>From Jim D. to Paul:
>Paul writes:
>>Rob raises an interesting question. If, due to subcontracting
>>labour, wage labour becomes a minority of workers in developed
>>"capitalist" countries, does that mean they are no longer
>>capitalist? (Which is the implication of accepting Jim's position
>>on slavery.)
>
>Actually, it's my "position" on capitalism, not on slavery. Frankly,
>I don't think capitalism is possible without wage labor. I think
>that most "subcontracting labor" is just wage labor in disguise.
>(There are also subcontractors who are petty or even large
>bourgeois.) Of course, this is an empirical question, one that I
>don't have the energy to even try to answer this morning.
What is happening in our post-Socialist & post-Social-Democratic
epoch is that early transitional forms of emerging capitalist
relations have returned.
***** positions: east asia cultures critique 7.2 (1999) 307-342
Bathing in the Far Village: Globalization, Transnational Capital, and
the Cultural Politics of Modernity in China*
Tim Oakes
Bathing in the Far Village
In the summer of 1996 I was browsing through a chic clothing boutique
in downtown Seattle when I came across a batik bathrobe prominently
displayed alongside several elegant dresses (fig. 1). It caught my
attention because it was of a particular style of batik that I
recognized. The sight of it--displayed among the silk, linen, and
rayon gowns from around the world--stopped me in my tracks, for two
years earlier I had seen this type of batik being produced in the
rural households and town workshops of Guizhou, China. Knowing what
peasant women earned in the laborious and highly skilled work of
applying wax for batik dying, my first impulse was, of course, to
check the price tag. The bathrobe was going for a cool $150. By my
calculation, the Guizhou household that contributed the majority of
the labor needed to produce the bathrobe earned roughly 2.5 percent
of the retail sale price.
The labor of women villagers in Guizhou was being sold in Seattle
under the label of Far Village, a small company established in 1993
by a Los Angeles designer. As the bathrobe's tag--on rough
handcrafted paper--sought to make clear, the purpose of Far Village
was to promote and protect the art and craft skills of "ancient
cultures" such as Guizhou's Miao people. More than this, Far Village
claimed that it promoted the empowerment of Miao peasant women, the
actual producers of its clothing. As the tag made explicit, the
consumer was purchasing much more than just a bathrobe; indeed, the
item itself was almost secondary to the concept being sold: the
possibility of organic cultural continuity in the modern world
and--as an added bonus--the modern emancipation of village women as
well. The Far Village project promoted a multicultural politics of
consumption that has become a hallmark of advanced capitalism in the
neoliberal West, a "politics" constituted less by the production of
difference than by its circulation according to the needs of flexible
accumulation and postmodern cultural relativism. Within this
politics of consumption, a blissful collage of abstracted and
consumable identities substitutes for the real social differences
that have historically emerged within and been so disruptive to
capital. 1
One way of interpreting the displacement of cultural politics from
the realm of production to that of consumption is to see it as part
of the global penetration of the commodity form--the colonization and
exploitation by transnational capital of the remaining modes of
production that have previously functioned beyond its reach.
Capital, according to this view, roams the world in search of
cultural otherness that is ripe for commodification, while
consumer-tourists, transfixed by the ideologies of multiculturalism,
quickly follow to "appreciate" and "preserve" the wreckage that
remains. Indeed, an apparent condition of advanced or "disorganized"
capitalism is a pattern of everyday consumption that renders us more
and more like tourists as we purchase not products but
representations and experiences. 2 Thus, in Seattle, one can be an
ethnic tourist by purchasing a batik bathrobe; one can bathe in the
far village without ever leaving the bathroom--and believe that the
village is better off for it. At any rate, that is the marketing
pitch that Far Village, as a capitalist venture, relies upon. 3
At first glance, then, the Far Village project reflects the familiar
story of transnational capitalism, with its pervasive extension of
the commodity form into the final frontiers of premodern "tradition"
and the metropolitan fetishizing of those commodities into the
misplaced metaphors of preindustrial cultural preservation and
justice for Fourth World women. 4 But the ethnographic details
underlying the Far Village project compel us to challenge the
assumption that globalization is a straightforward process of capital
commodifying everything in its path and enlisting cultural
differences into its repertoire of surplus-value extraction. The
social relations of production that underlie the Far Village project
are profoundly conditioned by multiple ethnic, cultural, and gender
differences within China, differences that divert and complicate the
politics of consumption going on in the Seattle boutique, as well as
the material processes of commodification underway in Guizhou. While
the surplus labor of Miao village women is being appropriated by
capital (a fact obscured by the myths of preserving ancient culture
and empowering women), their encounter with transnational capital is
further complicated by an ongoing cultural politics of modernity
within China, which, in its latest guise, could be described as the
challenge of an increasingly vigorous capitalist marketplace to the
socialist state's role as the dominant narrator of China's "identity"
as a modern nation-state and culturally coherent society. 5 Ethnic
groups in China, such as the Miao, find themselves at the unstable
intersection of state and capitalist discourses as they compete for
the loudest voice in narrating ideal models for the modern
imaginations of the Chinese people. Their participation in a
globalized production and marketing project such as Far Village
enlists Miao villagers in a struggle not only over the exploitation
of surplus labor value but also over the unfinished project of modern
China. It is this struggle over Chinese modernity, and the role of
ethnic groups in this struggle, that divert and distort the politics
of consumption expressed in the purchase of a batik bathrobe. While
globalization clearly links producers and consumers across vast
spatial divides, intensifying the exploitative reach of capital to an
unprecedented scale, this essay seeks to argue that those linkages
are profoundly conditioned and altered by processes that occur on
more local and regional scales. Here, globalization is viewed
through the lens of the local to bring into sharper focus the dynamic
interaction between placed cultural practice and displaced capital.
6...
...Examining ethnic politics in China according to the
political-economic context of the relationship between rural ethnic
producers and international capital--as mediated by the Chinese state
and the tourism industry-- also offers a materialist contribution to
the growing literature on Chinese ethnic cultural studies. 10 In
this essay, minority subjectivity is also considered, but within a
field of power relations dominated by capital and state policies that
have less to do with ethnicity per se than with liberal market
reforms. While I offer no definitive conclusions regarding the
agency of minority subjects, I hope to provide a framework for
analyzing ethnic cultural politics in China that pays explicit
attention to the growing role of mobile capital and market
development in conditioning minority subjectivities.
The Sway of Capital
Gathering the analytical threads spun thus far, three critical points
may now be made regarding the political-economic context of ethnic
crafts production in China. First, the Far Village project
represents less the preservation of a noncapitalist production
environment and culture than an intensification and an extension of
an existing form of state capitalism in China toward more global
channels of accumulation. Second, the functional division of labor
inherent in Guizhou's commercial rural crafts production is marked by
gender and ethnicity. The Guizhou crafts industry is segmented into
Han versus non-Han ethnicity, and the question of who eventually
controls the production of ethnic products is also a question of
ethnic politics. 11 In addition, minority subjectivity in China is
largely a feminized subjectivity; crafts production itself is thus
further segmented by the marking of specific tasks as "women's work."
Ethnicity and gender thus play complementary roles in the configuring
of minority subjectivity in China, and these roles are reflected in
the production relations that dominate the crafts industry. Third,
the cultural politics of crafts production in Guizhou provides an
arena in which the divergent interests of the state and capital
become apparent as they compete for dominance over the ethnicity- and
gender-charged narratives of Chinese modernity. The consumer of Far
Village products enters unaware into this arena of the cultural
politics of Chinese modernity.
The Far Village project seeks to promote an alternative model to the
industrial capitalist modernity of the West. Yet, paradoxically, it
seeks to achieve this via conventional market mechanisms that are
subject to uneven patterns of capital accumulation. The Los Angeles
designer who, in 1993, proposed the project to leaders in Guizhou's
crafts and tourism industries sought explicitly to "avoid demanding
so much work that it disrupts village life and becomes an unpleasant
chore." Her proposal further indicated that "rather than just
selling a product we want to sell the concept of Far Village; that
the world needs to protect and help these ancient cultures to
survive; that things made by hand are valuable and should be honored;
and that the marketplace will respond to such a selling technique."
12 Her vision for the project was that of a nonexploitative market
link between metropolitan consumers and "ancient cultures"--the
latter with their traditional, noncapitalist modes of production
(modes presumably not characterized by the exploitative extraction of
surplus labor value). This vision therefore relied upon an assumed
image of "village life" that was somehow free of the "unpleasant
chores" of formalized wage labor or production for the market; a "far
village" that did not live, in other words, under the sway of capital.
Contrary to this marketable myth of consumer contact with (and
preservation of) the premodern, the Miao villagers who produce goods
for Far Village enter into production relations that are closely
integrated with the Chinese state's capitalist development
strategies. They live, in fact, well under the sway of capital, and
it is precisely for this reason that they produce their crafts for
Seattle consumers. It is their integration within capitalist
relations of production, rather than survival beyond them, that leads
to the labor of Miao women being fetishized as an ideal type of
"natural economy," which is characterized by the so-called
subsistence mode of production. Usually equated with preindustrial
and precapitalist rural production relations, the naturalness of the
peasant economy is often assumed in popular, official, and even some
scholarly characterizations of "backward" (luohou) regions of China's
countryside (such as Guizhou). 13 There is much dismay among Chinese
officials and scholars, for example, over the "small-farmer
mentality" (xiaonong sixiang) of Guizhou's rural producers, their
resistance to marketization, and their refusal to embrace the ideal
of comparative advantage in China's new "market socialism."
According to this view, subsistence producers persist in their ways
of self-sufficiency and ad hoc participation in local markets. More
important, however, is the charge that such peasants are not
sufficiently entrepreneurial and therefore fail to create conditions
in which capital can accumulate. In other words, production
relations of subsistence are not oriented toward profit, that is,
toward extracting surplus labor value.
For a Chinese state seeking to enlist market forces in its
modernization agenda, such peasant stubbornness is a problem. For
the Far Village project, it is the fragile artifact of a way of life
long lost in the industrialized West. Both the Chinese state and
transnational capital, in other words, construct a mythical image of
the Miao other--but for opposite purposes. The state's agenda is one
of developmentalism, in which the Miao other represents a version of
a subsistence-oriented agrarian tradition that the state sees China
progressing beyond as it engages with the world economy. 14 Far
Village's agenda is obviously quite different. Echoing the ideals of
what in the Mexican context Scott Cook and Leigh Binford have termed
"ethnicized neopopulism," Far Village "combines the celebration of
indigenous ethnic pluralism . . . with a genuinely romantic loathing
of capitalism." 15 The production of labor-intensive crafts such as
ornate batik and embroidery is only possible, it is felt, in a
noncommercial, subsistence-oriented environment. Hence the project's
goal of not interrupting village life or making crafts production an
"unpleasant chore." But changing the subsistence environment of the
village would also destroy the uniqueness (and therefore
marketability) of the products. Thus, the idea is to preserve a
communitarian, household-based production environment that is
dominated by kinship relations--an environment where the production
process is presumably not regulated by a disciplined regimen of time.
Through their conscription into the front lines of subcontracting
capitalism (as it reaches into the most remote regions of China's
interior), Miao villagers find themselves occupying a space in which
the contradictory discourses of modernity narrated by the Chinese
state and by capitalist elites compete for dominance.
In fact, the Chinese state has long played a significant role in
shaping the social relations of production in which Miao villagers
participate. Historically, the Miao of Guizhou have been subject to
the volatile economic permutations that are characteristic of a
Chinese "internal colony." 16 With the development of collective
agriculture under Mao, Guizhou peasants were fundamentally
integrated, as never before, into the broader political economy of
state resource extraction. 17 Through the socialist state's
appropriation of agricultural production, and through its many
ideological campaigns aimed at instilling a modern revolutionary
consciousness throughout China, village economies were fundamentally
disrupted and linked to relations of production that were distinctly
modern and statist and which profoundly destabilized local social
relations in the countryside. State procurement of surplus grain
directly implicated Chinese peasants in an industrial modernization
strategy that depended heavily on the exploitation of agriculture.
Land reform and collectivization destroyed any lingering possibility
that Guizhou's villagers could be viewed as isolated holdouts, where
ancient production relations governed by the customs of tradition and
kinship might escape the modernizing influences of the modern
nation-state. Ironically, it is not until the post-Mao era that we
begin to see the specter of subsistence raised by the reform-oriented
state's efforts to introduce a new round of modernization to the
rural Chinese economy.
Rural reforms in post-Mao China have brought an important shift in
which a state-market hybrid has largely replaced the state in its
role of dominating local production relations. Agricultural
production is increasingly driven by commercial concerns, and rural
industrialization has brought significant new sources of wealth and
inequality to the countryside. 18 Initially, during the early 1980s,
rural reforms that unintentionally led to the dismantling of
collectives and the establishment of household contracting brought
about an unprecedented increase in grain production and, with the 20
percent rise in state grain-procurement prices, a rapid rise in rural
incomes and household savings. 19 In the latter half of the 1980s,
however, the state sought to reward farmers for diversifying their
activities and making market-based decisions about what and how much
to produce. At the same time, fiscal decentralization encouraged
local governments to actively seek out new sources of revenue; for
rural areas, this meant local state support for rural
industrialization and commercial agricultural production. With the
central state divesting itself of the rural economy, and with
collective resources largely dismantled, demand for capital
investments in new industrial and commercial ventures intensified. 20
Rural industries and commercialized agriculture have become two
important means to achieving fiscal autonomy for many prosperous
rural areas along the coast and near large cities. Thus, rural
production in these areas witnessed a profound shift--from a focus on
intensifying traditional inputs (such as labor) to increased
capitalization, efficiency, and profitability. By 1992, when Deng
Xiaoping made his famous southern tour, which initiated a commercial
boom throughout the country, a "commercial countryside" was being
explicitly advocated as the primary goal of rural development.
Household crafts production is currently being promoted throughout
China--especially in regions where larger-scale rural industries
remain undeveloped--as a complement to, rather than a departure from,
this trend. 21
For Guizhou's villagers, post-Mao reforms have meant important new
incentives to produce for the market, as well as new opportunities to
seek out off-farm sources of wage income. Yet developments since
1985 have made it increasingly difficult to earn a living from
farming in a region where cultivation is dominated by staple grains.
Although procurement quotas have been dropped and grain prices
continue to rise, increasing production costs have made grain farming
a losing venture in all but the most prosperous and industrialized
regions. 22 While commercial crops now receive the greatest priority
among farmers throughout China, weak agricultural markets, poor land,
and high population pressure make cash crops an unrealistic option
for most Guizhou farmers. 23 Even traditional specialties, such as
cotton or tobacco, or sidelines, such as pork or poultry, generate
slim profits that leave farmers vulnerable to an increasingly
volatile market environment. 24 Across China, access to nonfarm wage
income has therefore become the key to improving the living standards
of rural households. 25 In regions where rural industries meet
household demands for wage labor, rural incomes have seen dramatic
increases. But in more remote regions, such as Guizhou, where
industrial manufacturing is not feasible, household-based commercial
crafts production is seen as one of the few opportunities to improve
rural incomes and one of the few options for generating a more
capitalized, profit-oriented rural sector. 26
Intensified crafts production emerges, then, not as the peasant
household's stubborn clinging to a traditional subsistence economy in
the face of modern change--as Far Village might lead us to
believe--but rather as its active response to an increasingly
commercialized and capitalized countryside, where structural
transformations in the economy require peasant families to bring in
more cash income. In the Chinese countryside, crafts production has
historically thrived in commercially developed regions not because of
the persistence of a "peasant mentality" but because of the chronic
need for cash faced by peasants in an increasingly market-based
economy. 27
This speaks to a broader debate over the articulation of capitalist
with noncapitalist modes of production. The Far Village project's
marketability depends, in part, on selling to the consumer the idea
that noncapitalist modes of production can remain wholly
"beyond"--yet at the same time profitably linked to--capitalism. In
fact, petty-commodity production has been characterized as a peasant
strategy of capital accumulation rather than a strategy of
traditionalist survivalism on the part of "ancient cultures."
Indeed, it is often because of their intense desire for modernity
that peasants in Guizhou enter into household crafts production.
Petty-commodity production has been conceptualized by Cook and
Binford according to the following four elements: (1) production for
market exchange; (2) nonwaged labor and private (household) control
of the means of production; (3) relative independence and autonomy of
the production unit; and (4) production for subsistence "but never to
the exclusion of capital accumulation or profit." 28 These four
elements have in common the peculiar way in which labor is joined to
capital. Instead of extracting profit through the control of waged
labor, capital accumulation for petty-commodity enterprises "occurs
through the extraction of surplus value from nonwaged labor." Cook
and Binford call this process "endofamilial accumulation"; it is
through such an accumulation strategy that peasant households may
realize actual profits from their "self-exploitation," profits that
may exceed the simple reproduction of subsistence. 29 Importantly,
this approach to conceptualizing petty-commodity production focuses
our attention on the conditions that either enable or prevent peasant
households from achieving actual capital accumulation rather than on
their assumed disinclination to pursue increased profits and
efficiency in their household enterprises. This can help us to move
beyond the assumptions underlying the Far Village project and to
examine more closely the production relations inherent in Guizhou's
village crafts industry.
In Guizhou, commercial crafts production is largely driven by
widespread rural poverty, which provides the incentive for women in
Miao households to become self-exploitative specialists. 30 As the
following section will reveal, definite patterns of class
stratification have occurred within crafts-producing regions
according to the commodity chains that have developed between
producers, middlemen, value-adding workshops, and traders who deal
with companies such as Far Village. But the functional division of
labor that adheres, and the articulations of meaning that emerge
within the industry, do not necessarily reflect class relations of
production per se but rather extant social differences based on
ethnicity and gender. Thus, while crafts production in Guizhou falls
firmly within the "sway of capital," the resulting patterns of uneven
accumulation and social differentiation do not necessarily arise from
the commodity form itself but from deeply imbedded patterns of
ethnic, cultural and gender differences that mediate and divert the
further encroachments of transnational capitalism toward a regionally
specific struggle over Chinese modernity.
The Cultural Politics of Modernity in Guizhou's Touristic Development
...Ethnic craft commodity production in Guizhou has developed within
a macroeconomic environment characterized by state fiscal
decentralization and decline. During the Reform Era, the
redistributive effectiveness of the central government has lessened
considerably. 31 Since 1980, a trend toward local self-financing has
also generated growing regional economic disparities. 32 The central
government's share of the budget has dropped from roughly 47 percent
in 1984 to 29 percent in 1995. By 1995, government revenues had
declined to 10.7 percent of the GNP. 33 Fiscal power has
increasingly been concentrated in wealthy regions, while poor
provinces such as Guizhou are faced with greater fiscal
responsibilities, inadequate revenues, and growing deficits. In
1995, for example, Guizhou's provincial revenues had amounted to just
45 percent of expenditures. 34 Between 1988 and 1994, the province
had received annual fixed-quota subsidies of RMB 740 million, which
represented an increasingly smaller proportion of the expanding
provincial budget. 35 In the early 1980s, central subsidies had
financed nearly 60 percent of Guizhou's total budget. By 1993, this
figure was down to less than 20 percent. Correspondingly, in 1995,
70 percent of total fixed-capital investments were financed by the
province, a significant increase over the 1992 figure of 48 percent.
36 One result was that by the 1990s, unable to transfer its
diminishing subsidies to the counties, the provincial government was
instead extracting a surplus from them to finance its outlays. Local
leaders, inventing new fees and surcharges to cover their remittance
quotas, correspondingly increased the financial pressure on rural
households. One report concludes that "in Guizhou, since 1988, the
entire rural sector has acquired net remitter status, so that the
rural sector may be supporting the urban sector." 37 Overall, poor
rural counties have seen very little growth in expenditures, while
even relatively wealthy counties are strapped with heavy
revenue-sharing burdens that dampen whatever comparative advantages
they have had. In addition, a new tax-sharing arrangement introduced
by the Ministry of Finance in 1994 has made it more difficult for
Guizhou counties specializing in liquor and tobacco production to
retain revenues associated with the tax on these "luxury goods."
Faced with the inadequacy of central development funds designed to
compensate for the adverse effects of fiscal decentralization on the
minority and impoverished counties of China's interior, Guizhou has
increasingly advocated the commercialization of the rural sector as
the means by which the rural poor may escape poverty. In other
words, the province's answer to its simmering fiscal crisis is to
"sell Guizhou." 38 This strategy amounts to addressing the
province's chronic shortage of capital by attracting external
investment for commercial development schemes. While central-state
investments in Guizhou's mining and energy sectors remain significant
(Guizhou is a key provider under the Comprehensive National
Development Plan, which emphasizes mineral and energy development),
the province is increasingly left on its own to both revive a
derelict ordnance-manufacturing industry and establish an integrated
rural market economy. 39 Guizhou's efforts to attract external
capital have focused on retooling its ordnance industries for
consumer-goods production; expanding its traditional specializations
in liquor, tobacco, herbal medicines, and ethnic crafts; and
intensifying commercial timber and livestock production. 40 The most
significant avenue for attracting investment, however, is the tourism
industry. Touristic marketing of Guizhou as an attractive and exotic
place has dominated the province's commercial development strategy,
and in this regard, the region's significant population of ethnic
minorities has played a crucial role.
Indeed, tourism has been slated to become one of the province's
"pillar industries," with plans calling for tourism revenues to
contribute as much as 20 percent to Guizhou's income by 2010, up from
about 5 percent in 1993. 41 However, in contrast to the province's
other recognized "pillars"--coal mining, hydroelectricity, mineral
processing, the defense industry, and agriculture--tourism is
promoted with two specific goals in mind: First, as a vanguard
industry, it is expected to open the way for other processes,
particularly external investment and the commercial integration of
the rural economy with external markets. This idea is championed by
the phrase lüyou tatai, jingmao changxi (economic trade performing on
a stage built by tourism), which is found in nearly all local media
coverage of commercial development projects. Second, tourism is also
expected to serve as a primary means by which the countryside might
cast off its "traditional thinking" and adopt a "commercial
conscience," thereby helping the province to lay a foundation for
fiscal solvency. 42
Reflecting this dual role of tourism development, ethnic minority
culture has become a fundamental feature of Guizhou's promotional
activities, both in terms of using exotic cultural representations as
enticements for potential investors and as a component of market
socialism's potential for rural development in minority regions.
Ethnic minority groups make up roughly one-third of Guizhou's
population. Most public events, such as trade fairs and holiday
celebrations, are marked with the ubiquitous ethnic symbols of music,
dancing, staged rituals, and crafts. Standardized versions of Miao
and Dong lusheng (reed pipe) dances, roadblock wine (lanlujiu)
ceremonies, and related performances have likewise become regular
features of tourist itineraries catering to official and business
travelers. Indeed, a major conference center at Hongfeng Reservoir
on the outskirts of the provincial capital was built to resemble a
series of minority villages--Dong, Miao, Yi, and Bouyei--where guests
may experience exotic ethnic receptions mixed in with their more
familiar karaoke singing contests. The touristic staging of such
ethnic performances and ceremonies is meant not only to make Guizhou
more interesting to outsiders but to establish a model for the
"cultural development" of minority groups themselves and to condition
them to articulate symbolic cultural practices with commercial
projects. Indeed, it is tourism's explicit marketing of ethnic
culture that most clearly illustrates its importance both as a
propaganda and marketing tool for Guizhou and, more importantly, as a
process of development and integration that encourages minority
regions to become more modern. It is in the field of ethnic-crafts
development that this dual role of tourism is most clearly at work.
The state narrates this modernizing role of tourism in several ways.
Examples abound of isolated villagers who are encouraged by the
guiding hand of the state to cast off their backwardness and jump
into the sea of commerce. One popular story relates how the
prefectural governor of southeast Guizhou, a Miao named Wu Dehai,
helped villagers to abandon ancient superstitions and create a
healthier scientific and modern culture through tourism:
In Qingman Village, custom 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 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, the villagers performed, playing the lusheng at any
time of the year. Thus, the locals received an enlightening
education and increased their enthusiasm for tourism. 43
Another story tells of a Miao woman who, having visited Beijing in
her ethnic costume, was pursued by an entrepreneurial Han to return
to Guizhou and begin selling Miao textiles to Beijing tourist shops.
This was another departure from the "law of tradition." A chapter
about her in a book titled Zhongguo qiye yinghao [Heroes of Chinese
enterprise] stresses that she was coaxed out of her "premodern"
thinking to blossom as a successful entrepreneur and culturally
developed citizen of "new China." She is credited with having
"brought the Miao out of the mountains and into the world of
commerce. From the point of a needle, they have filled the earth
with embroidery and leaped to earning over 800,000 yuan." 44
As a number of scholars have suggested, the narrative of modern China
has emerged, in part, from an ongoing discourse of non-Han otherness.
45 Throughout the twentieth century, peripheral minority groups have
served as both a symbolic source of authentic primitive vitality,
which has reinforced China's indigenous roots as a society capable of
modernizing while remaining distinct from the West, and a marker for
gauging the "normalcy" and progress of the dominant Han population.
This symbolic role intensified during the 1980s "roots" (xungen)
fever. As Louisa Schein puts it, "The suppressions of the Cultural
Revolution . . . combined with the perceived emptiness of imported
culture from abroad, seem to have left a void at the core of Chinese
ethno-nationalism, leading individual and state culture producers to
turn to minority cultures as reservoirs of still-extant
authenticity." 46 This authenticity was inscribed with a subject
position that was both non-Han and feminine--at once primitive,
exotic, sensual, and enticing. Post-Mao narratives of Chinese
modernity are thus conditioned, in part, by what Schein calls
"internal orientalism."...
The Crafts Industry and the Far Village Project
As practiced in Guizhou, the cultural politics of Chinese modernity
evinces two diverging hegemonies. Minority groups are the first
targets of a state-narrated modern subjectivity that draws on an
established history of China's "civilizing mission" toward non-Han
peripheral peoples. 47 In Guizhou, touristic crafts production is
thus meant to instill a "commercial consciousness" that will help
minority farmers progress beyond their "small-farmer mentality."
Along with tourism, commercial crafts production encourages minority
groups to move "toward the world" (zouxiang shijie). 48 Capital,
too, seeks this kind of alignment between local production practices
and the global marketplace. The difference is that the subjectivity
narrated by capital is one in which minority groups are invested with
a premodern and preindustrial authenticity, which serves as both a
marketable image and a romantic ideology that addresses metropolitan
anxiety over global capitalist development. In these terms, then,
Guizhou's modernization depends upon the very primitiveness that the
socialist state seeks to overcome. In the case of the Far Village
project, we see being narrated precisely this paradoxical version of
modernity, as well as the capitalist relations of production that
underlie it.
The contradictions of Guizhou's touristic commercial development are
visible not just in the Far Village project but throughout the
province's commodity craft industry. Tourism, it is well known, is a
significant catalyst to commercial crafts production throughout the
world. 49 In Guizhou, it has helped spawn what may be roughly
categorized as three broad types of crafts development: first,
relatively large-scale, factory-based crafts production; second,
household-based traders, or "middlemen" (locally called erdao fanzi),
who travel the countryside buying old and new crafts from poor
households and selling them directly to tourists or to metropolitan
wholesale buyers from places such as Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and
Taibei; and third, putting-out systems that link town- and city-based
marketing and value-added industries directly to poor, rural
household producers. 50
Each of these types is characterized by distinct ethnic, gender, and
spatial divisions of labor. The management of larger-scale factories
is composed almost exclusively of urban Han men, while the workers
are all non-Han female migrants from nearby rural villages. Rural
household-based traders are exclusively non-Han women, while their
buyers are either foreign or urban Han. Rural household producers
participating in putting-out systems are also exclusively non-Han
women, while their "foremen" (longtou) are often (but not always)
men, and may be Han or non-Han. These divisions reflect the nature
of cultural discourse that emerges within the local crafts industry,
a discourse that articulates these social divisions with the broader
narratives of modernity emanating from state and capitalist agents.
Household crafts production in the Miao villages where Far Village
work is contracted is strictly regarded as women's work. With the
intensification of neoliberal reforms in 1992, the growing difficulty
of earning a livelihood from agricultural income alone has meant that
women's work is increasingly called upon in poor households to help
fill the budget gap. 51 Many unmarried women help fill the gap by
seeking employment in larger crafts factories in nearby towns and
cities, while other women--unmarried and married alike--remain in
their villages doing putting-out contract work in their homes. While
many of these women have welcomed the opportunity to earn a living by
selling their crafts skills, they regard contract work as a very
unattractive option chosen only as a last resort. They are well
aware of the exploitative nature of the putting-out system. Thus, it
is only the very poorest households that are compelled to participate
in crafts contract work. Fewer and fewer younger women, furthermore,
take the time to learn embroidery and batik skills, which many regard
as "old-fashioned," preferring to wear "modern" clothes at special
occasions. Such attitudes only reinforce the image of impoverishment
and destitution that accompanies this work. Nevertheless, they are
encouraged to participate by local officials, entrepreneurs, and even
tourists, who regard their work as a form of cultural preservation
that keeps the old handicraft traditions from dying out.
Leaving home to work in crafts factories is one of the few
opportunities young women have to earn a cash income and live in
town--to be on their own, away from the village. In the Miao and
Dong autonomous prefecture of Qiandongnan, coastal trading firms
established a number of labor-intensive crafts factories in the early
1990s, thanks in part to local tax policies designed to attract
investors. These policies began in 1994 when the prefecture was
designated a state-level "experimental development zone" by the State
Nationalities Affairs Commission (Guojia Minwei). 52
In Taijiang County, within Qiandongnan, such policies netted several
new, externally funded crafts-producing enterprises in 1994. These
were essentially sanlai yibu (literally, three "importeds" and one
"compensatory") enterprises, in which the local nationalities affairs
commission provided a building and recruited female labor from
surrounding villages while a number of coastal trading companies
provided the capital, raw materials, and market connections. One of
these factories, set up by a Jiangsu company to produce tie-dyed silk
cloth for export to Japan, employed about one hundred village women
who sat all day tying up thousands of tiny dot patterns on silk (fig.
2). They were paid RMB 6 for every ten thousand ties, and although
the manager said they could typically produce five thousand ties per
day, workers on the shop floor told me that the most anyone earned
was between RMB 30 and 40 per month. 53 Another Taijiang factory
employed a similar number of rural women who earned similar wages
making embroidered cloth for export to Southeast Asia. I visited
other such factories of this size throughout Qiandongnan Prefecture,
where in all cases, women lived in factory-provided dormitories but
were responsible for their own food; the workers' wages seldom
exceeded RMB 50 per month. Moreover, the special policies developed
to attract this economic activity to Qiandongnan meant that Taijiang
County was collecting few tax revenues from these factories.
When asked in 1994, an officer at the Taijiang Nationalities Affairs
Commission (Taijiang Minwei) justified these exploitative ventures by
stressing that they only represented a first step in modernization.
He likened them to a window through which other coastal companies
could see the county's investment potential. He also noted that
Taijiang's rural households still had few opportunities to earn cash
and that these factories would help generate a "commercial
consciousness" in the countryside; he believed that turning Guizhou's
countryside into a source of cheap labor for coastal companies
dabbling in international trade would not adversely affect future
development prospects. But by 1996, the county's attitude had
changed considerably: it refused to renew any leases for the
coastal-run factories, citing insufficient pay and poor working
conditions. For Taijiang County, the previous goal of attracting
external investment at any cost had clearly backfired. "We lost money
and the workers were treated badly," the Minwei officer admitted.
Furthermore, the county no longer had any funds available for
promoting commercial crafts production. The county Minwei's annual
appropriation of RMB 10,000 had been cut, and remaining development
grants were being swallowed up by day-to-day administrative
expenditures and salaries. 54 Thus, by 1996, the local government's
role in promoting rural "commercial consciousness" had diminished
considerably.
The development of larger-scale factories thus reflects the efforts
of the local state to attract external investment regardless of the
high opportunity costs involved. In Taijiang, further, the
exploitative tendencies of uneven capital accumulation contradicted
the state's goals in the broader field of sociocultural development.
While the local government managed to drive the most egregious
exploiters out of the county, fiscal restraints have also forced it
to retreat from full participation in the commercial crafts arena,
leaving future development solely to the private urban entrepreneurs
who are the basis of the putting-out system. In these developments,
we see a different version of modernity being narrated through
commercial integration. While the state seeks to promote
sociocultural development and socialist modernization (in which
Guizhou's rural poor are encouraged to progress beyond their insular
traditions and local customs), independent capitalists seek to
exploit precisely that image of primitive backwardness as a marketing
strategy in selling ethnic craft products.
Larger-scale factories benefited from the cheap yet highly skilled
labor of unmarried Miao women, but they tended not to emphasize the
exotic ethnicity of their products. Setting up operations in places
such as Taijiang was instead done to take advantage of a distinctive
labor market of skilled young women. In contrast, the many
enterprises engaged in the putting out of crafts production in the
region specialized in products that were explicitly marked by their
ethnic exoticism. The largest and most established of these
enterprises in southeast Guizhou, where the bulk of the province's
ethnic crafts are produced, was Taijiang's Miao Embroidery Factory
(Miaozu Cixiu Gongyipin Chang). This was basically a finishing
workshop where Miao textiles, produced by village women under
contract, were incorporated into numerous products, including
wallets, shoulder bags, and clothing (fig. 3). These products were
generally not used by locals themselves but were the result of advice
given by tourists and textile specialists who passed through the
region suggesting ways that local crafts might be made more
marketable. But because of their apparent role in contributing to
the preservation of the ethnic textile heritage, enterprises such as
the Miao Embroidery Factory were also regarded by the state as
institutions of cultural development. Indeed, the Taijiang
government's retreat from the arena of commercial crafts development
had resulted in its support of the factory as a means of achieving
local development goals. The county bureaucracy facilitated the
factory's obtaining a large grant from UNICEF and promoted it among
prefectural and provincial tourist agencies. Tour groups were
regularly brought to the factory store, and this often resulted in
the establishment of market links in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and
throughout East and Southeast Asia.
Such close relations between local governments and rural industries
are, of course, common throughout China. Nor is the Miao Embroidery
Factory's situation unique among crafts enterprises in Guizhou, where
these enterprises typically have maintained close ties to local
governments and the state tourism industry. Significantly, it was
these ties that helped spawn the development of the Far Village
project, in which an American clothing designer proposed to turn
authentic ethnic textiles into fashionable clothing for high-end
markets in Japan and the United States. From its very inception, the
project was linked to an established putting-out system of commercial
crafts production that was already articulated with the modernizing
state in many ways. The project thus inherited an extant set of
relations, both between these enterprises and the state and between
the enterprise and its contracted household producers. There was
almost no direct link between the project and actual producers;
instead, the stated goals of the project could only be realized via
the putting-out system upon which much crafts production relied. As
it turned out, this system proved to be a poor transmitter of Far
Village's stated goals.
The significance of the putting-out system (which supported crafts
workshops like the Miao Embroidery Factory) is that it represented
not simply an unequal economic relationship with producing households
but unequal ethnic and gender relations as well; the inherent power
dynamic expressed in the system's economic relationships is thus also
reflected in these other dimensions. Production contracts generally
entailed the provision by the workshop (and/or its agent or longtou)
of all materials and designs, with the household being responsible
solely for labor. In 1994, the application of wax for batik earned
village women in Taijiang an average of RMB 7 for twelve hours of
labor; in 1998 women earned RMB 20 for embroidery pieces that took
roughly one month to make. Household producers clearly understood
the difficulty of accumulating any real capital under such
conditions. But the system was attractive to desperate locals
because households didn't have to put up any capital to participate
and all materials were provided. These households were also
typically those without sufficient labor power to send a family
member to a nearby city or to the coast to earn cash.
More important than the extraction of surplus labor value inherent in
such an arrangement was the way it guaranteed that control over
production remained in the hands of urban workshop managers, who not
only dictated piece rates but provided the "authentic" designs and
patterns that ensured the standardization of their products. 55 This
power to dictate textile patterns was also wielded across ethnic and
gender lines, with most urban managers being Han men and all
household producers being non-Han women. Thus, the very definitions
of authenticity and tradition constituted a field of ethnic and
gender politics in which a feminized non-Han minority tradition
continued to be constructed, in part, by a more powerful,
masculinized class of urban Han. Whereas wealthier households could
afford to purchase new, more "modern" designs for their own use, poor
women working under contract merely produced the "authentic" designs
provided by their foremen. Urban entrepreneurs were thus encouraged
to seek out the poorest villages. Villages that urban workshops had
exclusively dealt with during the 1980s were, by the early 1990s,
being passed over for more remote and poorer places on the grounds
that, as one factory manager put it, the early sites had "become more
and more influenced by Han culture, and so the patterns aren't as
authentic." Another problem cited by this manager was that the
increasing commercialization of textile production in these villages,
which were no longer self-enclosed economies, had influenced local
embroidery styles. His solution to this "contradiction" (maodun) was
to maintain a cultural bank of authentic traditional styles, frozen
in time, that would form the basis of sustained future production.
"If peasants want a job," he said, "they'll have to produce
embroidery according to the styles we require, and these will be the
authentic ones." 56 For many ethnic producers, the result was not
simply increased subjugation to capital but an associated surrender
to their Han employers of the determination of what was authentic.
It is into this contradictory environment of China's cultural
politics of modernity that the Far Village project arrived,
trumpeting the goals of cultural preservation, "sustainable
development," and "empowerment" for villagers, especially village
women. As stated in the Far Village project proposal, the designer's
objective was to ensure that younger women, who "lose these skills as
they move away from the village . . . be offered a way of earning
money in order to retain their embroidery, weaving, and batik
skills." 57
Yet as the project got underway in 1994, it was apparent that the
enlisting of capital for these misguided purposes was instead
reinforcing an extant power dynamic that worked to keep women
producers subordinate and vulnerable, rather than "empowered." The
project was affiliated with four existing crafts workshops (and their
associated putting-out systems) in different locales throughout the
province. Far Village work was parceled out by these workshops
according to the same contractual arrangements that had previously
existed. Village producers, on average, earned between 1 percent and
5 percent of these workshops' wholesale prices for Far Village
products. In addition, the whole project, and especially the
clothing designs, were shrouded in secrecy. Ostensibly, this was
because of intense competition from nonaffiliated crafts workshops.
One affiliated workshop had had the experience of a designer who quit
in 1992 starting his own workshop with designs stolen from his
employer. But there was another, more disturbing reason for all the
secrecy. This was necessary, one manager claimed, "so that the idea
doesn't get out of control, so that peasants don't start trying to do
this kind of thing for themselves. That would influence their
traditional designs." The manager further justified this control as
in the best interests of the peasant producers themselves: should
these unsavvy crafts workers unwisely stray into more "modern"
designs, they would fail to satisfy foreign buyers and thus lose any
income potential. 58 Not seeing the final product assembled in the
crafts factory, village women applying wax for batik had no idea that
their labor had helped produce a bathrobe that would eventually be
sold in a Seattle boutique. Such knowledge, according to workshop
managers, would have compromised the "traditional authenticity" of
their products. 59...
[Endnotes omitted; the full article is available at
<http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/positions/v007/7.2oakes.html>.]
*****
Yoshie
