Studies on Ethnic Groups in China Stevan Harrell, Editor
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Studies on Ethnic Groups in China Stevan Harrell, Editor Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Doing Business in Rural China: Liang- Frontiers, edited by Stevan Harrell shan’s New Ethnic Entrepreneurs, by Thomas Heberer Guest People: Hakka Identity in China and Abroad, edited by Nicole Constable Communist Multiculturalism: Ethnic Revival in Southwest China, by Susan K. Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims McCarthy in Northwest China, by Jonathan N. Lip- man Religious Revival in the Tibetan Border- lands: The Premi of Southwest China, by Lessons in Being Chinese: Minority Educa- Koen Wellens tion and Ethnic Identity in Southwest China, by Mette Halskov Hansen In the Land of the Eastern Queendom: The Politics of Gender and Ethnicity on the Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Sino-Tibetan Border, by Tenzin Jinba Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861–1928, by Edward Empire and Identity in Guizhou: Local J. M. Rhoads Resistance to Qing Expansion, by Jodi L. Weinstein Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China, by Stevan Harrell China’s New Socialist Countryside: Moder- nity Arrives in the Nu River Valley, by Governing China’s Multiethnic Frontiers, Russell Harwood edited by Morris Rossabi Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes On the Margins of Tibet: Cultural Survival in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands, edited by on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier, by Åshild Emily T. Yeh and Chris Coggins Kolås and Monika P. Thowsen A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tour- The Art of Ethnography: A Chinese “Miao ism in Rural Ethnic China, by Jenny Chio Album,” translation by David M. Deal and Laura Hostetler Mapping Shangrila • • • Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands Edited by EMILY T. YEH and CHRIS COGGINS University of Washington Press Seattle and London This publication was made possible in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation © 2014 by the University of Washington Press Printed and bound in the United States of America Design by Thomas Eykemans 18 17 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. University of Washington Press www.washington.edu/uwpress Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mapping Shangrila : contested landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands / edited by Emily T. Yeh and Chris Coggins. pages cm. — (Studies on ethnic groups in China) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-295-99357-7 (hardback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-295-99358-4 (paperback : alkaline paper) 1. China—Relations—China—Tibet Autonomous Region. 2. Tibet Autonomous Region (China)—Relations—China. 3. Landscapes—Political aspects—China. 4. Landscapes—Political aspects—China—Tibet Autonomous Region. 5. Shangri-La (Imaginary place) 6. Borderlands—China. 7. Borderlands—China—Tibet Autonomous Region. 8. Geography—Political aspects—China. 9. China—Environmental conditions. 10. Tibet Autonomous Region (China)—Environmental conditions. I. Yeh, Emily T. (Emily Ting) II. Coggins, Chris, 1963– DS740.5.T5M37 2014 327.51051’5—dc23 2014004037 The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ∞ Contents Foreword by Stevan Harrell . vii Acknowledgments . xi Note on Transliterations and Place-Names . xiii Abbreviations and Foreign-Language Terms . xv Introduction . 3 Producing Shangrilas Chris Coggins and Emily T. Yeh PART I SHANGRILAZATION . 19 Tourism, Landscape, Identity Chapter 1 Vital Margins . 27 Frontier Poetics and Landscapes of Ethnic Identity Li-hua Ying Chapter 2 Dreamworld, Shambala, Gannan . 51 The Shangrilazation of China’s “Little Tibet” Chris Vasantkumar Chapter 3 A Routine Discovery . 75 The Practice of Place and the Opening of the Yading Nature Reserve Travis Klingberg PART II CONSTRUCTING THE ECOLOGICAL STATE. 95 Conservation, Commodification, and Resource Governance Chapter 4 Making National Parks in Yunnan . .105 Shifts and Struggles within the Ecological State John Aloysius Zinda Chapter 5 The Nature Conservancy in Shangrila . 129 Transnational Conservation and Its Critiques Robert K. Moseley and Renée B. Mullen Chapter 6 Transnational Matsutake Governance . .153 Endangered Species, Contamination, and the Reemergence of Global Commodity Chains Michael J. Hathaway Chapter 7 Constructing and Deconstructing the Commons . 175 Caterpillar Fungus Governance in Developing Yunnan Michelle Olsgard Stewart PART III CONTESTED LANDSCAPES . 199 Harmonious Society and Sovereign Territories Chapter 8 Animate Landscapes . 205 Nature Conservation and the Production of Agropastoral Sacred Space in Shangrila Chris Coggins with Gesang Zeren Chapter 9 The Amoral Other . 229 State-Led Development and Mountain Deity Cults among Tibetans in Amdo Rebgong Charlene E. Makley Chapter 10 The Rise and Fall of the Green Tibetan . .255 Contingent Collaborations and the Vicissitudes of Harmony Emily T. Yeh Afterword . 279 The Afterlives of Shangrila Ralph Litzinger References . 287 Contributors . 318 Index . .321 Foreword Mapping Shangrila? The very title screams contradiction. The original Shangrila of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon was unmappable—hidden away in a place no one had previously known about and no one could find except by accident. It was a place of the imagination. And now people are not just mapping it; they are visiting it, preserving it, developing it, and harvesting mushrooms from it for a world market. The imagined space that was really nowhere has become real (or at least the imagination of that space has been projected on a real place), while at the same time the real space of the Sino- Tibetan borderlands has been imagined—as a place of difference, a place of conservation, a place of abundant resources, a place of aesthetic pleasure. In the introduction to this varied and stimulating collection, Chris Cog- gins tells the story of visiting Khawa Karpo and mentions that it is one of the eight gnas ri, or sacred mountains of Tibet. Recalling only Kailas out of that catalog, and curious what the other six might be, I searched online for gnas ri and found an entry for a country of that name at the Nation States Encyclopedia, a wiki site that consists of (as the editors inform us) more than forty-four thousand entries, all of them for totally fictitious countries and nations. Gnasri, according to the site, is “an isolated, landlocked country located north of Karenytenia and Purzkistan . at an average elevation of 4,500 meters.” Several of the names associated with the geography and his- tory of Gnasri are given in Tibetan script. To most of us, the physical gnas ri Khawa Karpo is no more real than its eponymous kingdom next door to Purzkistan. And although the mountain is undeniably physically there, still, in the imaginations of people living nearby, it is, after all, a gnas ri, a “dwelling mountain” of a powerful god. The god, in fact, buried seventeen Chinese and Japanese mountaineers pre- paring to defile (i.e., climb) it in 1991, after which an unlikely coalition of local traditionalists and the Nature Conservancy successfully petitioned the State Council in 2000 to keep the real place imagined by not allowing vii anyone to go there, any more than they can go to Gnasri or could go to the original Shangrila. But now people can go to Shangrila, because it is a real place, a county that used to be called Zhongdian in Chinese and is still called Gyalthang in Tibetan, easy to find on a real map north of Lijiang and south of Deqin in northwest Yunnan. And it is but one place in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands that is being not only reimagined but incorporated into the Chinese nation- state as a space of accessible wonder, friendly exotica, extraction opportuni- ties, and conservation imperatives. How the Sino-Tibetan borderlands are becoming legible—readable—is the topic of this book. And one can read the book as the history of any com- bination of a set of interlocking stories that make up a fascinating part of the real history of our time. One can read Mapping Shangrila as a story of a real nation-state, or at least of a People’s Republic of China that is trying hard to become one, by incorporating topographic, ecological, economic, and cultural differences into a proud, strong, united, modern nation that nevertheless preserves its local differences. Or one can read the book as the story of global capitalism and its penetration of previously inaccessible places in search of resources and profits, from lumber to minerals to mushrooms. In still another way, one can read the book as a story of the globalized reaction to this resource exploitation—of nongovernmental organizations, government agencies, and even private citizens working to preserve the landscapes, flora, fauna, and cultures of places that need to remain exotic both for their own sake and for the sake of people who want to visit them. Or again, one can read the book as a story of imagined places, or how imagined places become real and how real places become imagined from various vantage points. My point is that the political, economic, conservationist, and imagi- nary projects are all part of a grand transformation, one we could not have foreseen when University of Washington Press editors and I conceived the Studies on Ethnic Groups in China series back in 1993. There are still ethnic groups in China, but their relationship to the state, the economy, and the rest of the populace, not to mention their relationship to the rest of the world, has been transformed beyond anything we could have imagined back then. We can no more return to the Zhongdian of 1993, or to the 1993 version of any of the places described in this book, than we can visit Hilton’s Shangrila or the Gnasri kingdom of the role-player’s imagination.