Rendering rural modernity: Spectacle and power in a Chinese ethnic tourism village

Abstract

For residents of Upper Jidao, a Miao village in Guizhou Province, China, the past decade and a half of tourism development in the region can be boiled down to one single suggestion: make a spectacle of yourselves. The spectacle of the rural and the ethnic in tourism – the finely dressed performers, the renovated village architecture – is usually considered the necessary means to the desired end result of boosting local economies. In this essay, I examine how architectural renderings constitute a world-making practice of and in rural ethnic China and how they illuminate underlying ideologies about sociocultural difference. By analyzing these drawings alongside ethnographic observations from long-term fieldwork in the village, this essay sheds light on the embedded relations of power and agentive potential enabled by this kind of spectacular development.

Material Compromises in the Planning of a ‘Traditional Village’ in Southwest China

“…Furthermore, the reports compiled from these visits are important documents for budgeting plans that boost the professional status of the Cultural Bureau. Creating a degree of leverage across vertical state power relations, the research and reports reflect national priorities to implement technocratic planning into policymaking and strategies to imagine the future of the Chinese countryside (Chio 2017). 5 More generally, the documentation and field reports of the village space that are produced by visiting teams of researchers, scholars, and consultants function as interventions that seek to impose a particular order.…”

“…Rather than looking at plans as end products, my ethnographic approach has focused on the social dynamics of planning, and we have seen how people respond to, get around, or reshape plans on the ground level. As colleagues have shown in relation to the implementation of development schemes in rural ethnic China (e.g., Chio 2014Chio , 2017, studying the embedded relations of plans is crucial to an understanding of the agentive potential of plans. The anthropology of planning in general (Abram and Weszkalnys 2011;Weszkalnys 2010) reminds us that agentive potential becomes prominent in gaps in planning that are absolutely decisive for outcomes, as this article demonstrates.…”

“…2 Aligning with such heritage policies, the rice sheaves hanging from fir bark granary columns also serve to exhibit local and regional developmental progress put forth by local officials to please higher-level government officials and elites, specifically their colleagues and superiors in the party hierarchy. These events are commonly described as 'window dressing' or as the 'formalism' (xingshi zhuyi) and 'face projects' (mianzi gongcheng) of local development, which have become common in the People's Republic of China since the turn of the millennium (Chio 2014(Chio , 2017Steinmüller 2013: chap. 7;Tan 2016).…”

“…Taking on the task of studying the gaps in plans to better understand how people respond to them, this article considers the gaps in cultural heritage preservation plans in Meili and the material compromises that planners, politicians, and people at the grassroots level strike. In doing so, I build on Chio's (2014Chio's ( , 2017 ethnography in Upper Jidao village, and also in Guizhou province, to describe the agentive potential enabled in architectural renderings and plans for preservation and rural development schemes. Looking at the power dynamics and ideologies that are enabled through the politics of appearance and the state-led image building that drives development planning, Chio convincingly illustrates how renderings convey an image of rural ethnic China as envisioned by urbanites, as well as the competing ambitions of village residents that are at stake.…”

Exploring the Relationship between Leisure and Sustainability in a Chinese Hollow Village

“…With the prior knowledge of the village and the program, and the permission from the company owner, some employees and villagers, we conducted two-day fieldwork at the village to gain firsthand and deeper understanding of the complex and multifaceted relationships between leisure and sustainability. Fieldwork is widely used to investigate the development and tourism in rural areas in China [18,41,42] as a way to allow the researchers to 'be there' and gain direct and holistic views of the real context. In the field, we mainly used the methods of participant observation, including taking fieldnotes, photographing and filming, to record the activities in which we participated.…”