NOTES

PREFACE

1Because this discussion was at the time a preliminary exploration for the Chinese publishers, I was asked not to use the company’s real name.

2Of 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.

3I am following the English translations of names provided on a map of the scenic 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 (Guilin 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 Nyíri 2006, 7). However, 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 distinguish these second-level guanjingqu as “scenic spots” because they are contained within the larger scenic area. Each of these three scenic spots has multiple jingdian (also translatable as “scenic spots” but which the official company map calls “viewpoints”) 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.

4Officially, the World Bank loan agreement is called the Guizhou Cultural and Natural Heritage Protection and Development Project. It was approved in 2009.

5Much has been written on visual research methods and collaboration using photography, video, and other media (including drawing) in anthropological and social science research; the literature is too extensive to list here. For a fuller discussion 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; Jackson 2004; Lozada 2006; and Turner 1992. On the history of travel films, see Ruoff 2002 and 2006.

6Oakes 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 elsewhere(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 subjectivity 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.

7Wasserstrom (2010, 122) cites Chang 2009 in making 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 calculated at 225 million (NBS 2009).

INTRODUCTION

1For 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.

2Oakes 1998 provides a comprehensive account of tourism development in Guizhou up through the mid-1990s; Donaldson 2007 compares tourism development policies recently enacted in Guizhou with those in neighboring Yunnan.

3The scholarly literature on Chinese migration, both internal and international, is large; see, for example, Fan 2005; Huang and Zhan 2005; Xin Liu 1997; Nyíri 2005a, 2005b, and 2010; Ong 1999; Ong and Nonini 1997; Solinger 1999; Sun 2002; and L. Zhang 2001. Xin Liu 1997 and, more recently, Nyíri 2010 offer readings of migration in the context of social mobility and national desires that have greatly informed my understanding.

4Chinese 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 (Nyíri 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.

5These 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 Publishing Group (CIPG) in Beijing” (from www.china.org.cn/2009-09/28/content_18620394.htm).

6The 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, 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.

8These are ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes (see Appadurai 1996, 33).

9On landscaping as an act of power, see Urry 2000, 80–93; see also Mitchell 2002 and Pratt 2008 [1992] on imperialism and visuality.

10Tim 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.

11Martin Jay 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” (Jay 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, Jay (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 “pictorial turn,” or the critique of the image, in academic scholarship, with its disciplinary 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).

12In the fields of art history and visual studies, critical approaches to landscape imagery have unpacked the power relations embedded in representations of landscape; see, for example, DeLue and Elkins 2008, and Mitchell 2002.

13Following this argument, Julia Harrison (2003) has shown through detailed, longitudinal interviews with Canadians before and after tours that tourism is not a separate sphere of experience but rather fully integrated into the passage of everyday time through anticipation and planning (before tour) and, later, storytelling and memory (after tour).

14The latter point has been persuasively argued in Graburn with Barthel-Bouchier 2001, MacCannell 1999 [1976]) and 2001, and Urry 2002b [1990].

15From Deborah Poole’s (1997, 10) work on the meanings and movements of Andean images, I take “visual economy” to encompass the cultural systems of technologies, 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 Lübbren 2003; Desmond 2001; Kahn 2011; and Selwyn 1996.

16On a similar process in urban China, see Broudehoux 2004 and 2007 for an incisive critique of the spectacularization of architecture in Beijing before the 2008 Olympics and the relationships of this visual spectacle to regimes of power, international attention, and authoritarian control.

17See, 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).

19Roads 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 commented on how “pretty” the road was and added that with the new, more convenient access to the city, “it won’t seem so far from here to there.”

1. SIMILAR, WITH MINOR DIFFERENCES

1The 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) (Harrell 2001, 38). Some scholars and official government writings on shaoshu minzu translate this phrase as “minority nationality,” following early Chinese Communist 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, 232fn1), 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.

2The following history of Ping’an is drawn largely from Lao’s written account, as well as from other scholarly sources.

3For a comparative study of folklore and cultural change in Ping’an and two surrounding villages, see Xu Ganli 2006.

4On the creation of the Zhuang as a political and ethnic category in China, see Kaup 2000.

5Administratively 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 Zhongdian was renamed “Shangri-la” as a means of increasing its visibility in tourism promotions (Hillman 2003 and Kolås 2008).

6Some 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 Leibold 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”).

7This “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 (shu), 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 control (Diamond 1995, 100).

8See Hostetler 2001 and Deal and Hostetler 2003.

9For example, take the emergence of the Chinese as the “yellow race”—a term first used by Europeans but brought back to China by missionaries (Dikötter 1992, 55).

10As James Leibold (2007, 29) has written: “The increased threat of Western imperialism 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.”

11Attention 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 technological advances, new Chinese nationalism, and continued colonial presence. Race and ethnic otherness in China during this period developed into an amalgamation 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.

12During 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).

13Mullaney 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 notable 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.

14Morgan 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]).

15Karsten Krüger (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 project. 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 Documentary 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.

16Through the efforts of Karsten Krüger and others, eleven of the films were remastered, 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 (1960), The Dulong People (1960–61), The Serf System of the Town of Shahliq (1960, 1962), The Jingpo (1960, 1962), The Oroqen (1963), The Hunting and Fishing Life of the Hezhe (1965), The “Azhu” Marriage System of the Naxi (Moso) from Yongning (1965), and Naxi Art and Culture in Lijiang (1966). See also Alexander 2005 and Chio dir. 2003.

17Moreover, the limited distribution of these ethnic classification films begs the question of what types of films were considered appropriate for public distribution and which qualities of scientific documentary filmmaking made its products unsuitable or undesirable for a mass audience.

18Many of these films about the struggles and livelihoods of ethnic minorities in Communist China from the 1950s and 1960s remain hugely popular in contemporary 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.

19Berry 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.

20According 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 they 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,’ contemporary fiction films from China conversely appear to be real ethnographic documents.”

21Other examples of minority song and dance performances being remade to convey 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).

22See Diamond 1995, Oakes 1998, Rack 2005, and Schein 2000.

23Social 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” during 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 ethnic 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.

24There is also a growing body of scholarship emerging on the conceptual similarities 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 understanding 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).

25The 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.

26For 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.

27Edward 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 conceived 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 backstage authenticity in his story to defend and justify his “failure” at boundary maintenance; MacCannell later published, in 2008, a pointed rejoinder on his role in Bruner’s story.

28See Bruner 2005, Cohen 2001, Hitchcock 1999, and Picard 1996.

29See Hitchcock 1995, Tilley 1997, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998 and 2006, and Thomas 1999.

30On tourist motivations, see Cohen 1979, Graburn with Barthel-Bouchier 2001, MacCannell 1999 [1976], and N. Wang 1999; on anxiety, modernity, and the marketing of “the ethnic” in the genre of world music, see Feld 2000.

31See 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.

32Critical 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 destinations 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 particular form of language play that emphasizes nostalgic yearning and desires. Ning Wang (1999, 360) elaborates on the relationship between authenticity and nostalgia, 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 themselves 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.”

33Svetlana 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.

34As 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 nostalgia and longing, manifest in the materiality of the photograph.

35David 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 Connecticut casino had trumped his own, as not looking to him like ‘real’ Indians. They had looked Indian enough, they retorted, when they were poor.”

36The 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.

37Taman 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; Errington 1998; Hitchcock 1995 and 1998; and Wood 1997.

38For 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.

39See 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.

40In 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 from the Central Institute of Nationality Studies during trips to the Longsheng region, including visits to Ping’an village, between May and September 1998.

41See 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.

42Luo 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.

43On 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.

44Margaret 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 purposes of engaging with, and in, the global networks of capital embodied in tourism.

45On China’s national tourism rating system, see Nyíri 2006.

46See 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.

47Wen Tong (2002) reported 710 persons in 156 households; Huang Haizhu (2006) reported 792 persons in 180 households.

48For example, Chinese scholars working in Ping’an have published on the development 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).

49Judith Shapiro (2001, 106–14) provides an account of hillside terracing and forced agricultural production in the model village of Dazhai, Shanxi during this era.

50Lao could not remember where exactly these foreign tourists were from; most residents I asked assumed they were from Hong Kong, although a few people told me they were “really foreign,” as in North American or European.

51Guilin was one of the first cities in China to be developed and designated for tourism in the early 1980s, so it is not entirely surprising that local officials in Longsheng also began discussing tourism so soon after China’s reform and opening in the late 1970s.

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 yong yangqian).

53Urry’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 photography, is part of a hermeneutic “sociocultural circle” of experience, reintegration and feedback.

54I 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 addition to postcards, photo books, and the like.

55This is the individual walk-up price. Tour group tickets are discounted by 50 percent.

56Ticket 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.

57This average is based off numbers from my own household survey in Ping’an.

58Sources 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.

59Thanks 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.

60Tourism in Upper Langde has been widely studied; see Donaldson 2007; Oakes 1998, 193–204, and 2006a; Wang Xiaomei 2007; and Zhou X. 1999.

61In 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.

62The 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.

63In 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.

64Articles 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 Upper 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.

65It 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.

66It 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).

67The 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.

68The 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.

69By 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.

70Jidao village had also been included in other recent rural poverty studies and projects, 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 Development Brief (Perrement 2006).

71I 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.

72See Chio 2012 for a discussion of locally recorded videos of Miao cultural life in Guizhou.

73In the village most people spoke Miao to each other, and when engaging with non-Miao speakers, they spoke a local dialect, Kailihua.

74Much 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.

75See Oakes 1999 for a case study of a more business-oriented handicrafts production.

76Unfortunately 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.

77Qin 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

1See Park 2008 for a study of nong jia le tourism outside Beijing.

2This 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 translation 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.

3These definitions have been taken from Guizhou Statistical Bureau 2007.

4For general statistical review of national conditions in 2006, see People’s Daily Online 2007.

5These “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 holiday, while in September 2013 updated guidelines for tourist behavior were issued by the CNTA (“China’s First Tourism Law Comes into Effect, Tourists Issued Manner Guides,” online at www.cnn.com/2013/10/03/travel/new-china-tourism-law/, accessed October 29, 2013).

6Of course, the idea that tourism could be harnessed for national development circulated 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.

7See Sofield and Li 1998a and 1998b. For example, the practice of landscape painting coupled with poetic inscriptions continues to inform contemporary travel patterns 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 Nyíri 2006 and 2010; for an assessment of Chinese outbound tourism, see Arlt 2006).

8Many studies of tourism have viewed the phenomenon as an outgrowth of a distinctly Western, Euro-American historical condition rooted in nineteenth-century 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” 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; Nyíri 2006; and Winter 2007 and 2009.

9See Chan and Zhang 1999 and F. Wang 2005 for detailed studies of the hukou system.

10See 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 Han 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, desirable 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.

11See Ghimire and Zhou 2001; Lew et al., eds. 2002; Li and Jia 2004; Qiao 1995; Oakes 1998; Xiao Q. 2005; and Zhang W. 1997.

12Class A enterprises could do business directly with overseas tour operators; Class B could receive international tourists organized by Class A agencies. Class C enterprises were limited to organizing domestic tours, though Class A and Class B agencies also engaged in domestic tour businesses as well (Gang Xu 1999, 77fn15). 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).

13The exact sources and methodologies used to gather this data is unclear; the statistical yearbooks do not specify precisely how these numbers were calculated. However, 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 tickets sold at major sightseeing destinations. Pál Nyíri (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 government. The original charts also provide an explanation regarding urban/rural tourist 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.

14See Gao, Huang, and Huang 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.

15A number of the Communist-era documentary films discussed in chapter 1 explicitly 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.

16While I use “peasant” as a translation for nongmin (as do Chu 2010, Hathaway 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” or “villager” in recognition of the diversity of occupations, livelihoods, individual histories, and kin relations in each community.

17See Su 2009, 81–117, for a general overview of the construction of the Chinese peasant historically and in light of more recent development goals.

18Julie Chu (2010, 64–65) provides a case from Fujian, where residents of Longyan, a rural area by classification, had “mainly relied on nonagricultural and translocal kinds of labor before the Second World War,” so they found that “the reclassification 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.”

19According to Gao, Huang, and Huang (2009, 440), this formulation was first posited by social scientists in the late 1980s as an analytical framework for addressing and solving problems in China’s rural development.

20Chu 2010 calls this the “moral career of the peasant,” in which it has been impossible for the category and the term to be dissociated from perceptions of social and economic backwardness. For a comparative study of development plans, including the role of tourism, in Yunnan and Guizhou throughout the 2000s, see Donaldson 2011.

21The “West” in this campaign encompassed everything from parts of northeastern Jilin to the Tibet Autonomous Region (Goodman 2004, 5–10).

22See He 2005, Li and Jia 2004, Shi 2005, Yang and Hui 2005, and Zhang P. 2005.

23These are the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Ningxia Mongolian Autonomous Region, Tibet Autonomous Region, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

24The convergence of ethnic minority development and tourism development, particularly in the late 1990s to early 2000s, has been well studied; see S. Davis 2005, Hillman 2003, Kolås 2008, Oakes 1998, Mueggler 2002, Notar 2006, Schein 2000, and Swain 2001.

25See, for example, Anagnost 2004, Hoffman 2003, Kipnis 2006, Murphy 2004, and Nyíri 2010 as well as a special section of the journal positions 17, no. 3 (2009): 523–642.

26On women migrant workers, suzhi, and subjectivity, see, for example, Gaetano and Jacka 2004 and Yan 2008.

27Official 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.org.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.

28This report is available online at “Socialist Countryside Should Not Be Mere Exercise in Vanity,” online at www.china.org.cn/english/2007lh/201767.htm.

29The complete law, “Law of the PRC on Urban and Rural Planning,” can be accessed online at www.china.org.cn/china/LegislationsForm2001-2010/2011-02/11/content_21899292.htm.

30On some of the problems of the New Socialist Countryside policy, see also Perry 2011.

31These 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 cultural 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.

32Gorsuch (2003) adopts this idea of a “ritual of reassurance” from Linda Ellerbee (2000).

33The 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.

34See Chio 2010 and Nyíri 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).

35See Sha and Wang 2006, Shao 2007, and Wang and Bai 2006.

36This was published originally in Qiushi (Seeking Truth no. 1 [2007]), the ideological journal of the Chinese Communist Party (cited in Blanchard 2007), and in magazines 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).

37In addition to miao jia le in Guizhou, this convention has also been observed in ethnic Dai regions in Yunnan, where nong jia 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 functionally inappropriate given the occupational diversity of rural residents (see also Zhang and Donaldson 2010).

39Nostalgia 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

1This 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.

2Julie 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.”

3The 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.

4For example, see studies on the effects of migration on sending communities in rural Jiangxi (Murphy 2002); patterns of migration and identity discourse among communities within Anhui, an area of China commonly associated with supplying 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).

5Yan 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 emaciated 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.

6For studies of migrants in tourism destinations, see Bookman 2006; Castellanos 2007, 2008, and 2010; Castellanos and Boehm 2008; and Lindquist 2009.

7After all, for the “global underclass that struggles to make sense of the world it inhabits in different ways . . . [t]hese 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).

8R. 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).

9The 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.

10Ze’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.

11The 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.

12As 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.

13The region around Ping’an was a major producer of lumber for the domestic markets 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.

14By 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.

15Ironically, 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 knowledgeable about modern building techniques. In his own case, then, the migrant experiences of this man’s son were considered beneficial to the family business.

16During the 17th Party Congress in 2007, then President Hu Jintao made a statement 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 registration 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.”

17Elsewhere, 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 practices, 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.”

18Diane 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” (Austin-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”

1On tourism in Upper Langde, see Donaldson 2007 and 2011; Oakes 1998, 2006a, and 2011; Yu D. 2008; and Zhou X. 1999.

2See Adler 1989, MacCannell 1999 [1976] and 2011, Urry 2002b [1990], and van den Abeele 1980 on sightseeing and tourism.

3By “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.

4Tourism 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.

5For a captivating documentary portrait of this phenomenon in Beijing, see the 2009 film New Beijing: Reinventing a City, directed by Georgia Wallace-Crabbe.

6There are a series of “hundred year” features of Upper Jidao that have been particularly targeted as valuable and worth promoting as a part of the village’s tourism. 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.

7It 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 speculated, but of course no one could say for sure what might have been.

8The 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 guidelines on how buildings (residential and commercial) can or cannot be altered, inside and out, for the purpose of historical preservation.

9Families 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.

10This particular series was called Ethnic Odyssey and featured, in total, sixteen episodes on fifteen different ethnic minority groups in China. It is now available as a DVD box set, distributed by China International TV Corporation.

11Such 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).

12None 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).

13More precisely, this style of architecture is known as diaojiaolou, 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. Diaojiaolou are found throughout Buyi, Dong, Miao, Shui, Tujia, and Zhuang ethnic minority communities in Guangxi, Guizhou, and neighboring areas in southwestern China.

14I 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.

15See 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 restaurants, 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.

16Village 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.

17See, 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.

18Questions 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.

19Hyde’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 current 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 photography, I am reluctant to assume, ipso facto, that the models I studied were necessarily 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).

20Hyde (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.”

21Hyde 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.

22The 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 differences in color).

23By 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.

24See the work of Åshild Kolås (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.

25Xin Liu (2002) has analyzed the terminology of “boss” and “miss” (xiaojie) in relation to businessmen and female escorts in China’s business culture; addressing a man as “boss” carries with it an immediate acknowledgment of respect and inequality in social status between the parties involved.

26Wedding 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.

27Pigs 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” ().

28Erik Cohen, Yeshayahu Nir and Uri Almagor (1992) have compared social relationships 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 ambiguity in the [photographer-photographee interaction] is most pronounced in situations 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).

29See Hammond et al. 2009 for an analysis of anthropology textbook covers.

30By appearing in pictures of the terraces, local women countered the “disemplacement” 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.”

31As 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.

32Notar (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.”

33See the work of Olivier Evrard and Prasit Leepreecha (2009, 250) for a similar case in contemporary Thai domestic tourism.

5. THE ABILITY TO BE DIFFERENT

1After the holiday week was over, I asked Teacher Pan how many tourists had visited; 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.

2It 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 residents on the whole believed this to be the case was revealing of their perspective on village relations after the tourism plans began.

3This 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.

4It 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 restaurant. There are public toilets in only three places in Ping’an—at the parking lot and at each of the two viewpoints.

5See, for example, Sun and Bao 2007a, 2007b, and 2007c; Nyíri 2006; Wen 2002; and Xu Ganli 2005.

6My 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.

7For example, Erik Cohen (1979) schematically analyzed different modes of tourist experiences.

8I 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 valuable commodity.

9The 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 makes 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.

10Information 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.

11The 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.

12I 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).

13The platforms where the minority models work were another example of this; but these structures, haphazardly constructed, were deemed unsightly by the management and county government officials in 2008 and forcibly taken down that spring. Some platforms had reappeared again in 2012, however.

14Upper 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 villages in the area. Furthermore, as has been demonstrated in studies of the profit-sharing system used in Upper Langde tourism (see Wang X. 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 tourism in 1997.

15For reports on Xijiang’s redevelopment and subsequent economic boom, see articles 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 development 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).

16Information on Japan’s One Village One Product movement can be found online at www.ovop.jp.

17The village in the background of the advertisement is actually Upper Langde village; it is recognizable from the location of the buildings and paths around the performance space.

18Thanks to Nelson Graburn, who first pointed out to me the formulaic structure of building tourism villages in terms of certain key components.

19To 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 Foucault’s study of knowledge, nature, being human, and categories in The Order of Things (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 history 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

1As noted in previous chapters, following arguments by Xin Liu (1997) and Pál Nyíri (2006 and 2009), overseas Chinese migrants are typically considered at the top of the “social-spatial hierarchy.”

2Village 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.

3The “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.

4Some 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 collectors who specialized in ethnic handicrafts from Guizhou or other parts of rural Guangxi.

5They had the advantage of being a larger extended household, including grandparents, 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 restaurant 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.

6The concrete houses were strategically situated throughout the village to control the spread of a fire, if one were to break out.

7According 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 “insufficient commitment to the project’s participatory approach and inadequate assistance 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 residents 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 residents 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 both the project development objectives and the key performance indicators to help the project’s progress improve (World Bank 2013, 1–2).