Dragonheads and Needlework: textile
work and cultural heritage in a
Provincial
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
This
scene took place in 1994, in the town of
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
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
Shidong – a “civilized
place” passed by and found anew
Shidong
is a port town on the
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
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
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” (
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
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
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
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
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
In
1998, Shidong’s gongtou operated
crafts shops at the tourist hotel in Kaili, and at a park in
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
The
problem of earning an adequate income from embroidery production is not limited
to Shidong, or
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,
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
The
marketization of
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
[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
[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
[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
[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
[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 “
[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
[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
[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
[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
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]
[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
[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
[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
[37] Daniel
Wright and Darlene Liao, “The other side of
[38] Croll, From Heaven to Earth; Unger and Xiong, “Life in the Chinese hinterlands.”
[39] Wright
and Liao, “The other side of
[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
[43] Oakes,
“Selling
[44] A 1998
handbook for potential investors produced by the county government offered the
following assessment of Taijiang’s resources:
Taijiang is one of
[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
[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.