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Politics of Development and Imaginaries of the Future
China, Laos, and Vietnam are three of a handful of late socialist countries where capitalist economics rubs up against party-state politics. In these countries, sweeping processes of change open up new vistas of opportunity and imaginaries of the future alongside much uncertainty and anxiety, especially for their large rural populations.
Contributors to this edited volume demonstrate the diverse ways in which rural people build futures in this unique policy landscape and how their aspirations and desires are articulated as projects involving both citizens and the state. This produces a politics of development that happens through and around the state as people navigate discourses of betterment to imagine and make new futures at individual and collective levels.
Contributors to this edited volume demonstrate the diverse ways in which rural people build futures in this unique policy landscape and how their aspirations and desires are articulated as projects involving both citizens and the state. This produces a politics of development that happens through and around the state as people navigate discourses of betterment to imagine and make new futures at individual and collective levels.
Politics of Development and Imaginaries of the Future
China, Laos, and Vietnam are three of a handful of late socialist countries where capitalist economics rubs up against party-state politics. In these countries, sweeping processes of change open up new vistas of opportunity and imaginaries of the future alongside much uncertainty and anxiety, especially for their large rural populations.
Contributors to this edited volume demonstrate the diverse ways in which rural people build futures in this unique policy landscape and how their aspirations and desires are articulated as projects involving both citizens and the state. This produces a politics of development that happens through and around the state as people navigate discourses of betterment to imagine and make new futures at individual and collective levels.
Contributors to this edited volume demonstrate the diverse ways in which rural people build futures in this unique policy landscape and how their aspirations and desires are articulated as projects involving both citizens and the state. This produces a politics of development that happens through and around the state as people navigate discourses of betterment to imagine and make new futures at individual and collective levels.
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This chapter, through a daily-life perspective, explores the question of “a good life”. It focuses on a case regarding the abolition of infanticide, through which the relations and interactions between the socialist state and ethnic minorities of southwest China are examined. By elaborating how an Akha custom (infanticide) that guarantees communal goodness/purity was abolished, the research reveals three competing or collaborating notions of “good life”. The Akha’s cosmological “good life” cherishing religious purity over contaminating “not-good” baby is partly reformed to obey state law which promises to protect people’s fundamental rights of life and property, and further to meet its members’ personal desires in keeping a wanted baby, maintaining complete family relations across generations, and securing property. This is an unusual case in that the ethnic cultural authorities from a small, politically marginalised, frontier-dwelling and egalitarian group in southwest China do not “resist” or “collaborate with” the state in the expected way. Instead, they draw on state power to oppose their own customs in a highly disassembled way. With such a unique case, the research helps to diversify our understandings of “good life” as well as state–society relations in southwest China in the twenty-first century.
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This chapter explores how steel workers contend with hopes and aspirations of the good life in the context of policy reforms on the level of the industry, state, and enterprise. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in Anhui Province, China, to explore how rural mine workers plan for and imagine the future. The reforms of the socialist work-unit (danwei) and gradual de-industrialisation of an iron ore mine in the 1990s shifted viable futures for worker families to the city. To access urban life for their families and themselves, workers commit to working in the rural mine until retirement, separated from their children who migrate to the city. Mine workers’ conception of a good life is influenced by the socialist good life of the past and by the anticipation of a future in the city. In preparation workers invest significantly into their retirement plans, imagining the reunification with their families and community without considering the generational differences in aspiration for a good life.
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This chapter focuses on the convergence of mass Christianisation and economic transformations among the Hmong of Vietnam’s northern highlands over the past thirty years. A history of impoverishment and ethnic discrimination has led hundreds of thousands of Hmong to follow Christianity as a perceived alternative path to progress instead of the state-led development agenda, despite sharing the same ‘will to improve’. By exploring local understandings about the means to development as well as new religious teaching on prosperity, entrepreneurialism and calculativity in a rapidly developing Hmong village, this paper queries the ‘elective affinity’ between new Christian movements and neoliberalism posited by other scholars. The case study sheds light on the awkward combination of ‘cooperative competitiveness’ accompanying a community-benefit tourism development model. Hmong Christian activity can both overlap, and sit at odds with, government agendas and market expansion, resulting in complex transformations and subjectivities which cannot simply be reduced to neoliberal logic.
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Over the past two decades, Chinese rural architecture has experienced dramatic changes through the Building the Chinese Socialist New Village movement. Thousands of new houses, particularly in the model of the New Village, have risen abruptly out of the ground. These western-style new houses with a garden (huayuan yangfang), which often appear in the media as typical family houses in western society, largely represent the imagination of the good life of the state and the peasant in contemporary China. In this chapter, I focus on how the family house is produced and consumed in Baikou New Village in south China. By presenting the materiality of the dwelling space, this paper probes the intertwined processes of the materialisation of the blueprint of the good life and how the new houses influence family life (especially intergenerational relationships) in post-socialist Baikou New Village.
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Lowland rice cultivation is changing in southern Laos. A formalised survey and informal interviews in the lowlands of Savannakhet Province indicate that while some farmers still raise water buffaloes, they now mainly use hand-held mechanised ploughs to till their fields. More chemical fertilisers are being used, and improved seed varieties have become dominant, with native varieties disappearing. Due to these changes, rice yields have increased substantially, with many more farmers selling surplus rice. The trade-offs are, however, not simple. Through applying the lens of risk perception, this chapter presents data about how lowland rice farming – the main occupation for rural people in Savannakhet Province – has changed over the last twenty years, critically assessing how farmers perceive and act upon risk during this time of rapid agrarian change. This approach can help us think about how farmers imagine the future and think about ‘good life’.
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Late socialist countries are transforming faster than ever. Across China, Laos and Vietnam, where market economies coexist with socialist political rhetoric and the Communist party state’s rule, sweeping processes of change open up new vistas of imaginaries of the future alongside uncertainty and anxiety. These countries are three of very few living examples that combine capitalist economics with party state politics. Consequently, societal transformations in these contexts are subject to pressures and agendas not found elsewhere, and yet they are no less subject to global forces. As all three countries maintain substantial rural populations, and because those rural areas are themselves places of change, how rural people across these changing contexts undertake future making is a timely and significant question. The contributions in the volume address this question by engaging with lived experiences and government agendas across Laos, China and Vietnam, showing a politics of development in which desire and hope are entangled with the contradictions and struggles of late socialism.
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Drawing on ethnographic research in northern Laos, this chapter analyses articulations of a good life in primary school textbook imagery and how this resonates with everyday life in rural upland communities. This is contrasted with children’s sketches of a good life found in the classrooms and ethnographic accounts of moments of ‘good time’ in the context of rural schooling. It is argued that these latter moments constitute brief instances of a good life in the present. Given the hierarchical power relations in which rural education is embedded, not all of these good times stay good for very long. This is reflective of the condition of late socialism in rural Laos.
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Single mothers in rural North Central Vietnam face many difficulties in carrying out their livelihoods. Since they deviate from the norms of the patriarchal family, many do not receive support easily from their own relatives or access livelihood assets from their parents. As units of production, their households lack the support from the relatives of spouses normally available to married women and face discrimination in accessing livelihood capitals. Finally, the stigma induced by the state-sponsored notion of ‘Happy Family’ acts as a social deterrent to their pursuit of the good life. Thus, regardless of their efforts in crafting their livelihoods, many single mothers find themselves unable to improve their income and reduce poverty. Despite greater social acceptance of single motherhood, their experiences suggest that the good life in Vietnam today remains invested in the ideal of heterosexual marriage reproduced by state discourses and enduring patriarchal ideas and practices.
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James C. Scott claimed that upland Southeast Asians consider their good life as dependent on their autonomy from the state. Given that the state today is present in various forms in the uplands, current uplanders can be considered as post-Zomian. Staying and moving represent two contrastive values in this region whose realisation serves to make a good life possible. This chapter considers these values through the issue of resettlement in Laos, a situation in which local values intersect with or contradict government planning. Even in situations in which the state demonstrates its hegemony and force, ethnic Rmeet uplanders tend to stress their own agency. Therefore, resettlement and its avoidance may both appear as the realisation of local values, sometimes in the shape of ‘village agency’, as the good life is seen as life in a community.