Leave the Fields without Leaving the Countryside: Modernity and Mobility in Rural, Ethnic China

Abstract

Studies of internal migration in contemporary China frequently focus on the movement of rural people to urban centers, while studies of Chinese tourism concentrate on the mobility of urban travelers. These approaches to mobility coincide neatly with established understandings of modernity, despite the fact that the Chinese government has tried to promote certain forms of rural modernization without mobilization–hence the national slogan “leave the fields without leaving the countryside.” This article complicates the relationship between modernity and mobility in China by examining mobility from the perspective of returned migrants in rural, ethnic minority tourism villages. Through the analysis of five migrants' stories of travel, I explore the ordering of mobility, or how differing types of mobility come to be re-signified in times of immense social change and the consequences of these symbolic shifts on local understandings of ethnic identity and rural livelihoods. My argument builds on analytical frameworks of mobility in post-reform China by examining how mobility itself has been ordered in ways that reveal particular desire, inequalities, and power relations. By exploring how mobility both orders social relationships and how different forms of mobility, such as tourism or migration, come to be ordered in relation to each other, I draw attention to how mobility, and by extension immobility, generates the conditions of possibility for tourism village residents to make sense of the potential and paradoxes of rural, ethnic tourism development in contemporary China.

Keywords:

• tourism
• migration
• rural development
• modernity
• ethnic identity
• Guizhou
• Guangxi
• China

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants from Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program, the Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, various departments and institutes at UC Berkeley, and the China Research Centre, University of Technology, Sydney. Thanks are also due to the journal editors, two anonymous reviewers, the guest editors of this special issue, Nelson Graburn, Pál Nyíri, Tim Oakes, William Schaefer, Mimi Sheller, Wanning Sun, and my writing group at UC Berkeley for their feedback and suggestions on previous versions of this article.

Notes

1. As shown in the work of Graburn (1989) and Harrison (2003), this idea already has been established in research on tourist motivations. From the perspective of the tourist, touristic mobility (the ability to be a tourist, or at least to think about being a tourist) can be an integral part of one's life even when not touring.

2. Tourist mobilities have also been promoted as a part of modern Chinese subjectivities; in Chio (2010) I discuss the national efforts in 2006 to produce “civilized” tourism (wenming lüyou), through promoting the idea of tourism as contributing to a “quality” population (you suzhi renkou).

3. Julie Chu also notes that for the subjects of her research in Longyan, Fujian province, “As states-classified peasants for four decades, the rural Fuzhounese were precisely not the kind of subjects authorized to chart moral careers as mobile cosmopolitans” (2006: 401, original emphasis). Similarly, in Upper Jidao and Ping'an villages, the ethnic minority, rural residents of these tourism villages were expected to always be “at home,” available to tourists at any time.

4. For further details on the conditions of tourism development and an analysis of the social conflicts that took place within each village as a result of tourism in Upper Jidao and Ping'an village, see Chio 2009.

5. Other recent works on ethnic tourism in China include Hillman (2003), Kolås (2008), Li (2003, 2004), Notar (2006), Swain (2001), Walsh (2005), and Y. Wang (2007). Li, Walsh, and Wang, in particular, have examined the crucial importance of the space and setting of ethnic tourism, including the significance of extending the rural, ethnic tourism experience inside the houses of local families to enhance the tourists' perception of authenticity.

6. Other scholars, notably geographers, have conceptualized “tourism landscapes” (Minca and Oakes 2006) and “touristed landscape” (Cartier 2005). But by deliberately leaving out the term “tourism” in my approach to landscape and travel, I hope to draw explicit attention to the co-existence of different forms of mobility as well as to bring an anthropological focus on travel and landscape as constitutive of human social experiences in addition to the construction of place.

7. Briefly, these “five dimensions of global flows” are ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes (Appadurai 1996: 33).

8. In her introduction to an edited volume on “privileged travel and movement,” Vered Amit argues that “What links various forms of contemporary travel are not global convergences but a host of asymmetries,” and furthermore, “[w]hat drive all forms of movement are the potentialities unleashed by expectations and experiences of asymmetrical distinction” (2007: 8). It is precisely this potential asymmetry pursued and expected in tourism, encapsulated in the ordering of mobility, that is shaping rural, ethnic livelihoods in China today.

9. This speaks to the household registration system (hukou) still in place in China today. Simply put, the hukou system has administratively bound residents to a geographical place (a township or city) and grants residents their rights and access to education, medical care, social security, employment, etc. Migrant workers do not easily fit into the hukou system and are commonly called the “floating population” (liudong renkou) (see F. Wang 2005; Zhang 2001).

10. The interviewees were all fluent in Mandarin Chinese, a regional local dialect of Chinese (which I could understand but not speak), and their local dialect of their ethnic minority language (Miao in Upper Jidao and Zhuang in Ping'an).

11. In fact, Fa was part of a 2004 “study tour” organized with international funds by the Guizhou provincial tourism board, during which representatives from selected villages for tourism development in rural Guizhou traveled to Ping'an village to learn how rural tourism functioned.

12. There was an elementary school in Ping'an, but due to low student numbers, it did not offer any formal preschool, and the minimum age for enrolling in first grade was seven years old. Thus, children in Ping'an were perceived to be at a major disadvantage to children growing up in the county seat, Longsheng, which was only a short bus ride away, and where there were pre-schools and where children could enroll earlier into elementary schools.

13. Diane Austin-Broos has conceptualized what she calls “the politics of moral orders” (2005; 1997), which are the modalities of power at work in “the order of values and meanings through which subjects are defined within a cultural milieu” (1997: 8). In these politics “subjects sustain themselves through modes of representation and practice that can mediate, criticize, or reinforce larger orders of governance” (1997: 12). I am drawing on this work to consider the orders of mobility at work in rural China. I thank Mimi Sheller for bringing my attention to this.

14. The visual side of tourism is crucial to tourism planning, and there is a wealth of information and approaches from the field of landscape architecture on how to create the greatest visual impact (see, for example, the Guidelines for Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment published by The Landscape Institute 2002).

15. On the other hand, Chu found that in Longyan the construction of a new road brought about “considerable pride and optimism” amongst local residents at the endless possibilities that the road symbolized (2006: 417–419).

16. Important work has also been done on the gendering of migration; see Castellanos and Boehm (2008) and Castellanos (2008, 2007) on gendered migration in the Yucatan, as well as numerous studies of women migrants in China, for example by Jacka (2006), Pun (2005), Schein (2006), Sun (2009), and Yan (2008).