelihoods. It is precisely this
complicated mess of obligations, relations, and expectations that rendered232	| Conclusion
the study trip to Ping’an somewhat disappointing, yet ultimately reveal-
ing, to me. I had hoped that the group from Upper Jidao could simply
learn by experiencing tourism in Ping’an, but I realized that this was to be
a long process of learning by doing.
The work of tourism in villages such as Ping’an and Upper Jidao is
clearly not yet done. Future research must contend with the social effects
and consequences of tourism policies, especially in terms of village resi-
dent grievances. Only by breaking apart the host-guest divide in tour-
ism theory and acknowledging that the relationship between the tourist
and the toured may be only one of many relationships affecting destina-
tion communities, does an ethnography of touristed villages like Ping’an
and Upper Jidao contribute to a more contextually rich and theoretically
sophisticated understanding of these places where travel is both labor and
leisure.GLOSSARY OF CHINESE CHARACTERS
a’mei Wf-	guge W.
a’ge F’T#	Guizhou sheng (Guizhou province)
bainian guwu	Guangxi Zhuangzu Zizhi Qu (Guang:
bainian liangcang	Zhuang Autonomous Region)
chengshi hua	r ■©•li.iO'/oIS guanjing qu MfR" IS
cunweiyuan hui	guanjing tai MfR" o'
dagong </--	Guilin Longji Titian Jingqu
duanwujie	Guilinhua
dui ge ft fei nongye	Jk	hexie shehui ’fo-jg- j£A- Huangluo Yao zhai
fen jia	hukou P 0
fengjing ;'.S? fengyuqiao SliTjjjf	jianshe shehui zhuyi xin nongcun
gaige kaifang	jian shi mian SLfkS,
gao liiyou #	Jidao Miao zhai *ZZ srS-
geti hu 'b ikr	Jidao Shangzhai * ZZ_h *
233234	| Glossary of Chinese Characters
jie dai shi	QiXing Ban Yue -t_S. 1-4.4
Jinkeng Hong Yao Titian Guanjingqu	Qiandongnan Miaozu Dongzu Zizhi
	Zhou (Qiandongnan Miao and
jingqu -J- IS	Dong Autonomous Prefecture)
jingdian ■J'.fe	44 S #) Sik	1 'H’l
iingji tounao &	qing ge 4*<t
Jiu Long Wu Hu Zb Shi it	qingmingjie ## 4
jiujiu	renkou suzhi ZvO #
Kailihua l/L’f'J#	
kexue fazhan -fT^r ScH	san nong wenti 3. 'jT HM shan ge J-rffc
la ke 4^	shaoshu minzu 4'ifc #44
laoban 44 4T	shengtai bowuguan #4}4#444f
Longji Gu Zhuang Titian	shengtai budao it ,4} -X#
Wenhua Guanjingqu	shengtai liiyou #4}4t#
# s)xlt« IS	sheng zhuang JL#
lusheng	suantang yu St# jt
liiyou xiehui it##-A"	suzhi # 4j
Miao jia le si '4 4-	techan 44#
Miao yifu siS<-M.	tese 44 &
minsu R4S-	tian zui ##
minzufengge #44 #44-	tiao ge chang M-ft#
minzu shibie #444“ 4'J	tiao lusheng 44#J£
minzuzhuyi #44ii4	tuji A# tusheng tuzhang iiijc
nong jia le nongcun 4<44	waidi ren it it #
nongmin -fc#	waimao it it
nongmin gong -fc#.!-	wenming ##
nongye 'jTJk	wenming liiyou Xttit#
Ping’an zhai #-§414	xiansheng # t
Ping’an Zhuangzu Titian Guanjingqu	xiaozu ']'&
#-?44i444ii E? Xt# IS	xibuda kaifa 3)####
putonghua	xifang SiTfGlossary of Chinese Characters |	235
Xijiang Qianhu Miaozhai
C9 i-
xingzheng cun ifjEfc#
yecai SfM
yiwu gongzuo fuwu dui
yuan shengtai 2^ 4 &
zhaimen S-l 1
zhishi qingnian	4
Zhongguo xiangcun you 4' ®
zhongqiujie
zhucao
zhutong fan H M &
ziran cunNOTES
PREFACE
1	Because this discussion was at the time a preliminary exploration for the Chinese
publishers, I was asked not to use the company’s real name.
2	Of these 1.4 billion trips, 576 million were taken by urban Chinese and 818 million
by rural Chinese. Statistics for 2007 reported 1.6 billion domestic travelers, or 1.2
trips per person, of which 612 million were by urban Chinese and 998 million by
rural Chinese. For more statistics on tourism in China, see tables 2.5 and 2.6 in
chapter 2 of this volume.
3	I am following the English translations of names provided on a map of the sce-
nic area, available on the website of the region’s tourism management company
(www.txljw.com). The full name of the region is Guilin Longji Titian Jingqu (Gui-
lin Longji Terraced Fields Scenic Area), which I shorten to Longji Scenic Area in
this book. Generally, jingqu can be translated as “scenic area” or, in some cases,
“scenic spot.” Jingdian is also a common term for “scenic spot” (see Nyiri 2006, 7).
FFowever, within the Longji Scenic Area there were three additional guanjingqu
(corresponding with Ping’an, Dazhai, and Longji villages, which are translated as
“spots” on the company map available at www.txljw.com/dt/dtlj/). Thus I distin-
guish these second-level guanjingqu as “scenic spots” because they are contained
within the larger scenic area. Each of these three scenic spots has multiple/z'zzgrfz'tzzz
(also translatable as “scenic spots” but which the official company map calls “view-
points”) within the villages. For clarity, throughout this book I refer to the larger
Longji Terraced Fields as a scenic area, each village as a scenic spot, and the specific
jingdian in each village as viewpoints.
4	Officially, the World Bank loan agreement is called the Guizhou Cultural and
Natural FFeritage Protection and Development Project. It was approved in 2009.
5	Much has been written on visual research methods and collaboration using pho-
237238	| Notes to Introduction
tography, video, and other media (including drawing) in anthropological and
social science research; the literature is too extensive to list here. For a fuller dis-
cussion of my own methods, see Chio 2011a. A few works that guided my own
efforts and thinking have included Blumenfield Kedar 2010; Collier and Collier
1986; Deger 2006; Harper 2002; fackson 2004; Lozada 2006; and Turner 1992. On
the history of travel films, see Ruoff 2002 and 2006.
6	Oakes and Schein (2006, 22) go on to argue that there is a need to “push beyond
the formulation of media providing the material for imagining el se where (s).” They
point out two contemporary phenomena that demonstrate different arenas where
imagining and ideas about the self are formed: in renegotiations of one’s subjec-
tivity based upon imagined geographical “scales” (provincial, regional, national
identities) and the influence of translocal businesses and industries, like tourism,
on self-perceptions of connectedness and networks of belonging and action.
7	Wasserstrom (2010,122) cites Chang 2009 inmaking this claim; following national
statistics in China, in 2003 the number of internal migrants, defined as persons
not living in the place of their household registration, was 140 million (Huang and
Zhan 2005). By 2008 the number of migrant workers (nongmin gong) was calcu-
lated at 225 million (NBS 2009).
INTRODUCTION
1	For descriptions of this government program and its policies, see the special report
“Rural Development: Building a New Socialist Countryside,” available online at
http://english.gov.cn/special/rd_index.htm.
2	Oakes 1998 provides a comprehensive account of tourism development in Guizhou
up through the mid-1990s; Donaldson 2007 compares tourism development poli-
cies recently enacted in Guizhou with those in neighboring Yunnan.
3	The scholarly literature on Chinese migration, both internal and international,
is large; see, for example, Fan 2005; Huang and Zhan 2005; Xin Liu 1997; Nyiri
2005a, 2005b, and 2010; Ong 1999; Ong and Nonini 1997; Solinger 1999; Sun 2002;
and L. Zhang 2001. Xin Liu 1997 and, more recently, Nyiri 2010 offer readings of
migration in the context of social mobility and national desires that have greatly
informed my understanding.
4	Chinese statistics on domestic tourism are based on the number of tickets sold at
official tourism destinations; thus this number of 1.4 billion trips taken references
the number of tickets sold (Nyiri 2010, 62). Given that the official population of
China in 2004 was 1.34 billion people, this number indicates that at least some
Chinese were taking repeat trips that year.
5	These statistics from 2010 were taken from the China Statistical Yearbook 2011
and reported on the website www.china.org.cn, which describes itself as “the
authorized government portal site to China, China.org.cn is published under the
auspices of the State Council Information Office and the China International Pub-
lishing Group (CIPG) in Beijing” (from www.china.0rg.cn/2009-09/28/c0ntent_
18620394.htm).
6	The full text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations
is available online at www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml.
7	“Landscape” plays a key analytical and conceptual role in a number of disciplines,Notes to Introduction |	239
and my usage of the term is limited here to the ways in which it has been directly
useful for understanding tourism in rural ethnic China. To that end, I have drawn
on theorizations of landscape from a number of disciplines, from art history to
geography. A few key works that have influenced this book include Bender 1993;
Cosgrove 1984 and 2006; Hendry 1999; Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995; Ingold 1993;
Meinig 1979; Mitchell 2002; and Tilley 1994.
8	These are ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes
(see Appadurai 1996, 33).
9	On landscaping as an act of power, see Urry 2000, 80-93; see also Mitchell 2002
and Pratt 2008 [1992] on imperialism and visuality.
10	Tim Ingold’s (1993) influential concept of “taskscape,” which derives form and
meaning through human activity, is very relevant to my analysis of doing tourism
as a landscape of travel because of the focus on action and embedded relations
through human movements and skills; however, in doing tourism, as is shown in
later chapters, the representational power of landscape is a serious matter that is
contested by tourism village residents and other stakeholders not only as activity
but also as image. Therefore, the term “landscape” is still more appropriate for
drawing out the specific strands of power and agency at work in this ethnographic
study.
11	Martin fay has called these ways of seeing “scopic regimes of modernity,” using
the example of Western European painting. His analysis of three “scopic regimes”
(a term coined by Christian Metz) aims to “understand the multiple implications
of sight in ways that are now only beginning to be appreciated” (fay 1988, 4). The
three models of scopic regimes that he addresses are Cartesian perspectivalism,
“the art of describing” (following Alpers 1983), and the baroque. Of these three
models, fay (1988, 5) argues that it is the first, Cartesian perspectivalism, which
has been regarded as “the reigning visual model of modernity . . . because it best
expressed the ‘natural’ experience of sight valorized by the scientific world view.”
This combination of science, nature, and the production of visual images has
proven to be ripe for theoretical inquiry. Indeed, Mitchell 1994 calls this the “pic-
torial turn,” or the critique of the image, in academic scholarship, with its disci-
plinary genealogy rooted in the critical writings of Benjamin 1969, Debord 1983,
and Baudrillard 1988, as just a few examples of key works that have paid attention
to how images and vision are thoroughly socialized and thus socially significant
(see also Crary 1990, 2001; jay 1993; and Levin 1993 for analytical studies of vision
in modern thought and the modern era).
12	In the fields of art history and visual studies, critical approaches to landscape
imagery have unpacked the power relations embedded in representations of land-
scape; see, for example, DeLue and Elkins 2008, and Mitchell 2002.
13	Following this argument, julia Harrison (2003) has shown through detailed, lon-
gitudinal interviews with Canadians before and after tours that tourism is not a
separate sphere of experience but rather fully integrated into the passage of every-
day time through anticipation and planning (before tour) and, later, storytelling
and memory (after tour).
14	The latter point has been persuasively argued in Graburn with Barthel-Bouchier
2001, MacCannell 1999 [1976]) and 2001, and Urry 2002b [1990].
15	From Deborah Poole’s (1997,10) work on the meanings and movements of Andean
images, I take “visual economy” to encompass the cultural systems of technolo-240	| Notes to Chapter i
gies, manufacture, and circulation “through which graphic images are appraised,
interpreted, and assigned historical, scientific, and aesthetic worth.” Touristic
images and representations include postcards and advertisements; see Crouch and
Liibbren 2003; Desmond 2001; Kahn 2011; and Selwyn 1996.
16	On a similar process in urban China, see Broudehoux 2004 and 2007 for an inci-
sive critique of the spectacularization of architecture in Beijing before the 2008
Olympics and the relationships of this visual spectacle to regimes of power, inter-
national attention, and authoritarian control.
17	See, for example, see the Guidelines for Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment
published by the Landscape Institute (2002).
18	“Visual effect” is defined as “change in the appearance of the landscape as a result
of development. This can be positive (improvement) or negative (detraction).”
Visual amenity is defined as “the value of a particular area or view in terms of
what is seen” (Landscape Institute 2002, 121).
19	Roads are both symbols of and necessary components of modernization, in China
and elsewhere of course. As Julie Chu (2010, 51-52) has noted of a highway built in
rural Fujian, despite the fact that the construction of the road required “the loss
of productive agricultural land and the major alteration of one of their [sacred]
mountains,” when she took a photograph of the road, a villager next to her com-
mented on how “pretty” the road was and added that with the new, more conve-
nient access to the city, “it won’t seem so far from here to there.”
1. SIMILAR, WITH MINOR DIFFERENCES
1	The Chinese phrase for “ethnic minority” is shaoshu minzu. The Chinese concept
of minzu is notoriously difficult to translate, as it bears reference to both the notion
of cultural nationalism in terms of a unified entity and the groups that make up
a nation (and the social and cultural differences between these groups) (Har-
rell 2001, 38). Some scholars and official government writings on shaoshu minzu
translate this phrase as “minority nationality,” following early Chinese Commu-
nist usage taken from Soviet ideas of nationality. I acknowledge the difficulties
raised by this translation, noting in particular Thomas Mullaney’s discussion of
the semantic work on minzu (2004a, 232I111), Chris Berry (1992) (who translates
minzu as “race”), Prasenjit Duara (1995), Stevan Harrell, ed. (1995 and 2001), and
Yingjin Zhang (1997). Nowadays, the English-language website of the Central
People’s Government of China also refers to the different shaoshu minzu in China
as ethnic minorities.
2	The following history of Ping’an is drawn largely from Lao’s written account, as
well as from other scholarly sources.
3	For a comparative study of folklore and cultural change in Ping’an and two sur-
rounding villages, see Xu Ganli 2006.
4	On the creation of the Zhuang as a political and ethnic category in China, see
Kaup 2000.
5	Administratively changing place names to reflect “local” characteristics has been
a popular strategy in tourism development, particularly in Yunnan. The city of
Simao was renamed “Pu’er” to promote the eponymous tea; the city of ZhongdianNotes to Chapter i |	241
was renamed “Shangri-la” as a means of increasing its visibility in tourism promo-
tions (Hillman 2003 and Kolas 2008).
6	Some scholars translate minzu shibie as “nationalities classification,” following
the early Chinese Communist usages of Soviet ideas of “nationality” for minzu
as drawn from writings by Joseph Stalin (Gladney 1996; Harrell 2001, 39; and Lei-
bold 2007, 150-55). However, I believe that given current constructions of minzu
in China today, the term “ethnic” better represents how these identities are being
discussed and imagined; I am following arguments and perspectives discussed in
depth in Harrell ed. 1995 and 2001, Mullaney 2004b and 2011, Mackerras 2004,
Tapp 2012, and others in this move (translating minzu as “ethnic/ethnicity” rather
than “nationality”).
7	This “civilizing project” did not assume that all barbarians were equally capable of
being civilized into the Chinese political and cultural center, and therefore some
groups, notably in the empire’s southwestern regions, “were readily divided into
raw (sheng) and cooked (shn), according to whether they were cultured enough to
accept moral edification and eventual civilization” (Harrell 1995, 19). Ming and
Qing dynasty records even describe how the Miao as a group were divided into
the “Raw Miao” and “Cooked Miao,” where the latter had taken on some Chinese
cultural customs and the former resisted pacification, assimilation, and state con-
trol (Diamond 1995,100).
8	See Hostetler 2001 and Deal and Hostetler 2003.
9	For example, take the emergence of the Chinese as the “yellow race”—a term first
used by Europeans but brought back to China by missionaries (Dikotter 1992, 55).
10	As James Leibold (2007, 29) has written: “The increased threat of Western impe-
rialism following the Opium War and the ineffectiveness of the Manchu court in
stemming the decline of the empire following the Taiping Rebellion created a crisis
of political authority in Qing China.... This political crisis was accompanied by an
epistemological shift in how difference was conceptualized in China.”
11	Attention to racial differences and the representation of barbarian populations
within China continued during the Republican era; William Schaefer (2003) has
demonstrated how images and verbal descriptions of “the savage” and racialized
otherness in short stories and illustrated magazines of the Republican era brought
into question the very nature of representational forms in the conjunction of tech-
nological advances, new Chinese nationalism, and continued colonial presence.
Race and ethnic otherness in China during this period developed into an amal-
gamation of comparative interests in defining differences between China and the
West, as well as an inward turn to applying these categories to the “barbarians”
within China itself.
12	During the early years of the Communist government, the policy of autonomous
local government was open to any groups who self-identified and submitted their
group status to the central government; the policy was called “names follows the
bearer’s will” (ming cong zhu ren, Gros 2004), which was a “stance of avowed non-
intervention by the state into questions of ethnic appellations” (Mullaney 2004a,
210).
13	Mullaney 2011 provides a detailed history of the classification project in Yunnan
and the extensive conceptual links between the project as it was completed and
earlier classifications of ethnicity and identity from both Republican-era sources
and foreign missionaries. The case of the Tai/Dai-Lue in southern Yunnan is nota-242	| Notes to Chapter i
ble in China’s southwest, in that prior to the Chinese Communist classification
project, there was a political structure and solidarity among the Tai/Dai-Lue that
included territory now divided between China, Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand.
This political structure had to contend with the process of classifying the “Dai” an
ethnic minority within China. See Hsieh 1995 and S. Davis 2005.
14	Morgan devised his schema of the evolutionary development of human social
organizations and values in his earlier research on the Iroquois (see Morgan 1962
[1851]), and it greatly influenced concepts of human social evolution theorized by
Herbert Spencer (1897), as well as arguments on social class and economic modes
of production put forth by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—namely Engels’s The
Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1972 [1884]).
15	Karsten Kruger (2003) has written a comprehensive history and analysis of these
films and their production, based on field research and interviews he conducted
with Yang Guanghai, one of the principal producers and filmmakers in this proj-
ect. The three main film studios in China at the time were the August First Film
Studio, the Beijing Scientific and Educational Film Studio, and the Central Docu-
mentary and News Reel Film Studio. Of the ethnographic films produced between
1957 and 1966, the August First and Beijing Scientific and Educational Film studios
played the most central role, perhaps as a result of many discussions held at the
time regarding the intended purposes of creating specifically ethnographic films
and the debate over the importance of authenticity in these films.
16	Through the efforts of Karsten Kruger and others, eleven of the films were remas-
tered, translated into English, and distributed internationally first by the Institute
for Media and Knowledge and later by the German National Library of Science and
Technology (in Hannover) under the title “The Chinese Historical Ethnographic
Film Series 1957-1966.” These included The Kawa (1958), The Li (1958), The Ewenki
on the Banks of the Argun River (1959), The Kucong People (i960), The Dulong People
(1960-61), The Serf System of the Town of Shahliq (i960, 1962), The Jingpo (i960,
1962), The Oroqen (1963), The Hunting and Fishing Life of the Hezhe (1965), The
“Azhu”Marriage System oftheNaxi (Moso) from Yongning (1965), and Naxi Art and
Culture in Lijiang (1966). See also Alexander 2005 and Chio dir. 2003.
17	Moreover, the limited distribution of these ethnic classification films begs the
question of what types of films were considered appropriate for public distribu-
tion and which qualities of scientific documentary filmmaking made its products
unsuitable or undesirable for a mass audience.
18	Many of these films about the struggles and livelihoods of ethnic minorities in
Communist China from the 1950s and 1960s remain hugely popular in contempo-
rary China and have become romantic, nostalgic anchors for the ethnic tourism
industry in certain destinations, such as in Dali, Yunnan (Notar 2006, 47-79), and
in Yangshuo, Guangxi, with the creation of a nighttime performance extravaganza
(directed by Zhang Yimou) based loosely on the film Third Sister Liu.
19	Berry 1992 provides a critical reading of the conflation of race, or Han majority
identity, and nation in the term minzu and its deployment in art, literature, and
film criticism in China as a distinguishing feature of Chinese productions.
20	According to Michael Oppitz, the ethnographic films of the 1950s and 1960s from
China hold little to no value as documents of minority ethnicities as compared to
contemporary feature film representations of ethnic minorities in China. Oppitz
(1989, 25) has written: “The films documented the tribal societies, of which theyNotes to Chapter i |	243
should be about, less than the ideological attitudes of the Han Chinese in the era
after 1949. When seen against such products from the ‘Exotification-Factory,’ con-
temporary fiction films from China conversely appear to be real ethnographic
documents.”
21	Other examples of minority song and dance performances being remade to con-
vey socialist messages include a 1965 picture book featuring folk songs such as
“How I Want to See Chairman Mao” (Uyghur) and “We Have Electric Lights Now”
(Owenki) (Schein 2000, 87).
22	See Diamond 1995, Oakes 1998, Rack 2005, and Schein 2000.
23	Social science researchers such as Fei Xiaotong (1981) played an important role
in the administration and fieldwork investigations of the classification project
and laid the groundwork for the establishment of “nationalities institutes” dur-
ing this period. On the establishment of anthropology in China, see Guldin 1994
and Guldin ed. 1986. Publications by non-Chinese scholars on the subject of eth-
nic identity formation in contemporary China include, for example, Blum 2001;
Gladney 1996 and 2004; Harrell ed. 1995; Harrell 2001; Heberer 2007; Kaup 2000;
Lipman 1997; Litzinger 1995,1998, and 2000; McCarthy 2009; Rack 2005; Rudelson
1997; Schein 2000; and Wellens 2010.
24	There is also a growing body of scholarship emerging on the conceptual similari-
ties and differences between Han identity and notions of “whiteness” (Mullaney et
al. 2012). Blum (2001, 57-58) offers some interesting convergences and divergences
between Han identity and “whiteness,” pointing out the importance of under-
standing the discursive formations of these categories in their historical contexts
(i.e., differing concepts of “blood” and “color” in China and, say, the United States).
25	The term lusheng is also used to refer to specific dances that accompany the playing
of the instrument; in general, people would say tiao lusheng to indicate both the
playing of lusheng and dancing. Traditionally men play lusheng and women dance
in a circular formation around the men during festivals and other village events.
Tiao lusheng is a common feature of most Miao tourism performances.
26	For analysis and case studies of ethnic tourism see, among others, Bruner 2005,
Hitchcock 1995, MacCannell 1999 [1976], Swain 1989 [1977], Tilley 1997, Walsh
2005, and Yang and Wall 2008.
27	Edward Bruner (2005, 1-7) has written about his role as a middleman in tours to
Indonesia, and his eventual “failure” to maintain the proper boundaries as con-
ceived by the travel agency director who had hired him as a tour guide. Bruner
relies upon the early work of Dean MacCannell on the notions of front and back-
stage authenticity in his story to defend and justify his “failure” at boundary main-
tenance; MacCannell later published, in 2008, a pointed rejoinder on his role in
Bruner’s story.
28	See Bruner 2005, Cohen 2001, Hitchcock 1999, and Picard 1996.
29	See Hitchcock 1995, Tilley 1997, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998 and 2006, and Thomas
1999.
30	On tourist motivations, see Cohen 1979, Graburn with Barthel-Bouchier 2001,
MacCannell 1999 [1976], and N. Wang 1999; on anxiety, modernity, and the mar-
keting of “the ethnic” in the genre of world music, see Feld 2000.
31	See Schaefer 2010 on nostalgia, photography, and the rural in China; see also P.
Young 2008 on loss and longing in early twentieth-century tourism to Brittany,
France.244	| Notes to Chapter 1
32	Critical tourism studies have considered nostalgia in a number of ways—as the
impetus for touring (MacCannell 1999 [1976]), as the sought-after object of tourist
practices (Graburn 1995 and N. Wang 1999), and as the gloss applied to destina-
tions to promote tourist activities (see Bruner 2005, 33-70 and 145-68). Graham
Dann (1996, 219) has even outlined the “register” of nostalgia tourism as a particu-
lar form of language play that emphasizes nostalgic yearning and desires. Ning
Wang (1999, 360) elaborates on the relationship between authenticity and nostal-
gia, writing: “The ideal of authenticity can be characterized by either nostalgia or
romanticism. It is nostalgic because it idealizes the ways of life in which people are
supposed to be freer, more innocent, more spontaneous, purer, and truer to them-
selves than usual (such ways of life are usually supposed to exist in the past or in
childhood). People are nostalgic about these ways of life because they want to relive
them in the form of tourism at least temporally, empathetically, and symbolically.”
33	Svetlana Boym (2002) has distinguished between what she calls reflective and
restorative nostalgia, where the former dwells upon longing, loss, and ruins,
while the latter emphasizes rebuilding and refilling gaps in memory. See also
K. Stewart 1988.
34	As Susan Stewart (1993 [1984], 135) has explained, “we need and desire souvenirs
of events that are reportable, events whose materiality has escaped us, events that
thereby exist on through the invention of narrative.” Of course, classic works on
photography and memory, such as Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1982 [1980])
and Susan Sontag’s On Photography (2001 [1977]) also discuss emotions of nostal-
gia and longing, manifest in the materiality of the photograph.
35	David Lowenthal (1996, 86-87) has described two such situations in the United
States: ‘“We have to learn how to be Indian again,’ said a Pueblo craftswoman.
‘First the whites came and stripped us. Then, they come again and “find” us. Now,
we are paid to behave the way we did when they tried to get rid of us.’ Since whites
expect Indians to be steeped in tradition simply because they are Indian, Indians
must trade on this image.... [Second] for example, many whites construe the new
Native American casino enterprises as a sad lapse from traditional tribal values.
Financial mogul Donald Trump pooh-poohed the wealthy Pequots, whose Con-
necticut casino had trumped his own, as not looking to him like ‘real’ Indians.
They had looked Indian enough, they retorted, when they were poor.”
36	The phrase “ethnic options” was coined by Mary Waters (1990) in her study of
white ethnic identities in the United States and later applied to tourism studied by
Robert E. Wood (1997). Alexis Celeste Bunten (2008) developed a similar idea of
the ethnic “repertoire” in tourism encounters, where tourism workers draw upon
a predetermined set of behaviors and practices in order to be successfully ethnic
in tourism.
37	Taman Mini theme park in Indonesia is commonly cited as a prime example of
a state agenda for tourism; see Adams 2005 and 2006; Bruner 2005, 211-30; Err-
ington 1998; FFitchcock 1995 and 1998; and Wood 1997.
38	For analyses of these parks, see Anagnost 1993 and 1997; Bruner 2005, 211-30;
Gladney 2004, 28-50; Oakes 2006b; Stanley 1998; and Stanley and Chung 1995.
39	See Tamar Gordon’s 2005 film Global Villages: The Globalization of Ethnic Display
for a vivid documentary portrayal of some of the parks and their employees.
40	In the Zhuang village in the Beijing park, for example, a sign stated that some of
the photographs included inside the house had been taken by researchers fromNotes to Chapter i |	245
the Central Institute of Nationality Studies during trips to the Longsheng region,
including visits to Ping’an village, between May and September 1998.
41	See also Cable 2008, Jing Li 2003, Sun and Bao 2007a; L. Yang, Wall, and Smith
2008; and Tan, Cheung, and Yang 2001 for studies of Manchunman village.
42	Luo Yongchang (2006a) compared four ethnic tourism villages, noting the types
of attractions available (from “daily life activities” to “village scenery”), the ways
in which tourism was started (through government and/or private investment, or
by the villagers themselves), and some of the problems encountered (low profits,
declining visitor numbers, etc.) in each village. Specifically, these were Basha Miao
Village and Upper Langde Miao Village in Guizhou, Ping’an village in Guangxi,
and the Dai villages in Yunnan.
43	On tourism and poverty alleviation in China, see Huang H. 2006, Luk 2005, Wei
Min 2005, and Wei Xiao’an 2003; a more conceptual approach to poverty tourism
is developed in Scheyvens 2001.
44	Margaret Swain (2001) has argued for an approach to ethnic tourism framed by the
concept of cosmopolitanism, to better understand the multiple identities inhabited
by ethnic tourism stakeholders who commoditize ethnicity precisely for the pur-
poses of engaging with, and in, the global networks of capital embodied in tourism.
45	On China’s national tourism rating system, see Nyiri 2006.
46	See Chio 2013 for a discussion of how the naming of these villages, in the context of
tourism, exemplifies and exacerbates local efforts to “claim heritage” in the context
of tourism and economic competition.
47	Wen Tong (2002) reported 710 persons in 156 households; Huang Haizhu (2006)
reported 792 persons in 180 households.
48	For example, Chinese scholars working in Ping’an have published on the develop-
ment of family-run inns (Liang 2005, Meng 2007, and Wen 2002), community
participation in tourism (Sha, Wu, and Wang 2007; and Wu and Ye 2005), folk
customs and cultural change (Wu and Lu 2005, Mao C. 2006, Xu Ganli 2005 and
2006, and Xue 2008), and problems encountered in tourism, including ecological
studies and government policy (Cheng et al. 2002, Huang H. 2006, Su and Chen
2005, Wei and Wu 2006, and Yang G. 2002).
49	Judith Shapiro (2001,106-14) provides an account of hillside terracing and forced
agricultural production in the model village of Dazhai, Shanxi during this era.
50	Lao could not remember where exactly these foreign tourists were from; most resi-
dents I asked assumed they were from Hong Kong, although a few people told me
they were “really foreign,” as in North American or European.
51	Guilin was one of the first cities in China to be developed and designated for tour-
ism in the early 1980s, so it is not entirely surprising that local officials in Long-
sheng also began discussing tourism so soon after China’s reform and opening in
the late 1970 s.
52	“Mountain People Also Use Foreign Money” is a direct translation of the title as
reported by Lao (in Chinese, he wrote Shanli ren ye hui yongyangqiari).
53	Urry’s tourist gaze has since been challenged in MacCannell 2001, 29, which
describes a second tourist gaze that knows and acknowledges the existence of the
unseen and unsaid in tourism. Graburn with Barthel-Bouchier 2001,153, following
Parrinello 1993, notes that tourism in general, not limited to sightseeing or photog-
raphy, is part of a hermeneutic “sociocultural circle” of experience, reintegration
and feedback.246	| Notes to Chapter 1
54	I have seen images of the terraced fields around Ping’an (both photographs and
drawings) reproduced on packets of tissues, bamboo coasters, in anthropology
textbooks, and in in-house advertisements for China Central Television, in addi-
tion to postcards, photo books, and the like.
55	This is the individual walk-up price. Tour group tickets are discounted by 50
percent.
56	Ticket sales from 1998 to 2000 were handled by the Longji Tourism Development
Company, which was run by the county government. From 2001 on, ticket sales
were handled by the Guilin Longsheng Hot Springs Tourism Company, Ltd.
57	This average is based off numbers from my own household survey in Ping’an.
58	Sources of water in Ping’an included natural springs and streams, cisterns, and
an artificial reservoir. The regulation of water use was a huge point of contention
between the villagers and the company—of course, both parties agreed that there
needed to be enough water to flood the terraces every spring (which was always the
busiest season) and run businesses. But, quite simply, there wasn’t enough water
to go around; the natural sources depended upon rainwater, and water usage was
not taxed or otherwise managed. Each year, villagers told me, they would have to
wait later and later into the spring or early summer to have enough water to flood
the terraces; many photography tours that came to Ping’an in April and May left
disappointed. Plans to regulate water collection and usage included a project to
cement over all of the original gutters and water troughs between the terraces
(which would prevent water loss through absorption but also altered the system of
water flow) and to build two new large cisterns high up in the hillside.
59	Thanks to Jessica Anderson Turner for telling me about this development. By
September 2010, this director had already left Ping’an and set up his business in
Yangshuo, the much more popular and much larger tourism destination just south
of Guilin. The space built for his performances was left in Ping’an, and at the time
residents were not certain how they might use the space in the future.
60	Tourism in Upper Langde has been widely studied; see Donaldson 2007; Oakes
1998, 193-204, and 2006a; Wang Xiaomei 2007; and Zhou X. 1999.
61	In China, the distinction between “natural” and “administrative” villages can be
important when understanding local-level community relations. Following Xing
et al. 2006: “A natural village occurs when households cluster together, forming
a small community. An administrative village is a region consisting of several
villages designated by the state as a unit for administrative purposes” (ibid., viii).
Thus, in the case of Jidao, Jidao is the administrative village name of two natural
villages, known simply as Upper Jidao and Lower Jidao.
62	The overwhelming majority of people living in Upper Jidao are ethnically Miao;
marriage is strictly patrilocal, so most married women living in Upper Jidao are
from other villages. I did, however, meet two young wives who were non-Miao
and who had met their husbands while working in Kaili or elsewhere. On occasion
these women would wear Miao festival clothes and perform.
63	In other domestic government publications—namely, Guizhou Tourism Bureau
2006 and Kaili Shi Fupin Kaifa Bangongshi 2006—the population of Jidao village
as a whole is provided, referring to both Upper and Lower Jidao.
64	Articles addressing the New Socialist Countryside program and rural tourism
development include Wang and Wang 2006 and Zhou J. 2007; Yu D. 2008, Luo
2006b, and Zhou X. 1999 on tourism and community participation in UpperNotes to Chapter i |	247
Langde; Li N. 2007, Luo 2006a, and Qian 2005 on cultural change and poverty
alleviation strategies in ethnic tourism; Liu Xiaohui 2007 and Li, Yu, and Dai 2006
on small business ventures in tourism, such as family-run inns; and Mo 2006 on
historical tourism resources in Guizhou.
65	It should be reiterated that in many of these national and provincial-level reports
and documents about the Bala River Demonstration Project for Rural Tourism, the
distinction of “Upper” or “Lower” Jidao is not typically used; rather just “Jidao”
is named. This oversight on the part of provincial, national, and international
funders, I believe, has had serious consequences for the residents of Jidao village.
Of course, there are more than seven villages along the Bala River, but only these
seven were chosen for inclusion in the project.
66	It was from this curiosity on the villagers’ behalf to know more about places like
Ping’an that I developed my collaborative video viewing methodology (see Chio
2011a).
67	The Libo National Nature Reserve was included in a national bid for inscription on
the UNESCO World Natural Heritage list, which was successfully granted in 2007
as part of the “South China Karst” World Natural Heritage region.
68	The corporatization of rural village tourism through such arrangements between
government offices, private companies, and village units is a typical model for
development in China; it was also used to infuse the Longji Scenic Area with
money for development in 2001, as described earlier in this chapter.
69	By comparison, in 2007 the average cost of a bed in a family-run guesthouse in
Ping’an was ¥25 a night, with shared facilities; in Upper Langde, just a mile from
Upper Jidao, a bed in the village hostel was ¥10 to ¥15 a night. In some of the
higher-end hotels in Kaili, the closest major city, rooms were around ¥150 to ¥200
a night in 2006.
70	Jidao village had also been included in other recent rural poverty studies and proj -
ects, including a program sponsored by the international organization Oxfam in
the late 1990s (Oxfam International 2009), the Ford Foundation, and as a case
study in a report on ethnic minorities, migration, and poverty by China Develop-
ment Brief (Perrement 2006).
71	I repeatedly asked government officials and residents of Upper Jidao why Upper
Jidao was chosen for tourism development rather than Lower Jidao or both. Most
residents of Upper Jidao said that the international experts invited in 2002 and
2004 had decided that Upper Jidao was better, whereas Zhang Xiaosong hinted
that Lower Jidao was less organized, in terms of leadership, and as a result it had
been more difficult to work with the villagers there. The few people from Lower
Jidao whom I asked about this typically responded, brusquely, that they had no
idea why Upper Jidao had been chosen as the tourism focus.
72	See Chio 2012 for a discussion of locally recorded videos of Miao cultural life in
Guizhou.
73	In the village most people spoke Miao to each other, and when engaging with non-
Miao speakers, they spoke a local dialect, Kailihua.
74	Much later, in 2012, I was told that the developer had spent about the first half of
his allotted amount, built the hotel frame, received the remainder of the amount,
and used those funds for another project in another village. When asked why the
developer wasn’t forced to complete the hotel, Teacher Pan, Qin, and others in
Upper Jidao shrugged and said there wasn’t anything they could do about it.248	| Notes to Chapter 2
75	See Oakes 1999 for a case study of a more business-oriented handicrafts production.
76	Unfortunately I have not met the donor in person; this description is based on what
Qin and other village women have told me over the years.
77	Qin actually presented the piece to Zoellick on the occasion of his visit to Guizhou;
I also received one in 2009 from the former director of the Guizhou Tourism
Bureau, Yang Shengming.
2.	PEASANT FAMILY HAPPINESS
1	See Park 2008 for a study of nong jia le tourism outside Beijing.
2	This phrase has also been translated as “Joyous Village Life” (Donaldson 2007),
“Delights in Farm Guesthouses” (Park 2008), “Happy Farmer’s Home” (Gao,
Huang, and Huang 2009), “happy country home” (Oakes 2011), and as “rural
resorts” in the state-run China Daily newspaper (Nilsson 2010), although I prefer
“peasant family happiness,” also used in Blanchard 2007. The logic for my trans-
lation is explained in this chapter, although to maintain consistency and draw
attention to the particular historical and cultural context of the phrase, I use the
Chinese nong jia le throughout.
3	These definitions have been taken from Guizhou Statistical Bureau 2007.
4	For general statistical review of national conditions in 2006, see People’s Daily
Online 2007.
5	These “civilized behavior” promotions included campaigns to practice waiting in
line at bus stops and basic English-language lessons for residents and taxi drivers
in Beijing. Problems in the tourism industry have garnered the attention of state
politicians. A national law regulating travel agencies was approved in April 2013
and took effect beginning on October 1, 2013, at the start of the National Day holi-
day, while in September 2013 updated guidelines for tourist behavior were issued
by the CNTA (“China’s First Tourism Law Comes into Effect, Tourists Issued Man-
ner Guides,” online at www.cnn.com/2o13/1o/o3/travel/new-china-tourism-law/,
accessed October 29, 2013).
6	Of course, the idea that tourism could be harnessed for national development cir-
culated in China as early as the late 1970s; Honggen Xiao (2005) has analyzed
discourses of tourism and development in five speeches by Deng Xiaoping given
between October 1978 and July 1979.
7	See Sofield and Li 1998a and 1998b. For example, the practice of landscape painting
coupled with poetic inscriptions continues to inform contemporary travel pat-
terns and valuations of the idea of “being there” in Chinese tourism practices (on
landscape and travel in China, see Petersen 1995, Strassberg 1994, as well as Nyiri
2006 and 2010; for an assessment of Chinese outbound tourism, see Arlt 2006).
8	Many studies of tourism have viewed the phenomenon as an outgrowth of a dis-
tinctly Western, Euro-American historical condition rooted in nineteenth-cen-
tury perspectives on leisure, modernity, individual subjectivity, and the meaning
of travel. Classic examples include Veblen 2009 [1899], Boorstin 2012 [1962], and
MacCannell 1999 [1976], which remain important for understanding tourism and
leisure practices in society. However, as useful as they may be for sorting through
the diversity of reasons for travel, formulaic classifications of tourist experiences
(i.e., Cohen 1979 and N. Wang 1999) are often insufficient for examining “other”Notes to Chapter 2	|	249
tourisms that are neither based in nor emergent from the West. For critiques of
the Western bias in tourism studies, see Alneng 2002; Y. Chan 2006; Ghimire
2001; Graburn 1983 and 1995; Lew and Yu, eds. 1995; Nyiri 2006; and Winter 2007
and 2009.
9	See Chan and Zhang 1999 and F. Wang 2005 for detailed studies of the hukon
system.
10	See such films as Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress and Zhang
Nuanxing’s Sacrificed Youth. Chris Berry (1992) and Yingjin Zhang (1997), along
with Ester Yau (1989), have all discussed Sacrificed Youth, the story of a young
Flan woman sent to a Dai village during the Cultural Revolution. Berry, Zhang,
and Yau differ in their conclusions, but nonetheless all agree that the portrait of
Dai culture and society presented in this film is generally one of a positive, desir-
able light and that the narrator of the film experiences a positive outcome to her
time “sent-down.” Davies 2005 provides a more nuanced analysis of reactions to
the publication of a book of photographs from the zhiqing era, which ranged from
nostalgia to regret; see also Davies 2007.
11	See Ghimire and Zhou 2001; Lewetal., eds. 2002; Li and Jia 2004; Qiao 1995; Oakes
1998; Xiao Q. 2005; and Zhang W. 1997.
12	Class A enterprises could do business directly with overseas tour operators; Class
B could receive international tourists organized by Class A agencies. Class C enter-
prises were limited to organizing domestic tours, though Class A and Class B agen-
cies also engaged in domestic tour businesses as well (Gang Xu 1999, 77t'ni5). The
deposit amounts required were ¥600,000 for Class A businesses, ¥200,000 for
Class B, and ¥100,000 for Class C agencies (Ghimire and Zhou 2001, 97).
13	The exact sources and methodologies used to gather this data is unclear; the sta-
tistical yearbooks do not specify precisely how these numbers were calculated.
FFowever, according to Gang Xu (1999), when statistics on domestic tourism were
first collected in the early 1990s, these numbers were based on the number of tick-
ets sold at major sightseeing destinations. Pal Nyiri (2010) has also reported the
same counting method for calculating tourist trips taken—namely based on the
sale of tickets at tourism destinations (jingqu) officially recognized by the govern-
ment. The original charts also provide an explanation regarding urban/rural tour-
ist ratios—namely that “rate is the ratio that the total amount of the urban citizens
or the rural habitants compares to the urban population or the rural population”
(CNTA 2008a). For clarity, I have not included these numbers.
14	See Gao, FFuang, and FFuang 2009 for a general review of rural tourism in China
since 1978; for specific examples of poverty alleviation and tourism development
in Guizhou and Yunnan, see Donaldson 2007, Luk 2005, Oakes 1998, and Sun and
Bao 2007a, 2007b, and 2007c.
15	A number of the Communist-era documentary films discussed in chapter 1 explic-
itly discuss religious practices among ethnic minorities in China as superstitions
in need of eradication; the films on the Uyghur ethnic group and the Naxi are
particularly good examples of this.
16	While I use “peasant” as a translation for nongmin (as do Chu 2010, FFathaway
2010, Murphy 2004, Oakes 2011, Zhang and Donaldson 2010, and others when
examining Chinese discourses on rural development and social transformation),
when I am discussing people in Ping’an and Upper Jidao, I use “village resident”250	| Notes to Chapter 2
or “villager” in recognition of the diversity of occupations, livelihoods, individual
histories, and kin relations in each community.
17	See Su 2009, 81-117, for a general overview of the construction of the Chinese peas-
ant historically and in light of more recent development goals.
18	Julie Chu (2010, 64-65) provides a case from Fujian, where residents of Longyan,
a rural area by classification, had “mainly relied on nonagricultural and translo-
cal kinds of labor before the Second World War,” so they found that “the reclas-
sification of most people as peasants was experienced as an extremely artificial
imposition from above and their confinement to compulsory agricultural work
in the countryside as a dramatic narrowing of their social world and life chances
under Mao.”
19	According to Gao, Huang, and Huang (2009, 440), this formulation was first pos-
ited by social scientists in the late 1980s as an analytical framework for addressing
and solving problems in China’s rural development.
20	Chu 2010 calls this the “moral career of the peasant,” in which it has been impos-
sible for the category and the term to be dissociated from perceptions of social and
economic backwardness. Fora comparative study of development plans, including
the role of tourism, in Yunnan and Guizhou throughout the 2000s, see Donaldson
2011.
21	The “West” in this campaign encompassed everything from parts of northeastern
Jilin to the Tibet Autonomous Region (Goodman 2004, 5-10).
22	See He 2005, Li and Jia 2004, Shi 2005, Yang and Hui 2005, and Zhang P. 2005.
23	These are the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Ningxia Mongolian Autono-
mous Region, Tibet Autonomous Region, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region,
and Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
24	The convergence of ethnic minority development and tourism development, par-
ticularly in the late 1990s to early 2000s, has been well studied; see S. Davis 2005,
Hillman 2003, Kolas 2008, Oakes 1998, Mueggler 2002, Notar 2006, Schein 2000,
and Swain 2001.
25	See, for example, Anagnost 2004, Hoffman 2003, Kipnis 2006, Murphy 2004, and
Nyiri 2010 as well as a special section of the journal positions 17, no. 3 (2009):
523-642.
26	On women migrant workers, suzhi, and subjectivity, see, for example, Gaetano and
Jacka 2004 and Yan 2008.
27	Official Chinese government documents and statements on the 11th Five Year Plan
can be read in English online at “Key Points of the 11th Five-Year Guidelines,”
www.china.0rg.cn/english/2006lh/160403.htm, and “China Mapping Out 11th
Five Year Guidelines,” www.china.org.cn/english/features/guideline/156529.htm.
In Chinese, the five areas focused on in the New Socialist Countryside program
were shengchan fazhan, shenghuo fuyu, xiangfen wenming, cunrong zhengjie, and
guanli minzhu. Official reports and statements on the campaign can be found
online at, “Building a New Socialist Countryside,” www.china.org.cn/english/
zhuanti/country/ 159776.htm. See also China (Official Government Website) 2006.
28	This report is available online at “Socialist Countryside Should Not Be Mere Exer-
cise in Vanity,” online atwww.china.0rg.cn/english/2007lh/201767.htm.
29	The complete law, “Law of the PRC on Urban and Rural Planning,” can be accessed
0nlineatwww.china.0rg.cn/china/Legislati0nsF0rm2001-2010/2011-02/11/c0ntent_
21899292.htm.Notes to Chapter 3	|	251
30	On some of the problems of the New Socialist Countryside policy, see also Perry
2011.
31	These projects were all noted in a preliminary plan, completed in 2006; none of
these specific items were ever built (as of 2012). A new performance space and cul-
tural center were constructed in 2008, although by 2010, the performance space
had been repurposed by the original land-use owners to build a new house.
32	Gorsuch (2003) adopts this idea of a “ritual of reassurance” from Linda Ellerbee
(2000).
33	The Central Spiritual Civilization Steering Committee (www.wenming.cn) is an
office of the Communist Party of China charged with maintaining and improving
the level of civilized behavior and thought in China.
34	See Chio 2010 and Nyiri 2010, 88-96, for details on the 2006 guidelines. Updated
guidelines were issued in September 2013 for outbound Chinese tourists and can
be found online (CNTA 2013).
35	See Sha and Wang 2006, Shao 2007, and Wang and Bai 2006.
36	This was published originally in Qiushi (Seeking Truth no. 1 [2007]), the ideological
journal of the Chinese Communist Party (cited in Blanchard 2007), and in maga-
zines such as Zhongguo Nongcun Keji (China Rural Science and Technology no. 9
[2007]: 48-50). It was also published online on the official website of the Chinese
government (www.gov.cn), which is the version referenced here (Shao 2007).
37	In addition to miaojia le in Guizhou, this convention has also been observed in
ethnic Dai regions in Yunnan, where nongjia le tourism businesses are called dai
jia le (J. Li 2005 and Sun and Bao 2007a).
38	“Farmer” often seems to be the easier term to use as a translation for nongmin;
however, as Myron Cohen (1993, 160) has pointed out, the term “farmer” doesn’t
suggest the “Other” as much as “peasant” still does; moreover, “farmer” is func-
tionally inappropriate given the occupational diversity of rural residents (see also
Zhang and Donaldson 2010).
39	Nostalgia for the rural village extends beyond just tourism, of course; see Schaefer
2010 for a close reading of documentary photographs of Chinese villages and “the
cultural politics of blankness” in contemporary Chinese art.
3.	LEAVE THE FIELDS WITHOUT LEAVING THE COUNTRYSIDE
1	This sentiment was even more present in Ping’an. There I realized I was one of
many—hundreds it seemed—scholars, students, and journalists who had come to
this village to gather data about rural life from the residents.
2	Julie Chu (2006, 401, emphasis in the original) also notes that for the subjects of
her research in Longyan, Fujian, “as state-classified peasants for four decades, the
rural Fuzhounese were precisely not the kind of subjects authorized to chart moral
careers as mobile cosmopolitans.”
3	The scholarly literature on internal migration and the experience of migrants in
China is vast; see, for example, see Chan and Zhang 1999, Fan 2005, Huang and
Zhan 2003, Jacka 2006, Murphy 2002, Pun 2005, Solinger 1999, W. Sun 2006, Yan
2008, and L. Zhang 2001.
4	For example, see studies on the effects of migration on sending communities in
rural Jiangxi (Murphy 2002); patterns of migration and identity discourse among252	| Notes to Chapter 3
communities within Anhui, an area of China commonly associated with supply-
ing female nannies and caretakers for urban households in Beijing, Shanghai, and
other cities (W. Sun 2006, 2008, and 2009); and changing notions of personal
development and desire among female domestic workers (Yan 2008).
5	Yan Hairong (2008, 44) argues that “if Modernity and Progress reside in the city,
and if the city monopolizes modern culture, the countryside is the city’s emaci-
ated other. It is in this discursive context that the countryside cannot function as
the locus of a modern identity,” thus necessitating the city as a part of the rural
imagination.
6	For studies of migrants in tourism destinations, see Bookman 2006; Castellanos
2007, 2008, and 2010; Castellanos and Boehm 2008; and Lindquist 2009.
7	After all, for the “global underclass that struggles to make sense of the world it
inhabits in different ways . . . [tjhese processes of sense making should be situated
not only in relation to capitalist expansion and state power, but also in the context of
the desires and emotions that drive migration and tourism” (Lindquist 2009,150).
8	R. V. Bianchi (2000) has dubbed these persons “migrant-tourist workers,” based
on research conducted in the Mediterranean, and similar studies have also been
done in New Zealand and Sweden on seasonal employees at ski resorts and hotels
(Boon 2006 and Lundmark 2006).
9	The social significances of ethnic clothing, including posing for pictures with
people in costume or renting a costume to wear oneself, is explored in chapter 4.
10	Ze’s description of tourism in Upper Jidao was quite precise, and exactly what
many travel media photographers sought to reproduce in their images. Women
in Upper Jidao were often asked to put on Miao clothes (Miao yifu), tie up their
hair into topknots (jiujiu) decorated with a flower in front, and then go into the
rice paddies and pose in action shots of planting rice seedlings or other farming
activities.
11	The distinction between rice and wheat, while certainly simplistic and reductive,
is a common one used throughout China to distinguish between northern and
southern regions and peoples.
12	As tourism increased in Upper Jidao, and in particular because more and more
U.S. college students had become involved in Upper Jidao’s development through
study abroad exchange programs organized by Zhang Xiaosong at Guizhou
Normal University, the foods deemed more palatable to foreign tastes—namely,
scrambled eggs and fried potatoes—were also offered to me whenever I visited.
13	The region around Ping’an was a major producer of lumber for the domestic mar-
kets until 1998, when forestry was heavily restricted by national law. Many Ping’an
villagers recalled hauling cut tree trunks through the mountains as one of the
few sources of cash income in the region in the 1980s and early 1990s. Thus, Mei
explained, she felt she “knew” the lumber business and could take that knowledge
elsewhere to create her own opportunities.
14	By this, I mean that some of those who migrated from Ping’an and Upper Jidao
had been recruited directly in the villages, traveled on privately organized buses
with a group of other recruits, and were taken directly to whatever work site (often
a factory) and employed as a group; these migrants did not have to strike out on
their own to find work, although many I knew from Upper Jidao did end up leaving
their initial jobs and finding work elsewhere.Notes to Chapter 4	|	253
15	Ironically, this particular man’s youngest son was also a recently returned migrant,
who had worked for many years in Jiangsu in construction and soon would begin
building a new hotel for his family. Everyone agreed that it was a good thing this
man’s son knew more about concrete and rebar construction; he was more knowl-
edgeable about modern building techniques. In his own case, then, the migrant
experiences of this man’s son were considered beneficial to the family business.
16	During the 17th Party Congress in 2007, then President Hu Jintao made a state-
ment to the effect that the household registration system may be dismantled, or
changed significantly, in the near future. In essays and discussions from East Asia
Forum, scholars have surmised that although the language of household registra-
tion may be erased, the lasting effects and social prejudices associated with hukou
may persist quite a bit longer (K. Chan 2010, Kong 2010, Tao 2010, and J. Young
2010), because this system administratively bound residents to a geographical
place (a township or city) in China and granted residents their rights and access to
education, medical care, social security, employment, and so on. Migrant workers
do not fit into the hukou system and are commonly referred to as the so-called
“floating population.”
17	Elsewhere, Urry (2002a, 271) has written of the importance of critically examining
mobility as “the analysis of why people travel, and whether they should travel in
the way they currently do, [which] is to interrogate a complex set of social prac-
tices, social practices that involve old and emerging technologies that reconstruct
notions of proximity and distance, closeness and farness, stasis and movements,
the body and the other.”
18	Diane Austin-Broos (1997 and 2005) has conceptualized what she calls the “politics
of moral orders,” which are the modalities of power at work in the “order of values
and meanings through which subjects are defined within a cultural milieu” (Aus-
tin-Broos 1997, 8). In these politics, “subjects sustain themselves through modes of
representation and practice that can mediate, criticize, or reinforce larger orders
of governance” (ibid., 12). I am extending her framework toward my consideration
of the orders of mobility at work in rural China.
4.	“take A PICTURE WITH us”
1	On tourism in Upper Langde, see Donaldson 2007 and 2011; Oakes 1998, 2006a,
and 2011; Yu D. 2008; and Zhou X. 1999.
2	See Adler 1989, MacCannell 1999 [1976] and 2011, Urry 2002b [1990], and van den
Abeele 1980 on sightseeing and tourism.
3	By “media” here, I mean television, film, print media, and of course, the Web; see
Kerwin 2010 for an analysis of images of the Miao on tourism websites.
4	Tourism and social change in Lijiang have been extensively researched ever since
the inscription of the “old town” district on the UNESCO World Heritage Site list
in 1997. See Chao 2012, Peters 2001, Su and Teo 2011, and Y. Wang 2007.
5	For a captivating documentary portrait of this phenomenon in Beijing, see the
2009 film New Beijing: Reinventing a City, directed by Georgia Wallace-Crabbe.
6	There are a series of “hundred year” features of Upper Jidao that have been particu-
larly targeted as valuable and worth promoting as a part of the village’s tourism.254	| Notes to Chapter 4
These are the “hundred year houses,” “hundred year granaries,” “hundred year
trees” (bainian gushu), and “hundred year ancient songs” (bainian gu ge). Many of
these features are actually older than one hundred years, as Teacher Pan was quick
to point out, but naming them as such provides for continuity.
7	It is possible that if this particular household had not had a home right on the river
that was so immediately visible to tourists arriving from the highway, they might
not have been the subject of so much criticism. This possibility was openly specu-
lated, but of course no one could say for sure what might have been.
8	The desire for visual continuity is not new or unique to rural China, of course;
many UNESCO World Heritage-listed regions around the world have strict guide-
lines on how buildings (residential and commercial) can or cannot be altered,
inside and out, for the purpose of historical preservation.
9	Families with two or more sons typically would eventually split once the sons
married. If the family did not have enough land or money to build an entirely
new house for one of the sons, they would create new spaces within the existing
house by adding walls so that the two sons and their families could engage in their
everyday household activities relatively independently of one another. A family
split of this kind also indicates that the finances are no longer managed together.
10	This particular series was called Ethnic Odyssey and featured, in total, sixteen epi-
sodes on fifteen different ethnic minority groups in China. It is now available as a
DVD box set, distributed by China International TV Corporation.
11	Such images are ubiquitous, and women from Upper Jidao wearing festival clothes
have been photographed for numerous publications, including the Japan Airlines
in-flight magazine, the Chinese edition of Marie Claire, and Hidden China, a
glossy coffee-table book of photographs (Meniconzi 2008).
12	None of this is unique to Upper Jidao, or China, for matter. The desiring gaze of
documentary filmmakers and tourists affects people and architecture around the
globe; see Stasch 2011 on the case of “tree houses” and photography in New Guinea.
Of course, to be truly successful in tourism, rural destinations have to change and
adapt to urban living standards in order to accommodate tourists; leading Chinese
tourism scholar and policy maker Wei Xiao’an has called this “urban life in the
countryside” (Wei 2005,165).
13	More precisely, this style of architecture is known as diaojiaoloa, commonly
translated as “wooden stilted houses,” in reference to how the living areas of the
house are built above ground level, where animals are kept. Diaojiaoloa are found
throughout Buyi, Dong, Miao, Shui, Tujia, and Zhuang ethnic minority communi-
ties in Guangxi, Guizhou, and neighboring areas in southwestern China.
14	I refer to the clothing worn by the minority models as “costumes” rather than
“clothes” or “clothing,” to differentiate between the intended purposes of these
different types of ethnic minority attire.
15	See figure 4.6 for an example of the local Zhuang clothes (a shirt, long pants, and
terry-cloth headdress) worn by women in the village when they guided tourists,
when they were working as porters and hosting guests in their hotels or restau-
rants, and sometimes, among the older women especially, as day-to-day clothing.
These Zhuang clothes were usually machine-made of synthetic materials but this
did not, to my knowledge, take away their “Zhuang-ness” for the women who wore
them or the tourists who viewed the women in the clothing.Notes to Chapter 4	|	255
16	Village residents told me that in previous years, some enterprising photo booth
owners had also brought peacocks and monkeys to Ping’an to be photographed
with tourists, but these businesses had left by the time I arrived.
17	See, for example, Kahn 2000 and 2011 on touristic images of Tahiti and recent
debates over nuclear testing; see also Ness 2005 on tourism and locational violence
through the analysis of the visual landscape of the Pearl Farm Beach Resort in the
southern Philippines.
18	Questions of power and photography are pervasive in the history of anthropology and
in anthropological analysis; see, for example, Cohen, Nir, and Almagor 1992; Crowe
2003; Edwards 2001; MacDougall 2006; Pinney and Petersen 2003; and Poole 1997.
19	Hyde’s (2007, 128-49) concept of the “transactional exchange” informs her
nuanced reading of the performance of “being ethnic” put on by non-ethnic
minority women in sex work, and also of the regimes of power informing cur-
rent discourses of HIV/AIDs, Chinese modernity, and ethnic identities. As far as I
know, the models in Ping’an were not engaged in any type of sex work; I have been
asked whether this might have occurred in Ping’an between models and tourists,
and over the course of my fieldwork, I never encountered nor heard of it in the
village (neither from other villagers nor from the models themselves). Although
theoretically there are interesting conceptual links between the study of sex work,
the economic exchange of emotions, and sweet talk in minority model photog-
raphy, I am reluctant to assume, ipso facto, that the models I studied were neces-
sarily doing anything more than posing (although Hyde 2007 and Walsh 2005 do
document various cases of sex workers using national stereotypes about ethnic
minorities as sexually “free” in popular ethnic tourism destinations by donning
ethnic costumes).
20	Hyde (2007, 118) elaborates: “The Han women represent and perform Tai-ness for
a Han audience in order to achieve secondary gains in their own economic status,
personal freedoms, desires, and amusements.”
21	Hyde develops this analytic by drawing from Louisa Schein’s (1996 and 1997) work
on the fusing of desire into the sexual and the political through the engendering
of ethnic groups, as well as from Judith Butler’s (1990) critical approach to the
performativity of gender.
22	The particular group of models I followed tended to wear, by their own description,
Dong, Miao, Tibetan, Yao, and Zhuang costumes most regularly. To be honest, I
couldn’t really tell the difference between most of the costumes (except for differ-
ences in color).
23	By comparison, a hotel worker in the village earned about ¥500 a month; recently
returned migrant workers I met said that factory labor in South China’s industrial
zones at the time paid around ¥800 to ¥1,000 a month for basic nontechnical labor.
24	See the work of Ashild Kolas (2008, 82) on the appeal of “playing” with ethnic and
social identities in Chinese tourism, which she points out is enjoyed by tourists,
locals, and migrant workers in the Shangri-la area of Yunnan; Beth Notar (2006,
61-64) has called this a practice of “romantic reembodiment” for Han Chinese
tourists visiting Dali, Yunnan. David MacDougall (2006,164-69) has also written
about the appeal of dressing up for photographs among middle-class domestic
tourists in India.
25	Xin Liu (2002) has analyzed the terminology of “boss” and “miss” (xiaojie) in256	| Notes to Chapter 4
relation to businessmen and female escorts in China’s business culture; address-
ing a man as “boss” carries with it an immediate acknowledgment of respect and
inequality in social status between the parties involved.
26	Wedding photography is a huge business in China and Taiwan (see Adrian 2003
and Li Xin dir. 2005). Engaged to be married or recently married couples will go to
professional studios for these pictures, and this is often considered part of “being
married.” Thus, by joking that they will “be engaged” once their picture is taken
together, male tourists are deliberately referencing what is considered a traditional
marriage practice as well as the supposed sexual availability of ethnic minority
women. It is also possible to “get married” to an ethnic woman at ethnic theme
parks and during various song-and-dance performances at tourism destinations;
having pictures taken together is often a central part of this process.
27	Pigs are culturally considered constitutive of Chinese households; as is frequently
pointed out, the Chinese character for “family” (^) is composed of the character
for “hog” or “swine” (^-) under the radical for “roof” (””).
28	Erik Cohen, Yeshayahu Nir and Uri Almagor (1992) have compared social rela-
tionships at instances of the photographic encounter, or what they term “stranger-
local interactions” in photography. They argue that ambiguity is a key feature of
photographer-photographee interaction. The ambiguity of the relationship can be
either unilateral (for example, a photographer who believes she or he is taking a
“candid” photograph of a subject who does not know the photographer is there)
or mutual (the most extreme version of this would be a posed portrait, in which
both the photographer and photographee are highly cognizant of the exchange
and agree to participate in the act) (ibid., 214-15). But, they explain, “the ambigu-
ity in the [photographer-photographee interaction] is most pronounced in situ-
ations where the photographer defines his relationship to the photographee as a
unilateral one and engages in taking a ‘candid’ picture of the subject who appears
to be unaware of, or unconcerned with, the photographer’s endeavor. The subject,
however, perceives it as a mutual relationship and reacts to such an attempt, for
example, by fear, anger, a smile, or by a consciously struck pose” (ibid., 215).
29	See Hammond et al. 2009 for an analysis of anthropology textbook covers.
30	By appearing in pictures of the terraces, local women countered the “disemplace-
ment” brought about by the development of Ping’an as a tourism destination, a
process that, as Sally Ann Ness (2005,120) has argued, occurs “in persons as they
experience the material transformation and scenic rendering of a location.”
31	As mentioned earlier, one minority model I knew was from Ping’an, although she
left the job after a couple of months to study hairdressing in Guilin. Yuan, the
model considered by the others the best at sweet talk, was actually from a Zhuang
village near Ping’an, so she was considered more local than the other models (who
were not Zhuang and from farther away). Although Yuan had relatives in Ping’an,
and her mother and sister were often around working in the guesthouses, Yuan
chose to live and eat with the other models in the house provided by the photo
booth owners.
32	Notar (2006, 60) has reported a similar sentiment among young Bai performers
outside Dali who found “the tourism-related work both easier and more glamorous
than the fishing and farming work of their parents.”
33	See the work of Olivier Evrard and Prasit Leepreecha (2009, 250) for a similar case
in contemporary Thai domestic tourism.Notes to Chapter 5	|	257
5.	THE ABILITY TO BE DIFFERENT
1	After the holiday week was over, I asked Teacher Pan how many tourists had vis-
ited; he estimated about twenty to thirty people per day, or no more than two
hundred people throughout the week. The village had tried to collect an entrance
fee of ¥10 per person, but many tourists, Teacher Pan said, had been turned off by
the fee and left, or, as the village clinician Qin later told me, they would try to sneak
around the main entrance using other paths. I observed at least one group of cars
driving into the village, only to drive back out within ten minutes; Qin said these
visitors had refused to pay the entrance fee.
2	It is important to state that there was no proof that residents from Lower Jidao had
blocked the road or slashed the sign, but the manner in which Upper Jidao resi-
dents on the whole believed this to be the case was revealing of their perspective
on village relations after the tourism plans began.
3	This kind of “cleaning up” of the look of a village also happened in Upper Jidao
in summer 2008. There, the local government sent in a few people to demolish a
row of brick pigsties that butted up against the village’s new performance ground.
When I visited in July 2008, I was told that the families had refused to take down
the sties themselves because, in their opinion, the government compensation
offered was too low (about ¥2,500 to be split between four or five households). The
new village subcommittee leader was incapable of brokering an agreement and
eventually acquiesced to the government’s demands. Doing so meant that hired
laborers from elsewhere knocked down the sties, leaving the rubble behind. As far
as I could ascertain, the families received no compensation.
4	It is worth noting that the issue of public toilets in Ping’an was often discussed;
village residents found it frustrating and mildly annoying when tourists, who were
not their customers, asked to use the facilities in a village home, hotel, or restau-
rant. There are public toilets in only three places in Ping’an—at the parking lot and
at each of the two viewpoints.
5	See, for example, Sun and Bao 2007a, 2007b, and 2007c; Nyiri 2006; Wen 2002;
and Xu Ganli 2005.
6	My use of the concept of distances here draws on Ning Wang’s (2001) invocation of
Simmel’s (1950) “appeal of distance” as applied to tourism studies, as well as John
Urry’s (2007) mobilities paradigm.
7	For example, Erik Cohen (1979) schematically analyzed different modes of tourist
experiences.
8	I am, of course, drawing on the idea of “time-space compression,” as articulated
by David Harvey (1990), in thinking through how social relations within Ping’an
and Upper Jidao have been affected by both physical transport changes regionally
and the ongoing pressures of tourism to emphasize cultural difference as a valu-
able commodity.
9	The idea of “the stranger” is so obviously relevant to the concept of the tourist that
perhaps for this reason it has received fairly little investigation in tourism studies
(Dann 1996, 13), and the figure of “the stranger” is frequently evoked in tourism
studies as an apt conceptual definition of the “modern-man-in-general”-as-tourist;
see the work of Eeva Jokinen and Soile Veijola (1997, 29-30), following, of course,
that of Dean MacCannell 1999 [1976], 1. Graham Dann (1996) has pointed out that
in the early theorizations of the tourist by Erik Cohen (1979), Cohen only makes258	| Notes to Chapter 5
explicit the relationship between being a tourist and being a stranger in a paper
about expatriates. Similarly, Dennison Nash (1996, 47-48) has also made passing
reference to the concept of strangerhood in his chapter on theories of tourism as
a personal transition.
10	Information about the Norwegian-Chinese joint ecomuseums can be found on the
website of the Norwegian Embassy in China (www.norway.cn). See a paper by Yang
Shengming (2005, 14), where she mentions that “the Chinese and the Norwegian
Governments have established with joint efforts four ecological village museums
in Guizhou.” See also the work of Li Jiqia (2005), who has examined this project
in Guizhou, and that of Peter Davis (2011, 236-47) on ecomuseums across China.
11	The change from using “ancient” to “old” in the English translation of the name for
Longji village was something I noticed on official maps in 2012.
12	I offer a more extended discussion of hotels and the politics of heritage in Ping’an
in Chio 2013. To be fair, when I raised the issue of the exclusivity and price of the
high-end hotel with one village woman, she rightly pointed out to me that the hotel
had opened up Ping’an to tourists who otherwise probably wouldn’t come to the
village, let alone stay overnight, so she did not perceive of the hotel as competition
(Chio 2013,155).
13	The platforms where the minority models work were another example of this; but
these structures, haphazardly constructed, were deemed unsightly by the manage-
ment and county government officials in 2008 and forcibly taken down that spring.
Some platforms had reappeared again in 2012, however.
14	Upper Langde is administratively connected with Lower Langde; however, from
anecdotal evidence, it appears that the economic differences between Upper and
Lower Langde are more balanced because of Lower Langde’s position on the main
road through the area and its role as the administrative center for a cluster of vil-
lages in the area. Furthermore, as has been demonstrated in studies of the profit-
sharing system used in Upper Langde tourism (see WangX. 2007 and Yu D. 2008),
the profits made by each household in Upper Langde from tourism are, relatively,
not that great. Nanhua village, just four kilometers from Upper Jidao, had been
developed with funds from the Kaili municipal government and “opened” to tour-
ism in 1997.
15	For reports on Xijiang’s redevelopment and subsequent economic boom, see arti-
cles from China Daily (Nilsson 2010), the U.S. National Public Radio program
Marketplace (Schmitz 2012), and Yu Lintao (2012), as well as the scenic area devel-
opment company website (see www.xjqhmz.com). In addition to being included
in the World Bank project loan in Guizhou for cultural and natural heritage,
Xijiang is also a part of a UNESCO China Culture and Development Partnership
Framework project (see www.unescobej.org/culture/culture-and-development/
china-culture-and-development-partnership-framework, accessed on December
13, 2012).
16	Information on Japan’s One Village One Product movement can be found online
at www.ovop.jp.
17	The village in the background of the advertisement is actually Upper Langde vil-
lage; it is recognizable from the location of the buildings and paths around the
performance space.
18	Thanks to Nelson Graburn, who first pointed out to me the formulaic structure of
building tourism villages in terms of certain key components.Notes to Conclusion |	259
19	To understand how difference is transformed and used within certain forms and
assertions of power, I am drawing on Mary Louise Pratt’s reading of Michel Fou-
cault’s study of knowledge, nature, being human, and categories in Hie Order of
Tilings (1994 [1970]), in light of Pratt’s own analysis of the work and productions of
seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century botanists and naturalists, many
of whom traveled to colonies in the New World as part of their labors (Pratt 2008
[1992], 24-36). Pratt argues that the way in which natural history turned difference
into a “system of variables” allowed European male colonialists to “subsume his-
tory and culture into natural.” Moreover, “the (lettered, male, European) eye that
held the system could familiarize (‘naturalize’) new sites/sights immediately upon
contact, by incorporating them into the language of the system. The differences of
distance factored themselves out of the picture: with respect to mimosas, Greece
could be the same as Venezuela, West Africa or Japan; the label ‘granitic peaks’ can
apply identically to Eastern Europe, the Andes or the American West” (ibid., 31).
CONCLUSION
1	As noted in previous chapters, following arguments by Xin Liu (1997) and Pal
Nyiri (2006 and 2009), overseas Chinese migrants are typically considered at the
top of the “social-spatial hierarchy.”
2	Village clinician and de facto tour guide Qin had been invited then as well but was
too far along in her pregnancy for the long bus rides on winding mountain roads.
3	The “wild vegetables” served at this time were sweet potato leaves, so to be exact,
they were not “wild” but simply different from the more familiar types of cabbage
usually offered.
4	Some businesses in Ping’an did sell handmade goods; these were mostly from the
neighboring Yao villages or, increasingly, brought into Ping’an by traders and col-
lectors who specialized in ethnic handicrafts from Guizhou or other parts of rural
Guangxi.
5	They had the advantage of being a larger extended household, including grand-
parents, their two sons, two daughters-in-law, as well as aunts and other relatives
hired to help out at their family guesthouse. Over the next few years, however,
this family gradually leased out more of their business and space to the restau-
rant manager from Henan, who served the day tours from Guilin. The sons, their
wives, and children, then moved to the county seat, Longsheng, where the children
attended school. These families would come back to the village only on weekends
and during school holidays.
6	The concrete houses were strategically situated throughout the village to control
the spread of a fire, if one were to break out.
7	According to a status report published in December 2012, progress on the World
Bank’s Guizhou Cultural and Natural Heritage Protection and Development
project was rated as “unsatisfactory” overall. The reasons given included “insuf-
ficient commitment to the project’s participatory approach and inadequate assis-
tance provided to local communities” leading to a situation where many “physical
works” (i.e., construction and renovations) were “being carried out by outside
contractors rather than the villagers themselves” (World Bank 2012b, 1). This was
certainly the case in July 2012 when I visited Upper Jidao, where village residents260	| Notes to Conclusion
were participating as manual laborers on some of the projects, which were in turn
managed by outside contractors mostly from Kaili. That said, most village resi-
dents were not experienced at executing large construction projects, nor did they
have the means to rent the necessary equipment (such as diggers, etc.), so there was
not much of an expectation, locally, that they could in fact carry out these projects
on their own. In the June 2013 status report, progress was still unsatisfactory and
a risk rating of “substantial” had been added; however, in the overview the report
noted that in the January 2013 midterm review, it had been agreed to scale back
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“administrative” vs. “natural” villages,
56, 246n6r
advertising. See media; signs
“agro-tourism,” 39-40
Alexander, John, 29, 242nr6
Almagor, Uri, r66, 256n28
Anayi (film), r47
Appadurai, Arjun, xxvi, rr, r82
architectural style: recognizable features
of, 2or-4; village renovations and,
133-39.139-45.149-50
Austin-Broos, Diane, 253nr8
authenticity, 35-40
Bala River Demonstration Project for
Rural Tourism, 57-59, 62, 247n65;
appearance of “gateway town” for,
133-34; differentiation of villages in,
r96-2O4,197
Bala River Miao Minority Village
Community, 62
bamboo rice (zhutongfan), 53-54
Bao Jigang, r38
Beijing, as destination, 119, r22, r27
Beijing Olympics (2008): building
projects for, r36; children in ethnic
costume scandal and, 156-57
“being ethnic”: training in, 68-7r, r38;
visuality and, 137-38
“being there,” idea of, 248n7
Benjamin, Walter, r92
Bianchi, R. V., 252n8
Blum, Susan, 33
Bo (Ping’an hotel owner), r87-88
Boym, Svetlana, 2441133
Bray, David, 90
Breidenbach, Joana, 92
Broudehoux, Anne-Marie, 136, 24oni6
Bruner, Edward, 243n27
Bunten, Alexis Celeste, 138,162, 206,
2441136
business of tourism, and returned
migrants, 111,120-23
Butler, Judith, 255n2i
call-and-response singing (ciui ge), 64,
219-20
Cartier, Carolyn, 9
Center for Ethnic and Folk Literature
and Arts Development of the
Chinese Ministry of Culture, 63
Chain Reaction (organization), 68-69
China Central Spiritual Civilization
Steering Committee, 92-93
285286	| Index
China Folk Cultures Village (FCV) in
Shenzhen, 38-39
China National Tourism Administration
(CNTA), xiv; funding of develop-
ment by, 59, 68, 223; future plans
for rural tourism, 97-98; tourist
behavior and, 92-93, 94. See also
China Rural Tourism (Zhongguo
xiangcun you) year (2006)
China Rural Tourism (Zhongguo
xiangcun you) year (2006), 3-5, 61, 75,
86, 94, 97
Chinese government: 8th Five Year plan,
80; 11th Five Year plan, xxvii, 3, 57,
61, 63, 75, 89; ethnic classification
and, 25-28; films produced by,
28-31; international vs. domestic
tourism and, 78, 79-80; national
holiday schedule and, 81-82; rural
development policy, xix, 3-5; tourist
behavior and, 91-95; urban-rural
planning and, 90-91
Chinese Historical Ethnographic Film
Series 1957-1966, production of,
28-30; titles and distribution, 242ni6
“Chinese Style Tourism,” 38-39
Chinese tourists: migrant experience
and, 101-4
Chou, Mr. (hotel investor in Ping’an),
187-88,190
Chou Chou (filmmaker), 147
Chu, Julie, 87,129, 24oni9, 25oni8, 25in2
Chun (Upper Jidao leader), 173-74,196
“civilized tourism”(iveji;»/jig liiyou), 17,
78, 91-95, 209
“civilizing projects,” 24in7
Clifford, James, 181-82
CNTA. See China National Tourism
Administration (CNTA)
Cohen, Erik, 166, 256n28
Comaroff, Jean, 18
Comaroff, John L., 18
“commodified persona,” 162-64, 166
“contact zones,” 36,181-82, 204-5;
competition in, 185-94
Cosgrove, Denis, 11
cosmopolitanism, concept of, 245n44
costumes of minority models: costs of,
158; types of, 152-53, 255n22; versus
“clothes” or “clothing,” 254ni4. See
also ethnic clothing
“cultural economy of distance,” 182, 206
Dai village park in Yunnan, 35,138, 248nio
Daugstad, Karoline, 12
Deng Xiaoping, 248n6
“Develop Rural Tourism, Promote Build-
ing a New Countryside” (CNTA
article), 94-95
diaojiaolou (wooden stilted houses),
254ni3
doing tourism: “backstage” perspective
and, xiv, xvii-xviii, xix-xx; being
ethnic and, 34, 35-40; business savvy
and, 111,120-23; experience outside
the village and, 129-30; focus on
visuality and, 15-19,134-38; learn-
ability of, 226-28; regimes of labor
and leisure and, 5-8. See also nong jia
le (peasant family happiness)
domestic tourism: billboards and, 4, 5;
historical trends in, 79-85; quality
of life and, 91-92; regulation of,
80; revenue from, 82; statistics
on growth of, xiv, 7-8, 78, 80, 82,
238n4, 249ni3; travel by returned
migrants and, 111-13; urban tourism
and, 85. See also ethnic tourism
villages
Dulong village in Yunnan, 156
ecological tourism (shengtai liiyou), 218,
257nio
ecomuseum (shengtai bowuguan), 189
embroidery, for tourism development
in Upper Jidao, 68-70, 203; of Miao
women’s clothing, 146-48; of Yao
women’s clothing, 55,189
entrance fees. See ticket sales
ethnic, as term, 23-24
ethnic classification, 24ini3, 243n23;
history of, 25-35; racial types and,
26; in Yunnan, 24ini3; during
Republican era, 26
Ethnic Classification project (minzu
shibie), xxvii, 25-32; ethnographicIndex |	287
films from, 28-31; purpose of, 25-28;
contemporary effects of, 32-35
ethnic clothing, 252n9, 254ml; dressing
up by tourists in, 255n24; Miao
clothes (Miaoyifu) and, 147-48,
252nio; Miao festival dress and, 118,
140, 146,147,148,153; photography
and, 146,147-48, 254ml; in Ping’an,
167-69,168; in Upper fidao, 145-49;
Zhuang clothes and, 168, 254ni5. See
also costumes of minority models;
minority models in Ping’an
ethnic identity: changes in community
consciousness and, 21-25; contested
governance of, 21; language and,
23-24; local vs. national discourses
on, 24-25; official classifications
and, 25-28, 32; political economy
and, 206; political policies and,
31-35
“Ethnicity, Inc.,” 18
ethnic minority groups (shaoshu minzu):
“civilizing” projects and, 24in7;
classification of, 25-28; number of,
31-32; official documentaries on,
28-31; practices of, 249ni5; regional
autonomy and, 27, 24ini2
ethnic minority women: ethnic belong-
ing and, 138; rural mobility and,
107-8; perceived sexual availability
and, 154,163-64, 255ni9 , 256n26;
traditional handicrafts and, 68-70
Ethnic Odyssey (television series), 254nio
“ethnic options” in tourism, 37-39, 206,
2441136
ethnic tourism villages: architectural
renovation in, 134-38; comparison of,
245n42; intervillage and intravillage
tensions and, 173-81; in Longji
Scenic Area, 41; mobility and, 15-19;
reintegration of returned migrants
and, 111,123-25; representation
strategies and, 35-40; similarities
across, 70-71; theme park model and,
38-40; tourist perceptions of prices
in, 215; visuality and, 15-19. See also
Ping’an village; Upper jidao village
ethnographic films, 28-31, 242ni5-20
Evrard, Olivier, 179
Fa (Upper jidao villager), 111,113,116,124,
231; migration experiences and, 112,
114-15; visit to Ping’an (2007) and,
209, 211
family household split (fen jia), 143,
254n9
FCV. See China Folk Cultures Village
(FCV) in Shenzhen
Fei Xiaotong, 242n23
Feng (Ping’an villager), 111,113,117,125;
travels by, 112
Five Golden Flowers (film), 30-31
folk customs (minsu), 22
Friedman, Sara, 98
Fu (Upper jidao leader), 148, 231; visit
to Ping’an (2007) and, 211, 213, 214,
215-16, 225
Golden Week holidays, 81-82
Goodman, David, 87
Goreme, Turkey, 109-10
Graburn, Nelson, 14-15, 37,184,199,
2391114. 243^0, 244^2, 245^3,
258ni8
Guangxi Daily (newspaper), 42, 43
Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region:
location in China, 2; regional
development policy and, 87-88;
tourism statistics for, 85. See also
Ping’an village
guanjingqu (scenic spots), villages as,
237n3. See also Longji village; Ping’an
village, Guangxi
guesthouses: business savvy and, 121;
in Ping’an village, 45, 46, 49, 52-53,
257ni2; renovations of, 136. See
also nongjia le (peasant family
happiness)
Guilin Longji Titian jingqu. See Longji
Scenic Area
Guilin Longsheng Hot Springs Tourism
Company Ltd., 45
Guilin city, Guangxi: rural-urban
income disparities and, 76-78
Guilin Tourism Company Ltd., 45, 46
Guizhou Cultural and Natural Heritage288	| Index
Protection and Development Project.
See World Bank project in Guizhou
Guizhou province, 2; ethnic tourism in,
55, 56; filming in, 146-47; regional
development policy and, 87-88;
rural-urban income disparities and,
76-78; tourism-related changes
in, xxiii; tourism statistics for, 85.
See also Bala River Demonstration
Project for Rural Tourism; Upper
jidao village, Guizhou
Guizhou Shan Li Tourism Development
Company. See Shan Li Tourism
Development Company
Guizhou Tourism Bureau, 56, 59, 60, 61,
194
Guo, jianbin, 156
handicrafts: in Ping’an, 259n4; in
Upper jidao, 57, 68-70. See also
embroidery
Han identity: ethnic classification and,
26; hegemony of, 31, 155; “whiteness”
and, 242n23
Harrison, julia, 239ni3
Harvey, David, 257n8
Highland Research Institute in Guiyang,
199
historical preservation guidelines, 135,
254n8
“home,” concept of, xiv, xxvi
hotels and guesthouses: in Ping’an
village, 45, 46, 49, 52-53,122-23,
257ni2
Hua (Upper jidao villager), 111,113,118,
124; travels by, 112
Huang Haizhu, 47, 49-50, 245n47
Huangluo village, Guangxi, 55
hukou (household registration), 7, 79, 87,
2531116
human social evolution, concepts of,
242ni4
Hyde, Sandra, 154, 255ni9
Indonesia, tourism in, 243n27, 2441137
infrastructure: development in Ping’an
and, 45, 229-30; development in
Upper jidao and, 63, 66, 91, 227,
230-31; rural underdevelopment and,
87-88; symbolic aspect of roads and,
18, 24oni9
Ingold, Tim, 239nio
Institute for Nationality Studies, 29, 30
“internal orientalism,” 107,155,160, 204
international tourism: behavior of Chi-
nese tourists and, 92-93; government
support of, 78, 79-80; photographs
with minority models and, 160
jay, Martin, 15, 239ml
jian (Ping’an villager), 214-15
jian shi mian (experiencing the world),
111,113-17
jidao Miao Village (jidao Miao Zhai). See
Upper jidao village, Guizhou
jidao village, 246n6i, 247n65. See also
Lower jidao village, Guizhou; Upper
jidao village, Guizhou
jingdian (scenic spot), 237113
jingji tounao (business brains), 111
jingqu (scenic area), 237113. See also
Longji Scenic Area
Kaili city, Guizhou, 60-61; renovations
in, 139,141
Kaili Tourism Bureau: mobility of Upper
jidao leaders and, 225-26
Kaup, Katherine, 28, 24on4
Kolas, Ashild, 255n24
Kruger, Karsten, 29-30, 242ni5
landscape: concept of, 10-11,12-14, 238n7,
239nio; visual impact of, 17-18
landscape of travel: concept of, xx, 9-15,
231-32
language skills in standard Chinese
(Mandarin), 23, 64, 65, 94,111,116-17,
118,122,147,174
Lao (Ping’an village elder), 21-25, 33- 4°>
41-44, 45.121
Laxson, loan, 204-5
“leave the fields without leaving the
countryside” (li tu bu li xiang)
slogan, 94,107,131
Leepreecha, Prasit, 179
Leibold, lames, 24inio
Lew, Alan A., 9
Li, Jing, 35Index |	289
Libo National Nature Reserve, 247n67
Li ethnic villages in Hainan, 109-10
Lijiang Old Town, Yunnan, 135-36
Lin Hesheng, 97
Li Qing guesthouses in Ping’an, 22, 45,
186,192,193
Li Zaiyong, 60,197
Liu, Xin, 105-6, 255n25
local foods: economics of tourism and,
222; tourist perceptions of, 53-54,
120, 214-16, 223; village specialties
and, 199-200; Western influences
and, 252ni2
local tourism development: funding
of, 59, 66-67, 223; individual goals
and, 65, 209-11, 230-31; individual
mobility and, 211-16; in Ping’an
village, 22, 40-55; in Upper jidao
village, 57-70
lodgings. See hotels and guesthouses;
nong jia le (peasant family happiness)
Longji Scenic Area, 41-49, 237113; money
for development in, 43, 247n68;
Ping’an tensions with management
of, 175-78,185; scenic spots in, 41,189,
190; visitor numbers to, 46
Longji village (Longji Ancient Zhuang
Villlage), Guangxi, 55, 188-89
Longsheng Multiethnic Autonomous
County, Guangxi, 40-41, 42, 77, 89.
See also Ping’an village, Guangxi
Longsheng Tourism Bureau, 45, 46
Longsheng Tourism Development
Company, 45
“looking good”: beautification efforts
and, 65-66, 90, 257n3; ethnic cloth-
ing and, 145-49; exterior building
renovations and, 139-45; idea of, 7,
17; landscape features and, 149-52;
photographing minority models
and, 152-66; visual expediencies and,
134-38. See also architectural style;
visuality
Lowenthal, David, 244 n35
Lower jidao village, Guizhou: tensions
between Upper jidao and, 173-75, 178,
194,196; tourism and, 66, 141-42,195,
247n7i
Luo Yongchang, 245n42
lusheng (bamboo reed instrument), 34,
243n25; performances and, 64, 68,
201; Upper jidao villagers as tourists
and, 214, 216, 221-22, 223, 224
MacCannell, Dean, 243n27
Mao Zedong, 86
Marie Claire (fashion magazine), 68, 69,
254ml
marriage customs: ethnic experiences
and, 35; mobility and, 104,107-8;
photography and, 164-65, 256n26
media, 253113; local representatives and,
65. See also travel media
Mei (Ping’an villager), 111,113,121-23,
124-25, 252ni3; migration experi-
ences and, 112, 116
Miao ethnicity: Bala River villages and,
199; boundaries of difference and,
33-34; classification of, 32; festival
dress (sheng zhuang) and, 118,140,
146,147,148,153; marriage practices
and, 104; Miao clothes (Miaoyifu)
and, 147-48, 252nio; silver horn-
shaped headdresses and, 140, 146;
Upper jidao village and, 200-201,
246n62, 247n73. See also Upper jidao
village, Guizhou; Upper Langde
village, Guizhou
Miao Mountain Sour Soup Double
Chicken Burger (KFC), 199, 200
Miao and tourism, xxiii; development in
Guizhou province and, 55-56, 57-58,
139-45; models in costume and, 217-
18, 219, 223; sharing of traditions as
tourists and, 219-23; song-and-dance
performances and, 63-64. See also
Bala River Demonstration Project for
Rural Tourism; Upper jidao village,
Guizhou
migrant workers: hukou system and,
253ni6; opportunity and, 113-14,126-
28; statistics on, 105, 238n7, 255n23;
in tourism destinations, 108-10, 195,
252n8. See also minority models in
Ping’an; mobility; returned migrants;
rural-to-urban migration; Yao
women, in Ping’an
Minca, Claudio, 9290	| Index
“minority films” (shaoshu minzu
dianying), 29, 30-31
minority models in Ping’an, 217-18, 219,
254ni4; costumes worn by, 152-53,
158,159, 255n22; economics of work
for, 157-62; encounters between
tourists and, 159-62,164-66;
photography of, 152-66,153, 159;
platforms and, 257ni3; relationships
with villagers and, 166-71; sex work
and, 255ni9; “sweet talk” and, 162-64.
See also ethnic clothing; ethnic
minority women
minsu (folk customs): impact of tourism
on, 22-23
minzu (ethnicity or nationality), concept
of, 26, 240m, 24in6, 242ni9. See also
shaoshu minzu; ethnic classification
minzu zhuyi (nationalism), 26
Mitchell, W. J. T., 13-14
mobilities paradigm, 129
mobility, xx, xxiii-xxiv, xxvi-xxvii;
assumption of rural immobility
and, 15, 53,104-8, 211-13, 228; as
consumption practice, 182-85;
number of internal migrants and,
7-8, 238n7; orders of, 102-3,104-8,
129-31, 253ni8; problems created by,
131; returned migrant perspectives
on, 101-3; social relations and, 106-8;
“social-spatial hierarchies” and,
105-6; tourism development and,
209-10, 225-26; tourism development
campaigns and, 209-10, 225-26;
younger generation and, 127. See also
migrant workers; returned migrants;
rural-to-urban migration
modernization: architectural renovations
and, 135-36; mobility and, 104-8;
rural development policy and, 3-5
Morgan, Lewis Henry, 28
Mullaney, Thomas S., 26, 240m, 24in6,
2431124
Nanhua village, Guizhou, 55-56, 59,195,
197, 2571114
National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), xiv,
82-85
national holiday schedule, 81-82
national rural development campaigns.
See New Socialist Countryside
(Shehui Zhuyi Xin Nongcun)
campaign; Open Up the West (Xibu
Da Kaifa) campaign
Native Americans, 2441135
NBS. See National Bureau of Statistics
(NBS)
Ness, Sally Ann, 183, 2561130
New Socialist Countryside (Shehui
Zhuyi Xin Nongcun) campaign, 3-5,
4, 61, 62-63, 25on27; core concepts
in, 89-91; economic goals of, 75-77,
89-90; precedents of, 86; social goals
of, 77-78, 89, 90
New Zealand International Aid and
Development Agency (NZAID), 60-61
Nine Dragons and Five Tigers viewpoint
in Ping’an, 48
Nir, Yeshayahu, 166, 256 n28
nongjia le (peasant family happiness),
xiv, xix, xxiv; as business model
for tourism, 95-99; handbook on,
96-97; home as destination and, 126;
individual vs. village goals and, 95-
96; negative effects on rural people
and, 97; as phrase, 73, 75, 248n2; Qin
and, 230; tourism policy and, 73-79
nongmin (“peasant”): as classification,
86-87, 249ni6, 25in38; mobility and,
104-8, 25in2; reliance of category of,
95-96,105
nongmin gong (rural migrant workers), 8
Norway, rural tourism in, 12
Norwegian-Chinese ecomuseums, 189,
257nio
nostalgia, concept of, 2441132 33, 2511139;
the ethnic in tourism and, 36-38;
landscape and, 10
Notar, Beth, 31, 242ni8, 255n24, 2561136
Nyiri, Pal, 91-92,106, 245n45, 249ni3
NZAID. See New Zealand International
Aid and Development Agency
(NZAID)
Oakes, Tim, xxvi, 9, 38, 88, 91,110-11,137,
238n6Index |	291
Open Up the West (Xibu Da Kaifa)
campaign, 75, 87-89, 91, 209
Oppitz, Michael, 242n20
otherness: “commodified persona”
and, 162-64; ethnic in tourism and,
35-40, 206; prototypes of, 33; racial
difference and, 26, 241ml; typologies
of, 137
outsiders (waidi ren), 157-58. See also
migrant workers
parking lots, x, 189, 201; Ping’an and,
50-51,176; Upper fidao and, xviii, 66,
122, 202, 231
“peasant” (nongmin). See nongmin
(“peasant”)
peasant family happiness (nongjia
le). See nongjia le (peasant family
happiness)
performances, 36; Miao clothing and,
140; song and dance in Upper fidao
and, 63-64, 68, 69, 124, 200-201; Yao
women in Ping’an and, 55, 218-22,
220. See also minority models in
Ping’an
photography: “commodified persona”
and, 162-64, t66; domination of
landscape by, 190-92; economy of
ethnicity and, 157-62; ethnic clothing
and, 146,147-48, 254ml; of locals
in ethnic dress, 167,168; marriage
practices and, 256n26; minority
models and, 152-66; nostalgia
and, 37, 244n34; “stranger-local
interactions” in, 256n28; tourism in
Ping’an and, 41-44, 48-49,151-52; as
“transactional,” 154; village appear-
ance and, 136-37. See also minority
models in Ping’an; visuality; visual
media
pigs, and Chinese households, 91, 256n27
Ping’an village, Guangxi: architectural
renovation in, 149-50; attitudes of
residents in, 54-55; balconies in,
190-94,193, 205; basis of tourism in,
41-44; categorization of tourism in,
39-	40; characteristics of, xxi-xxii,
40-	41, 245n42; development in,
xviii, 50,149-50, 229-30; economic
impacts of tourism in, 44-53; ethnic
identity in, 21-25, 4° 41 (see also
Zhuang ethnicity); government
involvement in, 49-50; hotels and
guesthouses in, 45, 46, 49, 52-53,
190-92,191, 257ni2; minority models
in, 217-18, 219, 254ni4; nature of
fieldwork in, xxi-xxii; outside
entrepreneurs and, 190-92; relations
between villagers and tourists in,
214-15, 224-25, 226; relations with
management company in, 175-78,
185, 224-25; returned migrants in, 111,
116-17,120-23,124-25; socioeconomic
tensions in, 185-94; ticket sales in,
xxii, 45-49, 54.125.175-78. 257m;
tourism development in, 22, 40-55;
water use regulation and, 2461158;
Yao women in, 55,189-90, 218-22,
220; younger generation in, 127,187;
Zhuang clothes and, 168, 254ms
place names, touristic changes in, 39,
54-55. 240ns, 245n46
Poole, Deborah, 16, 239ni5
population quality (renkou suzhi). See
suzhi (quality)
“power of difference,” 98
Pratt, Mary Louise, 181-82, 259ni9
Qiandongnan prefecture: tourism-related
changes in, xxiii. See also Upper
fidao village
Qin (Upper fidao clinician and tour
guide), 133-34, 257m; guestrooms
in house of, 230, 231; mobility vs.
tourism and, 211-13; roles in tourism
organization, 64-65, 69, 116, 147;
training programs and, 68, 226, 227;
visit to Ping’an (2007) and, 211-13,
215, 216-18, 222-24, 226
quality. See suzhi (quality)
“quality population” (suzhi renkou), 209
racial difference, and ethnic other-
ness, 26, 241ml. See also ethnic
classification
Rack, Mary, 34292	| Index
returned migrants, 110-11, 253ni5;
business savvy and, in, 120-23; jinn
shi mian (experiencing the world)
and, 111,113-17; knowledge of tourist
needs and, 111,117-20; reintegration
and, 111,123-25
Reuters, 147,148
Rhoda, Richard, 106-7
roads: Ping’an and, 45; symbolic aspect
of, 18, 24oni9
Rout, Bill, 60
rural immobility: assumption of, 15, 53,
104-8, 211-13, 228; as ideal, 130
rural poverty: promotion of tourism and
alleviation of, 5-6, 40, 59, 60, 75-77,
81, 85,106; “three rural problems”
and, 87-88; Upper Jidao village and,
5-6, 40, 76-77. 78. 2471170
rural-to-urban migration, xxiii-xiv;
domestic workers and, 25in4; forces
behind, 7-8; Great Leap Forward
and, 104; literature on, 25in3;
promotion of rural tourism and, 19,
53; as undesirable, 106-7. See also
returned migrants
Rural Tourism Plan, 2006-2020 (Guizhou
Tourism Bureau), 194-95
Sacrificed Youth (film), 248nio
sanitation, 257n4; development planning
and, 91; ethnic identity and, 23, 24
Sankeshu township, Guizhou, 133-34
scenic spots (jingdian), 189, 237113. See
also viewpoints
Schaefer, William, 241ml, 243^1, 2511139
Schein, Louisa, xxvi, 11-12, 238n6, 255n2i;
ethnic classification eras and, 32;
“internal orientalism” and, 107,155,
160, 204
“scopic regimes,” 239ml
sedan chair carriers, 50-51
Seven Stars with Moon viewpoint in
Ping’an, 48, 50,152,191
Shan Li Tourism Development Company,
61; hotel project and, 61, 66-67
Shao Qiwei, 94-95
shaoshu minzu (ethnic minority):
concept of, 240m; local sense of
ethnic identity and, 24-25; state
construction of difference and,
25-28
signs: Bala River villages and, 201; nong
jia le and, 73,74; Upper Jidao village
and, 66, 67
Simmel, Georg, 183-84, 257n6
slogans promoting rural development, 3,
94.107.113.114, 131
“small farmer mentality,” 88-89
“social-spatial hierarchies,” and mobility,
105-6
souvenirs, 37, 215, 218, 2441134. See also
photography
Stalin, Joseph, 28
Stewart, Susan, 2441134
strangerhood, concept of, 257n9
“the stranger,” tourist as, 183-85
Su (Ping’an villager), 215-16
Sun Jiuxia, 138
Sun Yat-sen, 26
suzhi (quality): campaign to increase, 89,
91-92, 94-95; concept of, 78
Swain, Margaret, 245n44
Tai/Dai-Lue ethnicity, 24ini3
“taskscape,” concept of, 239nio
Teacher Pan, from Upper Jidao, 64-65,
67, 70,116,124,173-74, 202, 231, 257m;
visit to Ping’an (2007) and, 209, 211,
213-14, 225-26
terraced fields: ethnic distinctions and,
189-90; tourism in Ping’an and,
41-44, 42, 43, 48-49,194; viewpoints
and, 48, 49, 219, 246n54; village labor
and, 48-49, 53, 125,150-52
Thailand, 12,179
theme park model (village as theme
park), 38-39, 63,110-11
Third Sister Liu (film), 30-31
ticket sales in Ping’an, xxii, 45-49, 54,
125,175-78, 257m
“time-space compression,” concept of,
257n8
topknots (jiujiu), 252nio
tour agencies: Chinese tourists and,
xv; classes of, 248ni2; expectations
of, 212; insurance and, 80; touristIndex |	293
behavior and, 93; village hosts and,
65
tourism: as development, 86-91;
differences vs. distances and,
181-85; meanings of, xvi, xvii, 14-15;
as mobility, 109-10; nong jia le as
business model for, 95-99; social
inequalities of, 190-94. See also
domestic tourism; ethnic tourism;
international tourism
tourism associations (liiyou xiehui),
60-61, 226-27. See also Upper fidao
Tourism Association
tourist behavior, 91-95, 248115. See also
“civilized lourisiifYivcmn/ny liiyou)
tourist expectations: appearances and,
134-35,149-50; distance and, 204-7;
ethnic dress and, 147,148-49; moti-
vating types of distance and, 182-85;
returned migrants’ knowledge of, 111,
117-20; village differentiation and,
200-201, 202-3
touristic imagery, 24oni5. See also
photography; visuality
training programs for ethnic villagers,
60-61, 63-64, 68-70,117, 226
“transactional exchange,” concept of,
255ni9
travel. See mobility; rural-to-urban
migration
travel agencies: tourist behavior and, 93
travel media: domestic audiences and,
xiv-xvi; “imagining elsewhere(s)”
and, 238n6; production of, and
visuality, xxv-xxvi; publicity of
Upper fidao tourism in, 67-68;
success in tourism and, 254ni2;
Upper fidao and, 146-47
Travelprints guidebooks, xiii-xvi
travel stories: concept of home and, xiv;
returned migrants and, xxiii-xiv,
111-25
Tucker, Hazel, 96,109
Turner, fessica Anderson, 41, 55, 2461159
UNESCO World Heritage list, 136,
2471167, 253n4, 254 n8
United Nations, 8
Upper fidao Tourism Association, xvii,
60-61, 64-65; visit to Ping’an (2007),
209, 210-26
Upper fidao village, Guizhou:
architectural renovation in, 139-45;
“being ethnic” in, 63-64; billboards
promoting tourism and, 4, 5;
characteristics of, xxii-xxiii, 63;
“cleaning up” efforts in, 90, 257113;
development in, xviii-xix, 57-70, 230,
231, 247n7i, 247n74, 259 n7; filming
in, 145-49; household incomes in,
56 57, 90; “hundred year” features of,
142, 253n6; images of clothing and,
254ml; village tensions and, 173-75,
178, 194-204; Miao ethnicity and,
200-201, 246n62, 247n73; mobility
of residents of, 103-4; nature of
fieldwork in, xxi; “planning” for
tourism in, 91; poverty and, 5, 40,
76-77, 78, 247n7o; returned migrants
in, 111,114-16,117-20,123-24; special
characteristics of, 196-204,197;
tourism organization in, 64-65
Upper Langde village, Guizhou, 55, 59,
73,197, 257ni7; Lower Langde and,
257ni4
Urry, fohn, 44, 129, 253ni7
viewpoints (guanjing tai), 48, 49, 219,
237113, 246n54
village residents: asymmetry of tourism
as mobility for, 109-10,129-31;
attitudes toward tourism develop-
ment and, 66; economic impacts
of tourism on, 44-53,126-28, 185;
experience of doing tourism for, 6-7,
14-15; improving suzhi (quality) and,
89, 91-92, 94-95, 98; individual vs.
tourism goals and, 65, 95-96, 209-16,
230-	31; learning about tourism and,
231-	32; in photographs, 147,148-49,
167-69,168; relationships to minority
models and, 166-71; socioeconomic
tensions among, 185-94; terminology
and, 249ni6; travel experiences of, 99
(see also returned migrants); work in
tourism for, 50-52, 68294	| Index
“visual amenity,” concept of, 24oni8
“visual economy,” 239ni5. See also
touristic imagery
“visual effect,” concept of, 24oni8
visuality: architectural renovation and,
134-38,142-43,144; collective vs.
individual goals for tourism and,
210; concept of, 13; elements of, 17-18;
lives of village residents and, 15-16;
research orientation and, xx-xxvi,
210-11; “scopic regimes” and, 239ml;
the unseen in tourism and, 2451153;
Upper Jidao villagers experience in
Ping’an and, 216-22; value of ethnic-
ity and, 228-29. See also “looking
good”; photography
visual media: ethnic classifications and,
28-31; filming in Upper Jidao and,
145-49; in research, xxiv-xxv
Wall, Geoffrey, 36
Wang Qiao (Kaili Tourism Bureau Party
Secretary), 144,197
Wang Wei (Beijing Olympics official),
156, 157
Wang Xiaomei, 133
Wang, Yu, xxiv, 136
Wei Xiao’an, 254ni2
Wen Tong, 43, 45
Western influences: ethnic classification
and, 26; local foods and, 252ni2
“whiteness,” notions of, 242n23
“wild vegetables” (yecai), 215, 259113
wind-and-rain bridges (fengyu qiao), 91,
145, 201
wooden houses, 139-45
World Bank project in Guizhou, 237n4;
Strategic Environmental Assessment
Study and, 17, 139-40; Upper Jidao
development and, 56, 62, 139,194,
230, 231, 259 n7
World Tourism Association (UNWTO),
xxii, 59, 62,114
Wu (Upper Jidao resident), 69
Xiao Qianhui, 195,197
Xijiang Thousand Households Miao
Village, Guizhou, 203,196, 257ni5
Xu, Gang, 79, 249ni3
Xu Ganli, 44
Yan Hairong, 252n5
Yang Guanghai 242ni5
Yang, Li, 36
Yao women in Ping’an, 55,189-90,
218-22, 220
Yuan (minority model in Ping’an),
164-65,167,188, 256n3i
Yunnan: ethnic classification in, 33,
24ini3; film on, 31. See also Dai
village park, Yunnan
Ze (Upper Jidao villager), 111,113,119-20,
124, 252nio; travels by, 112
Zhangjiajie forest park in Hunan, 51
Zhang Tan, 61-62
Zhang Xiaosong, 60-61, 62, 66-67, 230,
247n7i. See also Chain Reaction
(organization)
Zhuang ethnicity: classification and,
27-28; creation of, 27-28; ethnic
clothes and, 167,168; “ethnicizing”
Ping’an and, 54-55; film on, 31; Long)
village and, 188-89; loss of, 21-25;
total population of, 40-41
Zoellick, Robert, 69Whilj the number of domestic leisure travelers has increased dramatically in
reform-era China, the persistent gap between urban and rural living standards
attests to ongoing social, economic, and political inequalities. The state has widely
touted tourism for its potential to bring wealth and modernity to rural ethnic minority
communities, but the policies underlying the development of tourism obscure some
complicated realities. In tourism, after all, one person’s leisure is another person’s labor.
A Landscape of Travel investigates the contested meanings and unintended
consequences of tourism for those people whose lives and livelihoods are most at stake
in China’s rural ethnic tourism industry: the residents of village destinations. Drawing
on ethnographic research conducted in Ping’an (a Zhuang village in Guangxi) and
Upper Jidao (a Miao village in Guizhou), Jenny Chio analyzes the myriad challenges and
possibilities confronted by villagers who are called upon to do the work of tourism. She
addresses the shifting significance of migration and rural mobility, the visual politics of
tourist photography, and the effects of touristic desires for “exotic difference” on village
social relations. In this way, Chio illuminates the contemporary regimes of labor and
leisure and the changing imagination of what it means to be rural, ethnic, and modern
in China today.
jenny chio is assistant professor of anthropology and associated faculty in film and
media studies at Emory University. She is the director of the ethnographic film
Peasant Family Happiness (2013).
"If we want to understand why tourists see and experience what they do ... and how this
reflects China as a nation that travels, [this book] is both delightful and essential.”
From the foreword bysTEVAN harrell
"While it has not been uncommon to view rural China as an increasingly ‘mobilized’
landscape of excess labor seeking better livelihoods in the cities, Chios study approaches
mobility in more abstract and broad-ranging terms. Anyone interested in ethnography,
ethnicity in China, and anthropologies of tourism will find A Landscape of Travel
interesting.”	riM oaki s, University of Colorado at Boulder
“Ethnographically rich and theoretically engaging, A Landscape of Travel is a remarkable
and timely study of how rural, ethnic people do tourism’ in a rapidly transforming and
globalizing China. A major contribution to tourism studies and China studies!”
li zhang, author of Strangers in the City and In Search of Paradise
“A Landscape of Travel documents the transformation of terraced rice paddies from food
production to scenery for tourist photography; the arrival of migrant workers to play the
part of local ethnic minorities; the shedding of traditional attire for store-bought costumes
designed to look generically ethnic; the applique of wood bark to the outside of cinder-
block homes to make them appear more rustic. This is a superb account of the day-to-day
workings of collectivist capitalism in rural China.”
dean Mace annell, University of California, Davis
Studies on Ethnic Groups in China
ISBN 97S-O-295-99366-9
7 8 0
9 3 6 6 9
9 0 0 0 0
University of Washington Press
Seattle and London
www.washington.edu/uwpress
9
Front cover photo: Ping’an village, Guangxi (2007). Photo by Jenny Chio.