Autonomy, Ethnicity, and Poverty in Southwestern China: The State Turned Upside Down

261 Pages·2007·1.009 MB·English

by  Chih-yu Shih (auth.)

Autonomy, Ethnicity, and Poverty in
Southwestern China:
The State Turned Upside Down
Chih-yu Shih
Autonomy, Ethnicity, and Poverty in Southwestern China
Copyright © Chih-yu Shih, 2007.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-4039-8446-3
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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ISBN 978-1-349-53995-6 ISBN 978-0-230-60934-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230609341
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shih, Chih-yu, 1958-
Autonomy, ethnicity, and poverty in Southwestern China : the state turned upside
down / by Chih-yu Shih.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Minorities—China, Southwest. 2. Poverty—China,Southwest. 3.
China, Southwest—Politics and government. I. Title.
DS730.S522 2008
951’.306—dc22 2007001437
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: December 2007
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Chapter 1 is an edited version of "The Teleology of State in China’s Regional Ethnic
Autonomy: A Review of the Chinese Writings in the International Workshop on
Ethnic Autonomy," Asian Ethnicity3, 2 (2002)
Chapter 3 is an expanded version of "Reforming China's Anti-Poverty Policy from
Below ? Experiences from Western Hunan," Asien99 (April 2006)
Chapter 8 is a revised version of "Lost Agency for Change: Diasporic Identities of
Yizhou’s Shui Community," Social Identities11, 4 (2005)
Chapter 11 is an edited version of "Living with the State: Ambivalent Autonomy in
Jinxiu’s Yao Community," The China Review(November 2007)
Contents
Introduction Performing Unity 1
Part 1 Political, Cultural, and Economic Unity
Chapter 1 The Teleology of the State: Top-down
Regional Ethnic Autonomy 17
Chapter 2 Performing Ethnicity: Politics of
Representation in Multi-Ethnic Guilin 29
Chapter 3 Silencing the Poor: The Statist-Liberal
Incapacity in Western Hunan 41
Part 2 The State Turned Upside Down
Chapter 4 The State as a Borderline Identity—
Distancing the Jing Ethnicity from Vietnam 75
Chapter 5 Imagined Genealogy: Behind the Cultural
Formation of Huishui’s Buyi Nationality 95
Chapter 6 Cement or Excrement? Autonomous Ecological
Thinking in Xiaoxi’s Poverty Discourse 111
Part 3 Out of Place
Chapter 7 3 + 1 + 1 = 1: Disempowerment in
Multi-ethnic Autonomous Longsheng 131
Chapter 8 Lost Agency for Change: The Diasporic
Identity in Yizhou’s Shui Villages 147
Chapter 9 Feeling Poverty: On the Same Side of the
Poor in Baise’s Zhuang Villages 161
iv Contents
Part 4 Riding the Citizenship
Chapter 10 Assimilation into Mulao Consciousness:
The Rise of Participatory Rigor in Luocheng 179
Chapter 11 Living with the State: Multiplying
Ethnic Yao Narratives in Jinxiu 197
Chapter 12 Learning to Be Rational: Peasants’
Responses to Marketization in Fenghuang 215
Conclusion From Unity to Harmony—
Progress or Regress? 233
Notes 239
References 253
Index 261
Introduction: Performing Unity
Ethnic communities in China demonstrate their ethnicity, as defined
by those acting in the name of the state, in ways that state officials at
various levels have not anticipated. The state, so to speak, acts to
define ethnic groups, but then ethnicities can create their own interpreta-
tion of what their ethnic identity means, which ultimately affects the state’s
agenda. Nevertheless, the stories of this sort are not always beautiful, and
noticeably different feelings are often registered toward the same stories.
These various feelings may come from actors in different positions and per-
spectives. They may also come from the same actor facing different people,
issues, or events. The seemingly monolithic state, represented by officials,
cadres, and the system of ruling, manages this disarray of feelings and judg-
ments by uniting them into a few specific discourses to keep otherwise
potentially disintergrated local narratives from emerging. Although the offi-
cially approved discourses on Chinese ethnicity never incorporate all of
them at the same time, frequent visits to the villages enabled the interviewer
to summarize them into a grand hegemony of Chinese multiple ethnicities.
At this point, it is plausible to conceptually divide the ethnic communi-
ties of the Chinese state into three different dimensions. This conceptual
division is not from any theoretical perspective. It is a product of the orien-
tation brought about by the continued visits to villagers in ethnic Hunan,
Guangxi, and Guizhou, beginning from the summer of 2001. In fact, local
officials and cadres report their work on the ethnic townships with respect
to three aspects: autonomy, ethnicity, and poverty. While autonomy is the
general principle of ethnic affairs in the governmentality of China, poverty
concerns specific policy issues dealt with through specially designated
administrative channels. As for ethnicity, except for the pervasive celebra-
tion of multi-ethnic unity, it mainly refers to arranging exemptions or priv-
ileges to ethnic jurisdiction. Together, the three aspects discursively lock the
local communities within the policy agenda of the state. Despite that these
2 Autonomy, Ethnicity, and Poverty in Southwestern China
three dimensions rarely take place at the same time or are experienced by
the same interviewee, they all point toward one big direction—the unity of
the Chinese nation, which means autonomy points to political unity, eth-
nicity to cultural-national unity, and poverty to economic unity.
The evolution of larger discursive contexts explains the division of eth-
nic citizenship into three aspects. From the earlier obsession with national
unity, which has led to the top-down granting of autonomy to ethnic com-
munities by the central authorities, post-Cultural Revolution attention to
modernization has added the dimension of poverty to ethnic citizenship.
The latest faddism of globalization has further developed interest in ethnic-
ity, as displayed in the form of tourism that submits images of local ethnic-
ity to be consumed by global visitors, whether they are electronic or
physical. Accordingly, the central authorities of the state intervene heavily
in defining autonomy and poverty, while local communities have, through
interaction with the outside world, made room for participation in provid-
ing meanings to their own ethnicities. However, intervention does not guar-
antee control as local communities begin to familiarize themselves with the
official rhetoric and make use of it comfortably.
In the visited villages, local ethnic communities are seen to be at a disad-
vantage when forming a counter-discourse to the institution of autonomy.
They are more capable of giving meaning to their own ethnicity rather than
accepting the state’s monotonous narrative of multi-polar unity. They are
occasionally capable of forming an alternative self-understanding when
falling into the designated status of poverty, distinguishing accordingly
between bottom-up and top-down perspectives. Therefore, what one can
learn about ethnic politics is quite different from what one would have
expected. If not for this learning, one would have expected that autonomy
would allow room for the local communities to breathe, while the discourse
on poverty would have easily locked them into a passive, backward position.
It should be stressed that these experiences are not necessarily universally
true; this book reports them with the intention of showing the possibility of
their mere existence.
The filed learning in this book is that the central authorities in China
have reduced autonomy into an administrative mechanism used for mobi-
lizing support for national unity. The central authorities do not need the
local communities to enforce autonomy, which has occurred mainly in the
form of recruiting ethnic cadres to serve as administrative heads. The local
communities (which are supposedly autonomous in administrating central
government policy) have little room for new languages or possibilities.
What the state officials care about is the local communities’ performance in
Introduction 3
executing policy goals. This preoccupation with achieving policy goals
results in such paucity of language that the term autonomy is not useful in
understanding ethnicity or any locally sensitive identities.
In addition, by contrast, the state’s intervention in defining ethnicity is
mostly dubious. Based on an a priori preoccupation with origin, the state
recognizes that each specific ethnicity is in itself retrievable from a distinc-
tive origin, but is not interested in knowing how this is so. This attitude
encourages and allows local communities, when motivated, to rediscover
their own past. Participation in the state in this sense enables an ethnic
community to assert its uniqueness.
Moreover, there is the issue of poverty. The addition of this dimension to
the discussion on ethnic citizenship should be a major breakthrough in
scholarship. Note that both autonomy and ethnicity provide discourses
conducive to the sense of subjectivity as well as difference in local commu-
nities. However, most ethnic communities fail to explore their full potential
partly because the central authorities want to use these two discourses to
achieve national unity in opposition to local distinction. However, another
reason for the inability of the local communities to take advantage of auton-
omy and ethnicity is that they lose a position of articulation due to their
poverty status. This status gives them a culturally backward image whenever
dealing with the state. Since they are not supposed to know anything mean-
ingful either in the state or in the market, it is difficult to confidently assert
autonomy or ethnic distinction. Although poverty is seemingly unrelated to
ethnic citizenship, it is critical to understanding the loss of agency for
change in many of the ethnic communities.
Here is an example of how poverty and identity are mutually consti-
tuted. During the period of research for this book, there have been a num-
ber of similar incidents regarding the self-restraint on profit making
exercised by members within the same ethnic group. These instances
revolve around restaurants in ethnic communities opened by villagers to
accommodate tourists. The restaurant owners often refuse to charge their
friends or relatives for products and services consumed. Government offi-
cials as well as local cadres find these practices unwise, or even unnecessary,
in the age of market reform. Nonetheless, one should suspect that this reluc-
tance to charge fellow villagers for meals is due to the concept of making
money that has already become an issue of identity among ethnic groups.
This means that as the government, at all levels, consistently and continu-
ously accuses local communities that are in poverty of being culturally back-
ward, the local villagers respond by treating Han tourists as no more than
sources of revenue. As a result, the act of making money among ethnic
4 Autonomy, Ethnicity, and Poverty in Southwestern China
groups becomes an indicator of strangeness and perhaps even a form of
revenge to defend themselves against the downgrading of their self-respect.
By contrast, free treats imply a we-group and relaxed self-representation.
Accordingly, poverty and identity are indirectly but forcefully connected.
This book stresses the opportunities for local communities to develop
their own discourse on poverty, even to the extent that some may retort
when the state tries to unilaterally impose certain identities upon them. The
designated status of poverty (which deprives most villages of self-respect)
may generate the quest for local subjectivity. This is especially true when the
work to alleviate poverty increasingly relies upon the preservation of local
ecology. Ecological thinking sensitizes the local communities to an ancestral
consciousness, which implicitly puts the state in the awkward position of
being an intruder.
The Interpretive Approach
The book adopts an interpretive approach. It is the first academic attempt
to break down official Chinese discourses on ethnic citizenship in accor-
dance with the existing practices of the state. Specifically, central authorities
have developed three separate discourses to deal with ethnic citizenship:
autonomy, ethnicity, and poverty. Each section in this book deals with a dif-
ferent consequence of these three discursive regimes. Each chapter stresses
the different functions of each regime in formulating local communities’
self-knowledge, and provides at least some clues about the contribution of
the state to the self-representation of the local communities.
Like those who want to rescue Chinese minorities from the state’s
monopoly over identity discourse, an earlier work of mine—Negotiating
Ethnicity: Citizenship as a Response to the State, (London: Routledge,
2002)—attempted to demonstrate the point that the state cannot control
the fate of the minorities; neither can it suppress their participation in iden-
tity politics nor unilaterally absorb them into a teleological mission toward
modernity. One would think that this way, the previous book had success-
fully shown the coincidental and contingent nature of identity. According
to Negotiating Ethnicity, it is unlikely that the ethnic communities would
completely subject themselves to the state’s determination of their self-
understanding. There is always room for creativity as well as for unintended
subversion. Negotiating Ethnicityfollowed the literature on Chinese minori-
ties and minority identities in celebrating the hybrid characteristics of
minority identities. This approach shows respect for each ethnic commu-
nity’s hybridity. However, this is not enough.
Introduction 5
This book makes a revision and realistically presents the possibilities that
hybridity may lead to inaction and that, backwardly, evolution may reduce
hybridity to a name that masks assimilation. However, assimilation can
sometimes contribute to the construction of identity rather than to the
destruction of it. This book will examine how the national state, or the
Chinese identity, can constitute a part of the ethnic identity through the
deliberate choice of a local community. The state contributes to the emer-
gence of subjectivity in the local community both positively and nega-
tively—positively because the local community uses the state to achieve a
certain identification effect, and negatively because the local community
cannot escape from the state in determining its self-representation.
More than Resistance
The conclusion of Negotiating Ethnicity was hasty. The inference results
from its author’s inattention to ethnic citizens’ potential to face, comment
on, or use the state to support their pursuit for self-representation. The
major argument in Negotiating Ethnicitywas that local ethnic minorities are
often able to satisfy the needs of the state. In return, the central authorities
allow these minorities to develop their own cultural identities in areas that
the authorities care very little about. If the ethnic minorities use the state,
according to Negotiating Ethnicity, they use it to avoid it. One would hon-
estly think that this observation, based upon fieldwork experiences, under-
mined the rationality of the state.
In the meantime, the majority of related literature on Chinese ethnogra-
phy supports observations made in the previous publication. However,
most writers did not make general statements in the way the earlier book
suggested. It looks that Negotiating Ethnicityrecorded a kind of experience
with the ethnic minorities who creatively cope with the demands of the
authorities. All of them have their own ways of coping that are attuned to
their own local conditions. In a sense, the book betrays its own discipline,
which is political science, by recounting stories of how the state matters in
manners alien to political scientists. Implicitly, in this earlier research, the
problematiqué rested upon a discursively assumed subjectivity in each eth-
nic community that is outside the state. These subjectivities enable each
community to cope with the state’s intervention in their life so that each is
able to avoid the state’s quest for national unity in their own way, even
though they typically appear submissive to the state at the moment they
encounter someone carrying the name of the state. Accordingly, the book
never conceived the state as an intrinsic element constituting ethnicity. This