1
positions: east asia cultures critique 7.2 (1999) 307-342
Bathing in the Far Village: Globalization,
Transnational Capital, and the Cultural Politics of
Modernity in China*
Tim Oakes
Bathing in the Far Village
In the summer of 1996 I was browsing through a chic clothing boutique in downtown Seattle when
I came across a batik bathrobe prominently displayed alongside several elegant dresses (fig. 1).
It caught my attention because it was of a particular style of batik that I recognized. The sight of it-displayed among the silk, linen, and rayon gowns from around the world--stopped me in my
tracks, for two years earlier I had seen this type of batik being produced in the rural households
and town workshops of Guizhou, China. Knowing what peasant women earned in the laborious
and highly skilled work of applying wax for batik dying, my first impulse was, of course, to check
the price tag. The bathrobe was going for a cool $150. By my calculation, the Guizhou household
that contributed the majority of the labor needed to produce the bathrobe earned roughly 2.5
percent of the retail sale price. [End Page 307]
Figure 1. Far Village batik bathrobe hanging in a Seattle clothing boutique
2
The labor of women villagers in Guizhou was being sold in Seattle under the label of Far Village,
a small company established in 1993 by a Los Angeles designer. As the bathrobe's tag--on rough
handcrafted paper--sought to make clear, the purpose of Far Village was to promote and protect
the art and craft skills of "ancient cultures" such as Guizhou's Miao people. More than this, Far
Village claimed that it promoted the empowerment of Miao peasant women, the actual producers
of its clothing. As the tag made explicit, the consumer was purchasing much more than just a
bathrobe; indeed, the item itself was almost secondary to the concept being sold: the possibility of
organic cultural continuity in the modern world and--as an added bonus--the modern
emancipation of village women as well. The Far Village project promoted a multicultural politics of
consumption that has become a hallmark of advanced capitalism in the neoliberal West, a
"politics" constituted less by the production of difference than by its circulation according to the
needs of flexible accumulation and postmodern cultural relativism. [End Page 308] Within this
politics of consumption, a blissful collage of abstracted and consumable identities substitutes for
the real social differences that have historically emerged within and been so disruptive to capital.1
One way of interpreting the displacement of cultural politics from the realm of production to that of
consumption is to see it as part of the global penetration of the commodity form--the colonization
and exploitation by transnational capital of the remaining modes of production that have
previously functioned beyond its reach. Capital, according to this view, roams the world in search
of cultural otherness that is ripe for commodification, while consumer-tourists, transfixed by the
ideologies of multiculturalism, quickly follow to "appreciate" and "preserve" the wreckage that
remains. Indeed, an apparent condition of advanced or "disorganized" capitalism is a pattern of
everyday consumption that renders us more and more like tourists as we purchase not products
but representations and experiences.2 Thus, in Seattle, one can be an ethnic tourist by
purchasing a batik bathrobe; one can bathe in the far village without ever leaving the bathroom-and believe that the village is better off for it. At any rate, that is the marketing pitch that Far
Village, as a capitalist venture, relies upon.3
At first glance, then, the Far Village project reflects the familiar story of transnational capitalism,
with its pervasive extension of the commodity form into the final frontiers of premodern "tradition"
and the metropolitan fetishizing of those commodities into the misplaced metaphors of
preindustrial cultural preservation and justice for Fourth World women. 4 But the ethnographic
details underlying the Far Village project compel us to challenge the assumption that globalization
is a straightforward process of capital commodifying everything in its path and enlisting cultural
differences into its repertoire of surplus-value extraction. The social relations of production that
underlie the Far Village project are profoundly conditioned by multiple ethnic, cultural, and gender
differences within China, differences that divert and complicate the politics of consumption going
on in the Seattle boutique, as well as the material processes of commodification underway in
Guizhou. While the surplus labor of Miao village women is being appropriated by capital (a fact
obscured by the myths of preserving ancient culture and empowering women), their encounter
with transnational capital is further complicated by an ongoing cultural politics of modernity within
[End Page 309] China, which, in its latest guise, could be described as the challenge of an
increasingly vigorous capitalist marketplace to the socialist state's role as the dominant narrator
of China's "identity" as a modern nation-state and culturally coherent society.5 Ethnic groups in
China, such as the Miao, find themselves at the unstable intersection of state and capitalist
discourses as they compete for the loudest voice in narrating ideal models for the modern
imaginations of the Chinese people. Their participation in a globalized production and marketing
project such as Far Village enlists Miao villagers in a struggle not only over the exploitation of
surplus labor value but also over the unfinished project of modern China. It is this struggle over
Chinese modernity, and the role of ethnic groups in this struggle, that divert and distort the politics
of consumption expressed in the purchase of a batik bathrobe. While globalization clearly links
producers and consumers across vast spatial divides, intensifying the exploitative reach of capital
to an unprecedented scale, this essay seeks to argue that those linkages are profoundly
conditioned and altered by processes that occur on more local and regional scales. Here,
3
globalization is viewed through the lens of the local to bring into sharper focus the dynamic
interaction between placed cultural practice and displaced capital.6
That "globalization" should, paradoxically, be interpreted on a local scale suggests a corrective of
assumptions about the penetration of transnational capital into the earth's last pockets of
"premodern modes of production." The commodity form--marking an uncomplicated chain of
(exploitative) exchange between consumers in a Seattle boutique and producers in a Guizhou
village--is not the only manifestation of social differentiation inherent in the encounter of Miao
women with the global marketplace. More significant are the ways capital accumulation gets
caught up in the ethnic and gender differences that mark the Guizhou countryside. These
differences not only condition patterns of capital accumulation as China integrates into global
markets, but they are themselves reconstituted through their encounter with capital. Globalization
does not simply reduce cultural differences to commodities; nor should the critique of
transnational modernity assume that alternatives to capitalist exploitation can emerge only from
the peripheries of the global economy, where "premodern traditions" still adhere. The critique of
globalization, in other words, should not [End Page 310] "lead us to fetishize imaginary spaces
that are not yet under the sway of capitalism."7 Rather, this paper seeks to contribute to a growing
field of studies that "focus on the intersection of commodification and labor exploitation under
postmodern transnational modes of production with the historical emergence of social formations
in time with but also in antagonism to modernity; these social formations are not residues of the
premodern, but are differentiated formations that mediate the processes through which capital
profits through the mixing and combination of exploitative modes."8
While the Far Village project does seek to entice consumers with those fetishized "imaginary
spaces" not yet under the sway of capital, a critique of the project should not simply reverse the
equation, claiming it as another case in the pervasive transnational commodification of
premodern cultural difference worldwide. Instead, at issue in this essay is the constitution of
social differentiation along ethnic and gender lines within the political economy of state-mediated
capitalist development in China. It is therefore necessary to situate the Far Village project within
the current social relations of production in the Guizhou countryside. This will reveal that the
village producers of Far Village textiles are in fact already living "under the sway of capital,"
having been enlisted in capitalist relations of production that stem from a decentralizing state, a
liberalizing market, and a growing tourist economy. Indeed, the worldwide growth of ethnic
tourism is perhaps indicative of the increasing purchase postmodern multiculturalism has on the
touristic consuming urges of metropolitans.9 The participation of Miao villagers in this growing
ethnic craft-tourist economy does not reflect their desire to maintain a mythical "premodern" way
of life; nor is it inspired by a need to resist capitalist homogenization. Rather, their participation is
driven by an acute pressure for economic survival in the insecure political economy of China's
commercializing rural sector.
Examining ethnic politics in China according to the political-economic context of the relationship
between rural ethnic producers and international capital--as mediated by the Chinese state and
the tourism industry-- also offers a materialist contribution to the growing literature on Chinese
ethnic cultural studies.10 In this essay, minority subjectivity is also considered, but within a field of
power relations dominated by capital and state policies that have less to do with ethnicity per se
than with liberal market reforms. [End Page 311] While I offer no definitive conclusions regarding
the agency of minority subjects, I hope to provide a framework for analyzing ethnic cultural
politics in China that pays explicit attention to the growing role of mobile capital and market
development in conditioning minority subjectivities.
The Sway of Capital
Gathering the analytical threads spun thus far, three critical points may now be made regarding
the political-economic context of ethnic crafts production in China. First, the Far Village project
4
represents less the preservation of a noncapitalist production environment and culture than an
intensification and an extension of an existing form of state capitalism in China toward more
global channels of accumulation. Second, the functional division of labor inherent in Guizhou's
commercial rural crafts production is marked by gender and ethnicity. The Guizhou crafts industry
is segmented into Han versus non-Han ethnicity, and the question of who eventually controls the
production of ethnic products is also a question of ethnic politics.11 In addition, minority
subjectivity in China is largely a feminized subjectivity; crafts production itself is thus further
segmented by the marking of specific tasks as "women's work." Ethnicity and gender thus play
complementary roles in the configuring of minority subjectivity in China, and these roles are
reflected in the production relations that dominate the crafts industry. Third, the cultural politics of
crafts production in Guizhou provides an arena in which the divergent interests of the state and
capital become apparent as they compete for dominance over the ethnicity- and gender-charged
narratives of Chinese modernity. The consumer of Far Village products enters unaware into this
arena of the cultural politics of Chinese modernity.
The Far Village project seeks to promote an alternative model to the industrial capitalist modernity
of the West. Yet, paradoxically, it seeks to achieve this via conventional market mechanisms that
are subject to uneven patterns of capital accumulation. The Los Angeles designer who, in 1993,
proposed the project to leaders in Guizhou's crafts and tourism industries sought explicitly to
"avoid demanding so much work that it disrupts village life and becomes an unpleasant chore."
Her proposal further indicated that [End Page 312] "rather than just selling a product we want to
sell the concept of Far Village; that the world needs to protect and help these ancient cultures to
survive; that things made by hand are valuable and should be honored; and that the marketplace
will respond to such a selling technique."12 Her vision for the project was that of a nonexploitative
market link between metropolitan consumers and "ancient cultures"--the latter with their
traditional, noncapitalist modes of production (modes presumably not characterized by the
exploitative extraction of surplus labor value). This vision therefore relied upon an assumed
image of "village life" that was somehow free of the "unpleasant chores" of formalized wage labor
or production for the market; a "far village" that did not live, in other words, under the sway of
capital.
Contrary to this marketable myth of consumer contact with (and preservation of) the premodern,
the Miao villagers who produce goods for Far Village enter into production relations that are
closely integrated with the Chinese state's capitalist development strategies. They live, in fact,
well under the sway of capital, and it is precisely for this reason that they produce their crafts for
Seattle consumers. It is their integration within capitalist relations of production, rather than
survival beyond them, that leads to the labor of Miao women being fetishized as an ideal type of
"natural economy," which is characterized by the so-called subsistence mode of production.
Usually equated with preindustrial and precapitalist rural production relations, the naturalness of
the peasant economy is often assumed in popular, official, and even some scholarly
characterizations of "backward" (luohou) regions of China's countryside (such as Guizhou).13
There is much dismay among Chinese officials and scholars, for example, over the "small-farmer
mentality" (xiaonong sixiang) of Guizhou's rural producers, their resistance to marketization, and
their refusal to embrace the ideal of comparative advantage in China's new "market socialism."
According to this view, subsistence producers persist in their ways of self-sufficiency and ad hoc
participation in local markets. More important, however, is the charge that such peasants are not
sufficiently entrepreneurial and therefore fail to create conditions in which capital can accumulate.
In other words, production relations of subsistence are not oriented toward profit, that is, toward
extracting surplus labor value.
For a Chinese state seeking to enlist market forces in its modernization [End Page 313] agenda,
such peasant stubbornness is a problem. For the Far Village project, it is the fragile artifact of a
way of life long lost in the industrialized West. Both the Chinese state and transnational capital, in
other words, construct a mythical image of the Miao other--but for opposite purposes. The state's
agenda is one of developmentalism, in which the Miao other represents a version of a
5
subsistence-oriented agrarian tradition that the state sees China progressing beyond as it
engages with the world economy.14 Far Village's agenda is obviously quite different. Echoing the
ideals of what in the Mexican context Scott Cook and Leigh Binford have termed "ethnicized
neopopulism," Far Village "combines the celebration of indigenous ethnic pluralism . . . with a
genuinely romantic loathing of capitalism."15 The production of labor-intensive crafts such as
ornate batik and embroidery is only possible, it is felt, in a noncommercial, subsistence-oriented
environment. Hence the project's goal of not interrupting village life or making crafts production
an "unpleasant chore." But changing the subsistence environment of the village would also
destroy the uniqueness (and therefore marketability) of the products. Thus, the idea is to preserve
a communitarian, household-based production environment that is dominated by kinship
relations--an environment where the production process is presumably not regulated by a
disciplined regimen of time. Through their conscription into the front lines of subcontracting
capitalism (as it reaches into the most remote regions of China's interior), Miao villagers find
themselves occupying a space in which the contradictory discourses of modernity narrated by the
Chinese state and by capitalist elites compete for dominance.
In fact, the Chinese state has long played a significant role in shaping the social relations of
production in which Miao villagers participate. Historically, the Miao of Guizhou have been subject
to the volatile economic permutations that are characteristic of a Chinese "internal colony."16 With
the development of collective agriculture under Mao, Guizhou peasants were fundamentally
integrated, as never before, into the broader political economy of state resource extraction.17
Through the socialist state's appropriation of agricultural production, and through its many
ideological campaigns aimed at instilling a modern revolutionary consciousness throughout China,
village economies were fundamentally disrupted and linked to relations of production that were
distinctly modern and statist and which profoundly [End Page 314] destabilized local social
relations in the countryside. State procurement of surplus grain directly implicated Chinese
peasants in an industrial modernization strategy that depended heavily on the exploitation of
agriculture. Land reform and collectivization destroyed any lingering possibility that Guizhou's
villagers could be viewed as isolated holdouts, where ancient production relations governed by
the customs of tradition and kinship might escape the modernizing influences of the modern
nation-state. Ironically, it is not until the post-Mao era that we begin to see the specter of
subsistence raised by the reform-oriented state's efforts to introduce a new round of
modernization to the rural Chinese economy.
Rural reforms in post-Mao China have brought an important shift in which a state-market hybrid
has largely replaced the state in its role of dominating local production relations. Agricultural
production is increasingly driven by commercial concerns, and rural industrialization has brought
significant new sources of wealth and inequality to the countryside.18 Initially, during the early
1980s, rural reforms that unintentionally led to the dismantling of collectives and the
establishment of household contracting brought about an unprecedented increase in grain
production and, with the 20 percent rise in state grain-procurement prices, a rapid rise in rural
incomes and household savings.19 In the latter half of the 1980s, however, the state sought to
reward farmers for diversifying their activities and making market-based decisions about what and
how much to produce. At the same time, fiscal decentralization encouraged local governments to
actively seek out new sources of revenue; for rural areas, this meant local state support for rural
industrialization and commercial agricultural production. With the central state divesting itself of
the rural economy, and with collective resources largely dismantled, demand for capital
investments in new industrial and commercial ventures intensified.20 Rural industries and
commercialized agriculture have become two important means to achieving fiscal autonomy for
many prosperous rural areas along the coast and near large cities. Thus, rural production in these
areas witnessed a profound shift--from a focus on intensifying traditional inputs (such as labor) to
increased capitalization, efficiency, and profitability. By 1992, when Deng Xiaoping made his
famous southern tour, which initiated a commercial boom throughout the country, a "commercial
countryside" was being explicitly advocated as the primary goal [End Page 315] of rural
development. Household crafts production is currently being promoted throughout China--
6
especially in regions where larger-scale rural industries remain undeveloped--as a complement to,
rather than a departure from, this trend.21
For Guizhou's villagers, post-Mao reforms have meant important new incentives to produce for
the market, as well as new opportunities to seek out off-farm sources of wage income. Yet
developments since 1985 have made it increasingly difficult to earn a living from farming in a
region where cultivation is dominated by staple grains. Although procurement quotas have been
dropped and grain prices continue to rise, increasing production costs have made grain farming a
losing venture in all but the most prosperous and industrialized regions.22 While commercial crops
now receive the greatest priority among farmers throughout China, weak agricultural markets,
poor land, and high population pressure make cash crops an unrealistic option for most Guizhou
farmers.23 Even traditional specialties, such as cotton or tobacco, or sidelines, such as pork or
poultry, generate slim profits that leave farmers vulnerable to an increasingly volatile market
environment.24 Across China, access to nonfarm wage income has therefore become the key to
improving the living standards of rural households.25 In regions where rural industries meet
household demands for wage labor, rural incomes have seen dramatic increases. But in more
remote regions, such as Guizhou, where industrial manufacturing is not feasible, householdbased commercial crafts production is seen as one of the few opportunities to improve rural
incomes and one of the few options for generating a more capitalized, profit-oriented rural
sector.26
Intensified crafts production emerges, then, not as the peasant household's stubborn clinging to a
traditional subsistence economy in the face of modern change--as Far Village might lead us to
believe--but rather as its active response to an increasingly commercialized and capitalized
countryside, where structural transformations in the economy require peasant families to bring in
more cash income. In the Chinese countryside, crafts production has historically thrived in
commercially developed regions not because of the persistence of a "peasant mentality" but
because of the chronic need for cash faced by peasants in an increasingly market-based
economy.27 [End Page 316]
This speaks to a broader debate over the articulation of capitalist with noncapitalist modes of
production. The Far Village project's marketability depends, in part, on selling to the consumer
the idea that noncapitalist modes of production can remain wholly "beyond"--yet at the same time
profitably linked to--capitalism. In fact, petty-commodity production has been characterized as a
peasant strategy of capital accumulation rather than a strategy of traditionalist survivalism on the
part of "ancient cultures." Indeed, it is often because of their intense desire for modernity that
peasants in Guizhou enter into household crafts production. Petty-commodity production has
been conceptualized by Cook and Binford according to the following four elements: (1) production
for market exchange; (2) nonwaged labor and private (household) control of the means of
production; (3) relative independence and autonomy of the production unit; and (4) production for
subsistence "but never to the exclusion of capital accumulation or profit."28 These four elements
have in common the peculiar way in which labor is joined to capital. Instead of extracting profit
through the control of waged labor, capital accumulation for petty-commodity enterprises "occurs
through the extraction of surplus value from nonwaged labor." Cook and Binford call this process
"endofamilial accumulation"; it is through such an accumulation strategy that peasant households
may realize actual profits from their "self-exploitation," profits that may exceed the simple
reproduction of subsistence.29 Importantly, this approach to conceptualizing petty-commodity
production focuses our attention on the conditions that either enable or prevent peasant
households from achieving actual capital accumulation rather than on their assumed
disinclination to pursue increased profits and efficiency in their household enterprises. This can
help us to move beyond the assumptions underlying the Far Village project and to examine more
closely the production relations inherent in Guizhou's village crafts industry.
In Guizhou, commercial crafts production is largely driven by widespread rural poverty, which
provides the incentive for women in Miao households to become self-exploitative specialists.30 As
7
the following section will reveal, definite patterns of class stratification have occurred within craftsproducing regions according to the commodity chains that have developed between producers,
middlemen, value-adding workshops, and [End Page 317] traders who deal with companies such
as Far Village. But the functional division of labor that adheres, and the articulations of meaning
that emerge within the industry, do not necessarily reflect class relations of production per se but
rather extant social differences based on ethnicity and gender. Thus, while crafts production in
Guizhou falls firmly within the "sway of capital," the resulting patterns of uneven accumulation and
social differentiation do not necessarily arise from the commodity form itself but from deeply
imbedded patterns of ethnic, cultural and gender differences that mediate and divert the further
encroachments of transnational capitalism toward a regionally specific struggle over Chinese
modernity.
The Cultural Politics of Modernity in Guizhou's Touristic
Development
It remains, then, to analyze specifically the political economy of crafts production in Guizhou in
order to illustrate the ethnic and gendered segmentation of the crafts industry, its relationship to
state development ideology and discourse, and the resulting politics of modernity. Thus, this
section explores the broader context conditioning crafts production and the Far Village project,
and the following section examines the project in greater detail, illustrating its relationship to
existing social relations of production in Guizhou's crafts industry.
Ethnic craft commodity production in Guizhou has developed within a macroeconomic
environment characterized by state fiscal decentralization and decline. During the Reform Era,
the redistributive effectiveness of the central government has lessened considerably.31 Since
1980, a trend toward local self-financing has also generated growing regional economic
disparities.32 The central government's share of the budget has dropped from roughly 47 percent
in 1984 to 29 percent in 1995. By 1995, government revenues had declined to 10.7 percent of the
GNP.33 Fiscal power has increasingly been concentrated in wealthy regions, while poor provinces
such as Guizhou are faced with greater fiscal responsibilities, inadequate revenues, and growing
deficits. In 1995, for example, Guizhou's provincial revenues had amounted to just 45 percent of
expenditures.34 Between 1988 and 1994, the province had received annual fixed-quota subsidies
of RMB 740 million, which represented an increasingly smaller proportion of the expanding [End
Page 318] provincial budget.35 In the early 1980s, central subsidies had financed nearly 60
percent of Guizhou's total budget. By 1993, this figure was down to less than 20 percent.
Correspondingly, in 1995, 70 percent of total fixed-capital investments were financed by the
province, a significant increase over the 1992 figure of 48 percent.36 One result was that by the
1990s, unable to transfer its diminishing subsidies to the counties, the provincial government was
instead extracting a surplus from them to finance its outlays. Local leaders, inventing new fees
and surcharges to cover their remittance quotas, correspondingly increased the financial pressure
on rural households. One report concludes that "in Guizhou, since 1988, the entire rural sector
has acquired net remitter status, so that the rural sector may be supporting the urban sector."37
Overall, poor rural counties have seen very little growth in expenditures, while even relatively
wealthy counties are strapped with heavy revenue-sharing burdens that dampen whatever
comparative advantages they have had. In addition, a new tax-sharing arrangement introduced
by the Ministry of Finance in 1994 has made it more difficult for Guizhou counties specializing in
liquor and tobacco production to retain revenues associated with the tax on these "luxury goods."
Faced with the inadequacy of central development funds designed to compensate for the adverse
effects of fiscal decentralization on the minority and impoverished counties of China's interior,
Guizhou has increasingly advocated the commercialization of the rural sector as the means by
which the rural poor may escape poverty. In other words, the province's answer to its simmering
fiscal crisis is to "sell Guizhou."38 This strategy amounts to addressing the province's chronic
shortage of capital by attracting external investment for commercial development schemes. While
8
central-state investments in Guizhou's mining and energy sectors remain significant (Guizhou is a
key provider under the Comprehensive National Development Plan, which emphasizes mineral
and energy development), the province is increasingly left on its own to both revive a derelict
ordnance-manufacturing industry and establish an integrated rural market economy.39 Guizhou's
efforts to attract external capital have focused on retooling its ordnance industries for consumergoods production; expanding its traditional specializations in liquor, tobacco, herbal medicines,
and ethnic crafts; and intensifying commercial timber and livestock production.40 The [End Page
319] most significant avenue for attracting investment, however, is the tourism industry. Touristic
marketing of Guizhou as an attractive and exotic place has dominated the province's commercial
development strategy, and in this regard, the region's significant population of ethnic minorities
has played a crucial role.
Indeed, tourism has been slated to become one of the province's "pillar industries," with plans
calling for tourism revenues to contribute as much as 20 percent to Guizhou's income by 2010,
up from about 5 percent in 1993.41 However, in contrast to the province's other recognized
"pillars"--coal mining, hydroelectricity, mineral processing, the defense industry, and agriculture-tourism is promoted with two specific goals in mind: First, as a vanguard industry, it is expected to
open the way for other processes, particularly external investment and the commercial integration
of the rural economy with external markets. This idea is championed by the phrase lüyou tatai,
jingmao changxi (economic trade performing on a stage built by tourism), which is found in nearly
all local media coverage of commercial development projects. Second, tourism is also expected
to serve as a primary means by which the countryside might cast off its "traditional thinking" and
adopt a "commercial conscience," thereby helping the province to lay a foundation for fiscal
solvency.42
Reflecting this dual role of tourism development, ethnic minority culture has become a
fundamental feature of Guizhou's promotional activities, both in terms of using exotic cultural
representations as enticements for potential investors and as a component of market socialism's
potential for rural development in minority regions. Ethnic minority groups make up roughly onethird of Guizhou's population. Most public events, such as trade fairs and holiday celebrations,
are marked with the ubiquitous ethnic symbols of music, dancing, staged rituals, and crafts.
Standardized versions of Miao and Dong lusheng (reed pipe) dances, roadblock wine (lanlujiu)
ceremonies, and related performances have likewise become regular features of tourist itineraries
catering to official and business travelers. Indeed, a major conference center at Hongfeng
Reservoir on the outskirts of the provincial capital was built to resemble a series of minority
villages--Dong, Miao, Yi, and Bouyei--where guests may experience exotic ethnic receptions
mixed in with their more familiar karaoke singing contests. The touristic staging [End Page 320]
of such ethnic performances and ceremonies is meant not only to make Guizhou more interesting
to outsiders but to establish a model for the "cultural development" of minority groups themselves
and to condition them to articulate symbolic cultural practices with commercial projects. Indeed, it
is tourism's explicit marketing of ethnic culture that most clearly illustrates its importance both as
a propaganda and marketing tool for Guizhou and, more importantly, as a process of
development and integration that encourages minority regions to become more modern. It is in
the field of ethnic-crafts development that this dual role of tourism is most clearly at work.
The state narrates this modernizing role of tourism in several ways. Examples abound of isolated
villagers who are encouraged by the guiding hand of the state to cast off their backwardness and
jump into the sea of commerce. One popular story relates how the prefectural governor of
southeast Guizhou, a Miao named Wu Dehai, helped villagers to abandon ancient superstitions
and create a healthier scientific and modern culture through tourism:
In Qingman Village, custom dictated that the lusheng couldn't be played, nor could drums be
beaten, between spring planting and autumn harvest. To violate this custom, it was said, was to
risk some great natural calamity. Wu Dehai himself is a Miao and wanted to respect the customs
of his own people. But he also wanted to adapt to the new environment of reform and openness.
9
So he went to the Miao village, found the village elders and cadres, spoke to them in rational and
scientific terms, opened their thinking, and reached an agreement to establish an ethnic tourist
site. After this, when tourists came, the villagers performed, playing the lusheng at any time of the
year. Thus, the locals received an enlightening education and increased their enthusiasm for
tourism.43
Another story tells of a Miao woman who, having visited Beijing in her ethnic costume, was
pursued by an entrepreneurial Han to return to Guizhou and begin selling Miao textiles to Beijing
tourist shops. This was another departure from the "law of tradition." A chapter about her in a
book titled Zhongguo qiye yinghao [Heroes of Chinese enterprise] stresses that she was coaxed
out of her "premodern" thinking to blossom as a successful entrepreneur and culturally developed
citizen of "new China." She is [End Page 321] credited with having "brought the Miao out of the
mountains and into the world of commerce. From the point of a needle, they have filled the earth
with embroidery and leaped to earning over 800,000 yuan."44
As a number of scholars have suggested, the narrative of modern China has emerged, in part,
from an ongoing discourse of non-Han otherness.45 Throughout the twentieth century, peripheral
minority groups have served as both a symbolic source of authentic primitive vitality, which has
reinforced China's indigenous roots as a society capable of modernizing while remaining distinct
from the West, and a marker for gauging the "normalcy" and progress of the dominant Han
population. This symbolic role intensified during the 1980s "roots" (xungen) fever. As Louisa
Schein puts it, "The suppressions of the Cultural Revolution . . . combined with the perceived
emptiness of imported culture from abroad, seem to have left a void at the core of Chinese ethnonationalism, leading individual and state culture producers to turn to minority cultures as
reservoirs of still-extant authenticity."46 This authenticity was inscribed with a subject position that
was both non-Han and feminine--at once primitive, exotic, sensual, and enticing. Post-Mao
narratives of Chinese modernity are thus conditioned, in part, by what Schein calls "internal
orientalism."
In the Qingman Village example above, the narrative suggests that images of ethnic primitivism
and authenticity are constructed to legitimize the state's scientific technologies of modern power
while providing a colorful traditional cultural base upon which a modern touristic market can be
built. In the second example, the discourse of authenticity is further marked by gender. The craft
tradition of embroidery represents an extreme version of primitive authenticity both because its
production is regarded as strictly household based and noncommercial and because its patterns
represent a cultural reservoir of myths, legends, and skills passed down from mother to daughter
for generations. For the modernizing state, it is all the more poignant, then, that this "women's
work" should become subject to, and benefit from, the winds of market reform. Ethnic women are
thus invested with the contradictory symbolism of tradition encountering modernity.
We see in Guizhou's touristic development two different forces at work: On the one hand, tourism
is a key to enhancing market integration and commercial development. On the other hand,
tourism is an agent of the [End Page 322] state's project of social and cultural development.
Ideally, then, tourism represents the forces of capital, deployed by the state in the hope that it will
ultimately benefit--in terms of revenue generation, fiscal relief, cultural development, and socialist
modernization. But capital's tendencies toward producing and reinforcing landscapes of uneven
accumulation may ultimately work at cross-purposes to the state's efforts to relieve poverty and
increase living standards throughout the countryside. As will be illustrated in the following section,
the political-economic forces of capital and of the state often contradict each other at the actual
sites of touristic commercial development, where ethnic women make crafts for the world market.
The Crafts Industry and the Far Village Project
10
As practiced in Guizhou, the cultural politics of Chinese modernity evinces two diverging
hegemonies. Minority groups are the first targets of a state-narrated modern subjectivity that
draws on an established history of China's "civilizing mission" toward non-Han peripheral
peoples.47 In Guizhou, touristic crafts production is thus meant to instill a "commercial
consciousness" that will help minority farmers progress beyond their "small-farmer mentality."
Along with tourism, commercial crafts production encourages minority groups to move "toward
the world" (zouxiang shijie).48 Capital, too, seeks this kind of alignment between local production
practices and the global marketplace. The difference is that the subjectivity narrated by capital is
one in which minority groups are invested with a premodern and preindustrial authenticity, which
serves as both a marketable image and a romantic ideology that addresses metropolitan anxiety
over global capitalist development. In these terms, then, Guizhou's modernization depends upon
the very primitiveness that the socialist state seeks to overcome. In the case of the Far Village
project, we see being narrated precisely this paradoxical version of modernity, as well as the
capitalist relations of production that underlie it.
The contradictions of Guizhou's touristic commercial development are visible not just in the Far
Village project but throughout the province's commodity craft industry. Tourism, it is well known,
is a significant catalyst to commercial crafts production throughout the world.49 In Guizhou, it has
[End Page 323] helped spawn what may be roughly categorized as three broad types of crafts
development: first, relatively large-scale, factory-based crafts production; second, householdbased traders, or "middlemen" (locally called erdao fanzi), who travel the countryside buying old
and new crafts from poor households and selling them directly to tourists or to metropolitan
wholesale buyers from places such as Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Taibei; and third, putting-out
systems that link town- and city-based marketing and value-added industries directly to poor,
rural household producers.50
Each of these types is characterized by distinct ethnic, gender, and spatial divisions of labor. The
management of larger-scale factories is composed almost exclusively of urban Han men, while
the workers are all non-Han female migrants from nearby rural villages. Rural household-based
traders are exclusively non-Han women, while their buyers are either foreign or urban Han. Rural
household producers participating in putting-out systems are also exclusively non-Han women,
while their "foremen" (longtou) are often (but not always) men, and may be Han or non-Han.
These divisions reflect the nature of cultural discourse that emerges within the local crafts
industry, a discourse that articulates these social divisions with the broader narratives of
modernity emanating from state and capitalist agents.
Household crafts production in the Miao villages where Far Village work is contracted is strictly
regarded as women's work. With the intensification of neoliberal reforms in 1992, the growing
difficulty of earning a livelihood from agricultural income alone has meant that women's work is
increasingly called upon in poor households to help fill the budget gap.51 Many unmarried women
help fill the gap by seeking employment in larger crafts factories in nearby towns and cities, while
other women--unmarried and married alike--remain in their villages doing putting-out contract
work in their homes. While many of these women have welcomed the opportunity to earn a living
by selling their crafts skills, they regard contract work as a very unattractive option chosen only as
a last resort. They are well aware of the exploitative nature of the putting-out system. Thus, it is
only the very poorest households that are compelled to participate in crafts contract work. Fewer
and fewer younger women, furthermore, take the time to learn embroidery and batik skills, which
many regard as "old-fashioned," [End Page 324] preferring to wear "modern" clothes at special
occasions. Such attitudes only reinforce the image of impoverishment and destitution that
accompanies this work. Nevertheless, they are encouraged to participate by local officials,
entrepreneurs, and even tourists, who regard their work as a form of cultural preservation that
keeps the old handicraft traditions from dying out.
Leaving home to work in crafts factories is one of the few opportunities young women have to
earn a cash income and live in town--to be on their own, away from the village. In the Miao and
11
Dong autonomous prefecture of Qiandongnan, coastal trading firms established a number of
labor-intensive crafts factories in the early 1990s, thanks in part to local tax policies designed to
attract investors. These policies began in 1994 when the prefecture was designated a state-level
"experimental development zone" by the State Nationalities Affairs Commission (Guojia
Minwei).52
In Taijiang County, within Qiandongnan, such policies netted several new, externally funded
crafts-producing enterprises in 1994. These were essentially sanlai yibu (literally, three
"importeds" and one "compensatory") enterprises, in which the local nationalities affairs
commission provided a building and recruited female labor from surrounding villages while a
number of coastal trading companies provided the capital, raw materials, and market connections.
One of these factories, set up by a Jiangsu company to produce tie-dyed silk cloth for export to
Japan, employed about one hundred village women who sat all day tying up thousands of tiny dot
patterns on silk (fig. 2). They were paid RMB 6 for every ten thousand ties, and although the
manager said they could typically produce five thousand ties per day, workers on the shop floor
told me that the most anyone earned was between RMB 30 and 40 per month.53 Another Taijiang
factory employed a similar number of rural women who earned similar wages making
embroidered cloth for export to Southeast Asia. I visited other such factories of this size
throughout Qiandongnan Prefecture, where in all cases, women lived in factory-provided
dormitories but were responsible for their own food; the workers' wages seldom exceeded RMB
50 per month. Morever, the special policies developed to attract this economic activity to
Qiandongnan meant that Taijiang County was collecting few tax revenues from these factories.
[End Page 325]
Figure 2. Miao women in a Guizhou
workshop making tie-dye patterns on silk
cloth for export to Japan
When asked in 1994, an officer at the
Taijiang Nationalities Affairs Commission
(Taijiang Minwei) justified these exploitative
ventures by stressing that they only
represented a first step in modernization. He
likened them to a window through which
other coastal companies could see the
county's investment potential. He also noted
that Taijiang's rural households still had few
opportunities to earn cash and that these
factories would help generate a "commercial
consciousness" in the countryside; he
believed that turning Guizhou's countryside
into a source of cheap labor for coastal
companies [End Page 326] dabbling in
international trade would not adversely affect
future development prospects. But by 1996,
the county's attitude had changed
considerably: it refused to renew any leases
for the coastal-run factories, citing insufficient
pay and poor working conditions. For
Taijiang County, the previous goal of
attracting external investment at any cost
had clearly backfired. "We lost money and the workers were treated badly," the Minwei officer
admitted. Furthermore, the county no longer had any funds available for promoting commercial
12
crafts production. The county Minwei's annual appropriation of RMB 10,000 had been cut, and
remaining development grants were being swallowed up by day-to-day administrative
expenditures and salaries.54 Thus, by 1996, the local government's role in promoting rural
"commercial consciousness" had diminished considerably.
The development of larger-scale factories thus reflects the efforts of the local state to attract
external investment regardless of the high opportunity costs involved. In Taijiang, further, the
exploitative tendencies of uneven capital accumulation contradicted the state's goals in the
broader field of sociocultural development. While the local government managed to drive the
most egregious exploiters out of the county, fiscal restraints have also forced it to retreat from full
participation in the commercial crafts arena, leaving future development solely to the private
urban entrepreneurs who are the basis of the putting-out system. In these developments, we see
a different version of modernity being narrated through commercial integration. While the state
seeks to promote sociocultural development and socialist modernization (in which Guizhou's rural
poor are encouraged to progress beyond their insular traditions and local customs), independent
capitalists seek to exploit precisely that image of primitive backwardness as a marketing strategy
in selling ethnic craft products.
Figure 3. Miao women in Guizhou
embroidering pieces of cloth for wallets,
shoulder bags, and clothing sold in Hong
Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia.
Larger-scale factories benefited from the
cheap yet highly skilled labor of unmarried
Miao women, but they tended not to
emphasize the exotic ethnicity of their
products. Setting up operations in places
such as Taijiang was instead done to take
advantage of a distinctive labor market of
skilled young women. In contrast, the many
enterprises engaged in the putting out of
crafts production in the region specialized
in products that were explicitly marked by
their ethnic exoticism. The largest and
most established of these enterprises in
southeast Guizhou, where the bulk of the
province's [End Page 327] ethnic crafts
are produced, was Taijiang's Miao
Embroidery Factory (Miaozu Cixiu
Gongyipin Chang). This was basically a
finishing workshop where Miao textiles,
produced by village women under contract,
were incorporated into numerous products,
including wallets, shoulder bags, and
clothing (fig. 3). These products were
generally not used by locals themselves
but were the result of advice given by
tourists and textile specialists who passed through the region suggesting ways that local crafts
might be made more marketable. But because of their apparent role in contributing to the
preservation of the ethnic textile heritage, enterprises such as the Miao Embroidery Factory were
also regarded by the state as institutions of cultural development. Indeed, the Taijiang
government's retreat from the arena of commercial crafts development had resulted in its support
of the factory as a means of achieving local development goals. The county bureaucracy
facilitated the factory's obtaining a large grant from UNICEF and promoted it among prefectural
13
and provincial tourist agencies. Tour groups were regularly brought to the factory store, and this
often resulted in the establishment of market links in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and throughout East
and Southeast Asia.
Such close relations between local governments and rural industries are, of course, common
throughout China. Nor is the Miao Embroidery Factory's situation unique among crafts
enterprises in Guizhou, where these enterprises typically have maintained close ties to local
governments and the state tourism industry. Significantly, it was these ties that helped spawn the
development of the Far Village project, in which an American clothing designer proposed to turn
authentic ethnic textiles into fashionable clothing for high-end markets in Japan and the United
States. From its very inception, the project was linked to an established putting-out system of
commercial crafts production that was already articulated with the modernizing state in many
ways. The project thus inherited an extant set of relations, both between these enterprises and
the state and between the enterprise and its contracted household producers. There was almost
no direct link between the project and actual producers; instead, the stated goals of the project
could only be realized via the putting-out system upon which much crafts production relied. As it
turned out, this system proved to be a poor transmitter of Far Village's stated goals. [End Page
328]
The significance of the putting-out system (which supported crafts workshops like the Miao
Embroidery Factory) is that it represented not simply an unequal economic relationship with
producing households but unequal ethnic and gender relations as well; the inherent power
dynamic expressed in the system's economic relationships is thus also reflected in these other
dimensions. Production contracts generally entailed the provision by the workshop (and/or its
agent or longtou) of all materials and designs, with the household being responsible solely for
labor. In 1994, the [End Page 329] application of wax for batik earned village women in Taijiang
an average of RMB 7 for twelve hours of labor; in 1998 women earned RMB 20 for embroidery
pieces that took roughly one month to make. Household producers clearly understood the
difficulty of accumulating any real capital under such conditions. But the system was attractive to
desperate locals because households didn't have to put up any capital to participate and all
materials were provided. These households were also typically those without sufficient labor
power to send a family member to a nearby city or to the coast to earn cash.
More important than the extraction of surplus labor value inherent in such an arrangement was
the way it guaranteed that control over production remained in the hands of urban workshop
managers, who not only dictated piece rates but provided the "authentic" designs and patterns
that ensured the standardization of their products.55 This power to dictate textile patterns was also
wielded across ethnic and gender lines, with most urban managers being Han men and all
household producers being non-Han women. Thus, the very definitions of authenticity and
tradition constituted a field of ethnic and gender politics in which a feminized non-Han minority
tradition continued to be constructed, in part, by a more powerful, masculinized class of urban
Han. Whereas wealthier households could afford to purchase new, more "modern" designs for
their own use, poor women working under contract merely produced the "authentic" designs
provided by their foremen. Urban entrepreneurs were thus encouraged to seek out the poorest
villages. Villages that urban workshops had exclusively dealt with during the 1980s were, by the
early 1990s, being passed over for more remote and poorer places on the grounds that, as one
factory manager put it, the early sites had "become more and more influenced by Han culture,
and so the patterns aren't as authentic." Another problem cited by this manager was that the
increasing commercialization of textile production in these villages, which were no longer selfenclosed economies, had influenced local embroidery styles. His solution to this "contradiction"
(maodun) was to maintain a cultural bank of authentic traditional styles, frozen in time, that would
form the basis of sustained future production. "If peasants want a job," he said, "they'll have to
produce embroidery according to the styles we require, and these will be the authentic ones."56
For many ethnic producers, the result was not [End Page 330] simply increased subjugation to
14
capital but an associated surrender to their Han employers of the determination of what was
authentic.
It is into this contradictory environment of China's cultural politics of modernity that the Far Village
project arrived, trumpeting the goals of cultural preservation, "sustainable development," and
"empowerment" for villagers, especially village women. As stated in the Far Village project
proposal, the designer's objective was to ensure that younger women, who "lose these skills as
they move away from the village . . . be offered a way of earning money in order to retain their
embroidery, weaving, and batik skills."57
Yet as the project got underway in 1994, it was apparent that the enlisting of capital for these
misguided purposes was instead reinforcing an extant power dynamic that worked to keep
women producers subordinate and vulnerable, rather than "empowered." The project was
affiliated with four existing crafts workshops (and their associated putting-out systems) in different
locales throughout the province. Far Village work was parceled out by these workshops according
to the same contractual arrangements that had previously existed. Village producers, on average,
earned between 1 percent and 5 percent of these workshops' wholesale prices for Far Village
products. In addition, the whole project, and especially the clothing designs, were shrouded in
secrecy. Ostensibly, this was because of intense competition from nonaffiliated crafts workshops.
One affiliated workshop had had the experience of a designer who quit in 1992 starting his own
workshop with designs stolen from his employer. But there was another, more disturbing reason
for all the secrecy. This was necessary, one manager claimed, "so that the idea doesn't get out of
control, so that peasants don't start trying to do this kind of thing for themselves. That would
influence their traditional designs." The manager further justified this control as in the best
interests of the peasant producers themselves: should these unsavvy crafts workers unwisely
stray into more "modern" designs, they would fail to satisfy foreign buyers and thus lose any
income potential.58 Not seeing the final product assembled in the crafts factory, village women
applying wax for batik had no idea that their labor had helped produce a bathrobe that would
eventually be sold in a Seattle boutique. Such knowledge, according to workshop managers,
would have compromised the "traditional authenticity" of their products.59 [End Page 331]
Yet the original Far Village proposal had explicitly sought the involvement of village women in the
decision-making process, and it had called for the work not to be a burden on their daily lives. It
envisioned a cooperative approach to ethnic commodity production, with the producers
themselves in control. But most of these contract workers labored between eight and twelve
hours a day and were not even told what their work was being used for. While we might excuse
the naž¨veté of the project's designer, the politics of Western consumer culture--wrapped by Far
Village in the rhetoric of cultural survival and gender empowerment--ultimately yields the same
colonial patterns of capital accumulation that are more blatantly represented by, say, Nike in
Indonesia. As if to ironically emphasize this point, by 1997, the project was in shambles, most of
its working capital having been absconded with by one of the Guiyang tour guides entrusted to
manage the project. Meanwhile, as of 1998, workshop managers were eager to move out of the
intricate batik and embroidery business. Taijiang's Miao Embroidery Factory--which lost a
significant investment in the collapse of the project-- was gearing up to produce a new line of
goods made from rough-woven "peasant cloth" (tubu). As the manager told me, the putting-out of
weaving generates much larger profit margins than batik or embroidery while still capitalizing on
an aesthetic of primitivism and authenticity. His exposure to Far Village--while costing him a
significant sum of capital--had clearly schooled him to position himself between the contradictory
demands of the modernizing state and the enticements of the transnational capitalist marketplace.
Globalization, Transnational Capital, and the Cultural Politics of
Chinese Modernity
15
The Chinese state supports a socialist modernization program in ethnic minority regions that
might best be summed up by the term wenhua fazhan (cultural development). While the meaning
of this term has varied with the state's historically changing ideas of what modernity entails, in the
guise of 1990s "market socialism," it most profoundly implies the development of a marketoriented "commercial consciousness," a risk-taking and entrepreneurial spirit, and an ability to
articulate one's cultural heritage with the [End Page 332] needs of China's integration into the
global marketplace. Along these lines, Guizhou's support for tourism development and
commercial crafts production reflects a specific vision of Chinese modernity, one in which
prosperity for all will follow quickly upon the heels of outside investors and their commercial
ventures. In broader terms, wenhua fazhan implies a modernity in which the ideals of socialism
are realized through the state's harnessing and manipulation of the market itself. For Guizhou
that market is increasingly driven by touristic consumption urges and metropolitan desires for the
traditional, the exotic, and the authentic.
Insofar as Guizhou can be represented in these terms for the benefit of the cash-strapped local
state, the market may indeed be an effective mechanism for achieving increased prosperity
throughout the province. But the market also displays its own unruly tendencies toward uneven
development, tendencies that contradict many of the purportedly socialist state's goals. Capital
accumulation occurs unevenly over a social landscape already stratified by ethnic, cultural, and
gender differences. The constructions of difference that have fueled the discourse of Chinese
modernity--for example, between Han men and non-Han women and between urban and rural-have become the fault lines conditioning the benefits (or lack thereof) of commercial development
in Guizhou.
The contradictory tensions apparent in Guizhou's commercial crafts industry reflect a broader
tension between the Chinese state and the rising presence of mobile Chinese capital in narrating
the subjectivity of the modern Chinese nation. According to Aihwa Ong, imaginings of the
possibility for and nature of modern China are currently dominated by two competing discursive
systems: "the modernist imaginary of the nation-state (emphasizing essentialism, territoriality,
and fixity) in tension with the modernist imaging of entrepreneurial capitalism (celebrating
hybridity, deterritorialization, and fluidity)."60 The latter vision, promoted primarily by a
transnational Chinese elite advocating "Greater China" as a new center of global capitalism, has
developed as a competing discourse of Chinese modernity only in the 1990s. Thus, ethnic
tourism and crafts production, initially promoted by the state for an agenda targeting
modernization and cultural development in Guizhou's chronically poor countryside, have been
appropriated by the increasingly vigorous presence of mobile capital seeking to [End Page 333]
inject "authentic" ethnic culture into the transnational marketplace of consumable identities. The
Far Village bathrobe thus becomes much more than a product of state-guided development in
rural China as it takes on the mystical qualities of a commodity displaced from the context of its
production--a piece of politically correct fashion answering the hybrid cultural urges of
metropolitan consumption.
While the state and capital, in their respective modernizing logics, are often thought to be
complementary, in China, the state remains wary of capital, frequently encountering moments of
antagonism even as it seeks to adjust to market-oriented redistributive mechanisms. Mayfair
Yang characterizes the situation this way: "On the one hand, it is the state that initiates and
sustains the new market-oriented policies and which eagerly lays out the welcome mat to
overseas capital. On the other hand, the state also finds that the new forces it has unleashed
often have a logic quite threatening to its own desire of fixing culture within territorial borders."61 It
is perhaps in the arena of gendered non-Han ethnicity that this contradiction is most clearly
manifest. In the social space of this contradiction there emerges a cultural politics of production in
which patterns of capital accumulation are linked to ideas regarding authenticity, tradition, and
modernity in relation to ethnic cultural and gender differences in the Guizhou countryside. The
complexity of these social relations of production speaks to three important theoretical points that
underlie my argument.
16
First, ethnicity in China is increasingly conditioned according to the political economy of "market
socialism," in which the state's narrative of modernity is increasingly challenged by that of capital.
While state categories of ethnic identity continue to play a major role in shaping the cultural
content and meanings associated with groups such as the Miao, mobile capital and its uneven
patterns of accumulation increasingly exploit extant social differences to generate new and often
contradictory narratives of modernity, as well as new constructions of culture and meaning. The
rapidity with which this is happening even in remote regions such as Guizhou calls for more
explicit attention to political economy in scholarly accounts of ethnic cultural politics in China.
Second, the perhaps clumsy idea of "globalization" associated with the expansion of transnational
capital does not mean that capital has simply [End Page 334] extended its commodifying reach
to all previously "untouched" modes of production and converted the process of social
differentiation into one based solely on the contradictions of commodification. Instead, a more
nuanced interpretation of globalization reveals the complexity of social differentiation that
emerges within varied production relations exploited by capital--relations conditioned by
historically and geographically specific patterns of ethnicity, culture, and gender.
Finally, in contrast to the complexity of production relations that emerge in the local sites of
encounter between producers and newly arrived capital, metropolitan consumers are subject to a
new level of mystification in which production--and its varied divisions of labor and forms of
exploitation--is replaced by circulation and distribution as the new site of a multicultural politics of
postmodern consumption. Alternatives and/or resistance to capital are thus displaced from
potential sites of antagonism that emerge in the spaces of contradiction within capitalism to the
mythical realm of the "premodern," the "traditional," the "Far Village." At the same time, while
consumers may believe they are actively engaged in a cultural politics in which cultural
preservation and social justice are on the line, the displacement of their political act from the
realm of production to that of consumption only achieves their collusion with a hierarchy of
powerful agents who facilitate uneven development by exploiting social differences and masking
that exploitation in the rhetoric of multiculturalism. But if the politics of production have been
subsumed by consumption in the postmodern West, China's countryside has perhaps been
gearing up for a protracted struggle over the relationship between labor and capital, a struggle
that will be waged in parts of Guizhou on ethnic, cultural, and gender fronts and which will impact
forever China's pursuit of modernity.
Tim Oakes, assistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the
author of Tourism and Modernity in China (1998).
Notes
*This paper is based on fieldwork in China in 1993-1994, 1996, and 1998. Many thanks to the
National Science Foundation, the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China, and the
University of Colorado for their financial assistance in making those trips possible. This essay
was originally given as a paper in a session titled "Narratives of Neoliberalism," cochaired by
myself, Patricia Price, and Tad Mutersbaugh, at the 1998 Annual Meetings of the Association of
American Geographers in Boston. Special thanks to Tad Mutersbaugh for directing me to the
Mexican crafts literature. I am grateful to Tad Ballew, Tani Barlow, Simon Batturbury, Allan Pred,
Louisa Schein, Rachel Silvey, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful criticisms and
suggestions. Remaining deficiencies are my own responsibility.
1. In Labor of Dionysus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri argue that the neoliberal economies of postindustrial societies have entered an era
characterized by the real subsumption of labor under capital: the politics of production and labor
have been subsumed by the politics of circulation and distribution. "Disappearing" from the arena
of "civil society," labor is thus mystified to a new level, as illustrated here in Far Village's
17
idealization of village life. Far Village mystifies its inherent politics of production into a "natural"
state (i.e., the natural village economy), replacing this with a pseudopolitics at the site of
distribution (i.e., buy a bathrobe and support the village women).
2. John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage,
1990), 82.
3. While Far Village uses a marketing pitch that is based on cultural and gender politics, it cannot
be confidently claimed that consumers themselves are mobilized to purchase Far Village
products for these specific reasons. The "politics of consumption" referred to here is a politics
assumed by the Far Village project; the actual intentions of consumers are beyond the scope of
this paper.
4. For culturally nuanced readings of the touristic fetishism of commodities in late capitalism see
Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986); and John Urry, "The 'Consumption' of Tourism," Sociology 24,
no. 1 (February 1990): 23-35.
5. See Aihwa Ong, "Chinese Modernities: Narratives of Nation and of Capitalism," in Ungrounded
Empires: The Cultural Politics of Chinese Transnationalism, ed. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini
(London: Routledge, 1997), 171-202.
6. See a related discussion in Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural
Economy," Public Culture 2, no. 2 (winter 1990): 1-24. Recent debates over globalization and
identity politics seem also to reveal contentions over the articulation of the relationship between
global processes and local identities. Also useful are Jonathan Friedman, "Being in the World:
Globalization and Localization," in Global Culture, ed. M. Featherstone (London: Sage, 1990),
311-328; Friedman, Cultural Identity and Global Process (London: Sage, 1994); Daniel Mato, "On
the Theory, Epistemology, and Politics of the Social Construction of 'Cultural Identities' in the Age
of Globalization: Introductory Remarks to Ongoing Debates," Identities 3, nos. 1-2 (September
1996): 61-72; and Mark Rogers, "Beyond Authenticity: Conservation, Tourism, and the Politics of
Representation in the Ecuadorian Amazon," ibid., 73-125.
7. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, "Introduction," in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital,
ed. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 15.
8. Ibid.
9. On ethnic tourism's development in China see Tim Oakes, Tourism and Modernity in China
(London: Routledge, 1998).
10. Studies of ethnicity in China have revealed the various ways minority subjectivities have been
enlisted into the broader projects of nationalism and socialist modernization. This essay draws on
much of this work in linking the Far Village project to an ethnic-cultural politics of modernity in
China. Theoretical work on the discursive relationship between ethnic identity and dominant
discourses of nation building, development, and modernity has raised important questions about
the negotiation of minority subjectivity within a field of power relations that is dominated by the
Chinese state and its policies regarding minzu ("nationality," or "ethnic") identities, autonomy, and
development. See David Y. H. Wu, "Chinese Minority Policy and the Meaning of Minority Culture:
The Example of the Bai in Yunnan, China," Human Organization 49, no. 1 (spring 1990): 1-13, on
minority policy and changing ethnic identities; Stevan Harrell, "Ethnicity, Local Interests, and the
State: Yi Communities in Southwest China," Comparative Studies of Society and History 32, no. 3
(July 1990): 515-545, on the constitution of minority identities in relation to state minzu categories;
Hsieh Shihchung, "On the Dynamics of Dai-Lue Ethnicity: An Ethnohistorical Analysis" (Ph.D.
18
diss., University of Washington, 1989), on the geopolitical integration of minority groups in China;
and Dru C. Gladney, "Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Majority/Minority Identities,"
Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (February 1994): 92-123, on the relationship between minority
subjectivity and nationalism. Charles McKhann, "The Naxi and the Nationalities Question," in
Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers, ed. Stevan Harrell (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1995), 39-62, offers an example of the subsuming of group identities to state
categories, and Cheung Siu-woo, "Subject and Representation: Identity Politics in Southeast
Guizhou" (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1996), highlights minority resistance to statesanctioned identity categories.
11. See similar ethnographic findings in Mexico in Lynn Stephen, "Weaving in the Fast Lane:
Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in Zapotec Craft Commercialization," in Crafts in the World Market:
The Impact of Global Exchange on Middle American Artisans, ed. June Nash (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1993), 27.
12. H. J. Exley, "Proposal for Far Village" (manuscript, 1994).
13. See, for example, Wang Xiaoqiang and Bai Nanfeng, The Poverty of Plenty, trans. Angela
Knox (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991).
14. On China's developmentalist agenda for the countryside see Elizabeth Croll, From Heaven to
Earth: Images and Experiences of Development in China (London: Routledge, 1994); and Ross
Garnaut, Guo Shutian, and Ma Guonan, eds., The Third Revolution in the Chinese Countryside
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
15. Scott Cook and Leigh Binford, Obliging Need: Rural Petty Industry in Mexican Capitalism
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 6-7.
16. See Alexander Hosie, On the Trail of the Opium Poppy: A Narrative of Travel in the Chief
Opium-Producing Provinces of China (London: George Philip, 1914); Chen Kexian, ed., Guizhou
Sheng nongcun jingji quhua [Rural economic plan for Guizhou Province] (Guiyang: Renmin
Chubanshe, 1989), 14-18; Chen Yongxiao et al., eds., Guizhou Sheng jingji dili [Economic
geography of Guizhou Province] (Beijing: Xinhua Shudian, 1993), 40-42; David Goodman,
"Guizhou and the People's Republic of China: The Development of an Internal Colony," in
Internal Colonialism: Essays around a Theme, ed. David Drakakis-Smith and Stephen Williams
(London: Institute of British Geographers, 1983), 107-124; and J. R. Spencer, "Kueichou: An
Internal Chinese Colony," Pacific Affairs 13 (June 1940): 162-172.
17. See Chen Yongxiao, ed., Guizhou Sheng jingji dili, 56-75; and Chen Kexian, ed., Guizhou
Sheng nongcun jingji quhua. For China in general see Jean Oi, State and Peasant in
Contemporary China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).
18. See Yang Minchuan, "Reshaping Peasant Culture and Community: Rural Industrialization in a
Chinese Village," Modern China 20, no. 2 (April 1994): 157-179.
19. Barry Naughton, Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978-1993 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 142-143.
20. See Christine Wong, Christopher Heady, and Wing T. Woo, Fiscal Management and
Economic Reform in the People's Republic of China (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1995).
21. See, for instance, "Li Seeks to Develop Traditional Crafts," China Daily, 30 September 1997,
Internet edition (http://chinadaily.com.cn).
19
22. Ke Bingsheng, "Regional Inequality and Rural Development," in Garnaut, Guo, and Ma, Third
Revolution, 245-255; Croll, From Heaven to Earth, 136-137.
23. Ron D. Hill, "People, Land, and an Equilibrium Trap: Guizhou, China," Pacific Viewpoint 34,
no. 1 (April 1993): 1-24.
24. In 1994, as part of reforms intended to halt the decline in central revenues, counties in key
tobacco-producing regions such as Guizhou saw the majority of their tobacco revenues shift to
the center. The same occurred for liquor revenues. At the household level, earnings from
sidelines and cash crops have also diminished considerably because of regional duplication and
market saturation. See Christine Wong, ed., Financing Local Government in the People's
Republic of China (Manila: Asian Development Bank, 1995).
25. Croll, From Heaven to Earth, 280; Jonathan Unger, "'Rich Man, Poor Man': The Making of
New Classes in the Countryside," in China's Quiet Revolution, ed. David Goodman and Beverly
Hooper (London: Routledge, 1994), 47; Jonathan Unger and Jean Xiong, "Life in the Chinese
Hinterlands under the Rural Economic Reforms," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 22, no. 2
(April-June 1990): 4-17.
26. Chen Yongxiao and Wang Jingren, "Guizhou jingji diyu fazhan zhanlue qutan" [Preliminary
inquiry into development strategies for Guizhou's economic regions], Guizhou Shifan Daxue
xuebao [Journal of Guizhou Normal University] 63, no. 2 (June 1990): 1-6.
27. "Peasant mentality" is a reference to A. V. Chayanov, who argued that peasants do not
display risk-taking, profit-oriented (that is, capitalist) behavior but rather subsist by maximizing
gross production to meet the demands of population increase or to accommodate whatever
income-earning opportunities present themselves. See A. V. Chayanov, The Theory of the
Peasant Economy, ed. D. Thorner et al. (Homewood, Ill.: R. D. Irwin, 1966).
28. Cook and Binford, Obliging Need, 10.
29. Ibid., 114-115.
30. In this regard, crafts production in Guizhou resembles the "cottage laborer" mode of
production that H. Medick has linked to the British development of industrialization. This mode
represented a shift in the British countryside from the primarily horizontal and vertical divisions of
labor that supported the relative production autonomy of "cottage craftsmen" to a functional
division of labor that tied household producers to a growing urban merchant class; the latter
provided raw materials to specialist cottage producers who became, in effect, wage laborers paid
on a piecework basis. See H. Medick, "The Proto-Industrial Family Economy: The Structural
Function of Household and Family during the Transition from Peasant Society to Industrial
Capitalism," Social History 9, no. 19 (November 1976): 291-315. Esther Goody argues that this
mode, in which merchants could realize an additional "differential profit" from the household
producer's inclination toward self-exploitation, led to the growth of industrial capitalism. See
Esther Goody, "Introduction," in From Craft to Industry: The Ethnography of Proto-Industrial Cloth
Production, ed. Esther Goody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 1-37. My analysis
diverges from these accounts by stressing capital's colonization of ethnic and gender rather than
class differences. This allows for the articulation of potential contradictions and social struggles
over capitalist development according to a relatively complex and diverse politics of ethnicity,
culture, and gender.
31. See Hanson C. K. Leung and Kam Wing Chan, "Chinese Regional Development Policies: A
Comparative Reassessment" (paper presented at the annual meetings of the Canadian Asian
Studies Association, Winnepeg, Canada, 1986).
20
32. See Wong, Heady, and Woo, Fiscal Management and Economic Reform, 81-134.
33. Guojia Tongjiju [State Statistical Bureau], Zhongguo tongji nianjian [Statistical yearbook of
China] (Beijing: Zhongguo Tongji Chubanshe, 1996).
34. Guizhou Sheng Difangzhi Bianji Weiyuanhui, [Guizhou Provincial Gazetteer Editorial
Committee], Guizhou nianjian [Guizhou yearbook] (Guiyang: Renmin Chubanshe, 1996), 60.
35. Wong, Heady, and Woo, Fiscal Management and Economic Reform, 92.
36. Guizhou Sheng Difangzhi Bianji Weiyuanhui, Guizhou nianjian, 60; Guizhou Sheng Tongjiju
[Guizhou Provincial Statistical Bureau], Guizhou tongji nianjian [Guizhou statistical yearbook]
(Beijing: Guojia Tongji Chubanshe, 1993), 102.
37. Wong, Financing Local Government, 11.
38. See Tim Oakes, "Selling Guizhou: Cultural Development in an Era of Marketization," in The
Political Economy of China's Provinces, ed. Hans Hendrischke and Feng Chongyi (London:
Routledge, 1999).
39. Zhongguo Jihua Weiyuanhui [China Planning Commission], Guizhou Sheng guotu zongti
guihua [Guizhou provincial comprehensive development plan] (Beijing: Zhongguo Jihua
Weiyuanhui Chubanshe, 1992); Liang Fang, "Guizhou's Ordnance Industry Turns Civil," Beijing
Review, 11-17 October 1993, 12-15.
40. See Chen and Wang, "Guizhou jingji."
41. Sun Jinghua, director of promotion and marketing, Guizhou Tourism Bureau, interviewed by
the author, Guiyang, 1 August 1994.
42. Symbolically illustrating these important roles of tourism, Guizhou's high-grade highway,
between Guiyang and Huangguoshu Falls, the province's most popular tourist attraction, was
completed in 1991. When this highway was built, 20 percent of Guizhou's administrative village
seats were still roadless. This represented a significant commitment to initiating the basic
infrastructure investments necessary for selling Guizhou. See Li Renshan, "Guizhou shaoshu
minzu zizhi difang jingji shehui fazhan qingkuan cunzai wenti ji jinhou fazhan de jianyi" [Current
conditions, remaining problems, and suggestions for future development in the socioeconomic
development of Guizhou's minority nationality autonomous regions], in Guizhou Sheng Shaoshu
Minzu Jingji Yanjiuhui [Guizhou Minority Nationalities Economic Research Association], Guizhou
Sheng shaoshu minzu jingji yanjiu [Economic research on Guizhou's minority nationalities]
(Guiyang: Minzu Chubanshe, 1991), 1-9; and Wang and Bai, Poverty of Plenty, 171.
43. Liu Xiuluan, Guizhou lüyou puluren [Pioneers of Guizhou tourism] (Beijing: Zhongguo Lüyou
Chubanshe, 1994), 34-38.
44. Zhang Shaohua, "Zhenjian tiaochu bashiwan" [Leaping to 800,000 from the point of a needle],
in Zhongguo qiye yinghao [Heroes of Chinese enterprise] (Beijing: Qiye Guanli Chubanshe, 1993),
23-38.
45. See, for example, Louisa Schein, "Gender and Internal Orientalism in China," Modern China
23, no. 1 (January 1997): 69-98; and Gladney, "Representing Nationality," 93-94.
46. Schein, "Gender and Internal Orientalism," 72.
21
47. See Stevan Harrell, "Introduction: Civilizing Projects and the Reaction to Them," in Cultural
Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers, ed. Stevan Harrell (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1995), 3-36.
48. Shi Chaojiang, "Miaozu chuantong wenhua yu shehui zhuyi xiandaihua" [Traditional Miao
culture and socialist modernization], in Zouxiang shijie dachao [An upsurge toward the world], ed.
Guizhou Minzu Cultural Studies Association (Guiyang: Minzu Chubanshe, 1991), 76-84; Lei
Guangzheng, "Shuizu wenhua yu xiandaihua" [Shui culture and modernization], Guizhou minzu
yanjiu [Guizhou minzu studies] 49 (January 1992): 33-36.
49. See Nelson H. H. Graburn, "Introduction: Arts of the Fourth World," in Ethnic and Tourist Arts:
Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World, ed. Nelson H. H. Graburn (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 1-32; June Nash, "Introduction: Traditional Arts
and Changing Markets in Middle America," in Crafts in the World Market: The Impact of Global
Exchange on Middle American Artisans, ed. June Nash (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1993), 12; Michael J. G. Parnwell, "Tourism and Rural Handicrafts in Thailand," in Tourism
in South-East Asia, ed. Michael Hitchcock, Victor King, and Michael Parnwell (London: Routledge,
1993), 234-257; and Ronald Waterbury, "Embroidery for Tourists: A Contemporary Putting-Out
System in Oaxaca, Mexico," in Cloth and the Human Experience, ed. Annette B. Weiner and
Jane Schneider (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 243-271.
50. In putting-out systems, merchant entrepreneurs mobilize labor primarily via contracts with
individual households, thereby minimizing their investment in fixed assets and reducing much of
their risk. In such systems, labor is dominated not by controlling the workplace but by controlling
the supply of raw materials, as well as the marketing of the finished product.
51. Historically, this has been a common response of farming households in Guizhou during
times of rapid economic change. Early in the twentieth century, poppy fields for opium were
primarily tended by women to augment household income. Today, the most common response to
poverty is the out-migration of a portion of household labor, usually that of males, which is leading
to a "feminization" of agriculture in many parts of rural China. However, certain key migrant-labor
markets (electronics and textiles, for example), tend to be dominated by young women. See
Tamara Jacka, Women's Work in Rural China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
120-142; Elizabeth Croll and Huang Ping, "Migration for and against Agriculture in Eight Chinese
Villages," China Quarterly 149 (March 1997): 128-146; and Joshua Muldavin, "Environmental
Degradation in Heilongjiang: Policy Reform and Agrarian Dynamics in China's New Hybrid
Economy," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87, no. 4 (December 1997): 579613.
52. This allowed the government to implement prefecture-wide policies that were designed to
make the region attractive to investors; counties and municipalities within the prefecture quickly
followed with special policies of their own. The prefectural capital of Kaili, for example,
established its own "economic and technological development zone," with five-year income-tax
holidays (even longer for "hi-tech" firms) followed by another five years of reduced taxes, VAT
reductions and waivers, subsidies for firms facing tax hardships, and other tax holidays of various
lengths for land, property, transportation, and employment. Land rents and utility fees also were
reduced, especially for hi-tech and tourist (including crafts) enterprises. See Zhang Nianhai,
"Minzu zizhi difang gaige kaifang shiyanqu de zhengce yanjiu" [Policy research on open reform
experimental zones in nationality autonomous regions], Guizhou minzu yanjiu no. 61 (January
1995): 31-33; see also "Zhou Wei Zhou Zhengfu Tongbao Shiyanqu Qingkuang [Prefectural party
and government circulate report on experimental zone conditions]," Qiandongnan bao
[Qiandongnan daily], 15 April 1994, 1.
22
53. For comparison, the average monthly income in 1992 for wage earners in Taijiang was RMB
165. See Guizhou Sheng Tongjiju [Guizhou Provincial Statistical Bureau], Guizhou tongji nianjian,
95.
54. Anonymous Taijiang Nationalities Affairs Commission officer, interviewed by the author,
Taijiang, 4 November 1996.
55. Managers felt they were contributing to rural development by teaching peasant households
the value of money and promoting their "commercial consciousness." They also felt good about
convincing peasants to respect the value of their traditions: "If it wasn't for me," one proclaimed,
"peasants around here would forget their old patterns" (anonymous factory manager, interviewed
by the author, Taijiang, Guizhou, 2 April 1994).
56. Ibid. The manager's claim that increasing commercialization had influenced local embroidery
styles was indeed true; Miao women had long incorporated changes into their textile designs to
reflect the changes they witnessed going on around them. For example, earlier in the century,
Western alphabet letters began finding their way into embroidered textile patterns simply because
they looked new and different. Textile patterns, in other words, are a dynamic process when
controlled by the producer. In the name of "authenticity," urban entrepreneurs were attempting to
freeze this process by taking control away from the producer herself.
57. Exley, Proposal for Far Village, 3.
58. Anonymous factory manager, interviewed by the author, Huangping, Guizhou, 11 June 1994.
59. Village producers didn't know where their products were ultimately bound because they never
had any direct contact with the crafts factories as final assembly points. All business was
conducted via the "foremen." Nor did they understand that their products (a piece of batik cloth, a
patch of embroidery) were being assembled into fashionable articles of clothing in those factories.
Enterprising village women, of course, could find out, but generally those households producing
under contract were remote enough to preclude much contact with the urban centers where crafts
were assembled.
60. Ong, "Chinese Modernities," 172.
61. Mayfair Yang, "Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on
(Re)cosmopolitanism in a Chinese Metropolis," in Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of
Chinese Transnationalism, ed. Aiwha Ong and Donald Nonini (London: Routledge, 1997), 297.