1 Introduction
What sort of social and economic arrangements are enabled by an extractive economy and its successors? How are patterns of social stratification influenced by these processes? Drawing on ethnographic evidence collected in a tourist destination town in Yunnan, China, that is surrounded by iron mines, I document how the evolution of state-controlled mining industries enables state capacity expansions that are marked by increasing inequality between core and periphery, increasingly centralised control over local cultural life, and the entanglement of these process within larger national transformations. I approach the role of extractivism in this context starting from the
2 State Formation and Cultural Extractivism
Extractivism and its entanglement with development processes have been a common concern for social scientists, particularly with regard to cases drawn from Latin America. The present literature review surveys relevant arguments related to extractivism and its critiques, then highlights elements of the internal colonialism literature as a means to extend critique of extractivism to the present case. The literature review suggests two intertwined questions: As local and regional economies transition out of an extractive (primary) economy, how does the underlying ideological orientation that structures extractivism persist? Secondly, how does the conceptual schematic of state formation
A broad overview of extractivism and its successor ideologies can be found in the introduction to this volume and in Calvão, Archer and Benya (2023). Other writings on extractivism have offered new visions of the relations underpinning extractivism while pushing beyond case studies of tangible, ‘natural’ resources such as ores and rare earth metals. Calvão and Archer (2021), for example, describe how blockchain technologies embedded in mining supply chains create their own forms of social and political value by reinforcing narratives of sustainability. Gago and Mezzadra (2017) use the example of the extractive logic inherent in patents for soya bean seeds—local knowledge is taken and codified in corporate intellectual property, which shifts value away from its source. These authors’ analysis yields an important foundation for an expanded analysis of extractivist structures; the use of the extractivism concept ought to yield insights beyond cases of raw materials and instead should explore the ‘fundament features of the logic of contemporary capitalism’s functioning’ (Gago and Mezzadra, 2017, 577).
2.1 State Formation and the Periphery
Analysis of the existing literature further builds on the nature of core and periphery development at the subnational level. This configuration of framing and data analyses extends the theoretical literature on internal colonialism as described by Hechter (1999) who envisions the process of internal colonialism as the result of an ‘uneven wave of modernisation over state territory’ that
creates relatively advanced and less advanced groups. As a consequence of this initial fortuitous advantage, there is crystallization of the unequal distribution of resources and power between the two groups. The superordinate group, or core, seeks to stabilize and monopolize its advantages through policies aiming at the institutionalization of the existing stratification system. It attempts to regulate the allocation of social roles such that those roles commonly defined as having high prestige are reserved for its members … [resulting in] a cultural division of labor.
hechter (1999, 9); emphasis added
Though Hechter’s thesis was often discussed during the 1980s and 1990s (and has been less prominent in the literature since), it was rarely thoroughly applied to China. An exception is work by Gladney (1994; 2004), who uses internal colonialism to frame his analyses of media representation of China’s ethnic minorities, particularly Uyghurs. Gladney (2004) argues that representations
The state is the culmination of a process of concentration of different species of capital: capital of physical force or instruments of coercion (army, police), economic capital, cultural or (better) informational capital, and symbolic capital. It is this concentration as such which constitutes the state as the holder of a sort of meta-capital granting power over other species of capital and over their holders.
bourdieu, wacquant, and farage’s (1994, 4); emphasis in the original
This last point about ‘meta-capital’ is key to the internal colonialism process and its role in transposing one model of extraction from that of raw resources to that of intangible culture. Cultural forms found in the margins of the state precede formal state presence (e.g., the indigenous traditions of the Huayao Dai discussed below long predate the foundation of the contemporary Chinese regime). Successful entrenchment of the centralised state in the supposed periphery requires the ability to define symbolic life as cultural capital that can be exchanged for economic capital, which can then be used elsewhere in the national economy. According to Bourdieu, Wacquant, and Farage (1994), the modern state’s role as a monopolist over the relations between these different capitals has a natural corollary: interpretations of capital’s relative values among the governed—laypersons’ notions of why certain cultural or social practices have a certain value—are subordinated to new official ‘exchange rates’. Thus, as states and regions contend with the relative value of a primary resource (such as iron ore) and an intangible resource (such as the value embedded in cultural tourism), it is the role of the state to decide, informally or explicitly, what the relative value of these things is and how to allocate and redistribute that value.
3 Date, Case, and Methods
This chapter draws on fieldwork conducted in southwest China over the summers of 2016, 2017 and 2018. The primary site is a town I refer to as ‘Red River’—a growing town with close to 10,000 residents. The town is surrounded by smaller villages with populations ranging from a few dozen to several hundred. The region has historically been home to several ethnic groups, chiefly the Huayao branch of the Dai minority. In recent years the town has become a Han majority town, but the surrounding villages are primarily Dai.
3.1 The Huayao Dai of Southwest China
The Huayao Dai (花腰傣; they also refer to themselves as the Daiya, 傣雅) are a branch of the Dai minority group found in Southeast Asia. The Dai overall number more than 7 million, with the majority (6.3 million) to be found in Myanmar, more than 100,000 in Thailand and Laos, and the remaining 1.1 million in southwest China (Tao, 2003). Though the majority of the Dai people practice Theravada Buddhism, the Huayao Dai are one of the few groups in China that still practice an indigenous religion. Their faith is a blend of animist and pantheistic traditions that are often melded with elements from Buddhists sects and other Chinese folk traditions.
The religious practices of the Huayao Dai are centred around two roles: the beima and the longtou. The beima, typically an older woman, occupies a position similar to a priest or shaman. Her job is to ensure that the spirits associated
The longtou occupies a position similar to a deacon in Christian traditions. They are bi-vocational, and husband and wife pairs often serve jointly. The longtou’s primary job is to assist the beima in obligatory rituals such as funerals and exorcisms. Longtous also serve as elders in the village, overseeing the secular affairs of the community (this aspect of their social role has waned in recent years as state governments take hold). There is no prescribed number of beimas and longtous that a village must have; people select into these positions on the basis of personal experiences and divination rituals. For example, most of the beimas discussed in this essay acquired their ability to speak in tongues and enter the spiritual realm after surviving a serious illness or injury during early adulthood. Most of the villages in the Red River area had at least two beimas; the number of longtous varies from one to more than a dozen.
The town is situated between a range of low, jagged mountains and the Red River, also called the Gasa River, which gives the town its name. While the town is densely populated and packed with multistorey residential and commercial buildings, it is surrounded by a dozen smaller villages that have historically relied on agriculture. Beginning in the mid-2000s, the local government was able to substantially increase its revenues via levies on the profits of mining taking place in the surrounding mountain ranges. Much of this extra tax revenue has been invested in tourist enterprises, particularly nongjiales (rural guest houses that allow tourists to participate in rural life) and performance venues. One of the major attractions each year is the Water Splashing Festival, a holiday that occurs each April in Buddhist Dai communities. The traditional function of the festival is to highlight the commencement of a new year with a ritualistic cleaning of Buddha statues and Buddhist temples, and the festival culminates in a playful, village-wide water fight—modern celebrations often feature water guns and water balloons. Even though the Huayao Dai in Red River are not Buddhist, the local government began promoting the Water Splashing Festival as a means of attracting large numbers of tourists.
3.2 Ethnographic and Analytic Approach
This chapter draws on fieldwork conducted in Yunnan during 2016, 2017 and 2018. During 2016 I travelled to Red River with a small group of anthropologists
Data were also collected through formal, semi-structured interviews with around 40 residents of Red River and surrounding villages. Interviewees were aged 18–85, collectively represented four ethnic groups, and were spread around Red River and a half dozen adjacent villages. While several themes were present in each interview, I followed Small’s (2009) sequential approach to interview design: emergent themes and provoked questions were allowed to influence each future interview inductively. Thus, interview data capture a comprehensive range of salient public issues in the region. Candidates for formal interviews were recruited until the number of new emergent themes diminished significantly. Formal interview data are supplemented by casual conversations with people such as taxi drivers, restaurant staff, and neighbours of my village guesthouse. Data are presented below as excerpts from contemporary field notes or as contextual notes to explore connections to the existing literature.
Red River’s residents are ensconced in steep mountain ranges and patches of flat land along the banks of the eponymous river, but the wider world is rapidly establishing a foothold in previously remote villages and neighbourhoods. My approach to developing the theoretical argument for this chapter follows the extended case method discussed by Burawoy (1998) and Burawoy et al. (2000). My fieldwork sought to explore Red River across both time and space. In addition to literal explorations of the regions connections to larger cities and the expansion of my fieldwork over three years, conversations also touched on perceptions of the region’s evolution, imagined futures for the region and its families. My ‘hook’ into a larger global process (see Burawoy,
The Huayao Dai are one of several sub-branches of the Dai ethnic group, but in this chapter I use the terms Dai and Huayao interchangeably; all Dai who live in Red River are members of the Huayao Dai branch. In the empirical sections below, I present data from field notes and from conversations with participants alongside my own analysis.
4 Transitioning from Extractive Mining to Extractive Tourism
Bai Taitai is a Huayao Dai woman in her early 30s and an entrepreneur in Orchid Valley—she and her husband, Zhou Laoban, have expanded their home to create space for guests, mostly residents of urban China looking to experience rural life in a nongjiale, or guesthouse (Park, 2014). Their home is large and new, with concrete walls painted a bright off white. The house has six bedrooms: one shared by her, her husband, and her two young children, one for her parents, and four reserved for guests, who pay around usd 7.50 (50 Chinese yuan renminbi (cny)) per night. A balcony on the second floor overlooks the home’s courtyard and poultry coops, and the roof is flat with ample room to lay out grain to dry in the sun and to sleep under the stars during cool summer nights.
Bai has a serious demeanour that belies her sharp and dry wit. She oversees a household with four generations of Huayao Dai women—her mother and father live in the bedroom next to hers, her grandmother divides her time between Bai’s home and a neighbouring cousin’s home, and a baby daughter follows her in a plastic walker. Bai’s wardrobe highlights the cultural changes between her mother’s generation and her own—she typically wears a cotton t-shirt, capris, and a sun hat while working in the home’s courtyard alongside her mother, who wears a plain white blouse, a black skirt embroidered with Huayao Dai patterns, and cone-shaped rice hat.
Her husband, Zhou Laoban, is a muscular Han man from a mountainside village about an hour away. He worked in construction for most of his teens and early twenties, and met Bai Taitai while building houses in Orchid Valley. Now he works intermittently as a demolitions expert in the iron mines that encircle Red River and its satellite villages. The work pays well and he typically only has to work a few hours a day when the mine boss needs something blasted. I ask Bai if she worries about her husband’s safety—‘What good does it do to worry?’
Scholars of tourism in developing spaces have noted the possibility of functional similarities between extractivism and tourism. In an analysis of the rise of ecotourism in Honduras, Loperena (2017, 621) notes that both ‘entail mostly outward-oriented production, market valorisation of natural and cultural resources, and processes of dispossession in areas with high economic potential’. Each of these dimensions is present in the emerging tourist economy of Red River. Consumption of cultural and ecotourism is marketed heavily to ethnic Han Chinese tourists from urban China and international tourists from Thailand, and the cultural experiences for sale are largely flattened to cohere with the demands of a market economy. Tourism is also fundamentally reshaping the political economy of Red River as villages are marked for either tourist or industrial development and residents face the risk of violent dispossession (Devine and Ojeda, 2017). While some models of post-extractivism tourism (coupled with logics of degrowth and local sovereignty) have successfully evaded these parallels with primary resource extractivism (e.g., Chassagne and Everingham, 2019), the transition to tourism in Red River has been marked by widening inequality at the expense of local indigenous populations.
We asked Yang, a distant cousin of the deceased from a neighbouring township, about the outlook for his village and the communities around him. The government of Yunnan had somewhat arbitrarily decided that Red River and its constituent villages would be a centre for Dai-related tourism in the region, while his own village continued to rely on agriculture. The villages connected to Red River township enjoyed generous subsidies from the government. Peasant households rented out their land to banana and rice plantations, guaranteeing a passive income of several thousand [cny] [several hundred usd] per year. Households who opened bed and breakfasts were also entitled to a [cny] 10,000 [usd 1,500] […] annual subsidy.
Author’s field note, July 2018
Prospects for men and women my age were still somewhat grim. Yang told us that many young people sought out part time jobs in the [county’s administrative capital], the women as office or clerical workers, and the men at nearby iron mines. The mines are particularly treacherous; Yang tells us that someone dies at a mine every day. Despite the dangers, work at the mines pays well, netting the young Dai men several hundred [cny] [several dozen usd] per day. The easy cash brings its own challenges; Yang tells us that many young men spend their pay on ktv [karaoke] parlours (which implicitly function as brothels as well) before the next day’s work begin[s]. After they marry, we ask, do Dai men still seek out this type of part time work? Yes, Yang replies; after working there long enough they learn […] to watch for the falling rocks.
Dao Li’s home in the village of Pingzhai, about two kilometres south-southwest of Orchid Valley, has stood for nearly a century. The structure was home to her grandparents, parents, and now to her, her second husband, and her children. Dao Li, a 38-year-old Huayao Dai woman, is now preparing for the home’s demolition. The home shows its age: the walls are exposed brick, the walls dirt, the second floor held up by wooden beams. Parts of the roof over the outer rooms of the house have collapsed, revealing the sunny sky overhead. The village around her home is equally humble; even the chickens are a little rougher around the edges than those in Orchid Valley. Dao is one of the poorest people I have spoken to
Author’s field note, July 2018in China, and perhaps anywhere. She tells us the income she generates from subsistence farming and other source[s] totals around 4,000 [cny] (just shy of usd 600) per year.
Many of the homes in Pingzhai were in a similar condition. While Pingzhai was roughly as far away from downtown Red River as was Orchid Valley, almost none of its households had been able to collect subsidies for rural accommodation offerings or other small businesses. Pingzhai is relatively close to a paper mill—Red River’s only industrial employer—and the odour is pervasive when the winds blow southwest. Pingzhai also lies at the intersection of the roads that lead up to the natural tourism destinations of the mountains—a waterfall, a mountain pass, and several scenic vistas. Ironically, this proximity to these other tourist destinations undercuts Pingzhai’s tourist potential by increasing traffic and undermining its ‘rural’ character. Contrasting families like Bai Taitai’s (from Orchid Valley) and Dao Li’s (in Pingzhai) highlights the inequalities created by the transition to culturally extractive tourism. Bai and her family live in a large, new home and enjoy a consistent passive income from their allotment of farmland and their guesthouse. Dao, by contrast, lost out on these very same opportunities: her farmland allotment was on poor soil and the local government expressed little interest in developing tourism for Pingzhai.
By and large, the expansion of the tourism industry in Red River funded by iron mining revenues has led to the evolution (rather than the replacement) of the extractivist form of governance. Central to this analysis is recognition that while the type of resources being moved has shifted from iron to culture, the underlying patterns of exploitation inherent in extractivism (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2017) are still present.
5 Ossifying and Flattening Culture
Bai Dage is an affable restauranter in his mid-30s. He is a heavy drinker, often entertaining guests and luminaries at his village restaurant well into the evening with bottles of baijiu shared in front of a ktv machine. The restaurant consists of a rectangular dining pavilion with waist-high cinderblock walls and a corrugated metal roof; adjacent to the dining room is an open-air kitchen that overlooks a poultry pen containing chickens, geese, ducks, and an occasional turkey. The restaurant sits beside a four-lane road at the top of a gentle terraced hill leading down to Orchid Valley, the village he administers
I often—on my walks out of the village and into town before the heat of the late morning sun rolled in—found Bai sitting on a stool in the dining area. My route involved a shortcut over a cinderblock retaining wall that divides the fish pond from a stand of dragon fruit vines; at the end of the wall pedestrian guests duck under a young papaya tree and step into the dining room. On a typical late June morning, the shirtless, wiry Bai grimaced and laughed his way through the day’s hangover, looking out through his aviator sunglasses over the dragon fruit vines and rice paddy that took up most of the hill between him and the village. I start my research for the day sitting across from Bai and chat with him about the vegetables he needs to buy at the market today. Over the previous few days I had accompanied Bai on the quick motorcycle taxi ride into Red River, the nearby town, and followed him as he scouted out the best deal for ‘collard greens’, mangos, mint, pork, and whatever else he planned to serve that day. ‘Why don’t I go into town today with your list? I want to practice my Dai’, I offer. Bai laughs gently—I’m not ready yet.
Bai has done well for himself. He occupies a formal position as leader of his village—a secular, political role that puts him in constant contact with the powers that be in town and, occasionally, in the county government. But he is also heir to the village’s religious authority—his father had previously served as a spiritual leader, but abdicated upon his son’s appointment to avoid any appearance of dynastic aspirations. Bai talked often about faith in the village and what it meant to him, his family, his son—the most concise answer he ever gave on matters of belief was, ‘You don’t believe in it, until you have to’. Parents die and need to be cared for on their journey to the next place, children get sick and the doctor’s medicine does not work fast enough. Bai’s candid acknowledgement of the instrumentality of his faith reflects the need to adopt the ‘modern’ outlook necessary for his secular role while still maintaining a core sense of ethnic identity.
After a local beima’s grandson murdered her son-in-law, the people of the village began to experience problems with his ghost bothering them.
There’s an additional type of spiritual leader called the yamou, men who provide services similar to Taoist priests (exorcisms, spells, etc.). In his role as village chief, Dage asked a yamou from outside the village—one that is more powerful than the local yamou—to help. The village collectively spent [cny] 20,000 […] [around usd 2,800] for a ward/spell to settle all of the village’s spiritual affairs at once. Dage plays an active role in this story [both] because he is […] the formal, elected leader of the village and because he is a bit sceptical about the power that the traditional spiritual leaders have here. He was given the ward in the form of a printed written formula of some sort. The spell would be cast/carried about by one of the village longtous, but the longtou is illiterate so Dage had to practice reading the spell to convey it to him. He recounts the following experience:
He was practicing the spell but did not read it completely. After casually reading parts of it he heard a voice and saw a large spirit—he describes it as some mixture of a large tree and a giant—which told him to turn around. As soon as he did he found himself in the middle of his fishpond. A friend, who had been in the bathroom at the time, came out and found him treading water.
Author’s field note, July 2018
This story captures the liminal position Bai finds himself in often—the Communist party leader and son of a priest, anxious about the village’s spiritual health but also about ceding too much control to a magician, finds himself punished by forces he does not understand because he is trying to straddle two worlds. This tension is emblematic of the challenges of participating in culture forms caught up in changing conditions of modernity (van Gennep, 2004), and Bai finds himself navigating collisions of modernisation and culture throughout his community.
As a concept, culture is, of course, immensely complex both conceptually and practically. Tourists, as consumers of culture, often have narrower expectations in mind. Urry and Larsen (2011, 1119) describe the performance of service in the tourism industry as a ‘bodily performance that needs to please, seduce or entertain, especially visually’. The subsidised cultural industry in Red River ossifies certain cultural practices in time for the enjoyment of tourists from China’s urban cores. The elements of spiritual life that were so integral to the lived experiences of Huayao Dai residents, particularly middle-aged and older residents, were difficult to commodify. Tourists instead prefer to see easily accessible, and unchanging, forms of culture that adhere to prior notions of
The conversation continues to focus on the outlook for […] young Dai men and women. Their faith is split between acknowledging the importance of their elder’s faith (which they view as superstition) and a more modern trust in science and contemporary medical practices.
At this point, Dao Xiaomei becomes a more central part of the conversation. She recounts several anecdotal experiences she has had moving between traditional and modern practices when raising her child, and opens the conversation to a broader discussion about discrimination and pride in ethnic identity. It wasn’t long ago, she says, that ethnic minority groups were subject to heavy discrimination. ‘Why aren’t you Han?’ she recalls being asked. Pride in her Dai identity is easier and stronger now, and Dao views a goal of her job to [be to] encourage and protect that pride. She relates how she used to be too embarrassed to wear traditional Dai clothing even outside of her own home; she now wears them to trips to Beijing and Shanghai. The Dai have gained the ability to take pride in traditional embroidery and fashions.
I ask about what men take pride in—and the answer is less clear. The men are more heavily engaged in agriculture, mining, and other heavy labour, and much of their free time (she reminds us) is taken [up] by alcohol. Sexism is apparently a serious issue in the area. This is apparent from what we have inferred about education in Gasa. Though Dao Xiaomei’s Mandarin is articulate and intelligently spoken, very few adult
women have been able to speak well enough to communicate with us. It is mostly the men that have received extensive education in Mandarin. It seems that the economy is the source of this gender stratification and [the] corresponding difference in cultural engagement. Men are enticed by the high incomes offered by mining, construction, and other manual labour sectors; women are more likely to engage in [the] commercialisation of culture, such as dance performance and embroidery work. ‘Culture’ has become synonymous with ‘cultural products’.
Author’s field note, Jun 2017
‘Judge a man by the land he farms on, and the girl by the embroidery she makes’, a local saying circulates among the Huayao Dai ethnic people in Xinping County, where most girls at the age of six or seven begin to learn how to stitch.
For Huayao Dai ladies, embroidering has become a way to pursue beauty, a way to perfect themselves and also a way to express what they most likely think romantic.
Dai ethnic communities of [Red River] are such places where you can see young girls getting together here and there, devoting themselves to the years-old hereditary craft.
Yunnan Provincial Tourism Administration, 2018
The patterns that Dao Xiaomei noted in reflecting on her own experiences are made explicit by the government’s tourism office: Red River was a place where outsiders could come watch women sew and dance, and leave with fond memories and embroidered souvenirs. The goal of such tourism, beyond economic enrichment and development, was the development and cultivation of urban citizens. Extracting ‘authentic’ experiences from people serves as a means of
6 The Creation of Hierarchy
A final consequence of the transition from natural resource extraction to culture extraction is the impact of externally funded, core-centric development on local hierarchies. Prior sections of this chapter have described examples of the spatial inequalities inherent in this process: certain villages and townships are chosen as tourist centres, leaving others to persist in mining and farming. They have also noted the impact that reshaping and flattening culture has on gender inequality, as women are encouraged to seek employment in hospitality and young men are pressured to move out for work. While earlier analyses of tourism in China suggested that the valorisation of ethnic culture might lessen tensions in contemporary China (e.g. Sofield and Li, 1998), in practice tourism has seen the creation of new types of inequality embedded in the absolute growth of the region.
Later a friend and I attempt to do a survey of a ‘typical’ block off the main street by cataloguing the types of business and facts about their proprietors, but our results are pretty mundane. Our site, a block of New Street, contains on one side (from south to north): an Asus dealer[ship] run by Dai, a pig feed store, a water store, a Dai rice store, a closed insurance business, something under construction, an alley of apartments, a fishing store with a group of drunk Huayao Dai men eating outside (they invite me to drink with them; I decline), a convenience store, a closed salon, a small playground, an old house, another old house set to be demolished—拆 [chai, “demolish”] painted on the wall—and a row of closed warehouse type buildings. The other side of the street is less interesting, mostly newer houses and a couple of convenience stores. In short, the flurry of tourist activity in Red River seems concentrated along a few
Author’s field note, August 2018blocks of the main road; once you go back a few blocks (especially away from the river and towards the mountain) there’s much less activity.
A quick census of the interior stalls (that is, the permanent tables) suggests that 10 per cent of the vendors are obviously Dai women (i.e., wearing the hats or have tattoos or stained teeth). We don’t have a good way to identify Dai men, so a generous estimate would suggest that a [quarter] of these vendors are Dai. On the other hand, all of the women selling vegetables and herbs on mats on the surrounding [pavement] are Dai. I buy some bajiao bananas [cny 2 rmb/jin],1 mangos [cny 4/jin] and a bunch of mint [cny 2.5] to take back to Bai Dage’s restaurant. The outermost ring of stores are the permanent storefronts that gird the market; these appear to be owned primarily by outsiders. For instance, we walk past stores selling Guizhou and Zhejiang wares; their respective owners say they are migrants. The handful of bricks-and-mortar stores with Dai employees are modest noodle joints.
Author’s field note, July 2018
There is a small souvenir shop next to the halal restaurant where I took most of my meals during the 2017 phase of my fieldwork. It was a modest storefront, less than 200 square feet with a large door that opened out to the main road running through Red River. Shelves lined both side walls and were stocked with dried tea leaves, red sugar, rice paddy eel traps woven from reeds, and small earthenware cups and tea pots made in one of the surrounding villages. The narrow back wall of the store had a large desk and computer where the proprietor of the store, Bai Yi, spent much of the day playing games. Bai is a Hani woman in her early 40s. She married into the village after growing up in […] Sandy Crest, the next town over. Despite being Hani, all of the wares she sold were associated with Huayao Dai culture. We ask why she—or anyone—isn’t selling souvenirs associated with Hani culture, to which she responds that no one is interested in the Hani here, local tourism is built on the Dai.
Author’s field note, July 2018
Author’s field note, July 2017
We talk about Qizu. The village is a mixture of Dai and Han; other groups live further up the mountain. He’s lived here is whole life and has several daughters who have married and left the village. We talk a little about land distribution—‘the Yi have the bad land with no water, the Dai and the Han have the good land’. He gets about […] [cny 1,000] per year for each of his 10 mu2 of land from the government; they’ve planted bamboo on his land to prevent erosion. The village of Qizu isn’t slated to move down the mountain, perhaps because it’s accessible by road and there isn’t a risk of landslides here. Dao Shifu seems to know little about China outside of this region—he hasn’t heard of several Eastern provinces and is amazed that my home state [the US state of Mississippi] is very flat—‘This sounds like good land’.
In short, development in Red River had meant change; the flood of outside investment has raised living standards in obvious ways. The highways connecting Red River to the provincial capital, Kunming, have improved every year, and the town now has a modern hospital. However, this development has created forms of inequality that were neither necessary nor expected by the locals hoping to participate in this growth. Inequality among the region’s diverse ethnic groups has been especially marked; the Han majority has occupied much of the new, semi-urban growth area in the town centre, while the Huayao Dai have enjoyed subsidies to build accommodation offerings in the surrounding villages. The Yi, Hui, and Hani, especially those living in more remote mountain villages, have been marginalised or ignored.
Inequalities along categorical lines like ethnicity serve important purposes; creating and entrenching gender, ethnic, and other categorical divides provides a means by which urban elites can consolidate (and hoard) opportunities and function as gatekeepers (Tilly, 1999). This growing ethnic and racial inequality is a noted feature of internal colonialism-style development (Hechter, 1999), but the increased complexity of Red River’s ethnic dynamics and the valorisation of certain cultural practices have made this inequality a pronounced feature of post-extraction development as well. Indeed, this pattern, in which a single ethnic group is chosen as the ‘winner’ of a development agenda, is common throughout Yunnan (Kolås, 2004; Sofield and Li, 1998). This repositioning and solidification of the ethnic hierarchy further serves the purpose of reinforcing Han supremacy in China’s ethnic landscape (Gladney, 1994; 2004).
7
The emerging tourist sector in Red River displays many of the relational and ideological features of natural resource extractivism. Both eras of the region’s recent development trajectory are marked by a core–periphery dynamic reminiscent of internal colonial models of national development and state formation, both in their orientation towards resource extraction and in their treatment of ethnic and racial inequality. Culture—namely, the performable and commodifiable dimensions of culture—is viewed as an unprocessed resource ready for consumption by Han ethnic majority tourists, who in turn return to China’s urban cores enriched and refreshed. The success of such a tourist industry requires that the culture to be extracted remain consumable, predictable, and legible. As a strong, core-centric state acts to create such an industry, the relevant dimensions of culture become flattened and ossified. The process further creates new forms of inequality; differential opportunities emerge along gender and ethnic boundaries. The net result is that while rural spaces experience economic development—Red River has grown and absolute standards of living have risen—underlying structural relationships are largely unchanged from an era marked by reliance on iron extraction. Economic life is directed by powerful, external actors, and sources of wealth in Red River are conceptualised as unprocessed, natural resources that attain value as they leave the region. The fieldwork used in this study, spread out over a three-year period, highlights the trajectory that these developments follow. In this case, that has meant growing opportunities for Han ‘in-migrants’, the professionalisation and standardisation of tourist states, and continued marginalisation of ethnic groups other than the Huayao Dai. The tendency towards ossified or new forms of inequality is not, however, indicative of a complete lack of agency on the part of minoritised or subaltern groups. The growth of a tourism industry has allowed for entrepreneurship, employment in better-paying service sector positions, and other opportunities that lead to higher absolute standards of living. Grappling with the tension between development and widening relative inequality in post-extractive tourist spaces will be an important concern for future work.
This case suggests several implications for development policy and development studies. A central concern is the role of transitions out of extractivism in creating, solidifying, and legitimising new forms of inequality. These new forms of inequality point to one embodiment of extraction’s afterlife—Gasa is not a post-extractivist economy per se because the emergence of tourism in the region has simply reshaped extractivist logic and allowed it to continue. In situations where powerful state or private sector actors have the capacity to
One jin is approximately 500 grams.
A Chinese unit of area measurement equivalent to approximately 0.066 hectares.
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