![Sample our Geography journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5937/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Geography.jpg"})
Abstract
Ethnic minority populations in Yunnan have had diverse mobility patterns since the advent of globalized production and developmental programmes. The article presents insights into the various mobility patterns and their effects in Yunnan and contributes to an understanding of the present economic and social processes of mobilities and changes in China as a whole. The analysis is based on an empirical study conducted in the years 2010–2011 by the authors together with local researchers in Yunnan. The results revealed that the mobilities practised among members of the ethnic minority groups in Yunnan included not only outmigration but also cross-border cultivation of plantations, daily and circular mobility, inflows of labour and investors, and involuntary relocation. Although some mobilities may have been conducive to livelihoods and capabilities due to the income-earning and profit-making opportunities arising from the acquisition and appropriation of land and capital, they have also resulted in differentiation processes that confirm the counter-geographies of production, survival, and profit-making. The authors conclude that mobilities do not just concern physical location, but as a social process, mobilities have reconstituted relational references and networks in terms of ethnic and cultural identity, gender relations, labour division, and locality and community integration.
Acknowledgements
Zhang Hongwen, Ou Xiao'ou, and Wu Jing, all from the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences, are thanked for their participation in the fieldwork and for case writing.
Notes
1 This article is part of a larger collaborative research project titled ‘Mobile Livelihoods and Gendered Citizenship: The Counter-geographies of Indigenous People in India, Laos and China’, funded by the Research Council of Norway. The project was jointly undertaken in the period 2010–2012 by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway; Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Bangkok, Thailand; Human Development Foundation, Odisha, India; and Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, China, and with partners in the respective countries. In China, the local partner was the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences.
2 The exception is noted particularly in English literature on gender issues in rural–urban migration and ‘floating population’ (e.g. Gaetano & Jacka Citation2004; Davin 2005; Jacka Citation2005).
3 Y. Wang & G. Gu, ‘Home perception and home making strategy: The struggle of rural-urban migrant women in Beijing and Shanghai’, article submitted to Routledge, May 2013.
4 Source: Y. Wang, Q. Zhao & K. Kusakabe, ‘Gender analysis of cross-border road infrastructure: A case of Kunming-Bangkok Highway’, report submitted to the Asian Development Bank, 20 September 2010.
5 To preserve the anonymity of the villages, the real village names have been changed.
6 ‘Hani Apei Congpopo’, a 5000-line record, developed from the singing and chanting of Hani scholars, records Hani ethnic people's development and mobility history. Most scholars of Hani ethnicity refer to this record in their studies.
7 Source: T.C. Luk & R. Xiang, ‘Hyper urban renewal and strategies of the urban poor in Kunming: A case of the second great transformation’. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of Taiwan Social Research Association in 2010.
8 Codified letters have been used to preserve the interviewees’ anonymity.
9 The respondents tended to report leasing a smaller area of land than they actually leased, because until 2005 the land was subject to agricultural tax. 1 mu = 667 m2.
10 This applies to the rubber plantation investors among Xi Cun villagers and the small landowners with cross-border neighbours.
11 The Regulation of Custody and Repatriation on City Wanderers and Beggars was formally issued in 1982 to control the jobless and homeless street wanderers and migrant populations. In 2003, Sun Zhigang, a university graduate working in a factory in Shenzhen, did not have the required identity card, temporary residence and work certificates with him while walking along a street. He was taken to a custody and repatriation centre as a rural migrant, where he was beaten to death. The incident provoked public outcry and the unpopular regulation was quickly abolished.
12 In accordance with ethnicity development policy, children of mixed marriage can choose to register the ethnic identity of either one of their parents.
13 Of the two Hani girls interviewed on 25 October 2010, one was 18 years old and had received secondary school education, and one was 20 years old and had attended vocational school.