Dragonheads and Needlework: textile work and cultural heritage in a Guizhou county

 

Tim Oakes

Provincial China 7(2) (2003): 151-177

 

Introduction

Her hands move over the pile of textiles, sensing for the smoothness of the embroidery thread, until she finds something that might be pleasing.  She pulls it out and holds it up before her as she stoops over the seller’s display.  “This,” she says to me in heavily accented English, “now this is a very good piece.  I could use this piece…”  She goes on to tell me how she owns a textile gallery in Paris.  Turning to the Miao woman sitting below her, she asks, again in English, “how much?”  The question needs no translation.  “Three hundred,” the seller says.  This I translate, and the buyer from Paris raises her eyebrows ever so slightly.  “Every year they ask more,” she sighs.  “What can you do?  Pieces like this are getting harder and harder to find.”  She pulls out three crisp bills and hands them to the woman.  At least she didn’t try to talk down the price, I’m thinking; she knows what she’s buying took someone a long long time to make.

 

This scene took place in 1994, in the town of Shidong, in Guizhou’s Taijiang County, during the town’s annual Sisters Rice Festival.  During the festival, tourists descend on Shidong to photograph the pageantry of dancing Miao women bedecked in silver and embroidered ornamentation, to hear antiphonal singing and beating of drums, and to hopefully catch an unmediated glimpse of some youth courtship.  But it seems that mostly they come to buy textiles, for the textile market that erupts during the festival appears to be the most popular attraction in town.  The transactions that take place there are striking, however, not simply because they represent the commodification of Miao culture, but also because they put a price on the value of textiles despite the vast gap in what those textiles mean to the buyer and to the seller.  What is the value of the piece of Shidong embroidery purchased by the gallery owner from Paris?  There is no real way to answer this question without considering the social conditions that structure its exchange as a commodity.  As Simmel argued, value is a social, not an absolute, condition of a thing.[1]  When a thing becomes a commodity, it enters a process of social negotiation over its worth.  But in this case, that negotiation is carried out by two parties that assign to it completely different values.  For the Shidong woman who sold the embroidery, it represents cash in a cash-starved society.  For the woman from Paris, it represents a displaced cultural artifact with particular aesthetic qualities.  Value emerges from what the piece represents in its given social context, but the discontinuity between these contexts renders the seller’s blunt “three hundred” almost absurdly arbitrary.  In Appadurai’s terms, the textile has entered a “regime of value” where its exchange is governed by certain norms that don’t presuppose a complete sharing of meaning among the agents involved.[2]

 

This paper seeks to explore two different social processes through which value is assigned to a piece of embroidery produced in Shidong.  The first process is the incipient commercialization of the rural economy in Guizhou.  The second involves the accumulating symbolic capital of Miao cultural heritage Guizhou.  The paper thus offers an analysis of embroidery within two different regimes of value.  On the one hand, it examines an emerging class differentiation within a rural “peasant” society that has resulted from the rapid commercialization of embroidery production.  From this perspective, embroidery is valuable as an agent of commercial development, but its value is assigned exclusively by those few who are in a position to garner benefits by organizing its production as a petty-commodity.  For its producers, embroidery is chronically undervalued in relation to its labor demands.  Value thus becomes an agent of exploitation.  On the other hand, the paper examines the elite narratives of Miao cultural heritage deployed as a strategy for development and modernization.  From this perspective, value is assigned not in terms of production relations but in terms of symbolic capital.  The value of embroidery, here, comes from what it represents in broader narratives of modernity and ethnicity.

 

In my analysis, I am not interested in arguing that one of these regimes of value is more “real” than another.  The value of a commodity is always arbitrary, whether it is assigned through production relations or through cultural representations.  My intent is not simply to “unmask” the exploitative labor relations hidden behind a state rhetoric of embroidery as “heritage” and “tradition” (though readers will certainly find such an argument in the pages that follow).[3]  Commercial embroidery production has fueled the rise of a new entrepreneurial class in Shidong (the “dragonheads”), generating considerable new wealth in the town.  It has also contributed to the further widening of the town’s income gap.  Yet while there is clear labor exploitation, to be sure, commercial embroidery production is unsustainable for all participants at the local level, and the surplus labor value generated for local entrepreneurs who control the means of production is not a long-term basis for an emerging class status.  In this context, Shidong’s future lies more in its value as a symbolic place of heritage, where tourists consume images, rather than as a material site of household production.  For this reason my analysis does not stop at production relations but expands into questions of how China’s market reforms and commercial development at the local level are both contributing to and being conditioned by a new cultural politics of value.  Embroidery has become a dominant symbol of place-based ethnic and cultural identity for state elites seeking to attract investment capital to the region.  As such, its value is conditioned by cultural processes and ideologies operating at broader scales.  These broader processes render local entrepreneurs highly vulnerable to a capricious global discourse of authenticity, as well as to capital’s relentless need to resolve the internal contradictions of production.  While embroidery embodies the political contests that have emerged over development, inequality, and identity in Taijiang, its value is increasingly conditioned by much broader processes.  This essay, then, seeks an examination of the “social life” of Shidong embroidery in hopes of illustrating the ways local entrepreneurs in China can find themselves caught at the intersections of the rapidly changing cultural economy.

 

 

The Dragonheads of Shidong

Shidong – a “civilized place” passed by and found anew

Shidong is a port town on the Qingshui River, one of three navigable waterways that drain the mist-shrouded maze of mountains in Southeast Guizhou.  The Qingshui winds its way through the clastic folds of the eastern Yun-Gui Plateau, flowing generally eastward into the broader valleys of Hunan.  There it merges with the Yuan, which eventually flows into Dongting Lake and the Chang Jiang.  Historically, the Qingshui—with its primary tributary, the Wuyang—was the major transportation system linking Southeast Guizhou with the highlands of Yunnan to the west, and with the downstream world of China proper to the east.  The river was the route along which the culture and power of downstream China gradually spread into this region.  Yet, aside from a number of bustling port towns along the river—where tusi lords, Chinese merchants, and soldier-settler colonists began to establish themselves as early as the Yuan Dynasty—Chinese culture made few inroads into southeast Guizhou beyond the narrow floodplains that intermittently lined the river valleys.  This region was infamous among Qing authorities as the so-called miaojiang or “Miao borderlands,” a knot of popular resistance to direct imperial rule as stubborn as the geography that enclosed it.  While such resistance presented a problem for the Qing authorities—who by 1726 would resort to military force to resolve it—the river ports themselves thrived as entrepôt trade and service centers along the major transport route between Yunnan and Hunan.  Indeed, by Republican times—when Japanese occupation forced Chinese commerce to move inland—these ports were the major trade centers of Guizhou, dealing in such items as timber, tung oil, opium, cotton cloth, and coal.

 

While trade brought significant populations of Chinese upstream to the misty river valleys and alluvial basins of the eastern Yun-Gui Plateau, the people living in the mountains through which the Qingshui carved its path were noted for their lack of interest in dealing with the Chinese.  In 1727, a Zhenyuan magistrate noted that in the miaojiang—where the Qingshui swirled “crystal clear and broad,” and “the springs are sweet and the soil rich”—was a “vast expanse” of land, where the people were completely self-sufficient, and where “courtesy is known to all.”  The miaojiang, he exclaimed, was a true “taohuayuan”—a paradise on earth.[4]  It was perhaps with some wistful resignation that the magistrate was compelled to write so effusively about a people whom the Chinese commonly called “sprouts” or “weeds.”  For the campaign to “open” the Miao frontier had already begun a year earlier, at the initiative of Ortai, the Manchu viceroy of Yun-Gui.[5]  His pacification of the miaojiang resulted in a new urban network being superimposed upon the existing system of river ports.  Thus, by the end of the 18th century, a dual and somewhat disconnected urban system existed, revealing the contrast between two related but distinct processes of Chinese frontier expansion.  On the one hand, there was a system of walled garrisons from which direct military pacification was launched.  These towns were strategically located around Leigongshan, the high mountainous heart of the miaojiang.  On the other hand, the system of river ports continued to develop, attracting merchants from as far away as Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hunan, and Hubei.

 

Taijiang county was established, in 1733, as a result of Ortai’s pacification campaign.  As noted in the Taijiang Gazetteer, this was the beginning of the end of the region’s self-sufficient economy.  Taigong garrison was established in 1728 at the northern base of Leigongshan, a winding 50 li march from the Qingshui and the older Chinese port town of Shidong.  In Taijiang, then, we find both urban systems represented in one county:  Taigong was a military outpost of imperial state control, while Shidong was a trade center linked by the river to the “civilized” world of downstream China.  Today, there are many reminders of the distinction between these two urban systems that developed during the Qing.  Taigong has lost its walls, and an unremarkable collection of cement-block and white-tile buildings has spread onto much of the small plain where the town is situated.  It has all the accouterments of a county seat in socialist China:  an upper middle school, a hospital, a theater, several department stores, repair shops and other services, restaurants, a few nightclubs, and a bus station.  The nearest train station is a slow two-hour bus ride away.  While its administrative function as a county seat meant that Taigong would inevitably emerge as the economic center of Taijiang, the displacing of river transport by railroads and highways added to the gradual decline and isolation of Shidong as a center of commercial activity.  Sojourning Chinese merchants either left or married locals and, over the generations, “became Miao.”[6]  Over time it was Shidong that became the exotic outpost, a Miao town known for its Miao—rather than Chinese—traditions.[7]

 

Yet, when comparing themselves with modernizing Taigong, still 40 anfractuous kilometers distant along a dirt road, a clear narrative of “civilization” still adheres among some people in Shidong.  The town’s river port tradition still captures the imagination of town elders, who commonly refer to numerous cultured individuals raised there, including the Guomindang general Zang Zuo and the famous Miao singer Ah Pao.  The old “Two Hu” (Hunan and Hubei) huiguan (native-place association), built in 1877, still stands on the narrow cobblestone lane that runs along the old wharf.[8]  Indeed, the old town remains a charming and relatively well-preserved collection of late-imperial architecture and ornamentation.  The imposing Sugongguan mansion, built by the Qing army after putting down Zhang Xiumei’s rebellion in the 1860s, still stands in some disrepair, its large sky-wells used as vegetable plots, the front hall serving as the town health clinic.[9]  These relict reminders of Shidong’s former wealth contrast with the new wealth emanating from Taigong and beginning to appear along the main road  which passes through town.  The old cobblestone lane, with its decaying late-imperial and Republican buildings, and this new road offer a study in Shidong’s transition between two eras.  The former, too narrow for automobiles, is quiet now, with a few small sundry shops; elders entertain grandchildren while sitting in front of their open doors.  The latter, up away from the river, vibrates with truck traffic, a hostel, and even a kareoke bar.  The new road is a nearly impassable stream of mud much of the time, Guizhou having a wet and humid climate, and yet this is where the town’s youth can feel that they’re witnessing the birth of modernity.  On most days, this is the center of activity for the town.  Only on market or festival days does the old river lane again come alive, as farmers from the surrounding mountains descend into town, congregating not along the new road and its promise of progress to come, but down by the river, where the town their ancestors knew may still be seen.

 

The farmers and town elders perhaps know more than the youth who congregate on the new road that modernity is a troublesome distraction more than a meaningful promise for Shidong.  As one informant put it, “In the old days, Shidong was rich, an important market center.  Then came modernization.  Now we’re poor.”  Indeed, in stark contrast to the wealth that trade brought less than a century ago, Shidong is now quite poor.  With a population of roughly 15,000 in the administrative zhen, 51 percent of its households still had no electric lighting in 1994.[10]  In 1997 the average per capita net income for the town was RMB686, or just enough to put the town over the poverty line for the first time.  This statistic, of course, masks the fact that at least one third of the households, probably more, still do not grow enough or earn enough to feed themselves through the year.[11]  Only 7.8% of the mountainous township is arable land—most of it concentrated on the narrow plain on which the town itself is situated.[12]  But more land would make little difference, as agriculture is generally regarded as a means of survival rather than development.  No one has ever made any money from farming in Shidong, and few expect this to ever change.  Still, the town ventured to plant 3,500 mu of plum trees and 2,000 mu of chestnut trees, borrowing over one million yuan for the investment.  Fortunately, these loans have been paid off.  But it was not the town’s success in China’s saturated fruit and nut market that generated such fiscal responsibility.  Rather, another economic force has begun to take hold in Shidong, bringing a renewed possibility of economic development and security.

 

That force is tourism.  While Shidong itself manages to attract a few intrepid tourists by virtue of two spectacular annual festivals, it has more importantly benefited from tourism developments in more accessible parts of the Guizhou.  Indeed, it has not been tourism per se that has been responsible for the new injection of cash income into the town, but rather the trade in craft commodities inspired by tourism.[13]  With no other industrial development to speak of, any cash that flows into Shidong from outside regions comes as a result of a vigorous household crafts industry.[14]  Crafts production in Shidong is dominated by two skills that have been passed down through households for generations:  silversmithing and embroidery.  The former involves the most highly skilled work, and is generally the most lucrative.  Shidong silversmiths specialize in designing and producing ornamentation for Miao festival and ceremonial costume, including elaborate headdresses, bracelets, hairpieces, and embellishments for clothing.  The village of Tangba, in particular, specializes in this trade, with nearly a third of all households engaging in it.  While there has always been a regional demand for their skills, thus enabling them to live relatively comfortable lives, tourism and crafts trade has exposed Shidong’s silversmiths to more far reaching markets, allowing substantially increased incomes over their local trade.

 

Embroidery is more widely practiced than silversmithing.  Exclusively a female craft (silversmiths are all male), embroidery is a skill that, until recently, was typically learned by all young girls in Shidong (and throughout much of Guizhou as well).  While it represents highly skilled work that can generate cash income for households that have no other means of earning it, embroidery does not easily lend itself as a basis for earning a commercial livelihood.  It is more generally regarded as a skill that can be utilized to augment household income, but only in certain circumstances do households look to supporting themselves through commercial embroidery production.  Household poverty, brought on by limited land and/or labor resources, is the primary inducement for families entering into the commercial embroidery trade.  But there are other ways in which households take part in the trade.  Some are not themselves producers but “middlemen,” scouring the countryside for embroidery to sell to tourists and agents from distant metropolitan centers.  A few even organize embroidery production in a semi-formal “putting out” system, linking household producers with urban agents in the county town as well as more distant urban centers like Guiyang, or even Hong Kong and Taibei.

 

The crafts industry in Shidong is thus rather diverse, ranging from highly skilled and relatively prosperous silversmiths to desperately poor households entirely dependent upon a variety of brokers providing access to resources, markets, and materials.  The industry is, in short, highly stratified in socio-economic terms, reflecting in many ways rural China’s new social divisions brought on by economic reforms.  The declining ability of agriculture to sustain basic livelihoods in remote regions like Guizhou is part of a broader policy trend pushing the market integration and commercial development of the rural economy.  A growing money economy has created new opportunities and new challenges for rural households, with new fault lines of class emerging within even small and remote communities such as Shidong.  In some ways, then, it is as if Shidong’s history as a remote extension of far reaching trade networks is being revisited.  While few believe the crafts industry is returning Shidong to its past prosperity, it is clear that renewed links to the outside world are benefiting a few while leaving many others behind.  As the following section seeks to establish, those who are benefiting represent a minority of townspeople who have been able to move out of agricultural production altogether, some of them enjoying official non-agricultural residence status; they have managed to tap into the new economy of the broader tourist market.  The new local entrepreneurs, in other words, are not necessarily those who were traditionally in the best position to benefit from mastering crafts skills.  Rather, they represent those who have only recently risen to the top of the rural hierarchy by virtue of their mobility between Shidong and the distant sources of political-economic power that render the “cellular” structure of rural society increasingly porous.[15]  When, with the intensification of commercial development in the 1990s, crafts production once again showed signs of becoming a viable means of income generation, these local elites were in a position to channel the industry’s meager profits into the hands of a relatively small group.

 

 

The commercial embroidery industry in Shidong

Embroidery is a common but unevenly mastered skill.  In 1998, a good needleworker could still command considerable respect among the women of Shidong.  This was particularly the case since many of the women felt that their daughters were too restless and distracted to master the skill.  Women often chastised their teenage daughters for the poor quality of their work, unfavorably comparing it to the pieces they did when they were teenagers.  But the blame for their daughters’ failure to maintain the level of skill found in older times was not laid completely at the feet of modernization either.  The specter of modernity did haunt the youth of Shidong, to be sure.  But many women made it a point to emphasize the difficulty of becoming a skilled needleworker, regardless of the era in which she lived.  As one informant put it, “We Miao are all types. Not all are smart; most aren’t smart.  Most are dumb.  But some are very smart; they make beautiful patterns and embroidery.  You have to understand this.  We’re not all clever needleworkers; just a few of us.”  Even if she does master the art, a woman can expect to loose the keen eyesight required for needlework by the time she’s 35 or 40, at which point she reverts to being an increasingly exacting critic of her daughter’s work.

 

Regardless of the varying skill levels, all women were expected to learn embroidery.  There was never a significant market, therefore, for embroidery in Shidong.  It was simply a craft all households were expected to be self-sufficient in.  There were other craft skills, however, mastered by only a few specialists, and these did generate a local market.  They included silversmithing, weaving, and drawing embroidery patterns for needleworkers to follow.[16]  In 1998, Shidong’s periodic market was still a forum for an active trade in silver ornaments, woven cloth (primarily for festival and ceremonial costume only), and embroidery patterns.  These craftsmen have benefited from increased tourist and commercial crafts activity in Shidong, but their livelihoods as artisans does not depend upon these new links to the outside world.

 

Commercial production of embroidery, however, is an entirely novel trade in Shidong, and depends exclusively on external markets to sustain it.  It is therefore subject to entirely new relations of production, and new innovations inspired by the demands of outside buyers who see in the laboriously crafted patterns of thread and cloth something with exchange value, rather than something with use value.  Laborious is, indeed, an appropriate term for the work.  A skilled needleworker needs good eyes, a steady hand, strong neck, back, and shoulders, and, most importantly, a great deal of time.  Embroidery is extremely time consuming, even mind-numbing work.  Once the pattern is drawn (or more likely, purchased), the needleworker simply follows the lines, making sure the threads are the right tension and as narrowly spaced as possible.  If the product is to be particularly fine, the thread will be individually waxed (poxian), with the melted seed pods of the local Zhaogu tree.  This process easily triples the amount of time required.  To commercialize such a craft, either the buyer must be willing to pay an inordinately high price given the labor intensity involved, or the producer must be so poor that she is willing to work for almost nothing.  Embroidery is marketable only as a result of the latter situation.  Only antique pieces can command a price that might begin to reflect the value of the labor required to produce it.  But here, it is primarily the antiquity of the piece that represents its value, not the labor that produced it.

 

The relations of production generated by the commercialization of embroidery in Shidong tend to result in four classes; I have termed these “foremen,” “intermediaries,” “specialized producers,” and “craft producers.”[17]

 

At the top of the hierarchy is the “foreman” or gongtou, who primarily contracts embroidery work to individual households.  There is only one real gongtou in Shidong, but others from Taigong, Kaili, and even Guangdong Province occasionally come to contract out embroidery work as well.  The income of Shidong’s gongtou is the source of much speculation throughout the town.  Needless to say, he was unwilling to relate this information himself, but I would estimate it to be at least RMB20,000 annually, probably more.  The gongtou is the primary contact for outsiders wishing to place large orders for embroidered goods in Shidong.  He maintains a broad set of somewhat informal contractual (baogong) relationships with producers throughout, and increasingly beyond, the town.  At times his system of production resembles a “putting out” system in that he often provides all of the materials and specifications, contracting out only the labor to producing households.[18]  He is also one of the primary contacts for guides bringing tourists wishing to buy embroidery crafts.

 

In 1998, Shidong’s gongtou operated crafts shops at the tourist hotel in Kaili, and at a park in Kunming.  In an average month, he bought 200 large and between 200 and 300 small embroidery pieces from producers in and beyond Shidong.  His involvement in the crafts industry came about through his daughter’s initiative.  While attending the teacher’s college in the nearby prefectural capital of Kaili during the 1980s, she witnessed the gradual development to tourism and crafts marketing in the area, and soon opened a shop of her own, selling antique Shidong crafts to tourists.  Through her shop, she made connections with prefectural tourism officials and tour guides from Guiyang, and was able to secure arrangements for her family to host tourists in Shidong with meals and demonstrations of crafts and festival customs.  Her household soon became relatively wealthy and was the first in the town to build a “modern” cement two-story dwelling (yangfang).  Officially an agricultural household, the gongtou began subcontracting its land as the family entered the crafts purchasing and contracting business full time.  Having no direct connections to town government, Shidong’s gongtou perhaps represents a new class of entreprenurial elites to emerge within the political economy of rural reforms.  While much of the literature emphasizes the links between this new class and the political hierarchy to emerge under collectivization, in this case at least such a pattern is not readily apparent.[19]

 

Next in the hierarchy are the intermediaries, often called erdao fanzi or “middlemen” by others in the town—a term that carries some negative associations of the exploitative and “tricky merchant.”[20]  There are about twenty of them in Shidong; they are all women.  They are distinguished from the gongtou only because they tend not to actually subcontract production to households, but rather scour the countryside for pieces that have already been produced.  Their incomes range from RMB200 to 800 per month, though business from month to month is very inconsistent.  While it appears that these people got their start in the late 1980s, supplying antique pieces to tourist shops in nearby cities such as Kaili, Guiyang, and Guilin, they have—in the late 1990s—increasingly been dealing in contemporary pieces, and have, at times, placed orders with producing households.  Thus, the distinction between them and the gongtou is perhaps increasingly blurry.  At any rate, such a distinction in Shidong may have been more a result of gender politics than class, since the town’s gongtou was a man.  Informants may have been investing the male gongtou with a more formalized structure of production relations simply because that would be expected of a male.  In fact, this gendering becomes even more apparent when one considers the negative connotations of the term erdao fanzi.  As one male informant told me:  “Those women are tricky, very cunning.  You have to watch out or they’ll cheat you.”  In contrast, such accusations were never made of the gongtou.

 

The foreman and the intermediaries represent those who have been instrumental in forging Shidong’s links to the broader commercial crafts market; they also represent the tiny fraction of the town that benefits substantially from those links.  Together, these people were commonly referred to as the “dragonheads” (longtou) of Shidong’s embroidery crafts industry.  Another group—specialized producers—have also benefited from these links, though much less so. Incomes among this group tend to range from as little as RMB100 to upwards of 500 per month.  They specialize in skills that have traditionally generated a local market:  silversmithing, weaving, spinning and dyeing, and drawing patterns for embroidery.  As mentioned above, these skills have always been somewhat commercialized.  On market days in Shidong, there are many of these specialists selling their crafts.  Embroidered items, however, are conspicuously absent until a tourist wanders by, at which point everyone whips out their embroidery to sell.  No one really “specializes” in embroidery, in other words, and it is precisely this factor which allows its more intensive commercialization beyond the local market arena.  Though tourism has certainly created an increased demand for crafts specialists, they are generally not as dependent upon the tourist crafts market as those engaging more strictly in embroidery production, and are thus somewhat more insulated from tourism’s market volatility.

 

Finally, at the bottom of the crafts production hierarchy are the actual household producers of embroidery.  While technically all households in Shidong are producers, this class represents those who depend upon embroidery production to help fill the household self-sufficiency gap.  These households typically must produce embroidery for sale in order to make ends meet.  Thus, they tend to represent the most desperate households in the town.  Incomes tend to range between RMB20 and 50 per month.  Among those households interviewed, the most common reason offered for their participation in commercial embroidery production was a shortage of labor power; a husband had died or was physically unable to work in the fields, or a husband and wife had no children or very small children, and could not keep up with the farm work themselves.  Almost as common was a lack of land.  In all cases, poverty was the deciding factor that brought these households into the arena of semi-formal contractual craft production.  In nearly all cases, the cash earned from selling embroidery was used simply to buy rice to keep the household fed during the lean months before the next harvest.  However, not all poor families had the option of entering into commercial crafts production.  Commercial embroidery requires a great deal of time, and only houses with both a shortage of labor or land and an abundance of time were compelled pursue this income-generating option.  Several poor households interviewed indicated that they simply didn’t have the time to produce embroidery for the gongtou, despite needing the admittedly meager income this could bring.

 

The lowest class of embroidery producers just described are all farmers.  They are compelled to participate in the industry for reasons that are very much related to changes in the agricultural economy since the late-1980s.  This link between crafts production and the political economy of rural reforms will be taken up in some detail later in the paper.  At this point, I make the observation to point out an important structure underlying these class categories.  Those in the first two classes—the dragonheads—have all moved out of agricultural production completely.  If they were agricultural households to begin with, they have since subcontracted their fields to other families.  Although their success could be testimony to the new opportunities for an improved standard of living brought by the reforms, it also reveals the deepening disparities that have enabled only a few to realize those opportunities.  As will also be discussed, there is little about commercial crafts production in Shidong that suggests these disparities will decrease as the market economy develops.

 

Two primary issues characterize the difficulties needleworkers face in benefiting from the development of the commercial embroidery market.  The most obvious of these is the low pay in relation to the intensity of labor required.  But another problem involves the inherent vulnerability, insecurity, and indeed, unsustainability of commercial embroidery production.  Regarding the former, it was not atypical for informants to tell me the dragonheads paid as little as RMB40 for a piece that required a month’s labor.  While household contracting does have the advantage of flexible working hours, all informants claimed they worked long hours on these pieces, some days as much as eight hours through the evening and into the night.  Pieces that took a whole month to produce were usually bigua, or “wall hangings.”  The dragonheads typically sold these same pieces for as much as RMB80-100, and they commonly went for between RMB150 and 200 in crafts shops in urban centers throughout Guizhou and southwest China.  When confronted with this disparity, and when asked why they didn’t simply sell their bigua directly to tourists, producers listed a number of obstacles they faced in garnering the higher profits earned by the dragonheads.  First among these was simply a lack of cash to buy the materials—cloth, thread, pattern—needed.  These were supplied by the gongtou.  More daunting still was the inability to sell directly to tourists.  There was no steady stream of tourists in Shidong, despite its two popular festivals, and those who did come were typically directed to the gongtou’s house.  Nor did these households have the means to travel to nearby tourist centers, where even if they could make the trip they would face stiff competition and outright hostility from established merchants, many of which were from Shidong themselves.

 

The problem of earning an adequate income from embroidery production is not limited to Shidong, or China for that matter.  Research has revealed extremely low profits for producers, accompanied by high rates of exploitation, for embroidery production in several countries, including Thailand, India, Guatemala, and Mexico.[21]  Research by Cook in Oaxaca, Mexico, reveals how embroidery is the most common craft product, the least beneficial to its producers, and the most exploitative of all crafts industries.[22]  His findings are supported by Waterbury, who also examined crafts putting-out systems in Oaxaca and found embroidery to be the least profitable and most exploitative for producers.[23]  The same is true in Shidong.  It appears that the only way embroidery production can be commercially viable is for the meager profits to be concentrated among a very few traders and subcontractors—the dragonheads—and for a structural condition of poverty to provide a class of producers willing to sell their labor power for almost nothing.  As Cook and Binford argue, such conditions have been developing in the Mexican countryside since the beginnings of structural adjustment and liberalization policies following the 1970s economic collapse.[24]  As will be discussed below, China’s reforms match rural Mexico’s market liberalization quite closely, similarly stimulating highly exploitative systems of crafts production.

 

The second issue facing embroidery producers—their inherent vulnerability—also stems from the same factors that render embroidery production so exploitative.  These factors result in a constant pressure to reduce labor time by simplifying the patterns, or reducing the density of needlework.  This pressure comes both from subcontractors who wish to increase production rates, and from the producers themselves who obviously wish to garner more income from less labor.  The former is seldom a factor in Shidong, where the gongtou always seems desperate for new orders from his buyers in Taigong, Guiyang, Taibei, Kunming, or Hong Kong.  In the case of the latter, the desire of farmers to increase their own marginal returns is often met with the paternalistic judgment of “experts” who claim to speak for the aesthetic qualities of embroidery as a cultural tradition.  It is a common complaint among the tourists, tour guides, and buyers from distant urban places that “the peasants are only concerned about money these days.”  I witnessed many of them sigh and shake their heads with genuine frustration at the “commercial corruption” of the peasantry.  Few of them seemed to appreciate the desperate need for cash that most farmers were faced with, but were ready to condemn those farmers for “loosing their culture” and their “traditions.”[25]  But beyond this problem of entrapment within a hegemonic discourse of cultural authenticity, producers also face a market of declining returns.  For example, the bigua innovation—introduced by an entrepreneurial Han buyer from Taigong—was being produced only in Shidong in the early 1990s.  By 1998, villages throughout Taijiang County and beyond were producing these—albeit in their own local styles—and prices were declining.  The desire to shorten the labor time required to produce them was being countered by a realization among buyers that only more intricate patterns would sell in the increasingly saturated embroidery market.[26]  By the late 1990s, producers in Shidong also found themselves competing for contracts with even poorer, more isolated villagers from outlying areas.  The dragonheads told me that Shidong producers were too concerned with money, took too many shortcuts in their work, and kept demanding higher prices.  The gongtou was finding it worthwhile to pursue contracts in even poorer regions where villagers still worked as hard for as little pay as Shidong producers did a decade earlier.

 

According to the mayor of Shidong, the 1990s saw a consistent decline in crafts business for the town.[27]  He gave three reasons:  First, the commercialization of production had resulted in poor quality work:  “When they’re making it for money they go too fast, rather than working from their hearts.”  Second, the number of producers had increased while the market had remained stable or declined, resulting in a decline in prices.  Third, antique crafts, which had been the industry’s mainstay, had mostly been bought up already.  For a poor household, the sale of an antique piece could bring in as much as five to ten years worth of income from contract needlework, but as these pieces were sold off annual incomes from selling crafts declined precipitously.  A final concern regarding sustainability commonly voiced in Shidong is the declining number of women who master the craft.  This has encouraged some entrepreneurial urban buyers in Taigong and Kaili to propose the establishment of state-funded training centers for embroidery, as an investment in the region’s only industry that has yet made a difference in the cash earnings of the farmers.

 

 

Commercial crafts production and rural reform

In previous work I have argued that commercial crafts production in Guizhou has emerged in response to the commercialization of the agricultural economy more generally.[28]  It is sometimes assumed that crafts production emerges from the self-sufficient nature of an enclosed “natural” peasant economy, and that it does not represent profit-seeking behavior on the part of peasants.[29]  Indeed, the marketing of crafts products often entails enshrouding the product in a myth of non-commercial production relations and “traditional authenticity” of a subsistence economy as yet unsullied by modern capitalism.[30]  Contrasting this, Cook and Binford have argued that household crafts production should be conceptualized as a form of petty-capitalism developing in response to, rather than persisting in spite of, the increasing marketization of the rural economy.[31]

 

The marketization of Guizhou’s rural economy has been fitful.  Nevertheless, Guizhou’s farmers have not escaped the impact of nationwide economic reforms that have, since the mid-1980s, reduced the real prices for agricultural products while allowing prices for agricultural inputs to soar.[32]  With the disbanding of collectives emerged a rural underclass in Guizhou, and other impoverished regions, that has been unable to consistently grow enough or earn enough to get through the year without going hungry.[33]  Households are encouraged to turn to agricultural “sidelines” and non-agricultural wage labor to resolve their dependence on grain cultivation.  In much of Guizhou’s countryside, however, “sideline” markets in tobacco, chilies, oranges, nuts, pork, and even medicinal herbs, are either saturated or operate at a very low equilibrium in which commercial exchange remains fairly limited.  In either case, profit margins are reduced to almost nothing.  Non-agricultural wage labor is also difficult to come by in a region where rural industry has been slow to develop.  Even the “crafts factories” that have popped up in urban centers like Taigong and Kaili, have had difficulty staying in business for more than a few years.  Household-based crafts production thus remains one of the few income-earning options for much of the rural population in Taijiang County.[34]

 

The problems faced by cultivation-dependent households are matched by fiscal problems faced by local governments in the region.  With central subsidies reduced from 2/3 to less than 1/5 of Guizhou’s provincial budget between 1980 and 1995, the net budget flow in Guizhou has been from the counties to the center, and from rural to urban sectors, since 1988.[35]  During the 1990s, in other words, more revenue was being extracted from the countryside than was returned in the form of expenditure.  Counties such as Taijiang met this fiscal squeeze by reducing outlays for development projects, canceling poverty relief efforts, and delaying payment on wages for teachers and local cadres.  Shidong’s schoolteachers, for instance, find their salaries typically delayed by four to six months; when payment is made, wages are often combined with IOU’s for an even greater delay of full compensation.  Needless to say, even salaried households in Shidong are sometimes compelled to enter the commercial crafts production system as a short term solution to cash-flow problems over which they have no control.  Recent increases in poverty-relief funding, coupled with the center’s heralded new campaign to “Open Up the West” (xibu dakaifa), may ease some of these fiscal difficulties over the next decade.[36]  In 1997 Jiang Zemin increased state poverty-relief funds to roughly $1 billion, and this was further increased by $783 million in June 1999, bringing the annual total to nearly $3 billion by the end of 1999.[37]  But how these funds will be spent in places like Taijiang remains unclear.  Throughout China, there has been a general trend in poverty-relief away from basic capital investment grants to loans for commercial ventures.[38]  Thus, Shidong was able to secure loans for its fruit and nut ventures, but schoolteachers remain unpaid and the town medical clinic is often closed for lack of operating funds.  The provincial government has been issuing microcredit to impoverished households for jumpstarting business ventures, providing some 200,000 households with $24.2 million in loans in 1998.[39]  But basic health and education improvements tend to now rely on the benevolence of coastal centers.  Between 1997 and 1999, Dalian, Ningbo, Qingdao, and Shenzhen gave $20.3 million to Guizhou to help build or remodel 228 primary schools and construct 87 hospitals.[40]

 

None of my informants in Shidong knew anything about opportunities for household credit, and none of the coastal funds seem to have reached the town.  But it is probably safe to say that credit would most likely flow to the town’s established dragonheads before reaching crafts producers themselves in the form of more work at low wages.  The dragonheads would, in other words, be the most qualified to borrow by virtue of their business ventures.  Even more likely, such credit would not flow beyond the county seat, where crafts factories such as the Miao Embroidery Factory represent the most visible commercial ventures worthy of state investment.  Indeed, in the late 1980s, the county government arranged for the Miao Embroidery Factory to receive a grant from UNICEF, based on the belief that—via the village women working in the factory—this was the most efficient way for United Nations funds to reach the broadest number of poor households.  While poverty relief efforts have been increasing in Guizhou, their focus on intensifying the commercialization of the rural economy ignores the structural inequalities that result from such commercialization.  For the crafts industry, these inequalities stem from the inherent nature of the work, which is highly intensive in terms of skill and time, and which cannot be viable unless organized into a putting-out type system which allows the thin profit margin to be accumulated by a few individuals.  Without some form of collective organization, there is little chance that the majority of those participating in what the center touts as a promising solution to rural poverty will realize any significant gains from that participation.[41]

 

The vulnerability of commercial producers indeed suggests a paradox for the entrepreneurs—the dragonheads—themselves.  If the long-term economic viability of hand-produced embroidery depends on continuing high rates of poverty, then this is a sustainable industry only for the most cynically minded.  But at some point, prices will have to rise, or the nature of production will have to change.  And although a “hegemonic discourse of authenticity” among consumers discourages a move toward the further mass production of embroidery—something the dragonheads would obviously like to promote—it seems just as unlikely that prices will increase either.  A rural putting out system stratified by dragonheads and poor household producers, then, is a failed option for sustainable development in the long run.  Yet it is a failed option for more reasons than these inherent contradictions of craft commodity production.  As the following section will argue, the dragonheads of Shidong find themselves increasingly marginalized by their own county’s efforts to attract external capital.  Increasingly, Shidong’s role in Taijiang’s efforts to put itself into the pathways of capital is symbolic, rather than material.

 

 

Selling Taijiang

This is not to say that Taijiang has not promoted itself as a center of skilled crafts production.  Quite the contrary.  Taijiang clearly seeks to capitalize on a latent army of skilled needleworkers to attract external investment.  But in doing so, it turns embroidery into a cultural tradition rather than a means of production.  Such a move is curiously ironic, given the county’s self-professed spirit of entrepreneurialism.  But the contradictions of household craft production are being resolved by making them irrelevant.  In the end, county leaders probably hope that it is in urban-based, externally-funded, modern and technologically equipped factories where Taijiang’s crafts workers will display their skills, not in their rural homes in the hills above towns like Shidong, where entrepreneurial locals seek them out and exploit their desperate need for cash.  Yet while Shidong’s role as the home of entrepreneurial dragonheads is ignored, its symbolic capital is not.

 

The squeeze of fiscal decentralization has generated a great degree of what Yang terms “competitive liberalization” at the local level throughout China.[42]  Taijiang’s response has not been unique in this regard.  Elsewhere I have documented Taijiang’s efforts to promote its crafts industry and attract external investment by allowing coastal firms to set up highly exploitative crafts factories in Taigong.[43]  The county provided facilities, recruited rural labor, and granted tax holidays for these firms, with only marginally beneficial results for the county and the workers involved.  While the county refused to renew leases for some of the most egregious exploiters, Taijiang’s development strategy is still portrayed by county leadership as “you help me develop and I’ll help you get rich” (ni bang wo fazhan, wo bang ni facai).  In 1998, favorable policies for investors included non-agricultural residency status for investments of at least RMB50,000, various tax breaks, and proprietary control of any utility infrastructures developed by investors.

 

These ventures in luring investors into Taijiang’s crafts industry indicate the county’s desire to market the unique skills of its rural labor force—the county’s “ocean of needleworkers.”  But Taijiang’s development strategy is still dominated by showcasing its natural resource base in forest products (including tea and herbal medicinal products), energy potential (particularly hydropower), pastures for livestock, and mineral resources.[44]  These “traditional” development resources, however, do not really distinguish Taijiang from any other region of Southwest China.  Nor does a skilled labor force of crafts producers willing to work for very low wages give Taijiang much of an edge over competing localities throughout the region.  Its “competitive advantage” is instead presented in broader cultural terms that seek to lure the investor with images of tradition, exoticism, and romance.  Unable to compete in terms of infrastructure or other more “rational” factors, Taijiang seeks to represent itself as a unique place in cultural terms that appeal to the investor’s sense of history and spectacle.  In this regard, Taijiang is attempting to put itself into the pathways of capital via a tactic increasingly prevalent throughout the global economy: that of producing spectacular cultural landscapes.[45]  Whether such a strategy resonates with investors, of course, is a different story entirely.

 

In a 1998 article titled “Welcome to get rich in Taijiang” (huanying nin dao Taijiang lai facai), county secretary Long Changhai and county government leader Pan Liang explicitly invoked Taijiang as a place steeped in tradition and culture in their efforts to attract investors.[46]  They began by noting the resilience, pride, and hard work of the Miao, a people exiled from the north over 2,000 years ago to live in the stony hills of Guizhou.  Despite losing their written script along the way, the Miao persevered, turning the ancient mountains and clear rivers of the miaojiang into a “paradise on earth.”[47]  In this “mysterious place” the Miao struggled against feudalism and imperialism, a reference  to the protracted rebellions of the 18th and 19th centuries.  Taijiang is thus portrayed as a place of particular cultural values that the investor, too, should find appealing and, implicitly, lacking in other “more developed” parts of China.  But these values are also linked to the new entrepreneurial spirit of “competitive liberalization” and openness.  Long and Pan’s article condemns the tumultuous leftism of the Mao era for denying the promise of the revolution’s hard-won liberation, and reassures potential investors that the heirs of Taijiang’s rebellious heritage are not the fanatical Maoists of yesterday, but the “open” and “reform minded” cadres of today’s new government, a government committed to development and entrepreneurialism.

 

But such cultural values by themselves are too intangible to garner attention without a spectacular landscape to illustrate them.  Three spectacles of Miao cultural heritage have thus been selected and promoted by the county in an effort to provide a set of attractions through which to lure investment.  One is the drum-dance of Fanpai village, identified in the 1980s by prefectural tourism officials as a sufficiently exotic display of “Miao spirit.”  A traveling dance troupe was organized, the dance was dubbed the “Oriental Disco” (dongfang disike), and the troupe quickly gained notoriety when it performed for Jiang Zemin and Li Peng at Zhongnanhai in 1990.  The other two attractions are festivals held in Shidong—now called the Dragon Boat Festival (longchuan jie) and the Sisters Rice Festival (jiemeifan jie).  As was the case throughout China’s ethnic minority regions, these festivals were revived in the 1980s as part of a more general reform era cultural revival.[48]  But as Mueggler points out, the revival of traditional festivals required some significant rhetorical adjustment by the state to purge them of “unhealthy” superstitions and other signs of ethnic autonomy that challenged the overarching narratives of China’s national unity and “spiritual civilization.”[49]  Thus, Shidong’s festivals have become celebrated as expressions of a traditional cultural heritage that speaks to the market-oriented needs of Taijiang’s development.  As such, these festivals have not only become the primary forums for Taijiang to showcase itself to potential investors, but the content and activities of the festivals themselves have been manipulated to fit the political and economic needs of the county.  In what follows I will discuss how the county has appropriated the Sisters Festival in this regard before briefly examining how this has impacted the sense of place among leaders in Shidong itself.  I shall argue that Shidong plays the key symbolic role in representing Taijiang as a preserved landscape of cultural heritage, rather than a living landscape of hard work and exploitative production relations.  It is by focusing on the representation of embroidery that this issue is revealed most clearly.

 

 

The Sisters Festival

Traditionally a spring fertility ritual conducted early in the agricultural cycle (beginning on the 15th day of the third month in the lunar calendar), the Sisters Rice Festival displayed unmarried women in their finest festival attire, with elaborately embroidered and silver-ornamented clothing and silver headdresses.[50]  Drum dancing (of a much less spirited sort than found in Fanpai) and antiphonal singing occurred, along with other rituals that provided a forum for male and female youths to meet in a socially-sanctioned environment of courtship and seduction.  The festival also included bronze-drum dancing, wooden-stool dancing, and reed-pipe (lusheng) playing.  The festival lasted three days, with activities typically beginning in mid-afternoon and lasting into the night, when youths were encouraged to meet and get to know each other.  Stories abound of these evening meetings turning into sexual encounters, and indeed recollections by elders confirm a carnival-quality to the festival prior to the revolution.  Today, official accounts of the festival activities emphasize the innocence of courtship and its ritualized expression in the exchange of five-colored glutinous rice cakes, while explicit references to premarital sex have been excised from the texts.  But this “cleaning-up” of the festival (at least in it representation) is only one aspect of the state’s appropriation of Jiemeifan Jie.

 

Because of the Sisters Rice Festival, and the Dragon Boat Festival occurring three months later at mid-summer, Shidong was put on Guizhou’s ethnic tourist itineraries relatively early.  It was recognized as a “natural minzu festival museum,” and by the late 1980s, special groups of tourists were being taken there to see the festivals.  The town built a small hostel to accommodate these groups, and, as noted above, locals who would become the dragonheads of the 1990s began to collect and sell Shidong needlework to tourists.  While the numbers of tourists visiting Shidong for the festivals gradually increased, however, it became apparent that the town’s primitive accommodations and relative isolation constrained the abilities of local governments to capitalize on the festivals for generating significant revenue or attracting interest in other aspects of the region.  A major change thus occurred in 1998, when the Sisters Rice Festival was slated for direct sponsorship by the Guizhou Tourism Bureau, which announced that it was coordinating the festival as part of its activities in association with the National Tourism Administration’s “Country and City Travel ’98” promotional theme.  Thus, the festival became the major ethnic festival to be promoted for tourism in the province.  According to one informant, over RMB1,000,000 was pumped into its promotion, with the most recognizable impact being that “rice” curiously dropped out of the festival name, and the primary site of festivities was moved from Shidong to the county seat of Taigong.

 

In Taigong, the new Sisters Festival took on the formal pageantry of a socialist state event, beginning with a parade through the town to the sports stadium, where an opening ceremony took place featuring welcoming speeches by political leaders.  This was followed by some performances by dancers from Shidong.  Elsewhere in town trade exhibits could be found, and on the following morning local officials held an open meeting for all potential investors to learn about special policies and favorable factors associated with investing in Taijiang.  The town passed around ample brochures of promotional material, some of which explained the nature of the festival, but most of which concentrated on portraying Taijiang as an open and business-friendly place, and relaying the names of crucial political and business contacts in the area.  In the festival “Service Guide,” for example, visitors were greeted with “Distinguished friend, the ancient Miao, an open people, welcome you!…Welcome to invest in business!”  The guide went on to lay claim to Taijiang as “The first Miao county under heaven,” where development has been slow but where people work hard and have a persevering spirit.  Recognizing the low quality of infrastructural services, the guide quite explicitly calls on the “understanding and compassion” (lijie he yuanliang) of the potential investor to consider Taijiang as an investment in a proud and worthy place.

 

Not only was the 1998 Sisters Festival a stage for the development-yearnings of the county, but it also became something of a standardized venue for the display of “Taijiang culture” more generally.  Thus, festival activities in Taigong included the Fanpai “Oriental Disco” dancers, and an evening display of Taigong’s traditional new year’s torch festival.  On the festival’s second day, held in Shidong, where several busloads of visitors arrived to see village women dance, some dragon boat races were staged for the convenience of those who probably would not be returning to Shidong in the sultry heat of July for the actual Dragon Boat Festival.  This ability to dislodge all of Taijiang’s most spectacular cultural events from their scattered space-time contexts and throw them together for two days during the Sisters Festival represented a significant victory for the “scientific work” of provincial tourism cadres who for years had been persuading locals to “violate” customary taboos regarding proper time and place for carrying out ritual activities.[51]  Indeed, it allowed the county to claim its population as “open” and “entrepreneurial.”

 

Yet while this work of producing a spectacular cultural event was clearly identified as an important quality of Taijiang’s modern Miao people, the work of producing the crafts that marked this event with exoticism and romance was erased in some significant ways.  Throughout the state’s promotional materials and the official media’s representations of the Sisters Festival, Miao crafts were portrayed as cultural artifacts and customary traditions, rather than the products of a thriving household-based petty-commodity economy.  This is curious, given the role crafts have played in Taijiang’s development and poverty-alleviation strategies.  Crafts production in Taijiang is already one of the most commercialized sectors of the economy, yet its representation emphasizes distinctly un-commercial qualities that add not to Taijiang’s image of entrepreneurialism but to its image of mystery and ancientness.  Thus, in the festival Service Guide, visitors were told that the ancient and mysterious culture of the miaojiang hinterlands was preserved on the bodies of Miao women, and that the Miao “book of history” could be read from a woman’s headdress and on down the embroidery covering her body (miaojiang fudi wenhua zang zai shenshang, shishu cong tou du qi).  Thus, while origin myths recount how the Miao lost their written language during their exile to the south, embroidery has preserved the “written record” of Miao history and culture.  Indeed, it is true that embroidery patterns almost always tell a story from ancient Miao legends; this is true even in the innovative bigua that became a popular Shidong product in the 1990s.  A China Daily article covering the Sisters Festival also noted this feature:  “A local saying holds the Miao culture is hidden in women’s clothes and that a woman’s headdress is a history primer.”[52]

 

While such representations should not seem too surprising, it should be recognized that they serve to associate embroidery with culture, tradition, custom and heritage.  These are innocent yet marketable features of any spectacle landscape.  The potential investor is invited to admire the culture of embroidery, not its exploitative relations of production.  Taijiang’s resource of cheap skilled labor is thus sold as a cultural feature, a fact of an ancient and even mysterious heritage.  It is not sold as something enabled by structural conditions of rural poverty, nor as something that apparently thrives on the inequality of commercial market development.  Instead, Taijiang’s “ocean of embroidery” is simply part of a cultural landscape bequeathed by the ancestors, a landscape that has become as “natural” as the rest of the region’s development resources.  The Sisters Festival, in official representations, contributes to this idea by allowing embroidery to become part of a standard set of cultural artifacts put on display as testimony to the Miao spirit with which the state seeks to entice tourists and potential investors.

 

It is telling, then, that during the official festivities in Taigong, there was no forum established for the dragonheads of Shidong to market their wares.  Many of course did manage to visibly position themselves, but it is curious that they were not welcomed to play a central role in the state’s carefully orchestrated event.  Rather, it was in Shidong, as it has been since the festival was revived in the early 1980s, that the commercial aspect of the Sisters Festival maintained its prominence.  As always, traders from Shidong and surrounding areas created a spontaneous textile market in the parking lot of the town’s hostel.  This market was, as always, one of the most popular aspects of the festival, allowing tourists to shop for Miao and Dong textiles from all around southeast Guizhou.[53]  For Shidong, the link between commercial development and the revived festivals has always been immediate.  Many locals and outsiders alike complained about the commodification of the festival, claiming that the “real” Jiemei Jie can only be experienced by hiking far into the hills away from the town.  But I find the commercialized nature of the Shidong festival striking in its contrast to the official version promoted in Taigong by the county, the prefecture, and the province.  While the official narrative of the festival explicitly sought to enhance Taijiang’s commercial development, it pursued this by representing Taijiang in terms of cultural heritage, values, and tradition rather than focusing on the actual production of the markers of that heritage, those values, and that tradition.  The potential investor, hoping to “get rich in Taijiang,” should not, in other words, be bothered by the production relations that occur in a place like Shidong.

 

 

Shidong and the purity of Miao identity

While the Sisters Festival was partially displaced to Taigong and appropriated for the state’s development agendas at broader scales, it remained an important feature of Shidong’s own landscape of commercial development.  In this way the festival marked the historical contrast between Shidong and Taigong discussed earlier in the paper.  Shidong remained a place of merchants and commerce eclipsed by the aggressive state’s own larger-scale geography of conquest.  But I do not want to overdraw this contrast.  It is a suggestive heuristic that need not be reified.  Shidong’s leadership was, after all, quite pleased with the festival’s selection for provincial sponsorship, even if it did mean Taigong would reap most of the benefits.  “What’s good for Taijiang is good for Shidong,” the mayor told me.  When pressed to explain, he noted that the town earned money whenever it took its dragon boats out for an exhibition run on the river.  More importantly, though, was a plan to turn Tangba village, where many of the boats are stored, into a sort of pay-at-the-gate theme park, a “minzu vacation village” (minzu cunzhai dujiacun).  Already by May of 1998 RMB200,000 had been invested by the Guizhou Tourism Bureau and the Provincial Nationalities Affairs Commission to build a proper toilet for tourists, provide electric lights, and clear the way for a small hotel and reception center, both in the traditional architectural styles of the village.[54]  The goal was to have tourists come and “live with the common people” and experience “real” Miao culture firsthand.  In this way, the mayor believed that Shidong could develop a sustainable, tourist-supported crafts industry.  But it is equally clear that such plans only enhanced Shidong’s symbolic role in Taijiang’s development.

 

Interestingly, in the mayor’s version of Shidong’s potential tourist developments, the town was already being marked as a place where tourists could come and experience a “real” version of the Sisters Festival in contrast to the “Hanified” (hanhuale) version being performed in Taigong.  “The performances in Taigong,” he said, “were influenced by Han culture; they weren’t really Miao anymore.”  But in Shidong, “the festival is performed simply, by the common people.”  When asked why some considered the activities of the festival to be “Hanified” even in Shidong, the mayor simply scoffed:  “If it’s done by the common people, how can it by Hanified?”  He saw no connection, in other words between commercialization and Hanification.  The latter was a cultural, not economic, process.

 

The mayor’s sense of pride in the symbolic authenticity of Shidong as a place was extended, indeed amplified, when discussing the town’s other major festival, Longzhou Jie.  The tradition of dragon boat racing is one that is obviously not limited to China’s Miao regions.  On the contrary, it is more often thought of as a Southern Chinese Han tradition.  Dragon Boat races, marking Duanwu—Qu Yuan’s death on the 5th day of the fifth lunar month—are carried out in major cities and towns throughout many regions of southern China.  Even in Guizhou, dragon boat racing on Duanwu Jie occurs primarily in Han towns like Zhenyuan, Congjiang, and Rongjiang.  Was not Shidong’s dragon boat tradition a holdover from the town’s Chinese heritage as a Han trading port?  But this suggestion only caused the mayor to explode.  Leaping from his seat he exclaimed, “Qu Yuan was Miao!  The Dragon Boat Festival is really a Miao festival!  And Shidong is probably the only place where it can still be seen in its original form.”[55]  The mayor’s claim actually trumped the county’s own cultural representations of the ancient and proud Miao people, identifying Shidong itself as the pinnacle of this ancient heritage, and offering a more polemical version of why the region deserved to become developed:

Miao language is really ancient Han language.  But no one pays attention to this fact; people don’t study it—because we’re Miao.  We’re poor and we’re discriminated against.  There used to be Han here during the late Qing; they came here to do business with the Miao.  Back then, there were huge deep forests; there was more water.  The Han married Miao women, became Miao.

This statement goes beyond even the “mystery and tradition” of official narrative and suggests a sense of pride and superiority that would probably not be entirely welcomed among leaders in Taigong or Guiyang seeking to entice investors to “get rich in Taijiang.”  Nevertheless it plays the county’s card perfectly, marking Shidong’s importance as a place in symbolic rather than materialist terms.

 

 

Conclusion

While his comments were polemical, the mayor’s outburst of Miao pride was ultimately only a more extreme form of the culturalism evident in the official narrative of the Sisters Festival.[56]  In both cases, Miao identity, and Shidong’s place-identity, were wrapped in cultural heritage.  What this does is allow the mechanisms of development—marketization and the new relations of commercial production in the rural economy—to go unnoticed as factors contributing to the very discrimination and poverty identified by the mayor himself.  Even the dragonheads themselves became symbols of a sort, representing Miao entrepreneurial spirit, and showing the rest of China how Miao people, too, can succeed in the reform era.[57]  Yet it seems likely that their symbolic role will eventually eclipse their material role as pioneers of a new socio-economic class.  It is likely that the contradictions of embroidery production will be resolved by taking it away from the countryside and industrializing it in urban centers.  The villages around Shidong will still supply the labor, but the dragonheads will get left behind by a scaling up of the production process, relegating Shidong to the role of a theme park of Miao cultural heritage.

 

What begins as a relatively straight-forward story of class differentiation in a developing commercial economy becomes rather more complicated when put in the broader context of the cultural politics of identity and authenticity.  My analysis is not meant to simply “demystify” these identity politics to reveal a “truer” form of class politics underlying it, although I do believe that the producers of Shidong embroidery are being harmfully erased by a broader development discourse based on the spectacle of Miao culture.  Instead I hope I have illustrated the complexities revealed by a place-based analysis that situates local entrepreneurialism within the broader contexts of political, economic, and cultural change.  These broader contexts provide the conditions upon which “regimes of value” emerge to shape the social role played by products like embroidery.  In this paper, those social roles have been characterized in terms of people’s need for cash in a marketizing economy and the need of local territorial units (a town, a county, a province) to attract development capital by selling itself as a cultural landscape of spectacle.  That embroidery serves both of these roles emphasizes how they sometimes contradict each other, and sometimes complement each other.  Finally, that embroidery can become so powerful a marker of these changing conditions reveals how the complex social dimensions of China’s reforms are felt in profound ways even in isolated rural places like Shidong.  China’s rural interior, then, has not been “left behind” or “excluded” by the reforms.  Commercial development, while incipient, has already had profound impacts in Shidong, and even this place long passed by has been reconnected to a broader world with dramatic results.



[1] Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).

[2] Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction:  commodities and the politics of value,” in The Social Life of Things:  Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 3-63.  Following Appadurai’s terminology, the Shidong market, in which a price is set for the textile as commodity, is a “tournament of value.”

[3] For such an “unmasking,” see Michelle Maskiell, “Embroidering the past: Phulkari textiles and gendered work as ‘tradition’ and ‘heritage’ in colonial and contemporary Punjab,” Journal of Asian Studies 58:2 (1999), pp. 361-387.

[4] Taijiang Xianzhi (Guiyang: Guizhou Renmin Chubanshe, 1994), p. 1.  “Taohuayuan” is a reference to the classic utopian poem by Tao Yuanming.  Zhenyuan, it should be noted, was established during the Yuan Dynasty, and was the major Chinese administrative center for the region.  It became a staging place for the campaign to subdue and pacify the miaojiang, beginning in 1726.

[5] Sen-dou Chang, “Some aspects of the urban geography of the Chinese hsien capital.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 51:1 (March, 1961), p. 27; Robert Jenks, Insurgency and Social Disorder in Guizhou: The “Miao” Rebellion, 1854-1873 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), pp. 66-7; Taijiang Xianzhi, p. 1.

[6] The idea of becoming Miao does not necessarily entail intermarriage, however.  Becoming Miao was more a cultural, than a racial or ethnic, transformation.  Thus, when tuntian colonies of soldier-settlers were sent to Guizhou to “open the lands and secure the frontiers,” they represented less a military conquest of non-Chinese regions than a displaced center of civilizing influence, introducing Chinese culture to the barbarians.  Miao would become Chinese to the extent that they adopted Chinese cultural practices; intermarriage was not necessary.  However, this also means that Chinese settlers could “become Miao” by adopting the cultural practices of the Miao.  This was, in fact, a pervasive fear among Chinese officials, and it is instructive to note that ethnographic work in the minzu shibie project of the 1950s revealed a number of Chinese soldier-settler groups who, having taken on a specific identity to distinguish themselves from earlier inhabitants (such as adopting the surname of their military commander) came to simply be called a certain type of Miao, such as Zhong Miao, by still newer inhabitants.  See Tim Oakes, Tourism and Modernity in China (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 91-93.

[7] Official sources, such as the Taijiang Xianzhi and the Qiandongnan Dilizhi (Guiyang: Guizhou Renmin Chubanshe, 1990), remain vague regarding Shidong’s origins.  They do note, however, that during the “late Qing” and through the Republican era, Shidong was a bustling port inhabited by Chinese merchants from Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, and Zhejiang.  They also note that as trade declined the Chinese moved on or intermarried and assimilated with the Miao.  1992 census figures indicated that Shidong is 93.4% Miao.

[8] Qiandongnan Mingshengzhi (Guiyang: Guizhou Renmin Chubanshe, 1992), p. 107.

[9] Qiandongnan Wenwuzhi (Guiyang: Guizhou Renmin Chubanshe, 1992), p. 55.  The Sugongguan also houses the town’s occasionally-open “Dragon Boat Museum.”

[10] Taijiang Xianzhi, p. 42.  See also Lu Qin et al. Taijiang Xian Miaozu Juan  (Beijing: Minzu Chubanshe, 1999), pp. 205-222.

[11] Those who work for the state, receiving a salary, don’t always fare much better.  Town schoolteachers consistently received their pay two to four months in arrears, and when it did arrive it was seldom the full amount.  One schoolteacher, married ten years with two children, had been trying to escape the cramped quarters of his parent’s two-room hut by building himself a new adjacent cement house.  The house had been under construction for over five years and in 1998 was still nowhere close to being finished.  “Whenever I get paid, I work on it a little more; then the money runs out again” he said.

[12] Taijiang Xianzhi, p. 42.

[13] Lu Qin et al. Taijiang Xian Miaozu Juan , p. 273.  See also Nelson H.H. Graburn, “Introduction:  arts of the Fourth World,” in Ethnic and Tourist Arts:  Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World, ed. Nelson H.H. Graburn (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 1-32; June Nash, “Introduction:  traditional arts and changing markets in Middle America,” in Crafts in the World Market:  The Impact of Global Exchange on Middle American Artisans, ed. June Nash (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 12; Michael J.G. Parnwell, “Tourism and rural handicrafts in Thailand,” in Tourism in South-East Asia, eds. Micheal Hitchcock, Victor King and Michael Parnwell (London: Routledge, 1993), 234-257; Ronald Waterbury, “Embroidery for tourists: a contemporary putting-out system in Oaxaca, Mexico,” in Cloth and the Human Experience,” eds. Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 243-271.

[14] Lu Qin et al. Taijiang Xian Miaozu Juan, p. 210, indicate Shidong’s 1992 industrial output value to be a mere 15% of agricultural output value.

[15] Vivienne Shue, The Reach of the State; sketches of the Chinese body politic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).

[16] Lu Qin et al. Taijiang Xian Miaozu Juan, p. 273.

[17] This analysis of production relations in Shidong’s crafts industry is the result of fieldwork carried out in May, 1998, and is based on multiple in-depth interviews with 18 informants within Shidong’s crafts industry.   Many thanks to a University of Colorado Summer Session Research Grant for making this fieldwork financially possible.

[18] In putting-out systems, merchant entrepreneurs mobilize labor primarily via contracts with individual households, thereby minimizing their investment in fixed assets and reducing much of their risk.  In such systems, labor is dominated not by controlling the workplace but by controlling the supply of raw materials, as well as the marketing of the finished product.

[19] Jonathan Unger, “‘Rich man, poor man’: the making of new classes in the countryside,” in China's Quiet Revolution: New Interactions Between State and Society, edited by. David Goodman and Beverly Hooper (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1994), pp. 43-63; David Goodman, “State-society relations: elite interdependence and accommodation,” (Sydney: Institute for International Studies, February 1999); Yang Minchuan, “Reshaping peasant culture and community: rural industrialization in a Chinese village,” Modern China 20:2 (1994), pp. 157-179.

[20] This is because fan – “to buy or sell” – is a homonym for fan – “criminal.”

[21] Maskiell, “Embroidering the past”; Parnwell, “Tourism and rural handicrafts in Thailand”; Scott Cook and Leigh Binford, Obliging Need: Rural Petty Industry in Mexican Capitalism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); June Nash (ed.), Crafts in the World Market: The Impact of Global Exchange on Middle American Artisans (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993).  For a more historical account that comes to similar conclusions, see Katherine Bowie, “Unraveling the myth of the subsistence economy:  textile production in 19th century northern Thailand,” Journal of Asian Studies 51:4 (1992), pp. 797-823.

[22] Scott Cook, “Craft commodity production, market diversity, and differential rewards in Mexican capitalism today,” in Nash, Crafts in the World Market, pp. 59-83.  Table 3 on page 68 offers the following income data on crafts production in Oaxaca, Mexico:

                                                Direct Producers                Intermediaries                     Income Ratio

Industry                                 N             Income                   N             Income                                   I/DP

Embroidery                            236              $4.00                   30              $88.00                                   22/1

Palm Plaiting                           97            $10.00                     1              $30.00                                      3/1

Backstrap Weaving               76            $35.00                     2            $321.00                                   9.2/1

Treadle-loom Weaving       155            $70.00                     5            $133.00                                   1.9/1

Brick Making                          17          $287.00                     7            $361.00                                   1.3/1

 

[23] Waterbury, “Embroidery for tourists,” pp. 252-54.

[24] Cook and Binford, Obliging Need.

[25] See Tim Oakes, “Bathing in the far village: globalization, transnational capital, and the cultural politics of modernity in China,” Positions 7:2 (Fall, 1999), pp. 307-42, for a full account of the politics of authenticity within Guizhou’s crafts industry.

[26] In fact, the director of Taigong’s Miao Embroidery Factory, which employs a number of women from Shidong as well as buys pieces produced in Shidong households, told me in 1998 that he was getting out of  embroidery altogether.  Even with putting-out contract work to rural households, while concentrating additional value-added labor in his own factory site, he was unable to maintain a consistent business in embroidery production.  While the reasons for this are not limited to the low profitability of commercial embroidery production, declining returns were his chief concern.  Instead, he planned to focus on weaving tubu, or “peasant cloth,” which was much quicker, easier, and less labor intensive to produce.  He hoped to cultivate an urban Chinese market for rustic textiles.

[27] County-wide, however, crafts production remained significant.  Between 1992 and 1996 annual sales of craft textiles averaged between RMB 300,000 and 400,000 (Lu Qin et al. Taijiang Xian Miaozu Juan , p. 274).

[28] Ibid.

[29] One of the keys to conceptualizing the “natural economy” of the peasantry has been to downplay or deny class differentiation within peasant societies.  This has been interpreted by Cook and Binford (Obliging Need, pp. 15-16) as a legacy of A.V. Chayanov’s neopopulist “Organization and Production School” of studies focusing on the Russian family farm.  It also has echoes in the “moral economy” arguments advanced by James Scott’s The Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).  In short, the idea of a “natural” peasant economy of subsistence necessitates a dualism, in which peasant societies are conceived as existing separately from capitalist societies.  This approach makes it difficult to conceptualize the social differences resulting from a commodity economy within peasant societies.

[30] This, for example, was the marketing strategy of the Los Angeles based Far Village project.   See Oakes, “Bathing in the far village.”

[31] Cook and Binford, Obliging Need.

[32] See Mobo Gao, Gao Village (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), pp. 171-99; Jonathan Unger and Jean Xiong, “Life in the Chinese hinterlands under the rural economic reforms,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 22:2 (1990), pp. 4-17; Scott Rozelle, “Stagnation without equity: patterns of growth and inequality in China's rural economy,” The China Journal 35 (1996), pp. 63-92; Elizabeth Croll, From Heaven to Earth (London: Routledge, 1994); Tim Oakes, “China’s market reforms: whose human rights problem?” in China Beyond the Headlines, edited by Tim Weston and Lionel Jensen (Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), pp. 295-326.

[33] See Unger, “Rich man, poor man.”

[34] Lu Qin et al. Taijiang Xian Miaozu Juan (Beijing: Minzu Chubanshe, 1999), pp. 271-280.

[35] Tim Oakes, “Selling Guizhou: cultural development in an era of marketisation,” in The Political Economy of China’s Provinces, edited by Hans Hendrischke and Feng Chongyi (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 42-3.

[36] For an analysis of the impacts of the campaign to “Open Up the West” in Guizhou, see Tim Oakes, “Building a southern dynamo: Guizhou and state power,” The China Quarterly 178 (June, 2004).

[37] Daniel Wright and Darlene Liao, “The other side of China’s prosperity,” The China Business Review 26:5 (September-October, 1999), pp. 22-24.

[38] Croll, From Heaven to Earth; Unger and Xiong, “Life in the Chinese hinterlands.”

[39] Wright and Liao, “The other side of China’s prosperity.”

[40] Ibid.

[41] On state efforts to promote commercial crafts production, see “Li seeks to develop traditional crafts,” China Daily Online Edition (www.chinadaily.com.cn), 30 September, 1997.

[42] Dali Yang, Beyond Beijing: Liberalization and the Regions in China (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).

[43] Oakes, “Selling Guizhou,” pp. 54-5.

[44] A 1998 handbook for potential investors produced by the county government offered the following assessment of Taijiang’s resources:  Taijiang is one of Guizhou’s ten major forestry counties, with 734,000 mu of forest covering 44% of the county and containing 2.75 million m3 of timber and 203 varieties of tree.  There are 421 varieties of traditional Chinese medicinal herbs.  39.8% of the county (719,400 mu) is pastureland, and 230,000 tons of lead await exploitation underground.

[45] See, for instance, Gerry Kearns and Chris Philo, eds., Selling Places: The City as Cultural Capital (Oxford: Pergamon, 1993), and Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Spaces (London: Sage, 1994).

[46] The article appeared in materials provided by the county government to guests attending the annual Sisters Festival in April, 1998.  It was concurrently published in the local newspaper during the festival.

[47] The loss of the Miao written language during their fabled sojourn to the south has long been part of the Miao origin myth, explaining their contemporary “backwardness” as an historical accident.  The myth insists the Miao were originally a cultured people of China’s core region, pushed out by the aggressive armies of the North Central Plains, rather than a primitive “hill tribe” who have escaped the evolutionary course of civilization.  The reference to “paradise on earth,” is offered in Chinese as shiwai taoyuan, a common literary reference to Utopia.

[48] Louisa Schein, “The dynamics of cultural revival among the Miao in Guizhou.” in Ethnicity and Ethnic Groups in China, edited by Chien Chao and Nicholas Tapp (Hong Kong: Univeristy of Hong Kong Press, 1989), pp. 199-212.

[49] Erik Mueggler, “Dancing fools: politics of culture and place in ‘traditional nationality festivals,’”  Modern China 28:1 (2002), pp. 3-38.

[50] See Miaozu Shehui Lishi Diaocha, Vol. 1 (1986), pp. 218-220 for a discussion of the Sisters Rice Festival in the Taijiang region.

[51] In Liu Xiuluan, Guizhou Lüyou Puluren (Pioneers of Guizhou Tourism) (Beijing: Zhongguo Lüyou Chubanshe, 1994), pp. 34-38, the following passage emphasizes the nature of this “scientific work,” relating how southeast Guizhou’s prefectural governor, Wu Dehai persuaded villagers to abandon their superstitions and open up to tourism:

In Qingman village, customs dictated that the lusheng couldn’t be played , nor could drums be beaten, between spring planting and autumn harvest.  To violate this custom, it was said, was to risk some great natural calamity.  Wu Dehai himself is a Miao, and wanted to respect the customs of his own people.  But he also wanted to adapt to the new environment of reform and openness.  So he himself went to the Miao village, found the village elders and cadres, spoke to them in rational and scientific terms, opened their thinking, and reached an agreement to establish an ethnic tourist site.  After this, when tourists came, villagers performed, playing the lusheng at any time of the year, enabling locals to receive an enlightening education and increase their enthusiasm for tourism.

[52] “Ladies’ night out down in Miao country,” China Daily Online Edition (www.chinadaily.com.cn), 28 April, 2000.

[53] In 1996, an estimated RMB 80,000 worth of textiles were sold at Shidong’s Sisters Festival. Between 1992 and 1996, Shidong sold an average of RMB 100,000 – 150,000 worth of textiles during the Sisters and Dragon Boat festivals (Lu Qin et al. Taijiang Xian Miaozu Juan , p. 274).

[54] It is interesting to note, here, that the “traditional style” of Tangba is not the late imperial courtyard houses, a few of which remain along the town’s cobblestone riverfront lane.  Rather, “traditional” architecture is now represented by the small wooden houses that dominate the landscape around the town.

[55] In this regard, it is curious that Shidong’s Dragon Boat Festival occurs not on the 5th day of the fifth month, but on the 15th day.  No one I asked could give a reason for this difference.

[56] I do not wish to condemn the mayor for harboring culturalist constructions of Miao identity, only to situate them in relation to broader state narratives of minzu identity.  There has been considerable academic debate over indigenous identity politics, and how academics should approach indigenous elites who display the same essentializing cultural rhetoric that has been criticized in much of the cultural studies literature.  See Daniel Mato, “On the theory, epistemology, and politics of the social construction of "cultural identities" in the age of globalization:  introductory remarks to ongoing debates,” Identities 3:1-2 (1996), pp. 61-72, along with accompanying articles by Rogers and Friedman.

[57] In fact, as if to emphasize this point, the only Miao person to be included in a book titled Heroes of Chinese Enterprise was a dragonhead from Taijiang county.  See Zhang Shaohua, “Zhenjian tiaochu bashiwan” (Leaping to 800,000 from the point of a needle), in Zhongguo Qiye Yinghao  (Heroes of Chinese Enterprise) (Beijing: Qiye Guanli Chubanshe, 1993), pp. 23-38.