Making Disaster Zones Into “Scenic Sites,” Homelands Into “Gardens,” Peasants Into “Grateful Survivors”

ABSTRACT

This dissertation employs long-term ethnographic fieldwork (conducted 2011-

2015) to study the State-led, “culturally sensitive” reconstruction and development of

Chinese ethnic Qiang communities after the devastating Wenchuan Earthquake claimed about ten percent of the total Qiang population in 2008. The Qiang are one of the 55 officially-recognized ethnic minorities. Many Qiang villages in southwestern Sichuan province not only swiftly recovered materially, but were made into heritage tourist destinations with State planning to “restore and develop” their culture. The dissertation examines both the State’s conception of the Qiang through its policies and projects, and the range of Qiang villagers’ response to the reconstruction and negotiation of their lives and relationships—revealing complexities and problems of this “culturally sensitive” recovery project. It argues that the mishandling of the Qiang culture as well as the top- down, short-term, and politicized aid employed by the government have impeded the improvement of the well-being in these communities, which are instead rendered as showcases of state power and nationalist construction.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An anthropology dissertation is a challenging yet rewarding work. First of all, I sincerely thank Nicholas Spitzer for his thoughtful and inspiring advice as well as patient and generous support from day one. Nick passionately advised my initial project on New

Orleans’ post-Katrina recovery, and offered me even more support and encouragement after I moved my research site to China. I am greatly indebted to his keen observations that helped sharpen and broaden my arguments, strong support that assisted me in securing funds for research, as well as graceful recommendations that allowed me to collaborate with colleagues from the Smithsonian Institution, the School of Advanced

Research, and other places. A Chinese saying has it that one’s teacher for one day becomes their father of a lifetime (yiri weishi zhongshen weifu 一日为师, 终身为父). To me, Nick is not only a respectful adviser, but also a life-long mentor and brother-like friend. I am also extremely grateful to Shanshan Du who taught me to think critically and independently, write carefully and comprehensively, and live strongly and positively.

Shanshan provided indispensable and invaluable advice on my research in China. The great amount of advice and years of generous encouragement from her have been a constant inspiration and valuable treasure for my research and life as a whole. I also thank Allison Truitt for her insightful comments on the dissertation and warm support throughout my writing and defense. Roberto Barrios of Southern Illinois University,

Carbondale, whose help and friendship are highly appreciated and cherished, has been advising my research and collaborating with me since 2008. I also thank other professors and friends at Tulane for their help.

The dissertation would not be possible without the extremely kind and generous help from villagers of Longxi and my other informants throughout China. I thank Aunt

Tang, Jiafu, Meilin, Donglin, shibi Beimen Yu (all pseudonyms), among many other villagers, who comfortably hosted me, taught me about Qiang culture and their homelands, shared their stories with me, and accepted me as a member of their family. I thank leaders and staff of Longxi Township Government who allowed me to work with them and gave me important data on Longxi’s recovery. I am grateful to all the officials, scholars, volunteers, and residents in Wenchuan, Chengdu, Beijing, and the United States who openly shared their experiences of and perspectives on the Wenchuan Earthquake and the reconstruction processes. Colleagues in China, including Bingzhong Gao, Yun

Tang, and Yuan Zhang, offered constructive comments on this research, for which I am very thankful.

The dissertation research and writing were funded by the National Science

Foundation, Association for Asian Studies, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for

International Scholarly Exchange, and Tulane University at various stages. I sincerely appreciate the support without which the work would not be possible.

My family has always been my strongest and most faithful supporter. The dissertation represents six years’ work, including 15 months in China, two years of writing, while getting married and having a baby. I am greatly grateful to Zifu Zhu, my beloved husband and best friend, who has always been there for me. Yanjin Zhu, my daughter, gives me the brightest smile and sunshine. I thank my parents-in-law for their help and understanding, and will forever remember my deceased mother-in-law’s loving care. Above all, my parents, Huiyun Zhang and Huiming Huang, have offered me

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enormous love, trust, wisdom, and encouragement that have made me who I am. I dedicate this dissertation to them.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... ii LIST OF FIGURES ...... vii Chapter 1 Introduction ...... 1 th May 12 , 2008: Sending Celebration Rice Day ...... 1 Wenchuan Earthquake and the Heavily-hit Qiang ...... 5 Making Disaster Zones into “Scenic Sites,” Homelands into “Gardens,” Peasants into “Grateful Survivors” ...... 8 Vulnerability, Resilience, and Culture in Post-Disaster Reconstruction ...... 15 State, Ethnic Minorities, and Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection in China ...... 27 Ethnography in and outside of Longxi...... 35 Chapter Outline ...... 41 Chapter 2 Historical Vulnerability and Marginalization of the Qiang ...... 45 A Trip to Longxi ...... 45 Longxi’s Ecological Risks ...... 49 Pre-Earthquake Socio-political Vulnerability ...... 56 Political Marginalization of the Longxi Qiang ...... 62 Conclusion ...... 71 Chapter 3 Wenchuan Earthquake Relief ...... 74 Massive and Effective State-led Post-Earthquake Relief ...... 77 The Overwhelming and Nurturing State ...... 79 Spectacular Relief as Political Neutralizer ...... 87 Disaster as Conjuncture of State Power and Society Compassion ...... 89 Earthquake Relief in Longxi ...... 95 Destroyed Home, Determined People...... 95 Disturbed Time and Place Making ...... 99 Conclusion: The Same Space, A Different Place ...... 105 Chapter 4 Making Disaster Zones into “Scenic Sites,” Homelands into “Gardens” ...... 108 Swift Planning and Massive Funding for the Reconstruction ...... 112 Instantaneous Modernization in Longxi ...... 116

The “Culturally Sensitive” Reconstruction of Qiang Villages ...... 118 A Different Pace of Resilience and Reconstruction ...... 125 “Miraculous Reconstruction” as Ecological and Cultural Damaging Mechanism ..... 132 Conclusion ...... 137 Chapter 5 “Excavation,” “Upgrade,” and “Development” of the Qiang Culture ...... 139 Cultural “Excavation”: Representing the “Ancient” and “Mysterious” Qiang ...... 142 Cultural Upgrade: “Culture of Yu the Great” and “Red Culture” ...... 152 Cultural Development: Heritage Culture for Tourism Display ...... 161 Conclusion ...... 169 Chapter 6 Grateful Qiangjiale ...... 173 Disaster, Heritage, and “Grateful Culture” Tourism ...... 174 “Wait?” “Depend?” and “Beg?” ...... 190 Challenges of Doing Tourism at Home ...... 190 “Face Projects” versus Sustainable Development ...... 200 Conclusion ...... 203 Chapter 7 Emergent Qiang Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection ...... 206 Qiang New Year Festival ...... 206 State- and Scholar-Led Qiang Cultural Rescue ...... 221 Urgent Heritagization as Heritage Knowledge Production and Identity Transformation ...... 226 Multivocality of the Qiang Intangible Cultural Heritage Practice ...... 238 Conclusion ...... 245 Chapter 8 Conclusion ...... 246 Reconstruction, Resilience, and Sustainability of the Qiang Communities ...... 246 Longxi in 2015: An Expanding Scenic Site ...... 254 References ...... 261

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Earthquake in China, 12 May 2008…………………..…………………………6 Figure 2: Chinese Flag on a Rebuilt House in Dongmen………...…………………….....9 Figure 3: Dongmen Village after the Wenchuan Earthquake.…………………………...11 Figure 4: A Bird’s Eye View of Dongmen Village after the Reconstruction……………11 Figure 5: Longxi Township Gate……………………………………………………….109 Figure 6: A Wooden Sign Reading “A Thankful Heart; Thanking You Very Much” in Dongmen Village……………………………………………………………………….185

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Chapter 1 Introduction

May 12th, 2008: Sending Celebration Rice Day

May 12th, 2008 was supposed to be a big and happy day for Yongliang Tang’s1 family and, to some extent, the entire Dongmen Village of Longxi Township. Longxi is located in the northwestern edge of Wenchuan County of A’ba Tibetan and Qiang

Autonomous Prefecture (A’ba Prefecture hereafter) inside Sichuan Province of southwestern China. More than 98 percent of the Longxi villagers were identified as ethnic Qiang in 2013; the Qiang are one of the officially recognized ethnic minority groups in China. May 12th, 2008 was the birth celebration day of Yongliang’s first daughter. Among the Qiang, a big festival is to be held by the baby’s parents within a month’s time of the birth to celebrate the coming of the new family member. In the regional dialect this event is called “Sending Celebration Rice” (songzhumi 送祝米) because, in the past, guests would usually bring a bag of rice, a few eggs, and other household items as gifts for the newborn. Nowadays, many just send cash wrapped in a red envelop. As soon as a baby is born, the father goes to notify his wife’s family of the happy news and sets up a date for the “Sending Celebration Rice” with other family members.

The date was chosen carefully. I asked Lijuan, Yongliang’s wife, why the May

12th was selected. She said that it was mainly because of Yongliang’s Uncle Zeng’s

1 To protect the privacy of the informants, all informants’ names used in the dissertation are pseudo names.

2 persuasiveness. Zeng was a man of his early 50s, and known for his skills of calculating dates for big ceremonies in Dongmen. All big days of a Qiang’s life, from the date of

“Sending Celebration Rice” to that of the burial ceremony, have to be calculated and consulted by a master like Zeng. Zeng once told me that his decisions were made relying on the Yellow Calendar Book. The book records both the preferable and avoidable things to do on each day, as well as a person’s Eight Characters (bazi 八字), including the time, day, month and year of the birth in Chinese lunar calendar, and the calculating rules

Uncle Zeng learned from his father. Lijuan recalled that Zeng was urging them to set the date a bit earlier before the baby grew a full month based on his calculation. Yongliang, on the other hand, wanted to hold the celebration on a weekend when his older brother, who owned a construction company away from home, and other working members of the family were free. Monday, May 12th, 2008 was the date agreed upon by all.

“Sending Celebration Rice” day is also the day when the baby is officially introduced to the extended family and the larger village community. First and foremost, as many Qiang families in this region have been practicing patrilocal dwelling for generations, it is the very first time that most of the maternal relatives, sometimes even the maternal grandparents, get to see the baby. On that day, these relatives are invited to enjoy a banquet with the baby’s paternal relatives and other friends. This event is also regarded as an important occasion for the wife’s family to “inspect” the marriage life of the daughter. In addition to paying a visit to the baby, they are there to briefly evaluate if the room for their daughter and grandchild is big and bright enough, the food nutritious and hearty enough, and the husband’s family treating them nicely and generously enough.

Paternal members of the baby’s family pay for all the expenses of the gathering. The

3 scale and seriousness of the celebration demonstrate the economic power of the family and the baby’s degree of importance. “Sending Celebration Rice” day is often a big day for the entire Dongmen village, a village with close-knit social relations. The Tang, the

Zeng, and the Huang families are the biggest families in the village. Through generations of intermarriage, many members of the three families have become relatives. All

Yongliang’s relatives in the village were asked to help out with the celebration. As the tradition goes, many other villagers voluntarily lent a hand for an inclusive event like this one. The Qiang’s custom, as Linhua Tang, my host aunt, told me, is that “For happy events villagers would attend with or without an invitation; for sad events they would only attend once invited.” Helping relatives and villagers were assigned with different tasks. For example, Aunt Tang was at the front gate welcoming guests and making tea.

Her nephews, Donglin Tang and his brother were busy cooking dishes in the kitchen. Her son and daughter-in-law, my host brother and sister Jiafu Li and Meilin Zhang, were finishing up their work in the farm field to be on time for the banquet. Meilin’s neighbor and good friend, Qingyan, and her then 5-year-old son, were waiting for her to come home so they could attend the party together.

It was almost 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Lijuan was getting anxious since her mother and other relatives from a nearby village still had not arrived. Everyone was waiting for them so the banquet could begin. Yongliang assured her that a car was already sent to get her relatives. Having just given birth to the baby, Lijuan was lying on the bed with her little girl most of the time as is customary for many Chinese new mothers. Finally her mother and the others came. At the front door each one was given a boiled egg, dyed red to share the happiness of new life. The eggs are called Happy Eggs

(xidan 喜蛋) and are only given to the close relatives of the baby. They should be consumed as soon as the relatives arrive. Lijuan chatted with her mother and sisters for a few minutes before Yongliang called them downstairs to sit at the banquet tables.

Donglin recalled that, at the moment, he was ready to put the fish in the frying wok to cook the last main dish. None of the guests imagined that a destructive event would suddenly change their lives forever.

Lijuan said that she felt the first heavy shake of the house upstairs, and heard loud sounds like fireworks exploding. She told me that instantly she realized that it was earthquake. Quickly she grasped her daughter and tried to open the door. She failed at the first attempt because of the heavy shake; then succeeded after a powerful pull. She shouted to everyone downstairs, “The earthquake is shaking!” In the regional dialect, people call the movement of an earthquake “shaking” (yaodizhen 摇地震), which vividly describes its horrifying effects. Yongliang did not believe her at first, and thought that the shake was caused by someone letting off fireworks. The house started to shake violently, and the ground began to move up and down, throwing people left and right. A huge stone fell from the mountain on the opposite side of the Longxi Creek, and hit right in front of the yard of the house. Within seconds, many more stones began to fall, sounding like roaring thunder.

Everyone was scared, shouting “earthquake shaking” and running away from the house. Lijuan and Yongliang hid under a big tree outside their house. She held her daughter in the arms while Yongliang covered both of them with his arms and chest. The ground was shaking for about a minute and Lijuan could see that her neighbors’ kids were running to find their parents. Lijuan heard people around her burst into tears.

Several women kneed down, begging helplessly for the gods (pusa 菩萨) to stop the earthquake. Others were begging the Sky Lord (tianlaoye 天老爷) instead. Crying and begging noises increased as the ground kept shaking. “It was extremely miserable

(zaoniedehen 造孽得很),” Lijuan said. All of the sudden, everything darkened. “It was darker than black,” recalled Lijuan, “It was so dark that I could not see anything. I wanted to check my baby with the cell phone but the weak light of the phone was completely swallowed by the darkness.” The whole village was immersed in an endless and appalling darkness. A minute felt as long as forever. “It was like the end of the world,” said Lijuan. After a minute, when the ground stopped moving and the darkness faded away, Lijuan found her daughter’s face completely covered in black dirt. Her own hair was also covered by a thick layer of black dirt. When she looked around, everyone’s face turned black. The crying women had a funny look as the tears left two white stripes on their black faces. As they continued crying, the stripes got whiter, making the contrast even clearer. “It was very funny. Those people were like actresses in horror movies,”

Lijuan laughed at the memory. She did not cry during the earthquake. As soon as it stopped when she realized that her father was herding sheep up in the mountain, she cried heartbreakingly. Yongliang calmed her down and wanted to call her father, only to find out that all cell phone signals were lost.

Wenchuan Earthquake and the Heavily-hit Qiang

The earthquake that people in Dongmen experienced was later known worldwide as the Wenchuan Earthquake. It took place at 2:28pm, May 12th, 2008. The epicenter was located in Yingxiu Township, Wenchuan County of A’ba Prefecture in Sichuan (Figure

1). Longxi Township is less than 100 kilometers north of the epicenter. The earthquake

6 was caused by the rupture of the Longmen Mountains thrust belt located on the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau and the western edge of the Sichuan Basin. It was measured at 7.8 magnitudes and 11 degrees in seismic intensity, lasting for two minutes while several aftershocks, some of which reached 6.0 magnitudes, took place in the following five months. The Wenchuan Earthquake caused heavy casualties as 69,222 people were killed, 374.638 injured, and 18,176 missing as recorded in August, 2008. The total affected area was more than 500,000 square kilometers including 10 provinces and 417 counties (cities and townships) in western China. The earthquake destroyed the social, economic, and political means and infrastructures of those areas. The direct economic losses amounted to over 800 billion Chinese yuan ($133 billion). In all, the Wenchuan

Earthquake became “the most destructive one with the widest affecting scope and most serious disaster-induced losses ever since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949”

(Chinese State Council 2008:8).

http://www.mapsofworld.com/world-news/earthquake-in-china-12-may-2008.html Figure 1: Earthquake in China, 12 May 2008

The Qiang are one of the 55 officially-recognized Chinese ethnic minorities. They are the most affected ethnic minority in the Wenchuan Earthquake because 98.2 percent

7 of the Chinese Qiang population, about 300 thousand, lived in the extremely hard-hit

Sichuan Province, according to the 2010 Chinese census data. In Sichuan, Qiang concentration inhabitation areas include Wenchuan, Maoxian, Lixian counties of the

Province’s northwestern A’ba Prefecture, and Beichuan County of the northeastern

Mianyang City. Others are scattered mainly in Songpan, Heishui, and Jiuzhaigou counties of A’ba Prefecture, Danba County of Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Pingwu

County of Mianyang City, Dujiangyan City, and Baoxing County of Ya’an City. Almost all the Qiang inhabitation areas were affected by the Earthquake to some extent. There were a large number of Qiang casualties. It is estimated that close to 30,000 Qiang people, ten percent of the total Chinese Qiang population, died in the earthquake; thousands were injured or missing (Li and Zhang 2009). It was a catastrophic impact on this small ethnic group. Sadly still, since the earthquake took place in the afternoon of a Monday when most students were in school, many young Qiang died or were injured. Hundreds of historic and contemporary Qiang villages and settlements were completely destroyed.

Secondary geological hazards and the drastic change of the environment further rendered many Qiang people homeless or forced them to move out of their native villages.

Qiang material and intangible cultural heritage was lost or devastated in the

Wenchuan Earthquake. Several historic stone watchtowers, listed as Chinese national intangible cultural heritage, collapsed or were broken. Relics of Qiang stone-constructed tombs in a number of counties were damaged. It is estimated that more than 1000 Qiang material culture collections, both publicly and privately owned, were buried in the earthquake. A number of Qiang culture experts, Qiang language speakers and researchers, shibi—Qiang ritual specialists, as well as practitioners of traditional Qiang skills and

8 crafts, died in the earthquake. The heavy losses of the Qiang population, traditional architecture and material cultural relics not only took away a predominant part of the

Qiang folk religion, heritage and tradition, but also made the survival and inheritance of the Qiang culture extremely difficult.

Making Disaster Zones into “Scenic Sites,” Homelands into “Gardens,” Peasants into “Grateful Survivors”

Surprising to many, the affected Qiang villages and Qiang culture witnessed radical transformation under the Chinese State-led reconstruction projects after the

Wenchuan Earthquake. One such rebuilt settlement, post-earthquake Longxi Township reconstruction was advertised by local Wenchuan County Government as a “miraculous reconstruction,” referring to the officially-directed swift, massive, “modernizing,” and

“culturally sensitive” transformation of the township after the reconstruction. The

Chinese government quickly assembled major human and material resources to aid earthquake relief and recovery efforts. The estimated 40,000 or so nationwide reconstruction projects were initially planned to be accomplished in three years’ time with a massive government-led investment of one trillion yuan ($157 billion) (Chinese

State Council 2008). All reconstruction projects later sped up and finished in only two years (Yang 2011). The quick influx of nationwide and international resources for the recovery of areas suffering from the severe catastrophe and long-time economic marginalization were regarded as the quintessential component of what the State framed as “great love” (da’ai 大爱), where sympathy for the victims and care for the wounded went beyond the boundaries of provinces, ethnicities, and nationalities.

Most reconstruction planning aimed to prompt a “great leap” in economic development (Sorace 2014 and 2015) for most of the previously economically and socially marginalized regions. Longxi Township, similar to other reconstructed Qiang villages, witnessed the “instantaneous modernity” (Zhang 2012). The majority of

Longxi’s reconstruction was quickly finished in early 2010 with a governmental investment of 152.4 million yuan ($22 million). Tremendous efforts were spent in improving the transportation, public service facilities and living conditions. A new primary school, hospital, government building, and police station were constructed.

Electricity, tap water, cable, and solar water heaters were installed in each newly built house. Feng Luo, Communist Party Secretary of Longxi Township suggested in an interview with me, “Longxi has advanced at least twenty years as a result of the reconstruction.” After the reconstruction, a Chinese national flag flied on top of each government-aided reconstructed building there—a demonstration and recognition of the powerful intervention and presence of the State (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Chinese Flag on a Rebuilt House in Dongmen. Photo by Qiaoyun Zhang

The “miraculous reconstruction” put heavy emphasis on the restoration and reconstruction of the Qiang culture. The Qiang are one of the oldest ethnic groups in

China. However, given a small population and meager economy, the Qiang culture has long been ignored and invisible; on the edge of vanishing through the years. Ironically, the earthquake brought the rebuilt villages as well as the Qiang to the attention of a national audience for the first time. Not only did the Qiang gain national awareness after

2008, Qiang culture became the focal point of the post-earthquake recovery and reconstruction. With the aim of “restoring” and “preserving” the Qiang, the Chinese State initiated recovery planning based on its own interpretation of the “Qiangness.” In three years’ time, most of the group’s villages in Sichuan were reconstructed. From the central government to specific villages, numerous Qiang cultural recovery projects were designed, implemented, and variously presented. A number of the affected villages were rebuilt into “modernized,” heritage tourism destinations to present and sell certain aspects of the Qiang culture. Heritage tourism has also become the pillar of economic development for those Qiang communities. After the rebuilding, Longxi Township is advertised as the Qiang People’s Valley to showcase the restoration and “revival” of

Qiang cultural traditions based on the State projects. Thus, it can be regarded as one of the best models of such reconstruction that made disaster zones into “scenic sites,” homelands into “gardens” (zaiqu bian jingqu, jiayuan bian huayuan 灾区变景区, 家园变

花园), highly praised in local and national media2 (Figure 3 and 4).

2 Another important discourse of the post-earthquake reconstruction was “making peasants into residents” (nongmin bian jumin 农民变居民), refers to an ongoing reform of household registration policy in China. As stated in the State Overall Planning, the reconstruction concerning population settlement should “encourage the rural-urban floating population for employment or business as well as their family members in the planned areas to transfer to the said working places for resettlement, and they shall be granted by the local governments the same treatment of living, education, medical care, social security, etc. entitled to the local residents” (Chinese state Council 2008:34). The policy mainly affected places which had many “rural- urban floating population” such as the county seats. Since Longxi was a rural, mountaineous township, not many peasants there changed their resident status during my fieldwork, which prevented me from gathering adequate data to further investigate this subject. However, my research focuses on another subjectivity formation of the peasants where they changed from earthquake “victims” into “grateful survivors.”

Figure 2: Dongmen Village after the Wenchuan Earthquake. Photo by Longxi Township Government

Figure 3: A Bird’s Eye View of Dongmen Village after the Reconstruction. Photo by Qiaoyun Zhang

In the meantime, particular measures were taken to urgently restore and preserve the officially-recognized Qiang intangible cultural heritage (ICH hereafter) after the

Wenchuan Earthquake. As a result, seven Qiang cultural practices were added to the

National Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage, including Sheep-skin Drum

Dance (2008), Embroidery Skills (2008), New Year Festival (2008), Polyphonic Singing

(2008), legend of Yu the Great (2011), Kouxian (Jew’s Harp) Playing Skills (2011), and

Qiang Watchtower Construction Techniques (2011). Qiang New Year Festival was added to the UNESCO List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Rescue in 2009.

The Qiang Cultural Ecological Conservation Area, the nation’s third of its kind, was established in late 2008, as part of the State’s program of comprehensively protecting the natural and cultural ecology of the Qiang ICH. In Longxi, a group of the Qiang shibi— the ritual specialists—are entitled as national and provincial ICH transmitters

(feiwuzhiwenhuayichan chuanchengren 非物质文化遗产传承人) of the Qiang New

Year Festival and Sheep-skin Drum Dance, who receive an annual subsidy to promote and teach the related Qiang ICH after the earthquake. This dissertation focuses on the

State- and scholar-led Qiang ICH preservation programs, exploring the “special treatments” (teshu duidai 特殊对待) of “urgently” (jinji 紧急) preserving the Qiang ICH.

Officially-organized celebration of the Qiang New Year Festival has become institutionalized since the Wenchuan Earthquake; Wenchuan County Government would arrange annual celebrations in different reconstructed Qiang villages. In 2013, Longxi was chosen as one of the celebration sites. This dissertation studies the official interpretation and celebration of the Qiang New Year Festival, revealing the far-reaching impacts of the “cultural reconstruction” project and ICH protection campaign on the continuance and change of Qiang historical cultural practices.

Making disaster zones into “scenic sites,” homelands into “gardens,” the reconstruction has brought radical transformation of the physical and cultural landscape of the earthquake-stricken areas. Missing from such a discourse, however, is the drastic change of the affected population’s experiences, opinions, and affective engagements with the State projects. This research explores the complexity and contestation of this

13 unprecedented large-scale State project which devoted immense attention and attempted to rescuing and restoring local cultures. More importantly, to understand the “miraculous reconstruction” is to interpret its varied manifestations and meanings, and analyze how to date it has affected and altered the perceptions, practices, and futures of all actors involved. The “miraculous reconstruction” is characterized by the State with incomparable swiftness, massiveness, so-called cultural sensibility, and planning for modernization. It was and is a demonstration of the unmatched powerful leadership and resourcefulness of the Chinese State. It is a revelation of the State’s attitudes and manipulation of “culture”—blending, mixing and packaging the histories, stories, beliefs and practices into a fixed entity to be preserved in its “original” sites and displayed according to preconceived understandings. Finally, the “miraculous reconstruction” is linked to tourism as its biggest selling point. The newly-constructed Qiang People’s

Valley and the “Qiang culture” promoted as “exotic” and “mysterious” have attracted a large number of mainly urban visitors seeking adventures in the rural- and ethnic-based tourism activities. Peculiarly, the rebirth of the victimized villages not only comforts the tourists in the renewed lives of their wounded fellows, but also reassures them that their donation and dedication as visitors are appropriately spent and recognized.

For the Qiang, the Wenchuan Earthquake becomes a cause and opportunity for ecological and sociopolitical reorganization of life and identity. The post-earthquake reconstruction changed not only the layout and appearance of the villages, but also the identity formation and sense making of the villagers, their contemporary ways of life, interpretations of Qiang history, and expectations for the future. A number of the Qiang villagers, represented by those in Dongmen, have been involved in the rural Qiang

14 heritage tourism business since the reconstruction. They started to run Qiangjiale (Qiang

Family Happiness 羌家乐), a rural-, ethnic-, and family-based tourism business where the Qiang villagers turned their newly-constructed or reconstructed homes into hostels, restaurants, Qiang embroidery shops, or other kinds of commercial ventures. The promotion of “grateful culture” (gan’en wenhua 感恩文化) is a defining characteristic of the Qiang heritage tourism in Dongmen and other reconstructed Qiang villages. Framed as direct beneficiaries of the “miraculous reconstruction,” Qiang villagers are portrayed as politically-indebted minority “victims” (zaimin 灾民) whose survival and advancement are forever owed to the State’s spectacular benevolence and overwhelming power (Makley 2014). As beneficiaries of the State-programmed “great love,” Qiang villagers are also educated by the “grateful culture” movement to show their gratitude towards the enormous amount of help that they can never completely return.

The Qiang are put in a difficult and precarious status. They were ordered to reconstruct homes, despite large amounts of investment, in places chronically threatened by earthquakes, landslides, flooding, and barren land. Their habitual social context, constructed and enacted through familiar time and sense-making, was forcefully and intrusively damaged through the State’s authoritative relief work, inconsistent relocation plans, and top-down “homeland reconstruction” (chongjian jiayuan 重建家园) projects.

Their heritage culture is represented through a series of market-oriented static, uniformed, and exotic tourism items. The State also interfers and alienates the Qiang’s access to and ownership of the heritage cultural practices, making the heritage a quintessential representation and property of the nationalist construct of state power, profit-generating tourism performances, and nostalgia-arousing activities for the leisure and entertainment

15 of mainly middle-class urban tourists. The post-Wenchuan Earthquake reconstruction has brought new money, yet extra restriction; new opportunities, yet forced compromise. I argue that the “miraculous reconstruction” has weaved an all-encompassing and overpowering net that wraps, sacks, and ties the villagers into this unexpected and arguably inappropriate transformation. To some extent, this has also brought a second disaster after the Wenchuan Earthquake, where the State orchestrates and “rules” how people would live in exchange for reconstructing and “saving” the communities and their culture. My aim in the following chapters is to reveal and reflect on the colorful, lively, and unsettling individual agencies of Qiang villagers and leaders that have negotiated the daunting net of the State’s plan into a modernizing landscape, and so transformed compulsive reconstruction into meaningful living.

Vulnerability, Resilience, and Culture in Post-Disaster Reconstruction

Anthropological studies on disasters have long recognized that, rather than being extra-social extreme or unpredictable events, disasters in fact result from the clash between a hazard agent and a kind of chronic, structural condition (Hewitt 1983, Oliver-

Smith and Hoffman 2002, Wisner et al. 2004). The previously-popular “behavioral paradigm” proposed mainly by geologists, seismologists, meteorologists and other scientists understands disasters as events caused by hazard agents to be prevented, controlled and managed by human behaviors primarily resorting to science and technology directed by government agencies and scientific experts (Bolin and Stanford

1998:27, Hewitt 1983). The “structural paradigm,” on the other hand, considers disasters not as “discrete events but part of the larger patterns and practices of societies viewed geographically and historically” (Bolin and Stanford 1998:27, authors’ original italics).

Disasters take place only when the potentially destructive events, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, fire storms, and nuclear meltdown, have affected certain populations who have limited capacity to prevent themselves from, reduce the damage of, and/or efficiently recover after the catastrophe. Yet both paradigms seem to be outdated when the “mutuality and complexity of hazard and vulnerability to disaster due to complex interactions between nature and society” are considered (Hilhorst 2003). Thus, a more complex paradigm is needed to investigate how disasters impact specific groups of people who have history, agency, and changing relationships with local, national, and global worlds and resources, as well as state agencies of various kinds.

Disasters should first be studied as historical events, where its formation and destruction should be evaluated through long-term human-environment and/or inter- human interactions (see Oliver-Smith 1999 on Peru and 2012 on Haiti). For example,

Wenchuan Earthquake took place in the historically earthquake-prone region of southwestern China, which falls in the Alpine-Himalayan seismic zone and Longmen

Mountain Fault Zone. In addition to the severity of the Wenchuan Earthquake, the grave damage caused by it was also due to the increased population concentration, continuous environmental destruction (e.g. excessive deforestation leading to frequent and massive mudslide and landslide), and inadequate earthquake prevention and reduction measures in a long period of time.

The historical view leads to another defining characteristic of disasters understood through the anthropological perspective. Disasters are “socialized” catastrophes (see

Oliver-Smith 1996, Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 2002). Causes of disaster damage are also socio-political in nature. Disasters are often induced by slipshod development projects

17 and improper government intervention. In the case of the Wenchuan Earthquake, it is reported that the construction of the large-scale Zipingpu Dam close to Yingxiu

Township might have triggered the seismic movement (LaFraniere 2009). Poor planning decisions partially led to the almost complete destruction of Beichuan County in the same earthquake, where the rural populations were forcefully relocated to the land highly vulnerable to landslide by State agencies in the mid-20th Century (Chai 2008). More heartbreakingly, the huge loss of thousands of student lives during the earthquake was linked to the poor quality of the State schools and corruption of related officials (Wong

2008). The interpretation of disasters is also politically shaped as the report, evaluation, and discussion of disasters are often influenced by media manipulation and political power (see Button 2010).

More importantly, particular social and political schemes and conditions have led to disparate disaster impacts and responses. Many disastrous events have alerted us that the same disaster always causes varied degrees of damage to different communities within the same society. The uneven risk to which groups of victims are exposed is often conditioned by unequal distribution of geographical, economic, political, and cultural resources to effectively respond to disasters. Anthropologists have provided robust research on how populations of different sociopolitical status and standing have suffered from and recovered after the same disaster at varied levels and speeds. Such differences including racial and economic disparities (see Adams 2013 and Browne 2015 on post-

Hurricane Katrina recovery of New Orleans African-American communities), varied access to political power and connections (see Oliver-Smith 1992 on Peru, Petryna 2003 on Chernobyl recovery in Ukraine), gender and age differences (see Henrici 2010 on

18 women in Haiti and 2015 on African-American women in New Orleans), and ethnic backgrounds (see Bolin 2006 for a review).

From a comparative perspective, different political structures and governing power can lead to different paths of recovery as revealed in the cases of Haiti (Schuller

2015), Sri Lanka (Gamburd 2014), and India (Simpson 2013) where the respective nations’ recovery largely relied on the international humanitarian aid, and in China where the central government dominated the relief and reconstruction work. On a larger scale, the globalizing of capital, materials, and people has lent a global connection to any “local” disasters, such as in the case of climate change-induced crises and disasters (see

Companion and Chaiken forthcoming). More strikingly, anthropologists have repeatedly pointed out the intersectionality of race/ethnicity, gender, political and economic power, neoliberal economic reform and globalization, as well as historically-formed international politics (such as the legacy of colonialism and post-colonial developmental schemes) in affecting a population’s capacity to respond to disasters (see Browne 2015, Fortun 2001,

Gamburd 2013, Hastrup 2011, Oliver-Smith 1992, Petryna 2003).

Central to the anthropological approach to disasters is the attention to local practices and knowledge-making in building and rebuilding places, relationships, and power so that individual and community histories, identities, and varied networks of communication can survive and continue (Adams 2013, Bankoff 2001, Gamburd 2014,

Petryna 2003). Studies of disasters have long identified the significance of indigenous adaptations and struggles under imposed, high cost, large-scale reconstruction and resettlement planning (Bankoff, Frerks and Hilhorst 2004, Scott 1999). Recent anthropological research, differing from the political economy viewpoint, has provided

19 meaningful reflection on how disaster epistemology and localized knowledge on risk and disaster (versus that of the experts) have influenced the response to and representation of disasters (see Barrios 2014, Bond 2013, Choi 2015, Sternsdorff-Cisterna 2015). In the aftermath of the Wenchuan Earthquake, the geographical, ethnic, economic, political, and social disparities among the affected populations played a major role in shaping their varied recovery trajectories.

Recognizing disasters as historically and socio-politically shaped events whose cause and effect are rooted in the ecological and cultural context where they occur, anthropologists and other social scientists have studied disaster response and recovery through the lenses of population vulnerability and resilience. The vulnerability approach is one of the major analytical tools which social sciences contribute to the study of disaster. In the now seminal edited volume, At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s

Vulnerability and Disasters (2004), Wisner and colleagues succinctly declare the provocative and powerful pseudo-formula of “Risk = Hazards * Vulnerability,” proposing that risk is the result of hazard agents and affected people’s vulnerability combined. Vulnerability is generally agreed to refer to the “susceptibility to be harmed”

(Adger 2006:269). It is used as an evaluation of the affected population’s ability to

“anticipate, cope with, resist and recover” from disaster (Wisner et al. 2004). Increasingly, the vulnerability approach requires researchers to investigate the social and historical processes which expose certain groups of people to higher chance of risk and harm. Such processes include the region’s environmental and technological susceptibility, socially and politically created patterns of vulnerability (including ethnic/racial, economic, political, and cultural disparities), localized experience and perceptions of risk and

20 disaster, and individually and internally differentiated human agencies (see Hoffman and

Oliver-Smith 2002, Oliver-Smith 1996, Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 1999).

Critics of the vulnerability approach, however, have cautioned on how it may render the affected population as passive and powerless victims dependent on external aid

(see Faas 2016). Such critics are concerned with the strategies and politics of framing the vulnerability of a particular population. For example, vulnerability as a “western discourse” is closely related to the post-colonial developmentalism that has essentialized the Global South as disaster-ridden, poverty-stricken, and disaster-prone (Bankoff 2001).

Political power interactions through local contacts, as reflected in the recovery and resettlement of the Wutai Rukai indigenous people of Taiwan after Typhoon Morakot, have also shaped the vulnerability discourse towards those economically and politically

“disadvantageous” people (Hsu et al. 2015). Secondly, vulnerability is extremely complicated to define and evaluate when put in practice. Faas (2016) in his recent review of this concept discusses the difficulty and ambiguity of measuring and quantifying vulnerability despite the abundant research and frameworks proposed by important researchers (see Cutter 1996, Cutter et al. 2000, Cutter et al. 2003, Tuner et al. 2003a and

2003b) as well as international agencies devoted to disaster reduction and recovery.

Finally, the vulnerability approach may submerge the agency of the affected population. On-the-ground ethnographies have discovered that those being rendered

“vulnerable” actually have developed versatile, historically-formed, and socially- effective resources and strategies to cope with the disaster and post-disaster recovery even under dominant state power and international aid (see Browne 2015, Gamburd 2014,

Hatsrup 2013, Simpson 2013). Critical to this kind of anthropological investigation is

21 how the localized strategies and resources differ from those of the State and aid agencies who may perceive and deal with the same disasters in culturally alienating and politically overwhelming manners, as in the post-earthquake period described in this dissertation.

Miscommunication and cultural insensitivity often arise when such differences are ignored. More detrimentally, the oppression of agency and ignorance of local relations and cultures usually result from the unequal and discriminatory relations between the aiding agencies and affected population, perpetuating the disaster injustice that has created the latter’s predicament in the first place.

Relatively, as the vulnerability approach analyzes the population’s susceptibility to disasters, resilience has become an increasingly popular and critical tool to study their

“ability to survive and cope with a disaster with minimum impact and damage” (Cutter et al. 2008). The resilience approach focuses on investigating certain population’s capacity to bounce back from, adapt to, and cope with a disaster quickly and efficiently (see

Barrios 2016 for a recent review of the concept). Similar to that of population vulnerability, resilience is also historically and socially shaped, influenced by a dynamic interplay of the ecological, political, economic, social, and epistemological resources that foster or hinder such capacity to survive and adapt (see Alexander 2006, Cutter et al.

2008, Oliver-Smith 1996 and 2002). Particularly, recent anthropological investigation on resilience has brought about new insights on this widely used term in theory and practice.

First, the resilience approach may engender “victim blaming” discourse and practice, leaving the affected population solely responsible for the outcomes of the disasters. Such assertion conceals “the root causes and global systems that contribute to the creation of the disaster itself,” leading to depoliticize disasters (Barrios 2016:28). The politically,

22 socially and globally shaped root causes of disasters are oftentimes not of the affected population’s own making; instead, the political systems and sociocultural constraints that limit their resilience should be investigated.

Consequently, it is problematic when it comes to building resilience of a particular population. On the one hand, resilience building requires a change in the political and social systems that endanger the population’s “lack of resilience” in the first place. However, not only are such “systems” extremely difficult to recognize and challenge, they have remained to be the major force that creates new kind of vulnerability in the name of resilience building. As revealed in Schuller’s (2015) investigation of the

“humanitarian aftershocks” in Haiti, the international humanitarian agencies have sustained the imposed condition of disaster vulnerability, “underdevelopment,” and dependence in their post-earthquake aid projects. In this case, researchers argue that resilience-oriented projects may become a new “methodology of power” (Walker and

Cooper 2011) that perpetuates the status quo (see also Barrios 2016, Benadusi 2013,

Schuller 2015, Gamburd 2014). On the other hand, anthropological studies have strongly criticized the imagined stability and homogeneity in the nurturing of community resilience. Resilience cannot simply refer to bounce back to “a pre-shock state” because the “pre-shock state” has never been stable or strong enough to cope with disasters. Even in the “traditional” societies, “their composition, social structure, and values change as a result of both ‘internal’ forces (e.g., human-environment relations, intergenerational and political tensions) and external influences (e.g., colonialism, national development policies)” (Barrios 2016, see also Gupta and Ferguson 1992).

More importantly, as Barrios (2016:30) argues, resilience “may at times be an emergent property that results from the socio-political circumstances created by a disaster rather than a pre-existing ability to return to a pre-catastrophe state of affairs.” Barrios

(2014) argues that both the “community” and its resilience (and lack thereof) are contingently shaped by local politics and contested negotiations between the community members and aiding agencies in his research on the community relocation in Honduras after Hurricane Mitch. Importantly, within the same population, their vulnerability and resilience manifest in multiple forms and mutually formulate the emergent and situated strategies for disaster recovery (Benadusi 2013). Alarmingly, the affected populations are usually “still vulnerable, yet already resilient,” referring to the fact that vulnerability and resilience “represent devices for displaying social identity that actors employ in contingent and strategic ways, even switching from one to the other, depending on the circumstances of everyday life” (Benadusi 2013:419-421).

As “vulnerability reduction” and “resilience building,” despite their contested connotations, become critical tools in studying and managing post-disaster recovery projects, anthropologists have played an indispensable role in pointing out that “local culture” must be seriously considered in such processes. The recovery, continuance and transformation of local culture after major disasters have always been the focal topic for disaster anthropologists. Ethnographic case studies have repeatedly argued that culture is oftentimes ignored in post-disaster planning. In a few cases when local culture is being noticed, it is usually rendered as physical, homogeneous and static. Saved and managed in terms of tangible or intangible cultural heritage, culture is usually regarded as a single unit in terms of post-disaster relief and recovery (see Button 2013, Maldonado 2016).

Cultural recovery, at the same time, is also imbued with economic and political incentives which largely shape and valorize the meaning and significance of the cultural practices. Repeatedly, we see that local culture is “alternatively subjected to malign neglect, coopted, or scapegoated in efforts of disaster risk reduction, prevention, mitigation, response, and recovery” (Faas and Barrios 2015).

Since the discipline’s establishment in the late 19th Century, American anthropology has strived to provide meaningful observations about what constitute and how to understand the different ways in which peoples around the world cope with the environment, construct social organizations and relations, explain origins of the world and meanings of life, and develop multiple technologies and material culture. While in the mid-19th Century the term “Culture” often capitalized, primarily referred to elite

Western European art and etiquette, early scholars like E.B. Tylor and later Franz Boas led a revolutionary paradigm shift on the meaning of “culture,” denouncing the hierarchical and ethnocentric connotation, and applying it in a broader sense. As is now popularly accepted, all humans (as well as some of the close relatives of the Homo sapiens) have “culture,” and are all acculturated in different ways as members of respective societies.

Anthropological understanding of “culture” has extensively deepened and sophisticated along with the development of the discipline. The well-established body of anthropological research on “culture” has discovered several defining characteristics of the concept and its working mechanism. Of particular importance to the discussion of

“culture” in the post-disaster recovery context are the analyses of the working mechanism of “culture,” as well as how “local culture” can be preserved and sustained after disasters

(see Hoffman 2016, Maldonado 2016). First, “culture” is related to particular historical circumstances unique to each society. It is embedded and becomes meaningful in a particular ecological and socio-political context, and mutually shapes the human- environmental and interpersonal relationships that produce it in the first place.

Anthropological concerns with human-environment relations have also revealed the emergent and ecologically relational quality of culturally distinct practices, meanings, and values (Biersack 1999, Ingold 2000). Not only does “culture” inform and enable people to respond to disasters in practical and meaningful manners, it can also only recover and continue when the specific relationships and sense-making practices are sustained (Barrios 2013, Browne 2015). In this case, post-disaster relief and reconstruction projects can only be successful when they take “local culture” into consideration, not in the sense of a confined or unchanged entity, but lived and varied experiences of the people. On the other hand, considering and preserving “culture” after disasters requires a comprehensive understanding of how “culture” works. “Culture” is a nondeterministic, internally heterogeneous, and unbounded process that constantly changes along with outside influences and is differently shared and interpreted among the practitioners (Brightman 1995, Fisher 2007). Studies on cultural change and exchange have focused on exploring the relationship between individual agency and the more encompassing social values and organizational structures. Research on the interpretation and writing of culture has also enlightened our understanding of the emergent, context- based, and politically-shaped qualities of how we present culture (see Clifford and

Marcus 1986, Geertz 1973).

In this line of thinking, “culture” is not “tangible, homogenous, static” as is treated in disaster-related policies and practices where its historicity, heterogeneity, and locally-diverse meaningfulness are sacrificed in numerous international disaster response programs (Maldonado 2016). More importantly, the so-called “traditional” culture and subaltern groups have suffered from politically-induced misinterpretations. In some cases, the cultural practices regarded “traditional” are deemed as archaic, unchanging and

“irrational” compared to the values of the politically dominant groups. More frequently,

“cultures” of the subaltern groups are associated with such “tradition,” the idea that the values, practices, and ways of knowing of certain groups people are both stasis and othering in the eyes of the interpreters (see Fabian 1983). In other circumstances, cultural preservation is reduced to cultural commodification. Culture comes to be represented as a superficial veneer of different textiles and staged rituals that can be mobilized as a commodity for a globalizing capitalist tourism industry (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009).

Setting out to explore the specific planning and visioning of the “culturally sensitive” reconstruction of Longxi’s Qiang villages, and the radical transformation of the villagers’ lives and subjectivity making, this dissertation investigates if and how the massive, high-cost, and authoritarian State projects have created a chance of culturally sensitive and socioeconomically sustainable development for the Wenchuan Earthquake survivors, as well as an effective measure of preserving local cultures. It analyzes the historically and socio-politically shaped vulnerability of the villagers due to the geophysical characters of their living environment, catastrophic scale of the disaster, and overwhelming State agendas. Analyzing the villagers multiple and diverse resources, strategies, and constraints to respond to the State-orchestrated “cultural recovery,” this

27 dissertation reveals the complex dynamics in resilience building and cultural development among the affected Qiang.

State, Ethnic Minorities, and Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection in China

A recent study of the history of the ethnic identification project during the early years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China by Mullaney (2011) has greatly improved our knowledge on the making and transforming of the Chinese ethnic groups which, argues Mullaney (2011:39), is the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP)

“radically liberal experiment with practically unfettered self-categorization.” Different from the Republic of China’s identification of China as a “Republic of Five Nations” and the overwhelming policy of assimilation, the CCP aimed to classify the ethnic groups according to Stalin’s four criteria of nationality including a set territory, shared language, culture, and economy, and more importantly, Major H. Davies’ notion of language as a marker of cultural identity. What Mullaney finds, however, is actually a “participant transformation” (ibid:12) of the ethnic groups where the intellectuals who went to the

Yunnan Province to identify the ethnic groups, dependent on local government hosts to provide them logistic support and interview agenda, ended up making the identification project an “unabashedly ethnogenetic taxonomic enterprise” (ibid:91). In this book,

Mullaney critiques the problematic use of language as the most important criterion, the fate of the “unrecognized” and mis-recognized groups (see also Harrell 2001), as well as the historical process of solidifying and naturalizing the identification of the 55 ethnic minorities in Chinese society. Moreover, almost all ethnic groups have various histories of mingling based on historical change and State-power relations, including the potential

28 for cultural creolization across the categories, and the resistance to identifying such a process both officially and in many inter-ethnic relations.

The Chinese Qiang were arguably an ignored minority member in the eye of the

Han-dominant State prior to the Wenchuan Earthquake. With a population of around 300 thousand, the Qiang consisted of only 0.01 percent of the Chinese population prior to the earthquake. The Qiang’s settlements concentrate in the southwestern frontier of the nation, with a predominant presence in Sichuan, and scattered residence in northwestern

Gansu and Qinghai provinces. Regarded as one of the oldest ethnic groups recorded in the oracle bone scripts, the ancient Qiang experienced prolonged migration and ethnic intermingling with other Chinese ethnic groups, including the Han (Ran, Li and Zhou

1984), and were known as the “blood donating” group that helped give lives to many

Chinese ethnic groups (Fei 1989). However, the Qiang, through years of wars, miseries and misfortune, gradually got beaten and declined through time. The locals often use the word da san le (beaten to be scattered 打散了) to explain why there are so few Qiang in contemporary Sichuan.

The current day, post-earthquake Chinese Qiang’s “culturally sensitive” reconstruction took and is taking place in an era of the State-planned “building a new socialist countryside” (see Chio 2014, Harwood 2014), development of rural ethnic tourism (see Chao 2012, Chio 2014, Notar 2006), and ICH protection campaign (Gao

2014) in ethnic regions. Embedded in such processes is the historical and contested agenda to “modernize” and “civilize” the many so-called “underdeveloped” and

“marginalized” ethnic groups (Fan 2016, Gladney 1994, Harrell 2005, Kaup 2000, Schein

2000). According to Chio (2014:3), “building a new socialist countryside,” written into

29 the 11th Five Year Plan (2006– 2010), is “with a renewed emphasis on policies that would help rural people and communities to take part in, and benefit from, China’s rapid modernization.” Harwood (2014) observes that the “building a new socialist countryside”

State planning included three major forms of State intervention in southwestern Yunnan province: environmental conservation; implementation of the national nine-year compulsory education policy; and the promotion of outward migration for work in the ethnically diverse Yunnan.

The Chinese State has long engaged in the so-called “civilizing projects” (Harrell

1995) for the ethnic minorities characterized with geographic, political, cultural, and socioeconomic marginality. Anthropologists interested in Chinese ethnic minorities have closely studied the geopolitical and sociocultural significance of the “remoteness” and

“marginality” of such groups. The Qiang, along with several other Chinese ethnic minorities in southwestern China, endure geographic marginality and remoteness from the “central” regions—mainly the Han-dominated urban centers. The remoteness, at the same time, engenders “the romance of a pristine landscape enshrouded in mystic beauty”

(Schein 2000:5). The marginality also entails a stigmatized imagination and moral condemnation of the ethnic region as a “site of lack, of uncivilized vulgarity, a land of economic and social malaise, of dispossessed people living in deep poverty, scratching out a living in the most infertile of China’s hill country (Litzinger 1994:206, cited in

Schein 2000:5). Schein (2000:5) adds that the ethnic groups are at times “figured as the feminine counterparts to forward-moving, dynamic centers that gendered masculine.”

In some cases, ethnic minorities are problematically portrayed as the “ancestors,”

“children,” and “women” of contemporary China, referring to their archaic/ahistorical

30 cultural values, “primitive” and “barbarian” lives and cultures, as well as political vulnerability (Harrell 1995). Worth pointing out is that later and increasing research on the ethnic minorities has questioned Harrell’s (1995) oversimplifying observation, revealing the cultural complexity and transformation within the groups (see Du 2002), powerful struggles and negotiations with the State imposition at the margin (see

Mueggler 2001), as well as the disputed violence and masculinity on the part of the

Mongols, Hui, and Uyger (see Gladney 2004, Lipman 1998, Rudelson 1997). Here the contested and condescending framing of the ethnic groups as “vulnerable” and

“backward” becomes especially problematic where the agency and subjectivity of members of the groups are submerged in the State-led discourse. For example, represented as helpless “victims,” the very ethnic and marginalized status of the Qiang made them “model” beneficiaries of the State’s spectacular aid.

Such Chinese State efforts often aim to “endanger, develop, sharpen or heighten the consciousness of the peripheral people as an ethnic group” to build the center’s superiority and peripheral groups’ acceptance of the problematic self-images (Harrell

1995:6). The Chinese Party-led State has been involved in authoritarian and problematic projects to describe, promote and administer the ethnic group. This has included standardizing their history and languages, providing official descriptions of their culture and customs to promote “an increasing ethnic pride and a desire to look impressive to the increasingly heterogeneous gaze of the Chinese” (Harrell 2001:42-47). Kaup (2000) in his studies of what he calls the creating of the Zhuang also notices the process of promoting the Zhuang ethnicity by upholding Zhuang heroes and their glorious history,

31 as well as the making of the Zhuang autonomous region with establishing preferential policies and an ethnic cadre system.

Researchers who have studied the representations of the Chinese ethnic minorities have provided meaningful materials of how the ethnic minorities are perceived by others and themselves, and how their identities are performed. Some argue that the histories and images of the various peoples are created by the discourse of the intellectuals and elites.

Litzinger (2000) notes that the there is a process of “making histories” of the Yao people such that intellectuals, officials, cadres, tour guides collectively speak for and represent the masses of the Yao and their ethnic identity. Chao (2013) also studies how the Naxi intellectuals, mainly using the Dongba culture as the carrier of the Naxi culture, create the history of the people, who at the same time exclude themselves from the so-called

“backward” cultures as well as uproot the Dongba culture from the daily lives of the people. Others have studied how the State discourse of ethnic identity is internalized and used by the local people. Schien (2000) in her study of the Miao people further describes how the marginal and feminized identity of the Miao is internalized and locally established in among the Miao group, who in turn, use and perform such an essentialized image of themselves for tourism and economic gain. A much more nuanced description of the Loloso people (a group of Yi) by Mueggler (2001) further gives us a strong analysis of the internalization of the State’s authority and legitimacy through “corporeal violence,” such as the intervention of burial rituals and birth control, in everyday life.

In the era of “building a new socialist countryside,” a number of rural ethnic minority villages have witnessed critical social transformation towards “modernity,” through uplifting the hygienic, medical, and living conditions of the villages, elevating

32 the group members’ education level, and, more importantly, promoting the economy of the regions, mainly through rural ethnic tourism (see Chao 2013, Chio 2014, Harwood

2014). Prior to the Wenchuan Earthquake, most of the Qiang regions were long known for their remoteness, isolation, difficult transportation, rough environment, limited resources, and lagging economic development. The Qiang, however, as rendered in the

State-led reconstruction projects, are represented as “ancient,” “exotic,” and

“underdeveloped” ethnic others where the State-led projects redefine their cultural identity and re-oriente their future after the earthquake.

Nyíri (2006) pointedly argues that a main characteristic of Chinese “scenic spots”

(jingdian 景点) and theme parks is that they are, since approved and managed by the

State, places where heroic Chinese history as well as major achivements of the Chinese develoment and unity are celebrated. In this case, “scenic spots” are also sites of patriotic education and windows of Chinese modernization. The newly-made Qiang “scenic sites” after the earthquake carry with them similar features. Being ethnic “scenic sites,” they also display the standing and significance of Chinese ethnic minorities, the Qiang in particular, during and after a major catastrophe. Chio (2014) discovers the essential role of rural tourism in such a State-led “modernizing” scheme. While designating the year

2006 as the year of “China Rural Tourism,” the China National Tourism Administration

(CNTA) situated tourism “within new national priorities” (ibid:3). Chio (ibid) provides timely research on the relationship among mobility, “modern” rural subjectivity formation, and the development of the nongjiale (rural family happiness 农家乐)—a form of rural- and family-based tourism—among the ethnic Zhuang villages of Guangxi

Province and ethnic Miao villages of Guilin Province.

The flourishing literature on tourism and modernity in Chinese ethnic regions studies how ethnic culture-oriented tourism has brought about visibility, profit, “modern” subjectivity, and potential conflict to often culturally and economically marginalized communities. The research mianly deals with the impacts of subsistence pattern change from farming to tourism on the lives and socialization of the villagers. These include: the essentializing, exoticizing, and marketing of the ethnic culture as tourism commodities catering to the imagination of the mostly urban and foreign middle class; the contested and interacting interpretations and practices towards the Chinese State’s developing strategies for governing the ethnic minorities; and, finally, the negotiation and blurring boundaries of “tradition” and “modernity,” rurality and urbanity, “backwardness” and forward-going, locality and globalization in the presumed “marginal” regions (see Cable

2008, Chao 2013, Chio 2014, Litzinger 2000, Notar 2006, Oakes 1998, Schein 2000).

The Qiang “culturally sensitive” reconstruction also responded to the recent surge of the ICH protection campaign in China. A little more than a decade ago, China joined the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in

2004. The National Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage was launched by the Chinese Ministry of Culture in 2005. Since 2006, China Heritage Culture Day has been celebrated on every second Saturday of June, where the ICH has played a major part.

Only until recently has the concept and ICH protection campaign entered into popular public purview as an increasing number of formerly-claimed “traditional” cultural practices are listed as national ICH (1219 items in 2011). China currently possesses 37 world intangible heritage culture items (including items in Need of Urgent Safeguarding), surging as the nation with the largest number of world ICH items.

As represented by the now officially-recognized Qiang ICH, such as the Qiang

New Year Festival and Sheep-skin Drum Dance, many Chinese ICH items are the ethnic cultural practices previously deemed “backward” and “superstitious,” representing the

“exotic” and “primitive” cultural values of those people. Consequently, the Chinese ICH protection campaign can be regarded as a “cultural revolution” (Gao 2013 and 2014) that such cultural practices are given new identities and roles as being part of scientific and public cultural activities, as well as essential components of the continuously emerging nationalist history. In most cases, the newly recognized ethnic practices are variously advertised as entertaining moments of celebration, educational occasions of China’s great and diverse history, and officially-approved displays of state power and generosity (see

Chen 2015, Gao 2013 and 2014, Liang 2013, You 2015). Along with the ICH protection campaign emerges the heritage tourism in ethnic villages, where the nominated cultural practices become the focal selling point (see Li 2014, Liang 2013, Zhang 2014).

The State-led “culturally sensitive” post-earthquake reconstruction of the Qiang villages presents a rare case that the ethnic villages went through a series of large-scale infrastructure projects to promote socioeconomic development and cultural heritage protection through heritage tourism and ICH protection campaign. At the same time, the reconstruction involved an authoritarian representation and manipulation of the contents and meaning of the Qiang “culture” as well as the lives of the contemporary Qiang. This dissertation documents the villagers’ varied responses to and interactions with the State projects. It explores the transformed “modern” subjectivity of the Qiang, and their hopes and resources for sustainable living after the “culturally sensitive” reconstruction.

Ethnography in and outside of Longxi

I stayed with Linhua Tang’s family, including her son Jiafu Li, daughter-in-law

Meilin Zhang, and Jiafu’s two teenage daughters, in Longxi’s Dongmen Village during my fieldwork. Linhua Tang was a hale and hearty woman in her late 60s. Since the first day we met, she insisted me calling her Aunt Tang. Aunt Tang was a native of Dongmen

Village who served as the director of the village’s women’s federation for over a decade.

She was known as “Doctor Tang,” who was not only in charge of the only village clinic inside her own house, but also the only midwife of Longxi Township for a long time.

When asked how many babies she had helped deliver, she said, “More than 100 at least, I cannot remember!” Aunt Tang’s reconstructed house was located in its original plot of the old part of Dongmen. Climbing a few stairs beside a decades-old walnut tree which blessedly survived several earthquakes, the maroon iron burglar-proof double-door of

Linhua’s house appeared on the right. Two bundles of yellow corn cobs hung on each side of the door, brightening up the whole gray stone structure. A wooden board hanging up on the upper left-hand side read “Qiang Scent Garden.” Another wooden board standing underneath said, “Qiang Scent Garden—Dining, Lodging, Relaxation,

Entertainment—Wenchuan Dongmen Village.” Aunt Tang’s house was turned into a nongjiale home hostel. To reflect the ethnic identity of such nongjiale, the home-based tourism business in Longxi was also popularly known as Qiangjiale (Qiang family happiness 羌家乐).

The first day I arrived at the house with Ma, native Longxi and then office director of Longxi Township government who helped arrange my stay in Dongmen, Aunt

Tang, quickly getting up from the couch in the yard, cheerfully greeted me. “I’ve been

36 waiting for you to come! The guest room is reserved. Several tourists came and wanted to book the room, but I turned them down to save it for you.” She talked fast and passionately. The house was a three-story, flat-roof, grey stone, square house. The first floor was made into a pigpen. On the wall straight ahead of me, a big character “羌”

(Qiang) was handwritten. The kitchen and two small rooms with the sign of “private use” were on the right side. Along the right-side wall displayed stones of different shapes and colors on the four-layer wooden planks, collected by Jiafu, and all for sale. On the left side, a one-meter high wooden stand was installed with two supporting poles on each side; hanging on the poles were bundles of dried red chili peppers and corn cobs. This wooden stand was the most popular spot of the entire house, where, standing behind the stand, countless tourists had taken pictures with the red chili pepper and corn bundles, myself included. Also on the left side were the dining hall, the living room, another small room for private use, and the restroom. A concrete stair above the restroom led guests to the second floor, lined on both sides with six guest rooms.

As we were talking, a woman in her early 40s entered the house. Her dark purple blouse and black pants were full of dirt; on her back was a half-meter high bamboo basket topped with fresh corns and green grass, better known as the “pig grass” in

Dongmen. Quietly she put down her basket, and greeted us with a shy smile. “This is my daughter-in-law. She’s also a Zhang. What a coincidence!” Aunt Tang introduced Meilin

Zhang to me. Meilin smiled again and said, “Little Zhang, have a seat.” Then she went straight to the kitchen. After the brief introduction, Ma left me with the Tang family. The time was close to five in the afternoon. A thin, tall man wearing glasses and dressed in khaki blouse and navy pants walked in. It was Jiafu, owner/chef of this home hostel, who,

37 on other times, was also a minivan driver that took locals and guests between Longxi and

Wenchuan county seat. After being introduced by Aunt Tang, he nodded at me briefly and went to sit on the couch, checking messages on his smart phone.

Only after a few minutes was Jiafu called to the kitchen. Tourists who went out exploring the village were about to return for dinner. Happily I volunteered to help. From my observation the kitchen was the biggest room of the whole house. On the left stood two big clay hearths with two fixed iron woks, a wooden stand filled with kitchen utensils and condiments, and another furnace connecting to a natural gas tank. In front of me was a long green aluminum cabinet; placed on its granite counter top were more kitchen gadgets such as the rice cooker, induction cooker, microwave, two thick chopping boards, and several pots and pans. The sink seemed especially small compared to the long aluminum cabinet. One fridge and two freezers were placed along the wall on my right side; next to them was a worn-out wooden cabinet, the only old thing there. On the square aluminum table in the middle of the kitchen were the meats and vegetables to be cooked.

Qiang Scent Garden served many local Qiang dishes, pork sausage and pickled pork made from the self-raised pigs, wild vegetables such as walnut tree flowers and wild ferns, sticky potato soup with pickled cabbage, hand-grinded bean curd, among other local Sichuan dishes. Jiafu was responsible for cooking and seasoning all dishes, while

Meilin and Aunt Tang helped prepare the ingredients. I was assigned to wash dishes and the vegetables. Quickly Jiafu put on the apron and turned on the furnace. The four of us became so busy that our intermittent chats were instantly drowned out by noises of the frying woks and steaming pots.

Loud laughter and voices suddenly broke the silence. Curious, I stepped out of the

38 kitchen. A group of visitors walked into the yard, some occupying the couch while some female members continued taking pictures behind the wooden stand. Aunt Tang also came out to greet them. “The village is beautiful,” one middle-aged woman told Aunt

Tang. From her accent I could guess that she was from a nearby county. “I didn’t know there was so nice a place in these remote mountains. I’m seeing the Qiang for the first time, and the watchtowers and stone houses are so different.” The woman went on with her comment. “Is this house rebuilt after the earthquake? We all donated money for

Wenchuan’s post-disaster reconstruction,” The middle-aged man in the couch added.

Aunt Tang did not respond but told them that the dinner was ready. The tourists all seemed to enjoy the dinner very much, asking me twice to give them more rice to go with the dishes. We did not have dinner until the tourists finished theirs. The four of us sat at the square aluminum table in the kitchen. Interestingly it became a major research site throughout my fieldwork.

Much of my knowledge of the village and the Qiang as a whole came from

Donglin Tang, Aunt Tang’s nephew and former Dongmen village head. Donglin was the first person to visit me at the Qiang Scent Garden. A tall and strong man in his early 50s, he was especially passionate in discussing the Qiang history and his vision for the village’s development with me. According to Xueqing Tang, Donglin’s sister and Aunt

Tang’s next door neighbor, there was nobody but me in the village who listened to

Donglin’s “cliché.” As the former village head, Donglin opened the first home hostel in

Dongmen, and was quite successful with the business. Xueqing, on the other, opened a small variety shop selling snacks and renting out Qiang-style costumes for tourists to wear for photo taking. Lijuan, who lived across the village lane from Donglin, served as

39 the township-designated tour guide of Dongmen when officials and reporters came to visit. On other times, she sold a variety of tourist souvenirs, including bags and scarfs decorated with Qiang-style embroidered patterns, at the village gate. All of them also had small pieces of farmland where they mainly planted corns for pig feeding, seasonal vegetables, and cherry trees—the new cash fruit in the region.

To study the Qiang shibi and the shibi scripts and ritual practices only known to a few remaining shibi in Longxi, I frequently stayed at shibi Beimen Yu’s home in E’er

Village and conducted extensive interviews with a number of shibi there, including shibi

Wenyi Zhu and shibi Guangyi Zhu. Longxi Township is advertised as “Qiang People’s

Valley” not only because more than 98 percent of the 4475 villagers were identified as ethnic Qiang in 2013, but more importantly, it is believed to be the origin place of the

Qiang shibi. Shibi are the Qiang ritual specialists. They are traditionally responsible for leading the worship, exorcisms, healing the sick, and monitoring many other rituals of the

Qiang including weddings and funerals. The origin and skills of the shibi largely remain secret and mysterious to the lay people. The skills are strictly taught and transmitted within the very few shibi families, or, in some rare cases, between elder shibi and non- relative apprentices. Shibi also serve as doctors, priests, and monitors of the major rituals in the villages.

I was also helped by officials and staff at Longxi Township Government. Feng

Luo, the Party Secretary, generously provided me with a number of official documents concerning Longxi’s post-earthquake reconstruction, and agreed to be interviewed by me twice about the history of and future for Longxi’s development. While volunteering to work at the township government to help with news collecting and reporting, I was able

40 to interview other officials and staff about Longxi’s reconstruction, and more importantly, observe the daily activities of the staffs in planning and implementing governmental projects. I also became familiar with Manager Ge, head of the Chengdu-based Sunshine

Company which won the bid to develop tourism in Longxi.

In Wenchuan County seat, I was able to interview county government officials in charge of Wenchuan’s tourism development and cultural heritage protection. I was also introduced to several volunteers and researchers who went to Wenchuan to help with reconstruction and decided to live in the beautiful riverside county seat ever since. In

Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital, I met, interviewed, and conducted research projects with scholars studying the Qiang, Chinese ethnic policy, and post-Wenchuan Earthquake reconstruction. Luckily, I also was introduced to and interviewed scholars and related officials who participated in the planning and research on preserving the Qiang culture and promoting ethnic ICH after the Wenchuan Earthquake in Beijing, China’s capital.

In total, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in China for fifteen months between

2011 and 2015. By living in Dongmen, I obtained most of the data through participant observation and interviews. I conducted 50 structured interviews with Longxi villagers, government officials, planners, experts, and scholars about their perceptions of and practices regarding earthquake relief and reconstruction. More than 100 informal interviews were carried out throughout the fieldwork, focusing on the transformation of life of the villagers. Two surveys with 40 Dongmen villagers were conducted on their perception of local disasters and the reconstruction, respectively. All ritual and festival practices were visually documented when permitted.

Chapter Outline

The second chapter introduces the historical marginality and socioeconomic vulnerability of the Longxi Qiang in responding to the frequent earthquake threats at home through a survey of the disaster history in this region and analysis of the political marginality of the Qiang as “barbarian” (manman 蛮蛮) in scholarly research and local discourse. It reveals how the difficult transportation, lagging economic development, limited socioeconomic resources, and inadequate understanding of the Qiang culture have posed a challenge to the “modernizing,” development-oriented, and “culturally sensitive” reconstruction projects.

The third chapter demonstrates, through archival research and personal stories, how the gravely destructive Wenchuan Earthquake was quickly yet overwhelmingly reported, managed, and “conquered” by the powerful Chinese State. The Chinese government’s response to the Wenchuan Earthquake featured a spectacular outpouring of resources for devastated families and communities. The earthquake relief and reconstruction, in turn, became a stunning and controversial demonstration of the State’s

“great love” towards the affected population and communities. With an investigation of the State-sponsored relief work in Longxi, this chapter reveals that, while the State’s spectacular earthquake relief work has served to reinforce the power of a paternalistic

State, it failed to address the policies and practices that have shaped the disaster in the first place.

Chapter 4 describes the planning and rebuilding of the “historic” Dongmen

Village as a “miraculous reconstruction.” The chapter discusses the series of reconstruction projects that brought about “instantaneous modernity” (Zhang 2012) in

Longxi. The State policy of a “culturally sensitive” reconstruction of Dongmen is also analyzed, where heritage tourism was developed as a means to preserve and promote the

Qiang culture. Moreover, the chapter studies the high environmental and socio-economic cost of the “miraculous reconstruction,” which was ecologically and culturally damaging to the recovery and continuance of the “culturally sensitive” living in the village.

Chapter 5 examines the State-sanctioned discourse and practice to “excavate”

(wajue 挖掘), “upgrade” (tisheng 提升), and “develop” (fazhan 发展) Qiang “culture” revealed in various governmental reports and repeatedly in my interviews with planning officials, experts, and tourism company managers after the Wenchuan Earthquake. The cultural “excavation” through essentializing aspects of the Qiang cultural symbols and practices contributed to a problematic representation of the “ancient” and “mysterious”

Qiang. Cultural “upgrade” involved the development of the “culture of Yu the Great” and the Qiang’s “red culture.” The former referred to the promotion of a legendary Qiang ancestor as a wise, diligent, and loyal ancestral leader of the Chinese nationality. The

“red culture” celebrated the Qiang’s admiration and loyalty to the Communist regime.

Finally, cultural “development” resorted to specific measures that could most profitably turn the heritage culture as tourism display. In Dongmen’s cultural reconstruction, the

Qiang “culture” became an alienated, state power-consolidating representation. The reconstruction was implemented to offer State designed and approved interpretation and construction of the status and significance of the Qiang “culture” in time of disaster.

The next chapter addresses the booming “grateful Qiangjiale” (gan’en Qiangjiale

感恩羌家乐), a mix of disaster, heritage, and “grateful culture” tourism developed after the reconstruction in Dongmen Village. As I argue elsewhere (Zhang 2012), through the

43 disaster tourism or “dark tourism” (Lennon and Foley 2000; Sharpley and Stone 2009), which refers to travel to sites of death and disaster, tourists may seek first-hand up-close experiences with the destructive power of disasters and become emotionally affected and attached. Qiangjiale, where local villagers redecorated their houses as hostels and restaurants to host tourists, was popularly established as Qiang heritage tourism was promoted after the reconstruction. The reconstructed Qiang villages became important destinations for the officially-framed “grateful culture” and “grateful education.” Being grateful is perceived as an expected and praised response from the “victims” to be grateful for all those that helped after the Wenchuan Earthquake. “Grateful culture” education was a top-down, political campaign. Dongmen was selected as an exemplary site showcasing the Qiang’s “gratefulness” to the staggering State relief and reconstruction efforts, which, at the same time, represented the Qiang villagers as passive gift receivers whose survival and advancement were predominantlyowed to the State’s spectacular benevolence and overwhelming power. The chapter then analyzes the contested impacts of the “grateful Qiangjiale” on the lives of those involved in the business, revealing the villagers’ struggles with the imposed tourism scheme, “grateful” identity, and precarious future.

Chapter 7 studies the emergent Qiang intangible cultural heritage preservation taken by the Chinese State to savage and restore the Qiang cultural practices after the

Wenchuan Earthquake. “State heritagization” refers to the political and social processes that a folk cultural practice is made into officially-recognized cultural heritage.

Discussing the nomination and celebration of the Qiang New Year Festival as a national

44 and UNESCO-recognized world ICH, this chapter investigates the measures, politics, and problems involved in the Qiang ICH protection and promotion in time of disaster.

In the concluding chapter I summarize the ethnographic information and interpretation in the previous chapters. I re-arrange them around the central conceptions of this dissertation—“culturally sensitive” reconstruction and fostering resilience in culture terms after disasters.

Chapter 2 Historical Vulnerability and Marginalization of the Qiang

A Trip to Longxi

Like many Longxi villagers, I usually took the long-distance bus to get to the village from Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province. Located in the heart of the Chengdu

Plain at the bottom of the Sichuan Basin, Chengdu is nationally known for its broad, flat, and fertile land and agreeable weather. In recent years, it has grown to be the political, financial, and cultural center of southwest China, highly regarded as one of the most prosperous cities of the country. For many Qiang who live in the mountain valleys,

Chengdu is the largest and farthest city to travel in Sichuan, where they go only a few times a year to get rare and exotic food items, fashionable clothing, and urban entertainment. To get back home, the mostly car-less Longxi villagers usually take the long-distance bus to Wenchuan County at the Chadianzi Long-distance Bus Station in the west of the city. Because of the transportation convenience, the west region of Chengdu around the bus station has become the hub for many residents of A’ba Prefecture who wish to establish new lives in the city. After purchasing my ticket, which cost 51 yuan

($7.5) from Chengdu to Wenchuan County, I would call Aunt Tang and tell her, “I’m coming up today.” In the local dialect, going to A’ba Prefecture from Chengdu is going up, not only because the Prefecture is to the north of Chengdu, but also for the fact that the altitude gradually picks up on the way.

“Going up” requires tremendous effort and courage. I call the first part of the

46 journey, between Chengdu and Dujiangyan City—the second biggest city and most popular hub for residents of A’ba—the Plain Journey as one was entertained by the endless flat agricultural lands and high-rising business and residential buildings. The

Plain Journey ended right at the edge of Dujiangyan City where the first mountain appears. Before the Zipingpu Tunnel was constructed, it would take several hours for the bus to climb over the mountain. Now the tunnel ride took less than 10 minutes. Zipingpu

Tunnel is part of the newly-constructed Dujiangyan-Wenchuan Highway, a major post- earthquake transportation reconstruction project completed in 2012. The Highway reduced the travel time between Chengdu and Wenchuan from almost five hours to less than two. The Mountain Journey began. Although the bus traveled on the highway, there were at least 12 tunnels with varying lengths from 600 to 3000 meters in between, meaning that the bus passed 12 mountains, big and small, in this one-hour drive.

Towering mountains standing on the left and the galloping Min River running on the right, the bus drove on the only road of this risky and terrifying journey. Welcome to the

Sichuan mountain region!

Transportation to A’ba Prefecture has always been difficult and dangerous. In the historical record the road entering A’ba was described as “along the river and cliff, extremely dangerous of all” (Shi 2008:6). Even now, there is only one road connecting the Chengdu Plain and A’ba Prefecture. The former national highway was constructed along the edges of the chain of mountains, and constantly blocked by landslides and flooding in the summer. With most parts heavily destroyed by the Wenchuan Earthquake and again buried by a major landslide in 2013, the former national highway receded into the history a few months after the completion of the new Dujiangyan-Wenchuan

Highway. Once a passenger on the bus half-jokingly told me, “There is a secret belief here [in Wenchuan] that lao tian ye (sky god 老天爷) would only allow one road to

Wenchuan. People want to have two highways to Wenchuan? No Way!” Due to the shattered mountain surface after the earthquake and annual rainy seasons, the new

Dujiangyan-Wenchuan Highway was already damaged several times; the heaviest destruction took place in summer 2013 when different parts of the highway were devastated. Transportation between Chengdu and Wenchuan was totally disrupted for more than a month. I was trapped in a small Qiang village along the national highway until a group of visitors kindly agreed to take me back to Chengdu through a detour path.

And that took us almost two days to get there. It is easy to imagine how much harder it was in the past for the Qiang to travel outside A’ba, and the kind of isolated life they had lived.

Everyone got off at the Wenchuan County seat bus station. To go to Longxi, I took a minivan privately-operated by the locals. Before the appearances of the minivans, villagers had to walk back and forth between the county seat, carrying the heavy products and items purchased on their back. It would take more than two hours each way. Elder villagers, especially women like Aunt Tang, who mainly stayed at home to take care of the farmlands and children, only went to the county seat a few times before the earthquake. Most of them never went to big cities like Dujiangyan or Chengdu. Jiafu, my host brother and son of Aunt Tang’s, was one of the drivers who bought the first minivan of Dongmen Village in late 2009.

Wenchuan County seat is the major market place where most of the Longxi villagers go shopping and do business. Many of them sell their agricultural products there,

48 and purchase other essential daily items such as rice, flour, beans, condiments, clothes, and shoes. The county seat is the center of local finance and affairs, as well. During my fieldwork, I went to the county seat several times to interview county officials and participate in county-wide events, treat myself and close friends to a good meal, and buy presents, usually candies, cake and bread, cigarettes, brand rice wine, and household items, for the villagers. With a fifteen-minute minivan ride along the mountain road, I finally arrived at the gate of Longxi Township, a small, obscure, and remote mountain township of northwestern Wenchuan County where more than 98 percent of the 4000 or so villagers were identified as ethnic Qiang in 2013.

Longxi is named after the Longxi Creek, literally meaning “dragon creek” in

Mandarin Chinese, which runs through the rolling hills inside of the township. Longxi

Creek merges into the Zagu’nao River, a tributary of the Min River. Min River, in turn, is an upper reach of the Yangtze River. Yangtze, the longest river of China, has historically been viewed as the cradle of Chinese civilization. The mountainous upper-reach region of the Min River, located in the northern part of Sichuan, has long been a major inhabitance area of the Qiang. Same as many other Qiang in this area, villages inside Longxi are perched on high alpine valleys. David C. Graham, the first Qiang scholar from the United

States who conducted field research around Longxi between the 1920s and 1940s, writes,

“The valleys of the rivers and streams are narrow, and the mountains high and steep.

Altitudes vary from less than 5,000 to over 18,000 feet above sea level” (1958:1). The elevation of the Longxi Township, for example, is between 1,500 and 2,780 meters.

Seated at the foot of a green mountain and by the side of the Longxi Creek, Dongmen

Village is the first village to welcome visitors into Longxi. Altogether, Longxi consists of

49 nine administrative villages. Lianhe Village, which contains Dongmen and other two sub- villages, and Bulan Village are the two of the lowest altitudes and closest to the highway.

Along the mountains on both sides of the Longxi Creek, there are Madeng, E’bu, Kuapo,

Zhitai, E’er, Damen, and Longxi villages, where the last three are seated on mountain tops above 2,500 meters high.

Longxi’s Ecological Risks

Longxi Township is located in an earthquake-prone area. In a broader sense,

China, as a whole, is one of the most seismically active countries ridden with frequent, heavy earthquakes. The country is located in the southeastern part of the Eurasian plate, which is constantly “clamped” by the Indian Ocean plate, the Pacific plate and the

Philippine plate and falls in between the Circum-Pacific seismic belt and the Alpine-

Himalayan seismic zone. Since the Mesozoic and Cenozoic Eras, the uplifting of the western Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and squatting of the South Sea in the east have made the land of China into “broken mosaics” (Teng et al. 2008:1386). Sichuan Province is in the middle range of the Chinese North-South Seismic Zone where the high-rising Qinghai-

Tibet Plateau (average altitude>4000 meters) in the western region and the low-lying

South China Block (average altitude 1000~2000 meters) in the east have been in constant collision, making Sichuan a seismically active province throughout history. Wenchuan

County is named after the Wen River which is now called the Min River. It is located in the 30°45’-31°43’ degrees north latitude and 102°51’-103°44’ degrees east longitude. It sits in the Chinese North-South Seismic Zone; on a smaller scale, Wenchuan County is within the Longmenshan Fault Zone on the border of the eastern boundary of the

Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and Sichuan Basin.

Earthquake has been a frequent hazard agent in this region. According to Teng and colleagues (2008:1387), there were 275 earthquakes (Magnitude≥4.8) in Sichuan since 26 AD, among which 18 were heavy earthquakes (7~7.9 magnitude), and 48 big earthquakes (6~6.9 magnitude). Averagely one earthquake took place in every 10 to 15 years. Specifically in the Longmenshan Fault Zone, there were already 4 heavy earthquakes (7~7.9 magnitude) and 14 big ones (6~6.9 magnitude) since 1713. As

Sichuan Earthquake Data Compilation (1981) reveals, a heavy earthquake (magnitude>7) would take place in every 30 to 50 years in the Longmenshan Fault Zone with numerous smaller earthquakes (cited in Zhang 2008:66). Each heavy earthquake, as the written record reveals, brought a large death toll and tremendous material damages. Researchers have collectively agreed that the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake was also caused by the uplifting movement of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau under the northwestern push of the

Indian Plate. When such a powerful movement was strongly resisted by the Sichuan

Basin and South China Block, drastic ruptures took place in the Longmenshan Fault Zone, fatally affecting people and villages in the Qiang-concentrated Wenchuan, Maoxian,

Lixian, and Beichuan counties, among other places.

Comparing to earthquakes, flooding, landslides and mudslides are much more frequent hazards in Longxi. The climate of the Longxi Valley changes from rainy to dry between the higher-altitude areas and the lower regions. The average annual precipitation is 518.8 mm. Longxi Creek and its 20 some tributaries pose constant flooding threat to the villages. According to Longxi Township Annals (2004:21-22), Longxi Creek originates from a mountain lake at the boarder of northern Wenchuan County and

Maoxian County at an altitude of around 4300 meters, and runs across the Longxi Valley

51 until merging into the Za’gunao River at an altitude of around 1500 meters.

The upper reach of the Longxi River is covered by virgin forests with lush vegetation and abundant water resource, which also has heavier rainfall than the lower- reach area. Plus, Longxi Valley is very deep and narrow. In this case, heavy rainfall and rising river flow can easily form flooding directly affecting low-lying villages on both sides of the valley. There is sparse vegetation but numerous bare rocks along the steep mountain edges; the soil erosion is very serious. The unregulated forest cutting in the past further made the region more susceptible to mudslides. Data collected in the Longxi

Village Annals (2004:4-10) show that between 1929 and 2000, three major mudslides and three heavy floods caused serious loss and damage to human lives, land and houses. In the meantime, only one heavy earthquake (1934) was recorded, along with three minor ones (magnitude<2.5). Additionally, throughout years of tearing, folding, extrusion, and dislocation due to the crustal movements, Wenchuan’s rock formation, including that of the Longxi Valley, has become extremely fragmented and crumbling, leading to frequent mudslides, landslides, and ground fissures in the mountain valleys.

The Wenchuan Earthquake again heavily shook and broke Longxi’s rock formation; flooding and mudslides have become annual hazards in this region. Almost every summer since then, flooding and mudslides of various degrees would take place in

Longxi. In the summer, I went with village officials and ordinary villagers several times to those high-risk areas to closely monitor the flooding. Loud sounds of falling rocks and running water often woke me up at night. Roads to the mountain-top villages were constantly blocked by mudslides; many villagers lost their farmlands and livestock to the disaster. In summer 2013, after three days of heavy rains, one of the worst mudslides in

Wenchuan’s history hit various villages and the nearby Maoxian and Lixian counties.

The newly-constructed Dujiangyan-Wenchuan highway was broken up by rolling stones and washing muds. Similar to the post-Wenchuan Earthquake situation, Wenchuan

County turned into an “isolated island” extremely difficult for outside relief resources to enter. Longxi Village was left without electricity or tap water for a week. In addition, drought is a constant threat to Longxi villagers during the dry seasons. The lack of vegetation on the mountain ridges and the inadequate irrigation facilities have frequently caused drought in this agricultural township.

Frequent flooding, mudslide and drought have more to do with the improper use of land and lack of protection of the virgin forests than the geophysical structure of the mountain valley. As the Longxi Township Annals (2004:25) states, “Due to the historically destructive lumbering of forest which severely destroyed the ecological balance, Longxi Township suffers from constant flooding and mudslide.” Shibi Beimen

Yu, who has spent his whole life in E’er Village on the mountain top where the widest forest of Longxi is located, clearly remembered how, in the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of trees were cut down and transported to the outside. Shibi Yu told me, “Each day, a number of trucks would arrive in the morning and leave fully loaded with lumbers in the afternoon. Most of the drivers and all their bosses were outsiders. A few villagers were later hired to drive the trucks. They said that the lumber was sold in Chengdu and even more distant cities. Anyway, the locals did not benefit much from the lumber business, but witnessed the disappearance of large areas of forests.”

During that period, with the booming construction business in big cities, the lumber business was the major revenue for the local government. Realizing the

53 destructive effects of the deforestation, the local government issued strict orders against excessive lumbering in the 1980s that only those with governmental permits could get timber from the forests. However, flooding and mudslides were already threatening

Longxi’s safety. Unregulated land reclamation along the hillside also caused the quick loss of soil, forest, and grass land. Most of the upper-level areas of the mountains became rocky and barren. Not until the late 1990s was the official “Conversion of Degraded Farm

Land into Forest and Grass Land Project” (tuigeng huanlin 退耕还林) implemented in

Sichuan, when mountain peasants were asked to turn their reclaimed farmlands back to forests, and so proportionately compensated for their loss. However, Lin Jun, Longxi’s

Deputy Party Secretary mainly in charge of the agricultural and forestry development of

Longxi, confessed to me that merely planting trees did not solve the deforestation problem for two main reasons. One was that the wrong trees were transplanted to Longxi which could not tolerate the dry weather and did not grow well; on the other hand, there was no adequate irrigation system to water the trees. Many of them died in the first year after being transplanted. The conservation project ended up wasting a great sum of money and resources annually.

Anthropologists are concerned with how certain hazardous agents turn into life- threatening disaster in specific context (see Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 2002). An investigation of local community life can help us understand the alarming differences between risk and disaster. The former refers to the potential hazardous agents, and the latter the massive damage in human lives and property actually caused by such hazardous agents. Many factors can prevent the hazardous agents from destroying people’s lives, while many others can accelerate such transformation. For people living in high-rise or

54 less sturdy buildings of densely-populated cities, earthquakes can be deadly events. After an 8.1-magnitude earthquake, the most deadly disaster in Nepal’s history since 1934, hit the country in 2015, a news report titled, “Nepal Earthquake: a disaster that shows quakes don’t kill people, buildings do” (Cross 2015), which reveals that improper human activities and interventions were the main cause of the earthquake destruction.

During my interview with a Qiang scholar and native Longxi, Professor G, she carefully suggested that I study if the villagers really treated the earthquake threat the same as the outsiders did, and if earthquake threats were the biggest concern of the villagers at all. Provoked by her inquires and following the suggestion of professor

William Balée at Tulane, I used the method of free listing, asking villagers to list all the disasters they knew about in Longxi during my fieldwork. Free listing turned out to be a very powerful method which probed informants to list as many items in a domain as possible instead of settling for just a few (see Bernard 2006:301-305). More importantly, by studying the sequence and frequency of the items listed by the informants, one can infer the degree of importance and frequency of each item. Altogether I got responses from 37 elder villagers (age≥45) out of the 200 or so resident villagers in Dongmen. They collectively listed flooding, mudslides, drought, earthquake, insect plague, frozen land, and epidemic diseases as items of disaster. Of the 37 responses, 33 of them ranked flooding and mudslides as the No. 1 and No. 2 hazards of which they could think, four of them ranking mudslide as No. 1 and flooding as No. 2. Drought took the 3rd place in 17 responses. Interestingly, 27 out of the 37 responses claimed that before the 2008

Wenchuan Earthquake, earthquake damage was barely heard of in Longxi, and of the 10 responses placing earthquake at the 3rd place, seven of them referring to the Wenchuan

Earthquake. Finally, insect plague was only mentioned in 10 of the responses, and regarded as much less frequent or destructive than the other four hazards. A 91-year-old grandfather told me, “The flooding in 1958 was the worst of all. I sat in this house watching all the bridges on the Longxi Creek being crashed and washed down by the river. The water line almost reached the mills on the bank.” Another informant said, “I remember vividly the heavy rain and flooding about 30 years ago. I was herding the ox with my daughter on the mountain when the hailstorm came. Out of nowhere a wide and forceful flood rushed down the narrow gullies, breaking a big house in half in just a few minutes. All of the farmlands were destroyed. I was scared to death!” Varied experiences and perceptions of the multiple hazards, in this case, led to different localized strategies and techniques to prevent and mitigate disaster damages.

In the case of the Qiang, they live in the earthquake-zone. However, they seldom suffer from the earthquake damage. There are several reasons which make earthquakes less threatening than flooding and landslides to Longxi villagers besides the low frequency of earthquakes. One is that the Qiang settlements tend to be very scattered, with a comparatively low population density. Longxi’s nine administrative villages distantly sit along the high mountains; each administrative village occupies large area of hill land but contains a population of a few thousand. When the Wenchuan Earthquake hit, many Longxi villagers recalled either working on the farmland or visiting friends in open yards, which allowed them to have a safe place until the earthquake passed. In this case, when an earthquake strikes such regions, comparing with densely populated cities and towns, fewer villagers may be hurt and less damage would be recorded. The Qiang traditional architecture style is seismic-resistant in many ways. Qiang people have created

56 and continued a unique architectural style in building domestic houses and an underground drainage system. Traditional Qiang houses are built with overlaying wide, flat stone pieces and locally-found yellow mud as adhesive. The overlaying techniques tremendously increase the quake-resistant capacity of the houses. The spaces between stone pieces are tightly filled with mud, protecting the house from rain, wind, or snow damage. The stone houses are very sturdy and comfortable, cool in summer and warm in winter. In addition, Longxi villagers are very careful about the location selection and construction procedures when building new houses, making sure that the construction takes place on a blissful time and in a non-offensive location based on the calculations of shibi, the ritual specialists.

Few measures have been taken to effectively mitigate the frequent flooding and mudslide in this region, which severely and repeatedly damage people’s lives and limit their development. After the Wenchuan Earthquake, various measures and investments were taken to mitigate and prevent earthquake damage in this region, while flooding and mudslides were unfortunately ignored. In this region, two major flooding and mudslide disasters already took place within 6 years after the Wenchuan Earthquake. This demonstrates that the high-profile and large-investment post-earthquake recovery project did not effectively help mitigate major environmental risks that threaten the Longxi villagers.

Pre-Earthquake Socio-political Vulnerability

A survey of the socio-political marginalization of the Longxi villagers is essential for the comprehensive understanding of the mutuality of environment and social life, tradition and adaptation, local struggle and broader influence. Similar to many other

57 economically-vulnerable communities, poverty was the haunting ghost and lingering plague for Longxi villagers prior to the earthquake. In Graham’s eyes, the Qiang were ridden by poverty caused by isolation and lack of transportation. He writes, “The poorer of the Ch’iang people are generally underclothed and underfed. On the other hand, the

Ch’iang are an industrious and hard-working people, and men, women, and children join in the work of supporting the family” (1958:11). Research has shown that poorer communities are more susceptible to natural disaster damage than their affluent counterparts mainly because they have fewer means or resources to adapt to or recover from environmental risk and destruction (see Bankoff 1999). Yet poverty needs to be understood as a historical process where multiple interacting geographic, economic, social, and political factors collectively deepen the swamp of straits and suffering.

Before the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake, Longxi was the Prefecture-level poverty- stricken township of Wenchuan. In dog-eared photos taken before the earthquake, most of the stone-and-dirt houses in Dongmen villages looked shabby, badly-maintained, and worn-out. All the village paths were dirt which could easily get dusty on sunny days or muddy on rainy ones. The traditional long-gowns that people wore were patched, faded, and dirty. There was no clean piped water or drainage system in any of the villages.

Electricity was often cut off in villages of higher altitude. In 2007, Longxi’s average annual net income was only 2300 RMB ($370) per capita, half of the national level for rural residents. If the Wenchuan Earthquake was the physical cause of the disaster, poverty was one of the root causes of the unavoidable and unbearable destruction and damage. Specifically, Longxi’s poverty can be analyzed mainly through the following three aspects: the single economic structure, encroachment of the market economy, and

58 transportation limitation.

An isolated agriculture-concentrated community, Longxi was long suffering from its single economic structure. A majority of the earthquake-affected areas were “haunted by economic instability.…the alpine plateau areas suffer comparatively small economic scale with a single industrial structure and a concentrated poverty-stricken population”

(Chinese State Council 2008:7). Agriculture was the predominant source of income for a township located in the remote mountainous valley. A few families relied on oxen and sheep husbandry as their primary sources of income, with additional revenue from collecting medicinal corps. For agricultural communities like the Longxi Qiang villages, the importance of land cannot be emphasized enough. However, there was not much flat, arable land in Longxi. Longxi Township Annals (2004:1) records that 90 percent of the land there was dry, hilly land, while the 10 percent flat, arable land concentrates around the mouth of the Longxi Creek. Another major source of income for the villagers was the wild medicinal crops such as caterpillar fungus, notopterygium roots, and Sichuan fritillary bulbs. Every spring and summer, groups of villagers would climb up the mountains searching for the precious crops and sell them in the market or to outside vendors. In Dongmen Village, the average household land area was less than 2 mu (1333 square meters) before 2008. With much of the land recently used for planting cherry trees in many Dongmen families, very little was saved for producing staple corps or vegetables.

Average household land area in villages of higher altitude could exceed 10 mu (6666 square meters), but most is dry, hilly land recently used to plant plum trees. Dongmen villagers often complained how little land they had and how little money they made comparing with those living higher up, especially as the plum price picked up quickly.

Many Dongmen villagers reclaimed wild land along the hillside.

In recent years, the economic structure and livelihood of the local Qiang have changed from being largely self-sufficient to more and more dependent on the fluctuating market and exchange with the outside world. Previously, highland barley, buckwheat, wheat, corn and potatoes grown locally in the mountainous region were the villagers’ staple foods. Rice is rarely grown in Longxi. It cannot be planted in the high-altitude villages; the wind is too strong in low-lying villages for rice to grow. Gradually influenced by the neighboring Han dietary habits, more and more villagers began to purchase rice and flour, new staple food for many Qiang there, in Wenchuan county seat; corns and potatoes were mainly grown as food for pigs. Since the early 1990s, many villagers, drawn to the high-price vegetables such as cabbages and green peppers, started to plant them in the fields previously reserved for staple crops. In all the villages that I visited, no villager planted any highland barley or other kinds of wheat. They even had to purchase the highland barley from other places when it was needed for making the locally-beloved barley wine for festivals and other rituals. Gradually, villagers’ annual income was heavily influenced by the rise and fall of the prices of the cash crops, and their daily consumptions and economic development also profoundly rely on the outside market.

Take the life of Aunt Tang’s family as an example. What they grew in their limited field was corn for pigs (which are often not enough and they have to buy extra corns to feed the two pigs they raise), vegetables for sale, tourism, and self-consumption, as well as apple, pear, and cherry trees. The special breed of the American cherries was first introduced to Wenchuan by the local Department of Agriculture in the early 2000.

These cherry trees need an average of seven to ten years to bear edible fruits. As soon as the Wenchuan cherries appeared on the market in late 2000s, they instantly became the best seller for their pure sweet taste, bright red color, and well-rounded shape. A kilo of

Wenchuan cherries cost as much as 50 yuan ($7.4) in the prime time in 2014, whose price was almost five times higher than that of the native breed. Since then, cherries have become the most important cash fruit for many Dongmen villagers, including Aunt

Tang’s family, who were smart and lucky enough to plant the trees in the early years of introduction.

The variety of foods consumed by Aunt Tang’s family, including rice, flour, fresh meat, chicken, duck, fish, tofu, peanuts, green vegetables, wine, and many other items, were all purchased in Wenchun County seat mainly by Jiafu driving his minivan. Every day, a mini-truck brought several kinds of pancakes, fresh meat, and vegetables to sell in different villages of Longxi. From time to time, mini-trucks selling starchy deserts, bedding items, and clothing would also visit Longxi. Additionally, villagers had to purchase the seeds, pesticides, fertilizers, farming tools, and transportation means from the market. With the rising price of all the production materials and cost of living, villagers’ lives can be disastrously affected once the sales of the crops, vegetables, fruits, and tourism go down.

Transportation is thus vital for Longxi villagers’ survival and development. But it has also long been the biggest obstacle. Rev. Thomas Torrance, one of the first English missionaries in the region, writes, “The rivers there flow through great erosions or glens.

The mountain-sides are precariously steep. Access to high farm lands and grazing plateaus is often extremely difficult” (1988:20). Generations of Longxi villagers had to

61 walk to the county seat and other places along the various mountain trails before the only

317 National Highway connecting Longxi and the outside world was built. One villager of Longxi’s high-altitude Damen Village recalled that it would take him, a young and healthy man, a whole day walking down the mountains to the county seat and return.

Horses and simple three-wheeled moto-cars, for a long time, were the only “luxurious” transportation means. The same villager commented, “This is my ancestral land.

Although it is high up here and almost barren, I have no other place to live.”

As years go by, Longxi’s vegetables as well as presently booming cherry and tourism businesses are extremely dependent on the availability and accessibility of the only national highway connecting Longxi to the outside world. Having only one highway, however, renders the villagers terribly vulnerable. When the Wenchuan Earthquake hit and completely destroyed the national highway, Longxi was left helpless and resource- less until the first troops of the armed forces marched there with blistered feet. In 2010 when the national highway was again destroyed by mudslides, researchers in Longxi observed, “Several trucks fully loaded with green peppers and cabbages were queuing along the highway waiting for it to be fixed. After one or two days at most, the peppers and cabbages started to rot. Villagers had no other way but threw the rotten food on the road or into the raging river despite of great emotional pain and reluctance. The year-long hard work and the biggest hope of each family were all gone for nothing” (Yang and

Jiang 2012:22). After the earthquake, many villagers invested in tourism business as

Longxi was transformed into a Qiang heritage site. However, the new enterprise is also heavily dependent on transportation convenience. As Yang and Jiang conclude (2012:22),

“Losing the previously self-sufficient and self-controlling economic life, [Longxi]

62 villages changed from being the [economic] ‘center’ to the ‘periphery’ as an agricultural production base, the bottom level of the market economy” (author’s original quotation marks).

Political Marginalization of the Longxi Qiang

Whenever talking about lives in the past, the usually cheerful Aunt Tang would turn sad. “I was hungry and overworked as long as I could remember. I labored in the field all the time but there wasn’t enough corn to feed me or my children. The house was dark and dirty. For a long while, we didn’t have the luxury of using electricity. I was dirty and only had few patched clothes. The price for the cabbages got lower and lower every year until I totally gave it up. When my husband died 20 or so years ago, life became even worse,” she told me. Jiafu still remembered his middle-school graduation day when his mother told him that he could no longer attend school. “I was one of the best students, but I knew my family could not support me anymore. I farmed in the field and exhausted myself with heavy manual labor in Wenchuan and Dujiangyan, but was still too poor to marry Meilin. I borrowed a big sum of money for my marriage; the debt made my life even more difficult. You can never imagine how hard life was for me. You will never know how much bitterness I have suffered,” Jiafu told me at the dinner table after a few glasses of cherry wine. As Graham (1958:11) keenly observed half a century ago, “To most of the Ch’iang people, the economic problem, that of earning a livelihood, with plenty to eat and to wear, and of keeping out of debt, is a difficult one, and the results are sometimes in doubt.” It is heart-breaking to learn that lives of the Longxi Qiang hardly improved in the passing years.

Jiafu’s recount reveals the customary practice of the Qiang working as migrant

63 workers elsewhere to add to their family income. Locally this practice is called “looking for money” (zhaoqian 找钱), and the Qiang, mainly the males, usually look for the extra money by “going down to the plain” (xiaba 下坝) (see also Wang 2008:23). As early as the West Han Dynasty (202BC-8AD), “to be employed in Sichuan regions”

(rushuweiyong 入蜀为佣) was already a popular means of living for many Qiang (Geng

2010:100 and 158, Shi 2008:6). The Sichuan regions mainly referred to Han-dominated places south of the province. Qiang villagers were hired for house work, tea bag carriers, and other manual work. As Geng explains (2010:158), the harsh environment and cold weather made lives of the Qiang extremely difficult in winter. Many of them had to find jobs in other places to subsidize families. Such a practice, as I will discuss below, is also a vivid demonstration of the marginalization of the Qiang in their constant communication and exchange with the neighboring groups, particularly the Han.

The Upper Reach area of the Min River has historically been inhabited by a mixture of several ethnic groups, mainly the Tibetans, Qiang, Hui and Han.

Geographically the Qiang live between major settlements of the Tibetans to the northwest and those of the Han to the southeast. Wang Mingke’s influential monograph Qiang between the Han and the Tibetan (2008) analyzes how the Qiang construct their identity through historical interacting and sensitive distancing from the two powerful neighboring groups. As Wang observes (2008:72), the Tibetan influence is the heaviest in the western and northern Qiang villages, and that of the Han the heaviest in the southern and eastern areas, where the Qiang in those different regions show distinct “cultural preferences” towards the Tibetans or the Han, respectively. Such cultural influences are discernible in people’s languages, clothing, customs, and identity perceptions.

The Qiang of Wenchuan County, who live the closest among all Qiang groups to major Han settlements to the south, have been heavily influenced by cultures and traditions of the Han, while maintaining their own characteristics (Wang 2008:8). For example, after the migration, the Qiang in this region gradually changed from herdsmen to agriculturalists due to the change of the environment and influence of their Han neighbors, although animal husbandry was widely retained. Exchanges of goods— husbandry animals, agricultural products and labor—and farming techniques between the

Qiang and Han were promoted during the process. The Qiang were also acculturated with the Han tradition, particularly Confucius, Taoist, and Buddhist thinking (Geng 2010:100,

Li, Ran and Zhou, 1980). Wang (2008:72-73) discovered that at Wenchuan Qiang’s family shrines and daily worship, the Han customs of worshiping Han gods Guanyin and

Yuhuang, as well as Han temples, are widely practiced, replacing the northern Qiang’s worship of mountain gods. Just behind the gate of Longxi, a small shrine of the Songzi

Guanyin (the goddess who sends offspring to families) was kept and worshiped by local villagers; burning incense, paper money, and fruits were constantly offered there. Elder villagers of Dongmen also showed me relics of the Guanyin Temple, destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, on a hill at the back of the village. In contemporary Longxi, almost everyone is fully bilingual with the Qiang language and Sichuan dialect except for villagers of Lianhe and Bulan, who live at the gate of the township along the highway and have the most frequent contact with the Han merchants and travelers. Most of them only speak Sichuan dialect, but are able to understand basic Qiang.

When comparing themselves to the Han, some of the Dongmen villagers felt less confident of being “civilized.” Xueqing is Aunt Tang’s niece and next door neighbor.

One afternoon when I was chatting with her in her front yard, she suddenly asked, “Are you accustomed to our lives here? You must find here very backward.” “No, I like it here,” I said. “You are being too kind,” She said, “I know what the Chengdu people call us—gougou man (barbarians of the valley 沟沟蛮), and you guys are the civilized people of the plain (baba ren 坝坝人).” Instantly I was drawn to her comment. “What are the gougou man like?” I asked with a teasing tone. Without a hesitation, she replied,

“Manman (barbarians 蛮蛮) like us speak a different language and live in the mountains, who are poor, cut-off, illiterate, and vulgar (tuqi 土气). You Chengdu people often laugh at and look down upon us.” Her frankness left me speechless. I was even more intrigued for the fact that this conversation took place in the front yard of her newly-rebuilt three- story house, popularly known as the “foreign house” (yangfang 洋房) by fellow villagers because her son built a half-circled balcony on the second floor with the western-style carved concrete fences. I once asked why his son decided to build a “foreign” balcony for them. Xueqing’s husband answered, “My son has worked as a migrant worker (dagong

打工) at the construction sites in the east coast for a few years. He decided to build something new and fashionable here in the village.” After the earthquake, Xueqing and her husband quickly opened up a variety store inside their house, selling food items and renting Qiang costumes for tourists to try on and take pictures. They are, to me, very

“modern” and shrewd people.

From Xueqing’s definition one can see that geographic difference—valley versus plain, literacy, and economic status, which together constitute what she means by

“civilized,” are major criteria distinguishing the Qiang from the Han. As one of his informants told Wang back in the 1990s, “Ethnic groups (minzu 民族) live upon the

66 mountains, and the Han occupy the plains.” Another Wang’s elder informant said, “…We can only make marks on the trees, but the Han are strange that they can carve letters on the stones” (Wang 2008:70). “Ethnic groups” here, as the informant later explained to

Wang, meant all the ethnic minority groups who lived in the mountains, not like the Han who mainly lived in cities or county seats. Also Wang argues (2008:70), “The Han have writing system, but the ‘ethnic groups’ do not. This is the crucial distinction between

‘ethnic groups’ and the Han in the minds of many natives.” The Qiang do not have a written language. Limited resources and difficult transportation due to geographical difficulties also render the economic discrepancy. “Generally speaking, the more southeastern the areas are, the better economy they have; lives get poorer and harder in areas to the northern and western parts due to the high altitude and coldness. Thus, people in this region collectively think that the northerners are poor, dirty and violent, and that the plain people are richer but more cunning,” Wang concludes (2008:73).

For the Qiang, being an ethnic minority has long put them in a disadvantageous place. Qiang identity and culture were seen as a mixed-blessing by Longxi villagers particularly before the earthquake. Many of them acknowledged that they were very different from the neighboring Han, mostly in self-condemning ways. They speak a heavily-accented Sichuan dialect that can be hard even for me, a native Chengdu person, to understand. They have special terms for many things; whenever they used them and found me confused, they would apologize for using the tu hua (local words 土话). Many times I explained my plan to learn Qiang language, and they often replied that it was not worth the effort since so few people used it. The language barrier becomes one salient obstacle to many Qiang’s achievement and self-evaluation. Speaking a different language,

67 or speaking the same dialect with a different and most times discriminated accent, can place the speakers into a lower educational and cultural status comparing to their interlocutors (see Hymes 1973, Labov 2006). Oftentimes Dongmen villagers told me that it was hard for the outsiders to understand their dialect, which left them little chance to bargain a better price for their goods or labor. Once they spoke, outsiders would instantly know that they were from ethnic regions of A’ba, thus treating them as manman. Ethnic dialect and ethnic culture often share a mutual identity; if the Qiang identity is termed strange or unfamiliar, speaking Sichuan dialect with a Qiang accent or speaking Qiang is also negatively regarded.

Many of the elder women and men (age > 50) of Dongmen are illiterate. Most of the men and women at their 40s only finished primary school; very few of them graduated from middle school. One evening, a group of elder villagers gathered in the front yard of Xueqing’s house when Aunt Tang took out a written announcement of

Spring Festival Safety Tips she received that afternoon. Aunt Tang was going to ask everyone there to read it one after another. Aunt Xu instantly said, “I cannot read. Little

Zhang, please read it for us.” Several other men and women laughed and seconded her suggestion. With pleasure I read the announcement for the entire group. While I was reading it, several of them seemed to enjoy it very much, and cheerfully commented,

“She reads so fast and fluently of all those words!” After my reading, Aunt Xu added, “It is my first time knowing what an announcement really says.” Her remark aroused another wave of laughter. That was the very moment that I realized how much difference an education could make on people’s status and self-esteem. Instead of feeling proud of my own literacy, I was saddened by the very fact that this group of diligent, kind, and

68 actually very capable men and women could immediately be belittled by non-literacy in the eyes of outsiders.

There were only two primary schools in the entire Longxi Township before the earthquake where most of the teachers were native Qiang with middle-school education.

According to the villagers, outside teachers would not want to work in this remote, ethnic township anyway. Even after the earthquake reconstruction, there is only one primary school in Longxi, and one middle school in Wenchuan county seat. Students from Longxi have to live on campus during the week and only go home at the weekends, causing an extra cost for their families. Many people of Jiafu’s generation had to drop off school because of economic constraints; several younger students of his daughter’s age, however, dropped off school for both economic and social issues. Living away from home at a young age without adequate parental or teacher guidance, many of such students quit schooling to work as manual labors in and outside Wenchuan, which, in their eyes, allowed them to make money and be independent, no matter how little or hard it was, as early as possible. Language and education greatly constrained the villagers’ access to outside, possibly better work opportunities. Most of the males could only find jobs in factories or on construction sites. Many of the women lived in Longxi all their lives, being peasants. After becoming good friends with my neighbor, Qingyan, a thirty-year- old native Bulan villager who married into Dongmen with two kids, I asked her once if she wanted to work outside instead of being a peasant here. She replied, “Where can I work? I am a primary-school graduate, have never even been to Chengdu, and do not know anybody in the cities. No good place would hire me.”

During my first month living with Aunt Tang’s family, Meilin was constantly

69 apologizing to me for the “poor” food and living conditions because theirs was a nongcun difang (countryside place 农村地方), non-comparable to that of the cities. Even though to me, their house was the ideal summer vacation hideout one ever desires. From time to time, Aunt Tang would apologize to me about how dirty the house was, saying that the

Qiang were well-known for being dirty and untidy comparing with the city-dwelling Han, although she cleaned the house first thing every morning. My adviser Nick likes to joke about how every Chinese was apologizing to him when he first went to China, although most of time they did nothing wrong. Even I apologized too much to him, and he often had to “beg” me to stop. I did not really understand what he meant until I went to

Dongmen and heard too many apologies. I understand that as my hosts, Aunt Tang’s family were very humble and kind people who tried their best to provide me a comfortable living environment. But I also notice that widely shared perceptions of the sharp differences between the city and the countryside, the Han culture and ethnic culture, brought a sense of shame and self-depreciation to many villagers. Such cultural differences could lead to imbalanced power relations, where villagers felt that they were not as good as many others. Through the apologies not only did the villagers consciously acknowledge their “lower” hygienic, cultural and political status than the Han outsiders, they also unconsciously expressed their inability and helplessness to change the status quo, which further increased their shame and condemnation. Their apologies in retrospect also seemed to be a strategy to lower expectations for the outsider or foreigner.

Born and raised in this remote township, poorly-educated, speaking a heavily accented dialect, and constantly feeling ashamed for being unpleasantly different, many

Longxi villagers told me that they were extremely “socially awkward.” Each of them,

70 however, perceived their “awkwardness” in different ways. As reflected in Xueqing’s comments, the Qiang tended to think that they were too honest and sometimes clumsy.

The Qiang folk stories of Zhoucang and Menghuo are all about the Qiang’s failure in dealing with the shrewd Han. Zhoucang, a robust yet inept man, was repeatedly tricked by the “ruling class” (in the Qiang informant’s wording)—the Han. Menghuo, on the other hand, lost to the Han enemies due to his stupid mistakes, which led to the Qiang’s return to the mountains.

The above descriptions collectively illustrate the image of the Qiang as strange- looking, less-educated, and socially-marginalized mountain “barbarians.” Qingyan and

Lijuan often said to me that many things they do were xiaoren (funny, awkward 笑人).

Qingyan was always too quick to admit that she did not know much, and that her life was boring whenever I tried to ask her to tell me her stories. Lijuan, however, who traveled with her husband quite often to outside towns and cities, liked to comment on how differently funny Longxi people talk, dress, and behave comparing with outsiders. Jiafu was on the one hand too shy to negotiate the rates with his customers and often accepted whatever they paid him, but on the other hand frequently complained how the tourists took advantage of him because they discriminated against the rural Qiang. Aunt Tang, famously or infamously known in the village for her loud voice and short temper, would change into a different person when hosting the tourists, being extremely quiet, accommodating, and patient. This so-called social awkwardness, or nervousness in socialization, again demonstrates the social distance between the Qiang and the outside, dominantly Han communities. Although communications and exchanges among the local

Qiang villages and outside communities have been going on for decades, the social

71 distance due to the lack of mutual understanding of cultural practices, as well as the imbalanced economic, educational, and political power relations, is the deep reason that alienates the Qiang from the neighboring groups, perpetuating their status as the “ethnic other.”

Conclusion

This chapter reveals the historical vulnerability and marginality of the Qiang in

Longxi Township. Inspired by Oliver-Smith and Hoffman’s (1999:20) advocacy of studying the “life history of disaster” (see also Oliver-Smith 1992), this chapter explores and explains the pre-earthquake conditions of the Longxi Qiang. It focuses on the various risks and predicaments, environmentally induced and socio-politically created, facing

Longxi villagers. It leads readers into the life world of the Qiang before the earthquake, understanding the earthquake in the context of the everyday life and vernacular practice.

Specifically, it analyzes four crucial aspects which collectively make up the life world of the Longxi Qiang. The first two aspects are the environmental challenges and frequent hazard agents, and the villagers’ localized conceptual framework towards risk and disaster. The Qiang’s political, economic, and social vulnerability is explained through the discussion of their means of livelihood and economic development, everyday challenges of social security and sustainable livelihood, and the complex influence of their ethnic identity.

The Qiang were an ethnic minority group overlooked and marginalized both in public policies and popular discussions before 2008. A native of Sichuan and anthropology student of China, I had barely heard of the existence of the Qiang, or read any extensive books about them, until the Wenchuan Earthquake struck. The Qiang were

72 an isolated and enclosed group for so long that they seemed to be untouched or left-out by any social advancement or modern transformation. Lives of the Qiang told by my own informants in the 2010s seemed to be little different from those told to the early missionaries and fieldworkers at the turn of the 20th century. Because of its small population, marginal status, and relative “quietness” and “peacefulness” comparing with the widely-reported Tibetans or Uyghurs, the Qiang were like a long-forgotten little brother in the big Chinese family before the Wenchuan Earthquake.

The Wenchuan Earthquake, however, brought the Qiang into the national spotlight for the first time where their economic and cultural recovery was heavily emphasized. When the earthquake first brought the Qiang to the public attention, they were reported as the traditional and isolated mountain-dwelling tribes with “primitive” religion and “ancient” customs. This also promoted me to conduct the dissertation research on the politics involved in recovering the “Qiang culture,” the changing representations of and attitudes towards it, and most importantly, how Longxi villagers re-negotiated their relationships with the State, the Han, and other outsider groups. When the Wenchuan Earthquake hit, most anthropologists both in China and abroad found themselves unaware of the Qiang and unable to make sensible judgments about their plight. If the anthropologists and ethnologists knew so little about the Qiang before the earthquake, what could we expect from reconstruction planners, directing officials, founding agencies, and construction consultants and workers—determining forces and dominant donors—to sensitively and sustainably restore and reconstruct the Qiang villages? How did the outpouring of overwhelming material and human reconstruction resources intrude, rescue, and quickly transform the long-closed and heavily-damaged

Qiang communities? What kinds of agency and power did the Qiang have in this confrontation? The following chapters are devoted to exploring the nuances and dynamics involved in the transformed Qiang lives and the reframing of the ethnic culture through the Chinese State-led disaster reconstruction planning, the emergence of disaster, heritage and grateful culture (gan’en wenhua 感恩文化) tourism, as well as the ICH protection campaign after the Wenchuan Earthquake.

Chapter 3 Wenchuan Earthquake Relief

I learned about the Wenchuan Earthquake a few hours after it took place on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. On the Monday morning of May 12th, 2008, I was checking my emails for the last time before leaving for my first and only archaeology field school in the prehistoric Mississippian Kincaid Mounds, southern Illinois. A close friend’s email struck me. She anxiously asked if my family were okay because an earthquake just hit Sichuan. She also sent me a news link stating that nearly 10,000 were reported killed by the earthquake. Panicked and dump-founded as ever, I ran to the field- school organizer, informed him of the earthquake, and told him that I needed to call my family first. As the whole team waited for me to make the call, my mind went blank. Too shocked, I could not recall my home numbers; the numbers I dialed every week. My body trembled. “I cannot recall the numbers,” I said to the organizer helplessly, “I need to go home and get my notebook.” He looked at me in an unbelieving and worrying way, and decided to let me go. I went home at a fastest speed, and sat in front of my computer for almost 5 minutes until the numbers came back to me. The first few calls did not go through; a few more went through but no one answered. Tears filled my eyes. After an hour or so, I heard my dad’s tiring voice, the voice which rescued me from the abyss of despair. “We are fine,” My dad assured me, “Your mom, your grand-mom, and I are sleeping in the car in the parking lot tonight as we were asked to evacuate from the apartment. But we are fine. The biggest strike passed. Minor ones took place from time to

75 time.” We spoke for less than 10 minutes before the signal was lost. Gradually I felt like myself again.

To distract myself from the panic and fear, I decided to re-join the team, and rode with another organizer to the field-school site. We started digging the very afternoon. But my mind was unsettling. For the first week or two, I closely followed the news of the earthquake relief and recovery. Like many viewers from a distance, I saw, felt, and

“experienced” the earthquake through various news reports and television programs. In those programs, I heard the rumbling noises of the earth movement and was threatened by the lasting darkness from the video clips taken by cell phones. I could hear the victims screaming, crying, and yelling at the sites of the collapsed buildings and roads. I cried with the parents who lost their children, couples who lost their loved ones, and strangers who lost every piece of their property to the earthquake. I wrote on my personal blog, “I spent the whole week in the field, thinking about what I was doing here with the dirt and everything when thousands of people were dying back home. This is not only about my family. It’s about life, its fragility, brevity, and meaning.”

My panic and sympathy towards the dead and wounded were typical reaction to a major disaster. Yet very quickly my attention and sadness was overwhelmed by a very different kind of reports—the Chinese State’s swift, forceful, and loving relief work in the heavily-stricken regions. Deeply impressed was I to see that Jiabao Wen, then

Chinese Premier, flew to Wenchuan only 90 minutes after it occurred to command the relief efforts. Then I learned the news that the Chinese government dispatched the biggest number of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) since its establishment, more than

100,000 soldiers, to conduct the rescue. Tears ran from my eyes each time when the PLA

76 soldiers saved a wounded victim from the collapsed building using bare hands or simple tools. The most emotional scene of all that I can remember was when Jiabao Wen held an orphaned girl and comforted her that the government would take care of her life. Holding the tearful orphaned girl, Wen emotionally assured her with tears in his own eyes, “Don’t cry! Be assured that the government will take care of you, take care of your life, and take care of your study. Here [the victim camp] will be as warm as your home. The government will take care of you the same way as your family would do.”

The live reports, documentaries, and television programs led me to feel and perceive the earthquake in a different manner. I was steered from fearing or condemning the untimely, destructive, and ruthless earthquake to compassionately appraising the effective, humane, and strong-hearted State relief work. A sense of “fatalistic optimism” touchingly filled my heart (Zhang 2011). The Chinese government successfully transformed the unpredictable risk (weiji 危机) into an optimistic opportunity (jiyu 机遇) to save the people and make their lives better again. The Chinese government’s response to the Wenchuan Earthquake featured a spectacular outpouring of resources for devastated families and communities. The earthquake relief and reconstruction, in turn, was and is a stunning demonstration of the State’s “great love” towards the affected population and communities. “Great love” (da’ai 大爱), on the one hand, refers to the quick and massive influx of the State rescue and reconstruction resources to the affected areas. On the other, it reveals the broad dimension and far-reaching influence of such

State-orchestrated relief efforts where sympathy for the victims and care for the wounded went beyond the boundaries of provinces, ethnicities, and nationalities. This chapter first analyzes the strategies and mechanisms involved in the State earthquake relief. With an

77 investigation of the State-sponsored relief work in Longxi, this chapter argues that the massive Chinese post-Wenchuan Earthquake relief work failed to achieve some of its goals of bringing about sensitive rescue to the affected population.

Massive and Effective State-led Post-Earthquake Relief

Political Structure of the Chinese Earthquake Relief

The Chinese State-led post-Wenchuan Earthquake was being nationally and internationally acclaimed to be timely, massive, and efficient. Many have attributed the success of Chinese earthquake relief to its centralizing political structure which enabled fast decision-making and commanding of massive resources (Patel 2009). However, researchers also point out that due to the fragmented and cellular political structure, orders made by the State Council, for example, could not be implemented effectively by the various ministries and levels of governments. Another problem revealed in the earthquake relief was that the Army Leading Group for Earthquake Relief tended to act on their own, not fully cooperating with the national Earthquake Relief Headquarter

(ERH) (Patel 2009). Chinese disaster relief is strictly managed by the central State, such as in the wake of the Great Tianjin Flood (1963), the Tangshan Great Earthquake (1976), and the January 2008 Blizzard (Edgerton-Tarpley 2014, Paltemaa 2011). The Chinese central authority responded very quickly after the Wenchuan Earthquake. The relief efforts consisted of a complex hierarchy of authorities. A unified leadership—headed by then President Jintao Hu—controlled the overall situation. Within two hours, the Chinese

State Council established the national ERH, Jiabao Wen being the Commander-in-Chief.

The ERH then scheduled and assigned several central ministries, including the Ministry of Public Security, Ministry of Transport, Ministry of Industrial and Information

Technology, and Ministry of Civil Affairs, to join the relief. On the provincial level, the regional governments became the primary relief body, although their authority and capacity were much shadowed by the central government and the PLA (Patel 2009:113).

The PLA and Chinese People’s Armed Police Force (CAPF), under the order of Hu, established the Army Leading Group for Earthquake Relief, which dispatched more than

100,000 soldiers, 1,000 or so warplanes, and a large number of transport and logistic equipment to the affected zones. Such a massive dispatch of Chinese army was of the biggest scale since the establishment of the Communist China in 1959.

On the provincial level and below, army units and militias, as well as people of different work units, led by the unit’s Party leaders, were organized to participate in the rescue. A popular slogan at the scene of the earthquake site was that “the disaster is an order (zaiqing jiushi mingling 灾情就是命令).” Lin Jun, deputy Party Secretary of

Longxi who was working at the Forestry Bureau of Wenchuan County when the earthquake hit, recalled:

After the first hour of panicking and hiding, most of my colleagues gathered in the open ground when the Bureau’s building was heavily damaged. We were separated into different teams to look for fellow colleagues. The Bureau’s Party Secretary became the chief commander. On the next day, Wenchuan Earthquake Relief Headquarter was established. Starting then, we received orders every day to search for, calculate, and report the missing/dead people and damaged properties. Every day, I had to report to my Bureau leader. It was the same as going to work.

Lin continued:

The day after the earthquake, I went to the Keku Elementary School to look for my sister and niece. Destroyed cars and trucks, and corps of those hit by mountain rocks and landslides were everywhere to see along the 317 [National Highway]. It was too miserable to look at; too horrifying to forget. Luckily my sister’s family were fine, and they had plenty to eat in their village up in the mountain. After the first PLA arrived in Wenchuan County seat on the third day, and food and other

relief materials were brought by the PLA or dropped by the helicopters, my main task was to help unload and distribute the materials. The materials were first distributed to the “three-have-not” (sanwu renyuan 三无人员), ordinary villagers and county residents who lost houses, foods, or farmlands in the earthquake. My bureau, as did all other governmental agencies, only got the leftovers, things that nobody wanted. I received a box of bottled water which expired months ago.

The Chinese central government, argues Paltemaa (2011), excels in mass mobilization through campaigns. As soon as the earthquake stroke, the Chinese Central

Television (CCTV) started their instant, massive, and 24-hours live coverage for four days. The series broadcast was named “Fighting against the earthquake; our wills unite like a fortress” (kangzhen jiuzai, zhongzhi chengcheng 抗震救灾, 众志成城). Chinese mass media, at the time, played a crucial role not only in framing the meaning of the event, but also mobilizing such solidarity and compassion to construct particular political and social united-ness. The “wartime rhetoric of disaster” (Edgerton-Tarpley 2014:14-18) adopted by the State media helped mobilize the mass participation where sacrifice and donation for the cause of earthquake relief were expected and extolled. The news coverage and special programs reached the hearts of many Chinese. A nation-wide donation campaign started instantly in which oversea Chinese actively participated. Tens of thousands volunteers quickly joined the earthquake relief, self-organized or managed by governmental or non-governmental organizations. Massive popular outpouring of support was broadcast and advertised on TV, when central officials acted as the leading supporters (see also Makley 2014).

The Overwhelming and Nurturing State

When disaster strikes, the State becomes the primary claim maker of the cause and significance of the unexpected crises in China. One of its first and crucial agendas is to define who is responsible for the disaster, and who should lead the rescue. An

80 important historical research by Kathryn Jean Edgerton-Tarpley (2014) has traced the governing body’s changing responses to disaster in late imperial and modern China (the

Republic of China period) in which it transited its role from nourishing the people to promoting the sacrifice for the nation, exempting the leaders from the blame, and establishing them as commanders in time of calamities with modern technology and abundant aid. According to Edgerton-Tarpley (2014:4), “‘controlling the water’ (zhishui

治水) and ‘nourishing the people’ (yangmin 养民) were key ways for a ruler to demonstrate his moral legitimacy and win the people’s hearts” in ancient China (author’s original quotation marks). For example, the Qiang ancestor and hero, Yu the Great, became one of the most admired legendary Chinese emperors by managing the yearly flooding and protecting people’s lives and crops. Traditionally, Confucian thinkers tended to attribute the outbreak of natural disasters to imperial rulers who lost their

“heaven mandate” (tianming 天命) due to moral degradation or offending the Heavenly gods (Edgerton-Tarpley 2014, Janku 2009, Schneider and Hwang 2014). “Heaven mandate” gave rulers their legitimacy; floods, draughts and famine were ususally considered “heaven-sent disasters” (tianzai 天灾) as results of losing Heaven’s support and signs of dynastic decline (Janku 2009). Elvin (1998:213) calls this popular Confucian thinking “moral meteorology” in which “[t]he emperor’s conduct was of preeminent importance; bureaucrats came in second place; and the common people ranked last.”

Nevertheless, Elvin (ibid) also states that there are several other views on the cause of the disasters, such as blaming the gods and Heaven for their mischievous tempers and behaviors.

The “heaven-centered mode of political criticism” (Edgerton-Tarpley 2014:4) has urged the rulers to put nourishing the people and appeasing Heaven as their primary responsibility (see also Janku 2009, Zhao 2009). When such mission failed, “heaven-sent disasters” would take place and punish them for negligence and apathy. In many cases, imperial edicts and officials acted as “grief-stricken parents of the people” (Edgerton-

Tarpley 2014:6). Some of them would even engaged in worshiping ceremonies and even self-hurting rituals to require Heaven’s forgiveness of their wrongdoings and reaffirm the legitimacy of the Heaven mandate as a way to halt disasters (see Elvin 1998, Janku 2009).

In fighting against famine, for example, there was a long tradition of the emperors conducting paternalistic activism and measurements to alleviate the disaster, showcasing their “paternalistic concern” to the people (Edgerton-Tarpley 2014:6). More importantly, as Janku (2009) points out, even though many of the measurements failed and people still died or suffered from hunger, the self-sacrificial deeds of the governors were highly praised and State activism widely recognized, exempting the rulers from blame or accusation.

Drastic shifting of interpretations of the causes of disaster was witnessed along with the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the birth of the Republic of China in 1912. As

Nedostup (2009) argues, the collapse of the imperial dynasty and cosmological order led people to think that “sovereignty was meant to originate not from the balance of Heaven,

Earth, and Man but from human agency alone” (cited in Edgerton-Tarpley 2014:9). In line with this refreshed treatment of sovereign power, a sweeping modernizing ideological trend, advocated by intellectuals such as Duxiu Chen, also gradually changed the elite view on authority and science. Condemning autocracy, superstition, or divine

82 authority, Chen and others called for adopting scientific and atheist measures to solve social ills. Consequently, argues Edgerton-Tarpley (2014:9-10), disasters were regarded as natural events, and that nature could be tamed by modern science and technology.

Disasters were thus reduced to technical problems to be eventually solved by modern society and natural science.

A crucial change of response to calamity, argues Li and Zhou (1991:14), was that the long-held belief of “examining and blaming oneself” was discarded, and new policies used (cited in Edgerton-Tarpley 2014:9). A changed perception of the state role is thus identified by researchers since the period of the Republic of China that the state has become the leader and manager of disaster relief and recovery. Main task of the state, as

Edgerton-Tarpley (2014: 14-18) argues, has focused on summoning all kinds of resources to fight against disasters, and legitimizing the “wartime rhetoric of disaster” which calls for “a sacred sacrifice” of ordinary people for the nation. As Edgerton-Tarpley (2014:18) thought-provokingly concludes, “The rejection of cosmological interpretations, the emphasis of sacrificing for the nation, the militarization of the language of disaster relief, and the muted attention to victims of the catastrophe” characterize the Chinese State responses to many catastrophes in contemporary China.

As reflected in post-Wenchuan Earthquake recovery, the Party-led State established itself as the powerful and compassionate savior. The Chinese State relief forces consisted of the leadership of central State officials, the huge amount of material and money resources managed by the central State, the massive dispatch of the PLA with unmatched human power, as well as the mass mobilization of ordinary Chinese. The central officials, the PLA, and the material and human resources they commanded

83 became the primary ways in which the Chinese State intervened and managed earthquake recovery. The State intervention of the earthquake relief was first and foremost embodied in the words and deeds of the central State officials. It is very important to study how these leaders presented themselves and, with the help of the mass media, constructed their authority in the relief work. Makley (2014:375) argues that during the Wenchuan

Earthquake relief, “the humanitarianism of PRC leaders refigured as paternal helmsmen of a ‘disaster relief state’” (author’s original quotation marks). Jiabao Wen flew to

Dujiangyan City, one of the heavily devastated sites about 30 kilometers away from the epicenter, 90 minutes after the earthquake hit. The CCTV broadcast a live report of him, in the jet, holding the emergency meeting to deploy the relief work and announcing himself appointed as the commander-in-chief of the national ERH, in a sorrowful yet staunch manner. He stayed in the earthquake zone for 88 hours, walking in the ruins and visiting destroyed towns in the aftershocks, commanding the relief work, comforting the victims, and confirming the care from and power of the central State.

The media closely reported his work. Saving the people was his first command.

As soon as he arrived in the temporary tent in Dujiangyan City and listened to the disaster situation, he was famously quoted in saying, “As long as there is a glimmer of hope, we will pay a hundredfold efforts to save the people.” One of the most touching moments was him kneeing down to comfort a small girl buried in a collapsed building, and saying,

“I’m grandpa Wen. You have to hold on, and you will be saved.” Soon Wen was warmly called “Grandpa Wen” by fellow Chinese, recognizing his humble paternalistic deeds. He was also spotted making way for a group of PLA soldiers carrying a stretcher holding a small girl just being rescued from the ruins. Wen made himself and millions of viewers

84 cry, while holding a tearful orphaned girl and assuring her that “the government will take care of you.”

Central and local government officials’ visits to the earthquake zones were important personified gesture of the abstract state. Jintao Hu, then Chinese President, visited several earthquake-stricken counties only four days after the earthquake. On May

18th, 2008, he made a widely-reported speech at one of the severely-destructed industrial site in Shifang City, Sichuan, firmly weaving his right arm to the soldiers and victims, and stating, “No difficulty could beat the heroic Chinese people.” Reports of the visits of

Sichuan provincial Party Secretary, Sichuan Governor, and other high-level officials appeared every day during the first month. Along with his tears and angers, Jiabao Wen, as the representative of the central government, established the Party leaders as “swift, diligent, and warm-hearted” paternal caretakers of the Chinese family (Schneider and

Hwang 2014:646).

More importantly, represented by the “paternal helmsmen,” the Chinese State stood up with great power and authority. According to the National Audit Office, until

December 2008, the total earthquake relief and reconstruction investment from both the central and provincial governments exceeded 128.7 billion yuan ($20.7 billion) (National

Audit Office 2008). Amongst such investment, 63.5 billion yuan ($10.3 billion) was assigned for earthquake relief, in which 60 percent of the monetary fund came from the central government and its various departments, and the rest 40 percent came from provincial governments and the military-ruled Xinjiang Production and Construction

Corps. The central government held the absolute authority in commanding and managing such financial and other material support, where no department or company could deny

85 its request. The Party-led donation drive was also extremely efficient. According to the same audit report, additionally, 45.6 million Communist Party members contributed 9.73 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) “Special Party Membership Dues” (teshu dangfei 特殊党费) to help the earthquake relief and reconstruction. The financial and material support from the

Chinese central government almost doubled the donation from national nongovernmental and international governmental and non-governmental agencies and individuals, demonstrating its predominant rescue power. In the following three-year reconstruction period, the central finance invented a total of 303 billion yuan ($45 billion) in the Wenchuan Earthquake reconstruction, fulfilling 90 percent of the State’s reconstruction targets (Ministry of Finance 2011).

Another vivid image of the earthquake relief was the action of the PLA and CAPF soldiers, whose strength, sacrifice, and perseverance have moved many Chinese. Time and time again, the CCTV broadcast how the “iron soldiers” (tiejun 铁军) scraping and digging the victims from the collapsed buildings with bleeding bare hands, and lying down in a row to build a “human bridge” to allow the affected students to crawl on, as well as the daring and dauntless airborne troops jumping from the airplanes into the hell- like earthquake zones. On the May 14th’s Longxi Earthquake Report edited by the

Longxi township government, it wrote, “In time of distress the true color of the heroes showed. Severely affected zone welcomes the family-like liberation army.” Meilin recalled the day when the first troupe of the CAPF arrived in Dongmen village on foot,

“They’ve been marching continuously along the dangerous and unfamiliar mountain trails, in the aftershocks, to find us. Many were carrying heavy bags of rice and boxes of water and instant noodles. The young soldiers, some of whom were still teenagers,

86 seemed extremely miserable (zaonie 造孽 in Sichuan dialect) with bleeding blisters on their feet and no food in the stomach.” As soon as the soldiers arrived, they started looking for the dead and wounded. For days, they walked in the mountains with bleeding feet, carrying down the wounded villagers and collecting the dead bodies. While the villagers were eating steamed rice and boiled noodles, they were eating ship biscuits; while the villagers were sleeping in tents, they only took naps along the road side.

The PLA and CAPF also brought military force and order to the earthquake zones.

Gamburd (2014) noticed that as soon as the Sri Lanka national troops took over the refugee camps, they instantly restricted the movement and communication of the campers and outsiders. In Wenchuan, the PLA oversaw the delivery of material resources and controlled the safety and security of the towns and villages. In Dongmen village, according to the daily earthquake reports, the dispatch of the daily food supplies was watched by the CAPF troops, the clearing and cleaning of the rescue channels and transportation of rescue materials were commanded by the CAPF directors, and the search for and disposal of the dead bodies and wounded ones were managed by the CAPF commanders. In several Longxi’s earthquake reports, the CAPF played a crucial role in maintaining the social stability after the earthquake, overseeing a fair distribution of the relief materials and conducting quick rescue of the victims. The State leaders and the

PLA and CAPF were the most felt and affective embodiment of the State intervention in the earthquake relief. The Chinese government officials represented the “soft power” of caring, humane and paternalistic image of the State; the PLA and CAPF exemplified the militant force and strict orders. The combination of the civil and military, the soft and hard forces, collectively commanded and disciplined the Chinese people’s lives.

While quickly rescuing thousands of the wounded and taking care of the tens of thousands of those rendered homeless, the Chinese State took the opportunity of the

Wenchuan Earthquake relief and recovery to reinforce its authority and leadership. The swift and stunning relief is framed as a symbol of the State’s powerful and paternalistic control of the lives and future of the Chinese people. Instead of revealing the slightest weakness of the State, Wenchuan Earthquake relief and recovery is commemorated as a spectacular muscle-flexing of the Chinese State. Nowadays, in the newly-established

Wenchuan Earthquake Memorial Museum in the entirely devastated Beichuan county seat, the introduction of the State earthquake relief reads:

Guided by the Central Committee of Chinese Communist Party and the State Council, CPC (Communist Party of China) members, PLA (People’s Liberation Army) members and people of all ethnic groups are united together to combat the disaster and commence relief work in its immediate aftermath. The earthquake relief was a great success as Chinese people made concerted efforts and demonstrated fearless spirits in the swift rescue work (Zhang et al. 2016).

Spectacular Relief as Political Neutralizer

Much less discussed or represented in the news media and State propaganda is the complex relationship among policy, development, and environmental degradation that led to the deadly earthquake destruction in the first place. Seldom does the media or State propaganda reveal the neutralizing effects of the spectacular State relief in dealing with the political, economic and social challenges facing the State after the Wenchuan

Earthquake. On the one hand, China’s rapid economic development since the 1980s has paid a high environmental and development price. Specifically, rapid but haphazard development projects may have led to mass devastation of a number of technological and geo-physically triggered disasters. The impact of the Wenchuan Earthquake, for example,

88 took form and magnitude in relation to poorly executed development projects like the construction of State schools. Inadequately built educational structures resulted in the deaths of many students (Wong 2008). The almost complete destruction of the old

Beichuan county seat was also partially caused by the poor State planning which relocated the populous county seat into a land highly vulnerable to earthquake and landslides (Chai 2008). The earthquake itself was also suspected of being triggered by a hydroelectric dam project in the Min River Valley, whose water reservoir placed 300 million metric tons of pressure on the Beichuan thrust fault responsible for the seismic movement (LaFraniere 2009).

The disaster relief also took place in a particular moment of nationalist construction. The year 2008 was popularly known as the Olympic Year (aoyunnian 奥运

年) in China, as the country would host the much-anticipated Olympic Games for the first time of its history in August. As China was preparing to use this opportunity to demonstrate its power and popularity to the international society, a series of crises took place. In addition to the 2008 global financial crisis that heavily hurt China’s export-led economy, the country was shaken by the snow storms of the southern regions in January,

Tibetan riots in March, Shandong train crush in April, and finally, the devastating

Wenchuan Earthquake in May. Some scholars argue that, worried of the negative impacts of such successive crises, the Chinese government used the outpouring resources and financial support for devastated families and communities as a towering response to the disaster’s socio-political repercussions (Makley 2014, Sorace 2015). At the same time, the reconstruction became a chance of reforming the withering rural economy through the massive, high-investment reconstruction planning. As Sorace (2015:479) argues, “[T]he

89 post-Sichuan Earthquake reconstruction was no ordinary post-disaster situation, but rather a window into the mechanisms of China’s political economic system and state- society relations.”

Disaster as Conjuncture of State Power and Society Compassion

Critiques of state-society relations, and in particular those of China, have long focused on the “state-society dichotomy” between State authoritarian power and needs and wills of the society, reinforcing the disjuncture of the State-society interaction and undermining the “dynamics of contemporary Chinese society” (Pieke 2004:518, see also

Pieke 2009). Recently, Steinmuller (2013) uses his ethnography on the rural life of villagers in central China to discuss the moments of intimacy-making which have cut across the State and society through embarrassment, irony, and cynicism between State officials and common villagers. Steinmuller’s (ibid) argument of the rural Chinese communities as “communities of complicity,” inspired by Herzfeld’s (1997) analysis of

“cultural intimacy,” further alerts researchers to the elasticity and co-constructiveness of the personal understanding of and attachment to the larger state. In Steinmüller’s argument (ibid), the Chinese State can be understood as constitutive part of the social world. Primarily focusing his work on the deeds and words of the State officials,

Steinmüller (ibid) may have run the risk of ignoring the workings of State institutions and policies, while assuming State officials are the sole representatives of the State. It is therefore interesting to see how State institutions and policies are involved in the State- society dynamics at the local community level. Foucault’s notion of the conditionality of science, knowledge, and power also sheds light on the omnipresence of the state

(Foucault 1991). The exercise of state power and its historical and socio-economic

90 context where the state is felt and taking effect should be carefully analyzed. Special attention should be paid to how the discourse and imagination of the state are composed and deployed in everyday life (Abrams 1988, Ferguson and Gupta 2002, Gupta 1995 and

2012, Trouillot 2001).

Anthropologists of crises and disasters have long observed the forming of communitas after major disasters when society enters into a liminal stage of fear, chaos, and together-ness (Gamburd 2014:18-29). The sense of being there together either physically or virtually builds up a new kind of communitas with strong compassion for the untimed death and injuries. Most of such work, however, discusses only the unity and cooperation among the affected populations while the State and other aiding agencies are frequently represented as either ineffective or intruding other.

Wenchuan Earthquake arguably provided a platform where the Chinese State and society could build up collaborative dynamics on the base of the compassion for human lives—the “great love.” The earthquake became the moment of reconciliation which overrode the gap between the State and fellow Chinese people, who worked together in urgently rescuing the affected population and relieving the disaster damage. Not only was the State earthquake rescue and relief carried out to showcase its strength and leadership, the genuine compassion to the affected population was easily discernable from the massive investment, the tearful face of Jiabao Wen, the blistered feet of the PLA soldiers, and many lost lives of the civil servants and soldiers to the cause of earthquake relief.

For example, in Yingxiu Township, epicenter of the earthquake, erected the tombs of Qiu

Guanghua, pilot of a military helicopter which crashed on a rescue mission, and his team members. Qiu could have escaped this deadly mission because he was only assigned to

91 lead the ground command due to his age and the severe destruction at home. However, he insisted on piloting the rescue helicopter, arguing that his long-time flying experience in this area would help navigate the helicopter in the bad weather (Liu et al. 2008). When visiting the tombs of Qiu Guanghua, the three PLA veterans of Longxi traveling with me respectfully bowed down to the tomb. One of them said, “I think I should do this. These people saved our lives.” Thus, it seems mistaken to reduce such compassion to humanity and human suffering to mere “legitimacy claiming” or “power consolidating” agendas on the part of the State as some scholars may argue.

At the same time, the whole nation was mobilized by the State-led relief work. It is reported that more than 13 million Chinese volunteered to help with the Wenchuan

Earthquake relief (Wei and Wang 2009), a number of whom, old and young people alike, sacrificed their lives, newborn babies, elder parents, life savings, or secure, high-income jobs to assist the earthquake victims. Post-Wenchuan Earthquake relief witnessed the emergence of the grassroots movement based on volunteerism and altruism which later promoted the fast growth of local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). More importantly, I have to argue that such compassion involved in the rescue and relief work was ideally shared by the State and Chinese society as a whole. Not only did the State appraise the grassroots volunteerism in State-run media and by officially recognizing the achievements of the individuals and organizations, it also established collaborative relationships with the so-called “grassroots NGOs” (caogen NGO 草根 NGO).

The volunteerism, compassion for humanity, patriotism, and nationalism were intermingled as reflected in the actions of the volunteers, and fellow Chinese. It is popularly reported that “the earthquake shook out patriotic passion of the Chinese people”

(Ye 2008). As one Chinese citizen said, “I cannot help crying when seeing pictures of the earthquake-stricken zones, and realize how small (miaoxiao 渺小) humans are in front of nature. We are compatriots. Blood is thicker than water (xue nong yu shui 血浓于水). We should fight against the disaster with people in the earthquake-stricken zones” (Ye 2008).

It is also reported that investors in the stock market, large companies and ordinary citizens alike, were self-mobilized to support affected Sichuan companies and stabilize the capital market by not selling related stocks. It is commented that the capital market became the “patriotic market” (aiguo shi 爱国市) that investors held on to their stocks as an act of “disaster rescue” (Xinhua Wang 2008). Another report titled “Earthquake Relief as the Mobilization Order for all Patriots” (Xinjin Bao 2008) reported that the 2008

Olympic Torch Replay made way for the earthquake relief where all participants mourned for the deceased at the beginning of the event and donated money along the replay routes. It writes,

Let us discard burdening concerns of political performances, images, or fame to offer a quiet funeral space for the deceased spirits, a clean space for the sufferings in the world, and more importantly, support for basic and most benign human nature in all public and political activities. “Disaster” is the most import thing among all matters. Those who forever remain silent under the ruins deserve our humble mourning. Those compatriots who need urgent rescue require our quickest attention. The catastrophe cannot be underrated, while human lives neglected. The capacity and courage of uniting the country together (juguo tongxin 举国同心) can only be inspired when people stay resolute in time of crisis and steadfast in front of catastrophes.

Thus, it is not surprising to see slogans including “Sichuan Fighting” and “China Fighting” at Beijing’s Tian’anmen Square where people gathered to join the national three-minute silent mourning to the earthquake victims—the first time in the nation’s history where a national mourning was held for ordinary Chinese. Chinese leaders as well as people from

93 all walks of life, including some oversea Chinese, suspended their work to conduct the three-minute silent mourning at 2:28pm, May 19th, 2008, seven days after the earthquake.

According to Chinese Han tradition, a solemn memorial for the deseased is usually held on the seventh day of their departure.

In this case, Wenchuan Earthquake, along with other major disasters since then including 2013 Ya’an Earthquake, served as a conjuncture between the State and society united by compassion for humanity. More importantly, Wenchuan Earthquake offered a new lens to study the dynamics of state-society relations and complexity of Chinese nationalism where volunteerism, individualism, and “great love” for humanity are added to the construction of patriotism and Chinese nationalism. Du (2014:5) keenly observes in her research on the “positive energy” ignited during the Chinese 2012 London

Olympic Torch Replay that “a ‘transcendental Chinese patriotism’” has been taking shape in major Chinese events that “by highlighting the grassroots moral inspiration in globalized China, it simultaneously injects elements of individualism, transnationalism, and universalism into the existing ideal and sentiment of Chinese patriotism (aiguo,

‘love of country [China]’).”

Worth discussing though is the fact that neither the Chinese State nor the society arehomogenous entities. As Makley (2014) thoughtfully points out, victims of the

Wenchuan Earthquake and those of the Yushu Earthquake (2010), mainly Tibetans, received vastly different attention and treatment from the State. The humanitarian government (Fassin 2012) displayed by the Chinese State was inevitably imbued with political and social interests that regulated not only the mourning rituals for the deseased, but also the “loving heart offering” behaviors (xian aixin 献爱心) of the living.

Alarmingly, Makley (ibid: 375) observes a new “high-stakes biopolitics” of “charity” and

“compassion” in the State-led earthquake relief that “state leaders’ claims to the moral management of life and death as the sovereign right to optimize the ‘natural’ or biological existence of national populations” (see Foucault 1978 and 2003, Marchezini 2015). The

Chinese State offered massive assistance to promote the Qiang cultural thriving, in turn, making them a “model minority” popularly celebrated in the nationalism discouse. In this biopolitical governing of the Qiang disaster “victims” as well as the compassionate

Chinese donors and volunteers, the State indeed has forcefully formed new subjectivities and sensibilities of being ethnic and patriotic in contemporary China.

The Chinese State announced an all-out effort (quanli yifu 全力以赴) to recover and reconstruct regions affected by Wenchuan Earthquake. Witnessing the massive and swift influx of State-led monetary and human resources, the majority of the affected population expressed the confidence in “creating a new home” as well as the faith in “a better and more beautiful tomorrow” (Liu 2008). As shown in later chapters, the Qiang, rather than maintaining their position as marginal, earthquake-stricken victims, were given unprecedented resources for economic thriving and cultural development, that served as a stunning exemplar of the State-claimed “miraculous reconstruction.” My research, in this case, explores the particular transformations and predicaments of the

Qiang throughout their renewed political, economic, and social encountering with the centralizing State, investigating issues and problems embedded in the State-orchestrated

“culturally sensitive” reconstruction despite of the strong assistance and determined heart.

As Zhang and Barrios argue (forthcoming), “The case study of Qiang reconstruction, then, gives us a window into a modality of state power where ‘culture,’ as defined by State

95 policies and actors, becomes a key factor in neutralizing critiques of vulnerability- engendering State policy and practice. More importantly, the recovery and revival of a marginal ethnic group serves to showcase the politics of handling ethnic marginality and subaltern cultures in time of crisis in post-earthquake China.” My discussions focus on how the reconstruction involved into a politicized and opportunistic moment when

Chinese state power consolidated its agenda for controlling and transforming the Qiang culture and communities.

Earthquake Relief in Longxi

Destroyed Home, Determined People

After the first strike of the earthquake, the whole Longxi Township lost electricity.

Telephones stopped working. The 317 road was totally destroyed by falling stones and earth movement. Communication with the outside world was completely cut off. Longxi was severely hit by the earthquake. According to the government report, 132 people lost their lives to the earthquake, 824 injured, and the total economic loss was 267 million yuan ($39 million) for this poverty-stricken township. All buildings were variously damaged in the earthquake. More than 3000 thousand houses collapsed, and another 6000 or so houses damaged. All roads within the township were destroyed. For the first two days, villagers only had only themselves to rely on in terms of emergency rescue. As soon as the first troop of the CAPF arrived in Longxi, their lives and wills were instantly managed by the State agencies.

Longxi’s State-led earthquake relief developed in three stages—emergency relief, emergency relocation, and finally, in-situ reconstruction. Emergency relief period lasted a little more than a month when rescue materials and personnel quickly reached Longxi.

On May 13th, the first troop of CAPF arrived in Longxi after walking more than 100 kilometers for more than 10 hours. Without a break, they were ordered to work with local officials and villagers to search for corpses of the dead and transporting the injured out of the mountain villages to prevent plague. Then, the soldiers joined Dongmen villagers to repair the road between the Dongmen and the township government building, so that the injured could later be transported from Dongmen to the county seat. Jiafu was one of the active volunteers in the road-repairing mission. He told me, “The soldiers did not know the short-cuts along the mountains. I drove my own tractor to lead them. Thinking back today, I’m still scared. There were many aftershocks each day. I was driving on the edge of the mountains when big rocks were still falling down. There was one time that we all saw a dead body after being hit by a falling rock. I chose to ignore it, and quickly passed by.”

Subsequently, medical teams came for anti-epidemic inspection. More soldiers, trucks, and other machines went for the rescue work. They helped get the power back, fix telephone lines, and dredge water. On May 17th, the first ever rescue material—2500 kilograms of rice—reached Longxi. Trucks of relief materials were brought in continuously as the transportation was partially resumed. In 11 days, until May 23rd, as much as 120 tons of rescue materials were transported to Longxi, while 30 kilometers of road were fixed, and 300 or so tents set up. Came with the soldiers was the State policy of emergency relief. During the first 3 months, each villager was subsidized with 500g of rice, 500g of cooking oil, and 10 yuan ($6) each day. Families were given a blue plastic and steel tent to live in. Rice and different kinds of packaged and canned food, as well as bottled water and oil, were sent there every few days. In the meantime, villagers were

97 ordered to salvage food and property each day from their own houses and fields. Their basic living was secured.

After settling down in the makeshift tents, villagers’ next biggest challenge was to save the crops, animals, and cheery trees essential to their livelihood. Not only did villagers have to prepare adequate water, feeding stuff, and fertilizers, they also had to keep up with the timed growth of the crops and animals. Timing, and in particular, time keeping, is fundamental to agricultural populations, whose life and work are largely based on the rhythm of the day, month, season, and year. Each year is regularly scheduled with various planting and feeding activities. The earthquake took place in a time when farming activities were the most demanding. As the temperature picked up since May and throughout the summer, villagers were busy with watering the fields, fertilizing the trees, and weeding. Pigs were also reaching their growing peaks. Villagers tried every means to keep up their work. Meilin remembered the difficulty of saving the cheery trees from drying up, “The water ways to the field were destroyed by the earthquake. The summer was unusually hot that year. We planted the trees for a few years already and they were about to bear fruits. Jiafu and I had to carry water buckets on our backs to water the trees. It was so hot, and the road was mostly blocked with big rocks. We carried the water every day and saved the trees. It was so tiring and difficult.

Many others just abandoned the trees.” Even when they were asked to move to a temporary shelter camp about 15 kilometers away from home, Jiafu and Meilin would go back to the village almost every day to water the trees. Jiafu and Meilin’ hard work was later well paid off. Their cheery trees were among the first ones to bear fruits. Along with the promotion of Wenchuan cherries and tourism soon after the earthquake, they were

98 able to sell the cherries for a high price. As a cheery tree takes seven to eight years to mature, those who re-planted the trees after the earthquake, however, had to wait for another three or four years for the fruits.

Pig feeding was another headache. Uncle Tang Zhongxu, who lived three houses away from Aunt Tang, was one of the stubborn pig keepers. He recalled, “I raised three pigs at the time of the earthquake. None of them was hurt by it. I continued to feed them by gathering pig grass and corns every day in the field and up in the mountains. My children kept asking me to move away and sell the pigs, but I refused. What would I eat if

I abandon the pigs? They don’t understand how troublesome it will be if there is no self- raised pig at the end of the year. The pickled pork sold at the market is expensive and of low quality; it cannot last long enough and easily goes bad.” In similar efforts, most villagers saved, in different extent, portions of their properties in the field and at home.

A resilient life is one that can quickly bounce back and is able to continue the familiar way of life after crises. Specifically, the ability to regain access to the habitual context and continue the familiar practices through the ordering of time and space after the earthquake becomes the key to the sustainable survival of the villagers. Villagers’ extensive effort in rescuing and tendering the farmland, fruit trees and livestock is the act of rebuilding the ecological and economic ways of life to produce food and hope for years to come. Dongmen villagers’ initial earthquake self-relief efforts show that disaster relief is culturally-specific and context-dependent effort. Its success depends on utilizing the culturally-appropriate methods, following the socially-agreeable timing, and providing sustainable resources. Since the CAPF arrived two days after the earthquake, villagers were offered with an increasing number of resources for living. They were, at

99 the same time, managed by the State plan of recovery. The abundant State rescue resources focused on material support and the overall renewal of disaster zones sharply contrast with the villagers’ land- and live-stock- centered sustainable relief strategies. The change of the ways of relief also changed the trajectory and ways of life, bringing about complex impacts on the community.

Disturbed Time and Place Making

In June 2008, frequent landslide threatened Longxi’s security. Zhi Yi, head of the expert team of Earthquake relief planning in A’Ba pointed by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of China (MOHURD) and researcher at the Beijing

Tsinghua Urban Planning and Design Research, warned the Wenchuan officials that mudslide and landslide—secondary disasters caused by the Earthquake—could bury the entire Wenchuan in a short time. Statistics from China’s Academy of Science’s

Earthquake Monitoring Group confirmed Yi’s concern. The order of emergency relocation was sent to Longxi on June 12th. At the dawn of June 15th, a heavy landslide hit Madeng Village of Longxi which quickly damaged large area of houses and farmlands.

Scared villagers, led by the village head, walked down the hills, carrying simple furniture and cooking utensils. To ease their anxiety, the village head asked them to sing the Qiang folk songs while walking. One by one, the familiar folk songs accompanied them to a safety gathering place. In the meantime, all Longxi villagers were ordered to move to a newly-established shelter camp outside of Wenchuan county seat before June 20th. They were only allowed to carry minimum essential items to the camp, and also told that they would permanently leave Longxi. All of a sudden, villagers were forced to abandon much of their remaining properties, especially the crops and livestock. More sadly, they had to

100 abandon their home villages, a place where they had lived for generations. No time was given to them to think through the orders or digest the dramatic change of life.

Leaving home means to leave behind the critical capital—land and livestock— which sustain the life of the Qiang. Such order was met with reluctance and sorrow. On the one hand, timely attendance of the farmland became impossible. Large areas of agricultural products and fruit trees were left to dry out in the hot summer days. Families soon lost the only steady income of the year. As journalists reported on the day of relocation, “When speaking of leaving Longxi, the 26-year-old Yu Fahui’s eyes became red…She could not believe that her village was no longer good to live. In Longxi Village

(a mountain village of Longxi where Yu Fahui lived), everyone owns two mu land fully planted with fruit trees. It was once a beautiful and comfortable home…” (Xu and

Ouyang 2008). Most of the villagers ended up letting go their sheep, horses, and yaks to the mountains. Some could only sell the pigs for a low price. A Dongmen villager said to me in an interview, “In the summer the pigs were still growing, and it was a big loss if killing or selling them when they were so small. I then had to buy pork towards the end of the year at a much higher price.” Still a few kept the pigs, and walked hours each day from the camp to the village to feed them. Very few villagers insisted to stay in Dongmen to take care of the pigs and crops. The earthquake, and especially the relocation, took away most of the living and production resources from Longxi villagers, making them exclusively dependent on State aid.

Furthermore, villagers had to break off all the affective attachment to the place which they call home. They were forced to leave the generation-old family houses, worshiping shrines, and ancestor tombs behind. Relocation is especially difficult for a

101 population whose existence is deeply entangled with many kinds of spirits sitting in this place. Of vital importance to many villagers, especially the elder members, was the inability to worship the spirits and ancestors, believed to be protectors and blessers of the land and people, in regular times. Their sentiments can be felt in a documentary,

Migration of the Xige People, recording the later permanent relocation of Longxi’s Xige

Village in 2009 (Gao 2010). In it, one elder lady crying in the front yard of her family house said:

From the bottom of my heart, I don’t want to leave. I was hoping to stay here with my old husband while my children relocated. But none of us could stay. Not a single person could. From the bottom of my heart, I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to leave my ancestors here…[the relocation] would abandon all of them, my parents, my grandparents, and my ancestors. If I move away, there would be no one to burn paper money to them. This is cruel.

The same documentary also recorded the village shibi walking around the mountains to inform the spirits of their departure with tears and fears of the uncertain future. Several

Xige families visited the tombs of the deceased ancestors for the last time, kneeing down and offering them burnt incenses, paper money, boiled pig head meat, and baked flour cakes, while begging for their final blessing of their long-way migration. Many cried at the tombs. The end of such reciprocal worshiping relationship brought double damage to the spirited people. It, on the one hand, renders them rootless, cutting off their connections to the family lands and caring ancestors. On the other hand, it takes away the fortune and blessing by stopping the reciprocal sacrificial rituals. Spiritually, villagers were left unprepared and unequipped when migrating to a whole new land.

Riding in army-owned trucks with small bags of stuff, all Longxi villagers went to

Zhongba, where the temporary shelter camp was located, and started to build a temporary

102 home inside State-supplied tents. In the camp, they shared kitchen and bathrooms; oftentimes, they shared food and other materials. For the first two weeks, there was no tap water or electricity in the camp. The rising temperature and increasing influx of residents also caused hygienic problems in the camp; several villagers were reported to have diarrhea. The more pressing problem was where the next income would be when the

State subsidy ended. Without land for farming or raising livestock, villagers found themselves with few skills or training for jobs in the small towns. While getting used to group living, villagers were also anxiously expecting where their new home would be.

Much to their surprise, they were asked to move back to Longxi, less than a month after living in the camp. On July 5th, China’s Central Television (CCTV) station’s

News Probe column broadcast the debate among the experts, officials, and villagers about the possibility of the in-situ reconstruction in Wenchuan. In the show, Xinbao Zhang, researcher at the China Academy of Science’s Institute of Mountain Hazards and

Environment in Chengdu, being interviewed at his office in Chengdu, refuted Yi Zhi’s arguments by suggesting that Wenchuan still had safe areas for reconstruction. More radically, Zhang asserted that Wenchuan people should not “run away” from a place that their ancestors lived in for over 2000 years and that survived many earthquakes before. In particular, Zhang mentioned Longxi, which in his view, was a relatively less dangerous place. “I haven’t been to Longxi. I heard that they moved the entire town [of people] away. It does not make any sense,” he said to the journalist of the News Probe column.

The journalists then made a trip to Longxi, only to find out that several villages were under severe landslide threats, many of which were already destroyed by the constant landslides after the earthquake. Many Longxi villagers were irritated by Zhang’s

103 seemingly cursory comment of them “running away” from home. Jiafu said to me, “That guy is from Chengdu. People say that he never came to Wenchuan. He makes his comments by merely looking at the satellite images. What kind of expert is that! He can be so irresponsible because he doesn’t have to live in Longxi.”

Xinbao Zhang was made an unfortunate target of attacks in this debate because in real life, no single expert could decide the post-earthquake planning of Wenchuan. As shown in many critics of the CCTV’s news report, Wenchuan’s reconstruction involved all kinds of oftentimes conflicting interests of different players, such as the central State agencies, local officials, planning experts, construction companies, and many other agencies. A thorough investigation of the decision-making process is beyond the scope of this dissertation. What is clear, however, is that villagers’ interests, and even worse, their right to express their interests, were largely ignored. Like fish on the cutting board to be handled by the chef, their lives were completely in the hands of the outsiders. On July

20th, all Longxi villagers returned home, again with very few personal belongings and bewilderment for the future. “I remember the date very clearly,” said Aunt Tang, “It was exactly a month after we moved to Zhongba. I joked with others that, like [a new mother/baby] coming out of a month, we left Zhongba and came back.” The Han Chinese custom is that a new mother and her baby should stay inside of the house, preferably in bed, to recover throughout the first month after childbirth. They can go out and resume normal physical and social activities after the first month, the practice of which is called

“coming out of the month” (chuyuezi 出月子) in mandarin Chinese.

Frida Hastrup (2010:102), in her research on the tsunami recovery among villagers in southern Indian, suggests, “Recovery is not a matter of sealing off the disaster

104 in an absolute past, but of restoring the accessibility of a habitual social context.” Key aspects of concern to researchers of disaster include the efficient rescue and re- establishment of the “normal” and “ordinary,” the legitimation of state rule in case of emergency, and the reformulation and advancement of the everyday “new normal” ways of lives (Hewitt 1983, Hoffman and Oliver-Smith 2002). Ethnographically, anthropologists are devoted to investigating how and why local cultures are restored and redeveloped after disaster. Many have revealed the contested re-establishment of the everyday experience where the mundane, the familiar, and the meaningful can be regained and reenacted (Adams 2013, Bankoff 2003, de Certeau 1984, Hastrup 2011).

First and foremost, the re-gaining access to the habitual context allows affected populations to recover on their own. On the other hand, it helps ensure a sustainable recovery. Resilience, in this case, lies in such self-sufficient and sustainable recovery.

The habitual context for the Dongmen villagers, in my observation, is constituted by everyday human-environmental interactions regulated and enacted by particular use of time and space. Through habitual and affective practice and experience, a space is made an intimate place one call home (Feld and Basso 1996, Tuan 2001). As reveals in the self- rescue efforts of the villagers, post-earthquake life can be navigated with the accumulated knowledge and experience in the familiar, though disturbed, environment. Homeland is the place where one strives to rescue and restore farmland and livestock to produce materials for long-term recovery. It is made secure and fortunate through the continued reciprocal relationship between the alive and the dead, the people and watchful spirits.

Re-gaining the access and control of the social timing and affective place that have made life fruitful and meaningful, as well as the power and right for deciding the future of their

105 own lives and environment, not only constitutes the essence of the resilience for sustainable recovery, but also the possibility of making home.

Unfortunately, the Chinese State’s efforts for disaster relief and recovery, on the one hand, tried every means to make the great earthquake as a bounded event to be quickly dissolved and controlled, and on the other hand, neglected and radically transformed the habitual ways of living of the Qiang. The powerful State was and is extremely vital in providing the massive much-needed resources to rescue and secure lives after catastrophes. The question is how resources and decisions can be handled when assistance becomes excessive and overwhelming. The State’s top-down and inconsistent relief policies of suddenly abandoning homelands and relocation with little supporting mechanism dramatically disrupted villagers’ time- and space-making practices, which, at the same time, rendered it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the villagers to retain their quotidian practices and relationships.

Conclusion: The Same Space, A Different Place

This chapter discusses the politics and complexities of the State-sponsored earthquake relief and recovery work. It argues that the Chinese State formulated a compassionate paternalistic yet unchallengeable authoritative relationship with the affected members of the nation through the swift and massive relief and recovery work.

Not only dominant in commanding, mitigating and programing the post-earthquake relief, the State also played a determining role in framing, staging and solidifying the meaning of the earthquake and its relief as an opportunity to strengthen national unity and patriotism, and the significance of the kangzhen (fighting against the earthquake 抗震) to the prospering destiny of the nation under the leadership of the Party. The State

106 spectacular earthquake relief can also be perceived as a mechanism of politically neutralizing the socio-political causes and effects of the Wenchuan Earthquake.

Interestingly, this chapter argues that Wenchuan Earthquake served as a moment of State- society conjuncture where both parties were inspired to join in the earthquake rescue and relief mainly based on the universal compassion for human lives and suffering. It demonstrates the state-society dynamics in time of crisis, as well as the complex negotiation of altruism, volunteerism, patriotism, and nationalism when the nation as a whole encountered unprecedented destruction.

This chapter describes the experience of the Longxi Qiang during the initial earthquake relief period. It demonstrates the conflicts of excessive State relief and villagers’ affective and sustainable desires to survive and recover. The State’s swift, emergent, and top-down earthquake relief decisions interfered with the villagers’ sustainable-living and place-making practices which constitute their post-disaster resilience. More important, most villagers were moved back to the even more dangerous

Longxi Valley to start their new lives, before the exact environmental, economic, political and social problems that caused the grave disaster damage were being addressed.

When villagers returned to the same village called Dongmen, their homeland had already been changed. Wild weeds covered the once fertile lands. Trees and crops died of drought. No pigs were honking behind the fence, chicken pecking the vegetable leaves, or sheep running. Their damaged and empty houses were coated with thick dust. Getting back to the rhythmic farming life became especially challenged when villagers already missed the whole season of work. With semi-empty suitcases and travel bags, villagers

107 were led to take on the next adventure of “reconstructing the homeland” (chongjian jiayuan 重建家园).

108

Chapter 4 Making Disaster Zones into “Scenic Sites,” Homelands into “Gardens”

After the reconstruction, a huge concrete imitation tree trunk was erected at the intersection of the 317 National Highway and Longxi Township’s main road. On it were two big red letters—Wen Chuan (汶川). Close to the top of the tree trunk a smaller concrete branch extended toward the right with three smaller red letters—Qiang Ren Gu

(Qiang people’s valley 羌人谷). Qiang People’s Valley is the new brand name of Longxi.

Following the direction of the branch to the right, a newly finished cement path led to a huge gate (Figure 2). A white boulder on the front left side was carved and painted with the four-A designation of the Longxi Qiang People’s Valley; the national four-A rating designated Longxi as one of the best tourist destinations in China. The system is similar to the five-star resort rating used in the United States. Behind the boulder was a 15-meter high Qiang-style “stone” watch tower. In most Qiang villages, stone watch towers are historically built at the entrance of the villages for defense and storage purposes. Looking closer, one could see that this tower was not made of real stones but concrete, with concrete imitation stone pieces attached to the exterior of the structure.

To complete the gate there was a “wooden” lintel mimicking the traditional wooden and stone style of the Qiang houses, whereas the lintel was a concrete structure wrapped by wooden boards. Affixed to the right side was a monumental sign—Qiang

Ren Gu; the characters were recognizable but not in standard Chinese. They were modified to look like dancing people, a representation of the Qiang’s love of dancing and

109 singing. Under the sign was a large statue of a warrior-like “door god” widely used by the

Qiang to guard their households. Bundles of corn cobs, one of the staple foods of the area, hung from the top of the gate. Passing through the gate, the path was lined by lamp posts with solar panels attached—one of the green technologies used in the reconstruction.

Hanging from the lamps were banners installed by the local township government. The left-side ones read, “Chinese Qiang People’s Valley; Mysterious Longxi Gully”

(zhongguo qiang ren gu, shenmi longxi gou 中国羌人谷，神秘龙溪沟). The ones on the right side read, “Witness the Miraculous Reconstruction; Appreciate the Rise of the Great

Love” (jianzhen chongjian qiji, ganshou da’ai jueqi 见证重建奇迹，感受大爱崛起).

Figure 5: Longxi Township Gate. Photo by Qiaoyun Zhang

I indeed witnessed and was much impressed by the “miraculous reconstruction” of Longxi time and time again throughout the fieldwork. The “miraculous reconstruction” refers to the officially-directed swift, massive, “modernizing,” and culturally sensitive transformation of Longxi Township, and many other affected places. Swiftness is a stunning characteristic of the Chinese post-Wenchuan Earthquake reconstruction. In addition to the quick relief work, the Chinese post-Wenchuan Earthquake reconstruction

110 speed is mind-boggling. A total of 40,000 or so nationwide reconstruction projects were planned to be accomplished in three years’ time with a massive government-led investment of one trillion yuan ($157 billion) (Chinese State Council 2008). More startling is the fact that all reconstruction projects sped up and finished in two years’ time despite an initial three-year timeframe. According to the State’s propaganda, all earthquake victims moved in to their new or repaired houses before the upcoming

Chinese Spring Festival in late January 2009. Schools, hospitals, and other major public service facilities were to be put in use before the earthquake’s first anniversary.

The post-Wenchuan Earthquake reconstruction was carried out with massive

State-channeled funding and other resources. Through the partner assistance policy, an outside province was responsible for the planning and completion of the reconstruction of a targeted township or county. Under the order of the State council, Guangdong province was responsible for assisting the reconstruction of Wenchuan. Zhanjiang city of

Guangdong was selected by Guangdong provincial government to aid Longxi’s recovery.

The post-Wenchuan Earthquake reconstruction is also a chance of development for the affected townships and counties. Most reconstruction planning aimed to prompt a “great leap” economic development (Sorace 2014 and 2015) for most of the previously economically and socially marginalized regions. Many reconstructed Qiang villages witnessed an “instantaneous modernity” (Zhang 2012). According to an internal publication, Gaige neican juece ban (Reform Decision-Making):

Ultimately, [the reconstruction] will be used to evaluate the sustainability of China’s current political, economic and social system; it will be used to verify and measure the governing capacity of the Communist Party and the leadership ability of the social elite. The process of post-disaster reconstruction is like a prism, reflecting both the superior advantages and profound abuses (biduan 弊端 ) of China’s current political system …

111

Everyone expects the earthquake area to become a model example (weida dianxing 伟大典型 ) for the future of China’s economic, social, cultural, political and ecological construction (cited in Sorace 2014:406).

An even more fascinating aspect of the “miraculous reconstruction” is its heavy emphasis on the restoration and reconstruction of the Qiang culture. Ironically, the earthquake brought the rebuilt villages as well as the Qiang to the attention of the national audience for the first time. Not only did the Qiang gain the national awareness after 2008, the Qiang culture also became the focal point of the post-Earthquake recovery and reconstruction. As early as May 22, 2008, 12 days after the earthquake, then Chinese

Premier Jiabao Wen firmly proclaimed that the Qiang culture and civilization must be well protected after the disaster (Cheng et al. 2008). Soon in the State Overall Planning for Post-Wenchuan Earthquake Restoration and Reconstruction (Chinese State Council

2008, Overall Planning hereafter), “inherit and carry forward local culture and protect ecology” is listed as one of the eight basic principles. To provide special financial and policy support for ethnicities heavily affected by the Wenchuan Earthquake to assure a timely and effective rescue and preservation of their cultures was also stated in the

Guidelines for Developing Cultural Affairs of Ethnic Minorities drafted by the Chinese

State Council in 2009. From the central government to specific villages, numerous Qiang cultural recovery projects were designed, implemented, and variously presented, where

Longxi Township can be regarded as one of the best models of this culturally sensitive reconstruction. Specifically, the Qiang culture was restored and highly promoted mainly through the development of Qiang heritage tourism in Longxi.

This chapter introduces the processes of Longxi’s “miraculous reconstruction,” investigating the resources, planning, and effects of the radical transformation of the

112 earthquake-stricken mountain village to the now celebrated Qiang People’s Valley. The chapter first discusses the swift planning of Longxi’s reconstruction led by the Longxi

Township Post-Earthquake Recovery and Reconstruction Planning Group (Longxi

Planning Group hereafter) consisting of officials and urban planners from Zhanjiang city.

It then discusses the wide range of reconstruction projects that brought about

“instantaneous modernity” (Zhang 2012) in Longxi. The State policy of a culturally sensitive reconstruction of the Qiang villages is also analyzed, where heritage tourism was developed as a means to preserve and promote the Qiang culture. According to a

Chinese State papoganda, the post-Earthquake reconstruction aimed to make disaster zones into “scenic sites,” homelands into “gardens” (zaiqu bian jingqu, jiayuan bian huayuan 灾区变景区，家园变花园) (Figure 3).

The “miraculous reconstruction” has become a powerful testimony of the Chinese

State’s overwhelming power and strength, as well as its paternalistic rule over the socially and culturally subaltern ethnic groups. Specifically, the development-oriented reconstruction served as a “modernizing” project for the ethnic Qiang villages, changing the appearance, economic pattern, and ways of life of many of the tourist villages. The reconstruction is by no means without unexpected consequences and unresolved complications. The chapter ends with a discussion of how the “miraculous reconstruction” has caused many far-reaching ecologically and culturally damaging problems to the future lives of the villagers.

Swift Planning and Massive Funding for the Reconstruction

Longxi witnessed the swiftest and most sweeping development in its history since the Wenchuan Earthquake. The reconstruction was supported by unparalleled

113 resources. The biggest reconstruction resource for Longxi was the aid from Zhanjiang

City, Guangdong Province. At the early planning stage of the reconstruction, the Chinese

State paired each of the 19 heavily-affected county or city with a more affluent province or municipality of central or eastern China, based on the national post-earthquake partner assistance policy. According to the Chinese State Council’s ordering, each aiding province was asked to use at least one percent of the previous-year total revenue to assist the reconstruction of the corresponding area for three consecutive years (Chinese State

Council 2008). Guangdong Province, one of the most affluent Chinese provinces, was ordered to assist the recovery of Wenchuan County, the most devastated county of all, with an estimated total fund of 8.2 billion RMB ($1.3 billion) (Xinhua Wang 2010).

Guangdong government paired each of its cities with one specific town or township of Wenchuan, which bonded Longxi and Zhanjiang, a coastal city 1700 kilometers away. Working with Longxi local government, Zhanjiang city government gathered a total investment of close to 160 million RMB ($26 million) to facilitate

Longxi’s reconstruction. The Zhanjiang’s team was headed by the then vice-mayor of

Zhanjiang and consisted of a number of officials, planning experts, other professionals, and construction workers. In June of 2008, the Longxi Planning Group was formed by the

Zhanjiang government, including officials of Zhanjiang Urban Planning Bureau,

Zhanjiang Urban Planning Design & Survey Institute, and Keycity Design Company, an urban planning company based in Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province, as the technique support unit.

The Wenchuan Earthquake brought Xiao Gang, Chen Ge, and other colleagues of Keycity Design Company to Longxi for the first time of their lives. Chen Ge, the

114 company’s vice-manager, and his colleagues learned about the earthquake while working on other projects in Guangzhou. Similar to many other people, they had no sense of how serious an 8.0-magnitude earthquake would be. Neither did they know anything about the epicenter, “an unfamiliar place—Wenchuan” (Xiao and Chen 2009:1). Soon they were saddened by the news and reports of the untimely deaths of the primary school students, newly-weds, residents of an entire building, and alike. On the next day of the earthquake, the company’s board of trustees decided to donate 500 thousand yuan ($73 thousand) to build a new primary school in Wenchuan (Xiao and Chen 2009:4). More importantly, the phoned Guangdong City Planning Association (a unit of the Department of Housing and

Urban-Rural Development of Guangdong Province), volunteering to help survey and design Wenchuan’s post-earthquake reconstruction free of charge. Keycity was later selected as one of the 15 urban planning companies by the Guangdong provincial government to plan Wenchuan’s reconstruction.

In late July, Keycity was ordered to work with Zhanjiang Urban Planning Bureau by Guangdong City Planning Association (a unit of the Department of Housing and

Urban-Rural Development of Guangdong Province) to plan for Longxi’s reconstruction.

On August 3rd, Xiao Gang, chairman of Keycity, Chen Ge, and three other planners arrived in Longxi. On August 5th, the planners met with Longxi’s officials for the first time, and were asked to suggest a working plan for Longxi’s reconstruction. The Planners had some of the most difficult, dangerous, and scary days of their lives in Longxi. Riding on the severally-damaged bumpy trails to the mountain villages was like going through

“hours of 8.0-magnitude earthquake” (Xiao and Chen 2009:27). Many times they had to

115 walk down the mountains along the steep clips when the only trails were destroyed by the subsequent landslides; several times the deadly falling stones just missed them by inches.

After staying in Longxi for two weeks, the Longxi Planning Group compiled the

Longxi Post-Earthquake Reconstruction Planning in September, 2008. Even before the aforementioned planning being approved in late December, reconstruction of the essential public services, including Longxi Primary School, Longxi township hospital, roads to Dongmen, E’er, Longxi, and Zhitai villages, and drinking and irrigation water system, was already started in September. According to the township government report, investment to the first batch of projects was nearly 74 million yuan ($10 million).

Altogether, with a total investment of 152.4 million yuan ($22 million), the Zhanjiang planning group initiated fifty-five reconstruction projects in Longxi. In early 2010, a total of 15 most “urgent, and technique-demanding” projects including many of the public service projects, were accomplished, while all of the projects were finished before

Zhanjiang partner assistance group left Longxi in October, 2010.

Reflected in the Chinese experience is how a swift reconstruction becomes one of the most effective ways to reinforce the efficiency and compassion of the government. A swift reconstruction is also one of the most directly-felt and eye-catching demonstration of the Party-State’s authoritarian power and unchallenged strength. Swiftness becomes a symbol of power and authority. The “modern cult of pace” (Schnapp 2011:11) has become one of the “golden” standards of rationality, efficiency, powerfulness, and advancement perceived in contemporary time. As Schnapp (2011:10) brilliantly writes,

“The narrative in question famously equates speed with modernity....It insists not only that speed infuse all modern forms of rationality, social organization, and aesthetic

116 experience, but also that it serve as the basis for measuring individuality, priority, property, productivity, progress, profit, intelligence, accomplishment, value, and pleasure

(even as speed engenders distinctly modern forms of exhaustion, distraction, delay, jams is the system, crashes and collisions).” In China, the worship of speed towered over many other factors in disaster rescue and recovery. Speedy recovery can only happen when the

State agencies took the entire control of all the programs, while most affected populations excluded from the decision procedures.

Instantaneous Modernization in Longxi

The post-Wenchuan Earthquake reconstruction has become another experiment of

“great leap development” (Sorace 2015) for many of the economically and politically marginalized affected areas. As Sorace argues (2015:484), “In the Party’s understanding, reconstruction and development were synonymous.” Analyzing the research by Sichuan social scientists on Sichuan’s “Development Model Reconstruction” after the Wenchuan

Earthquake, Sorace (ibid) continues to assert, “The development envisioned was not marginal improvement over pre-earthquake standards but a ‘great leap development’ that would catapult Sichuan’s rural economy by twenty to thirty years after two years of fervent reconstruction activity.”

In Longxi, the opportunity of reconstruction was immediately seized as a chance for industrial restructuring and socio-economic advancement. As early as on August 5th,

2008, Longxi Township Government initiated the General Ideas for Longxi’s Post-5.12

Earthquake Economic Development, claiming “Developing One Valley,” “Strengthening

Two Infrastructures,” and “Establishing Three Pillar Industries” as the main development strategies. “Developing One Valley” aimed to explore the ecological and cultural tourism

117 resources of the “Qiang People’s Valley.” “Strengthening Two Infrastructures” referred to improve governmental and public service facilities. Finally, the “three pillar industries” included agriculture, cash fruit economy, and livestock husbandry.

With Zhanjiang’s aid and funding, the majority of Longxi’s reconstruction was finished in early 2010. Tremendous efforts were spent in improving the governmental and public service facilities in Longxi. Two-way cement paths leading to each of the eight administrative villages were constructed for the first time in Longxi’s history, a township long haunted by the poor transportation facilities. More than 20 diversion and irrigation projects were implemented to improve the area’s historically poor water infrastructure. In early 2010, a new hospital, elementary school, police department, farmers’ market, bus station, township government building, and cultural activities center were constructed successively, each equipped with advanced equipment and facilities.

The reconstruction led to an instantaneous “modernizing” transformation in

Longxi. I have identified similar processes in other reconstructed Qiang villages (Zhang

2012). Shortly after the earthquake, each of the 1,100 or so affected household was offered subsidies ranging from 16,000 to 22,000 yuan ($2600 to $3600), depending on the number of family members. Each affected villager was given daily subsidies and supplies for the first three months. Those who decided to rebuild or fix their houses were provided with an interest-free five-year loan of up to 20,000 yuan ($3000). The Hong

Kong Red Cross subsidized villagers who rebuilt their houses with reinforced concrete ring beams an additional 25,000 yuan ($4100) per household. My interviews showed that the average cost of a two-and-half story house was around 150,000 yuan ($22,000) without interior decoration or furniture. With the State’s financial aid, personal savings,

118 and support from relatives and friends, many villagers in Dongmen and A’er were able to rebuild or fix their houses soon after the earthquake. As indicated in the Longxi government’s annual report, more than 90 percent of the 1138 damaged peasant houses were reconstructed within a year’s time in 2009.

Longxi’s villages were also “modernized” and “beautified” with facilities installed through governmental funding and various public donations, such as electricity, tap water, cable, and solar water heaters, in each new house. Many villagers had flushing toilets and a shower at home for the first time in their lives. Rough dirt roads were replaced by cement paths throughout each village. According to the integrated planning, for the first time in many villages, underground electricity and water lines reached every rebuilt house, a designated garbage collection house was constructed, certain areas were assigned to raise the livestock, and landscaping designs decorated the villages with new trees, flowers, and wall paintings. A villagers’ recreation center with a small library and meeting rooms was established in each village, with equipment for digital presentations and long-distance teleconferences. Feng Luo, Communist Party Secretary of Longxi

Township, admitted in an interview with me, “Longxi has advanced at least twenty years after the reconstruction.” After a reconstruction, a Chinese national flag flew on top of each government-aided reconstructed building there, a demonstration and recognition of the powerful intervention and presence of the State.

The “Culturally Sensitive” Reconstruction of Qiang Villages

Not only did the Wenchuan Earthquake cause a large death toll among the Qiang, it also gravely damaged the Qiang culture, tangibly and intangibly. A considerable number of Qiang cultural relics and records of the Qiang ICH were lost or devastated in

119 the earthquake. More than 1,000 precious collection pieces of Qiang culture were ruined

(Duo 2009). Many of the few living Qiang shibi, culture experts, Qiang language speakers and researchers, as well as practitioners of traditional Qiang skills and crafts, died in the earthquake. The deaths of these people led to a lack of successors or researchers of Qiang culture. Almost all of the Qiang culture research centers, museums, and libraries were destroyed by the earthquake. Several historic Qiang villages simply disappeared after the earthquake.

The earthquake brought Qiang people to the national attention for the first time.

Through the intensive and extensive coverage of the recovery process in Sichuan, many

Chinese people, the Han as well as other minority groups, became aware of the critical condition and sorrowful tragedies with which Qiang people were dealing. The recovery of the historical Qiang villages is a problematic culturally sensitive project as represented by Dongmen and other reconstructed Qiang villages including Jina Qiang Village in

Beichuan County (Zhang 2012). Quickly after the initial reconstruction in 2008, a series of “style transformation” (fengmao gaizao 风貌改造) projects were carried out in

Dongmen, responding to Wenchuan County’s requirement for “cultural reconstruction”

(wenhua chongjian 文化重建). Such a requirement came directly from Qing Lidong, then Wenchuan County Party Secretary. At the review meeting of the Longxi Post-

Earthquake Recovery and Reconstruction Planning initiated by the Zhanjiang Planning

Group on December 18th, 2008, Qing said:

In terms of industrial development, tourism should be the key for Longxi’s development, and it depends on Longxi’s distinct Qiang cultural landscape…to make Longxi Wenchuan’s advantage [in tourism development], Aba’s distinct [tourist site], and Sichuan’s highlight. Longxi’s reconstruction planning should not only answer to the material

120

needs of the victims, but also leave them a rich spiritual wealth. (Cited in Xiao and Chen 2009:106)

At the meeting, Qing suggested construct a Qiang People’s Valley folk culture display center at the entrance of the township as a way of preserving and promoting the Qiang culture. Two of Longxi’s famed villages, Dongmen Village and A’er Village, were chosen as key tourist sites. Later in 2010, the tourism development project was carried out in Longxi Township with an estimated investment of over 25 million yuan ($4 million). Longxi Qiang People’s Valley was designated as a national Four-A tourist destination in 2011.

Longxi was indeed an ideal village for tourism development. A mountain valley with the clear Longxi Creek running through, Longxi was blessed with clear air, abundant sunshine, and cool temperature in the summer, which were sought out by many urban dwellers. It was near 317 National Highway—the vital communication and tourist line between Sichuan and Tibet, travelled by millions every year to the world-famous natural heritage sites such as Jiuzhaigou Valley and Huanglong National Park, and plentiful local attractions. In addition, at that time, there was only one other Qiang tourist destination in the northwestern region of Wenchuan County—Luobo Village seated upon a 2000-meter high mountain. The path to Luobo village was not only very dangerous, but also constantly blocked by snow and landfills in winter and summer respectively.

Main source of funding for the tourism development project was from governmental departments of Wenchuan County. The project was led by the Wenchuan

Qiang Yu Culture Tourism Administration, responsible for approving Longxi’s overall tourist development plan bid by nationwide planning and construction companies. Longxi government was overseeing all the specific reconstruction procedures. A few professional

121 construction firms of Chengdu and A’ba Prefecture were hired to design and build specific projects around the township. Sunshine Company, a real estate company from

Chengdu, won the multi-million bid to develop tourist activities in Dongmen Village and

E’er Village. Villagers were variously involved in the tourist development. Baodi Tang, a native of Longxi and private labor contractor, succeeded in making a fortune out of the reconstruction by working with the construction firms. Donglin repeatedly told me that he also personally designed and managed several projects, enabled by his long-time relationships with the local officials and company heads, as well as accumulated prestige in and outside Dongmen. From time to time, villagers were hired as temporary construction workers for different projects.

Similar to other reconstructed tourist Qiang villages, Longxi was not only instantaneously transformed from an impoverished to a “modern” village, but also emerged as a popular Qiang heritage tourist destination since 2010. Heritage tourism refers to the tourist activities centered on consuming the oftentimes officially-nominated

“cultural heritage” of a group, including both tangible and intangible cultural heritage.

Soon after the Wenchuan Earthquake, several Qiang folk skills and rituals were added to the National Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage, including Qiang embroidery, Qiang New Year Festival, Qiang Sheep-skin Drum Dance, and Qiang

Watchtower Construction Skills. Tourism brought fame and fascination to Longxi not only because it was a swift reconstruction project, but also because of its purposeful demonstration of cultural sensitivity. In particular, Dongmen Village changed into a

“pure” and “historic” Qiang heritage tourist site after the reconstruction. The village was rebuilt as an elaborate replication of a traditional Qiang village. It agglomerated the

122 marrow of Qiang architecture, craft, culinary, and performing arts. The politics of restoring and reconstructing the Qiang culture for tourism will be discussed in detail in the next chapter. After the reconstruction, tourism became a major source of income for a majority of villagers of Dongmen and E’er, the two key tourist destinations of Longxi.

Visits to the reconstructed Qiang heritage tourism sites were increasingly popular in

Sichuan after the Wenchuan Earthquake during my fieldwork (2011-2015). The post- earthquake experience of the Qiang and the wide promotion of the Qiang culture drew the attention of many Chinese tourists. Based on my daily observation in Dongmen, most of the tourists were from nearby counties and cities. They travelled to Dongmen to enjoy the cool weather in the summer, experience the rural lifestyle, and engage the promoted

Qiang culture. Ever since the completion of the project, villagers were busy with hosting tourists from all over the country. Many villagers transformed their houses into family hostels where visitors could live in Qiang houses and taste the traditional Qiang dishes such as the preserved pork, fried bamboos, and Qiang desserts. Rooms of the home hostels were quickly booked out during major national holidays. To allow Aunt Tang’s family to receive more guests, many times I had to give my room to the guests and sleep in the bunk bed with Jiafu’s younger daughter. Other villagers were involved in the tourism business by opening Qiang embroidery shops and variety shops selling tourist souvenirs. Tourism brought about economic prosperity in the village. Donglin estimated in 2013 that, for those in tourism business, the family’s annual income almost tripled after the earthquake.

The Qiang cultural rejuvenation went beyond the booming heritage tourism.

Grants of tens of thousands yuan (thirty to forty thousand dollars) were given to research

123 groups to study, recover, and preserve Qiang culture and language since the earthquake.

Qiang cultural museums were established in all of the Qiang-concentrated counties including Wenchuan, Maoxian, Lixian, and Beichuan. Longxi also hosted the only township-level Qiang cultural museum. In Wenchuan County seat, Qiang dancing and singing were performed regularly in the public parks at the evenings when the locals and tourists alike could participate in such activities. In other Qiang villages, journalists reported back in 2010 that teachers of Qiang dancing and singing started to have young students who newly became interested in the previously-viewed outdated rituals (Yu and

Yuan 2010). In Dongmen, traditional Qiang embroidery and other needlework became best-selling souvenirs in many reconstructed Qiang tourism villages. A single piece of

Qiang-style embroidered handkerchief could sell as much as 100 yuan ($15). Some venders claimed that a single month’s revenue of the embroidery business could be much higher than their previous annual income when the business was good.

The Qiang shibi and their practices gained unprecedented fame and popularity.

Shibi are the Qiang ritual specialists traditionally responsible for leading worships, exorcisms, healing the sick, and monitoring many other rituals of the Qiang including weddings and funerals. They are the main moderator of the Qiang New Year Festival and

Sheep-skin Drum Dance, both listed as Chinese ICH in 2008. The origin and skills of the shibi largely remain secret and mysterious to the lay people. The skills are strictly taught and transmitted within the very few shibi families, or, in some rare cases, between elder shibi and non-relative apprentices. Because the Qiang have no written language the shibi’s scripts are passed down orally between generations through reciting and memorizing. Most of the shibi’s learning time is devoted to memorizing the orally

124 transmitted shibi scripts, which mainly consist of the origin myths of the ancient Qiang, lists of the gods to be worshiped, and incantations for each different rite. In this case, shibi serve as doctors, priests, and monitors of the major rituals in the villages.

Longxi Township is advertised as “Qiang People’s Valley” not only because more than 98 percent of its population were identified as ethnic Qiang in 2013, but more importantly, it is believed to be the origin place of the Qiang shibi. Longxi’s E’er Village is widely considered as one of the few origin villages of shibi. Master Yu, one of the greatest shibi in recent history, lived and trained two of his sons, one grandson, and

Wenyi Zhu, his son-in-law as shibi in E’er. All of them and their families still lived there after Master Yu passed away in 2006. Word has it that Master Yu was one of the two or three shibi in contemporary Sichuan to memorize all of the shibi scripts. In Kuapo

Village on the mountain across the valley lived another shibi with his two male apprentices, all of whom, according to local villagers, repeatedly proved the effectiveness of their healing and exorcising abilities. Still, there were several other villagers in Longxi who practice, or proclaim themselves as shibi. Among the 20 some noted Qiang villages that I visited in Sichuan, Longxi had the largest number of self-identified shibi.

After the earthquake, Longxi’s surviving shibi, especially shibi Wenyi Zhu, the national ICH transmitter of the Qiang Sheep-skin Drum Dance, were made into local stars. According to Wenyi Zhu, countless journalists, researchers and tourists had consulted him about the shibi practices and oral histories of the Qiang in Longxi. Along with a number of other shibi and Sheep-skin Drum Dancers in the village, Wenyi Zhu became extremely busy performing and presiding related rituals at various occasions. He also started to take apprentices around the villages. As will be discussed in more details

125 in Chapter 7, the transformed Qiang rituals and practitioners as national ICH and ICH transmitters respectively brough about complex impacts on the meaning and practices of such rituals, as well as the identity and life of related shibi.

After the reconstruction, many Dongmen villagers gave up their migrant work in outside cities and returned home to run individual tourism business. As will be discussed in Chapter 6, tourism in the reconstructed Qiang tourist villages was a mix of disaster, heritage, and “grateful culture” (gan’en wenhua 感恩文化) tourism that the Qiang hosts sold on their misfortune and marginality, as well as the post-earthquake swift reconstruction and cultural revitalization. The tourism not only brought an ostensible new thriving of the vanishing culture, but also transformed the ways of life and socialization of the villagers, leading to new processes of subjectivity-formation of the contemporary

Qiang as contested beneficiaries of the State reconstruction project and challenged inheritors and marketers of the State recovered culture.

A Different Pace of Resilience and Reconstruction

Jiafu was one of the first ones to start reconstructing houses in Dongmen. Not only did his elder mother and two teenage girls need a clean and stable house to live in, he but also mastered the house construction skills that his deceased father taught him.

Jiafu was confident to design and build the house on his own. He did not have the resource or money to hire a construction team anyway. Jiafu told me this when we were standing in front of one of the walls in the house, against which he made four rows of wood pallets to display the dozens of stones he collected through the years. Looking at the display, I asked, “So you drew the blueprint yourself?” “I didn’t need a blueprint. It is all in my head,” he replied in his usually calm, slow, but incontrovertible tone, “Such as

126 building the wall, I layered the stone pieces just using my eyes [to measure the straightness].”

Jiafu’s original plan was to build a house similar to the old one, probably relatively bigger, steadier, and with new interior decoration in a year’s time. Following the customary practice, the house was built with locally-available stone pieces, yellow dirt, and grass. Most of the stone pieces were recycled from the collapsed house. The dirt and grass, as Jiafu was taught, were used to cement the stones, and better than the cement, these natural materials could allow the “wind to breathe” (in Sichuan dialect, toufeng 透

风), leaving the house cool in the summer while warm in winter times. The house was designed to be a square, three-story high, and flat-roof one, a common architecture style of Qiang houses. The first floor was saved for pigsties. The upper two floors were for human living, with the kitchen and living room on the second floor, and bedrooms on the third. The flat roof was often used for drying corns and other produces. Upon the middle of the back wall on the roof was the place for the nacha—a small white stone pagoda where the Qiang’s highest sky gods are worshiped regularly.

Prices of the building materials kept rising months into the reconstruction period where the majority of the families started their projects. As all of the 1000 or so affected regions in Sichuan started rebuilding according to the central State government’s planning, costs of the reconstruction and transportation skyrocketed. For example, the price of one piece of brisk almost three folded when it was sold in Dongmen. Prices of the cement, reinforcing steel, and aluminum alloy all doubled for the least (Bao 2009). A seemingly smarter choice might be to wait until the reconstruction fever passed, as villagers were all offered a temporary tent to live for months. However, playing with time

127 was not an option for the villagers where the Chinese State government set strict time frame and reimbursement policies for the reconstruction as early as in June 2008.

On June 20, Sichuan provincial government, based on the central government’s policy, issued the “5.12” Wenchuan Earthquake Rural House Reconstruction Program of

Work, setting the subsidy standards for rural permanent housing reconstruction, and rural housing repair and reinforcement. For villagers choosing to rebuild their permanent houses, governmental subsidies ranged from 16,000 to 22,000 yuan ($2600 to $3600), depending on the number of family members. The officially evaluated low-income families were offered extra subsidies. In Dongmen, a family like Jiafu’s with 5 people

(Jiafu, his wife Meilin, mother Minhua, and two daughters listed on his hukou booklet— residence booklet) was given 19,000 yuan ($2886) to reconstruct their house. However, villagers had to present evidence of reconstruction to receive the subsidy, which, from an auditing and governing perspective, was not an unreasonable requirement. “The money was only given [to us] when [local officials could see] the house foundation and roof,” a villager in E’er told the reporter (Wu 2012). According to Longxi township government’s

Settlement Table of the Rural Housing Reconstruction Subsidy, the first 40% of the subsidy was given to eligible villagers in October 2008, another 40% in early 2009, and the rest in March, 2009. This means that most of the houses were expected to be completed in less than a year’s time.

The strict time line and standardized procedure conflicted with the local customary time tables for house building. In the past, the construction of a Qiang family house could take months up to years, which required not only careful selection of location and materials, but also worship rituals and community cooperation. A slow-

128 paced construction of the house allowed the gluing dirt to slowly dry out to increase the viscosity, which in turn, enhanced the house’s sturdiness. It also gave time for the family to accumulate the financial resources. After finishing one floor, villagers used to wait for a year or two to build another. As house building involved breaking the ground believed to be charged by spiritual gods, it was a sensitive and time-consuming practice that required a series of public worshiping rituals from the beginning to the end. Shibi, close family members, and neighbors and friends in the village were invited to monitor, witness, and celebrate the laying of house foundation, installing of the main door and central beam, roof building, as well as appropriate placements of the ancestor shrine and nacha before moving in. Spirits being appeased and worshiped, kin and friends reciprocating labor and support, house building, in this case, was a major life decision and ritual process of the Qiang in which the environmental, spiritual, and social relationships were enacted, negotiated, and sustained.

Under the financing and political pressures, Longxi villagers rushed into the reconstruction. Many tore down their century-old family houses to rebuild a new one, for one main reason that the subsidy for constructing a permanent house was much more than that for house repairing. Some chose a makeshift location to rebuild where the previous one was no longer safe enough. Few people had Jiafu’s luxury of starting early and rebuilding on his own with stones and dirt. Many used over-priced bricks, cement, and reinforced steel bars in order to quickly make a livable house. Villagers’ already quickened reconstruction was pushed forward by the financial assistance from the Hong

Kong Red Cross. In early 2009, the organization promised to offer an additional 25,000 yuan to Longxi families who would build houses according to the organization’s anti-

129 seismic standard with cement and reinforced steel bar foundations and supports. In order to obtain the aid, a number of villagers even destroyed their half-built new houses and started anew. Some villagers gave up repairing the old house to build a new one. Due to the lack of available land, many of them built the new houses in their already shrinking farmland. In total, this project funded the construction of six hundred new houses around

Longxi. Referred by one of the villagers as “cement boxes” (shuini hezi 水泥盒子), those new houses were dazzlingly different from the surrounding stone and dirt structures (Wu

2012).

Weijun Tang, Jiafu’s cousin who lived across the village road, was debating if to repair the hundred-year old family house which survived two major earthquakes, or build a new one somewhere else after the earthquake. His old house was one third of the huge housing complex belonged to his grandfather, Jisheng Tang, once the richest landlord of

Dongmen. According to Donglin, Weijun’s cousin, Tang Jisheng, their grandfather, a

Han Chinese from a rural township of Sichuan, wandered to Longxi to make a living, and married his wives there, all of them were Qiang from villages higher up in the mountains.

This marriage pattern of manniang hanlaotou (mother the barbarian and father the Han,

蛮娘汉老头) was widely practiced in ethnic regions of southwestern China, indicating the mobility discrepancies of the Han as the mobile migrants into the ethnic regions, as well as the ethnic group women’s willingness of marrying down from the mountain villages, as a way to escape poverty (Du 2011). Gradually the elder Tang made a fortune mainly by smuggling tea between Dujiangyan and Songpan, the latter being a hustling market place for the Han-Tibetan good exchanges. Tea, grown in Sichuan and Yunnan

(major Chinese tea production sites close to Tibet) and an indispensable ingredient of the

130 butter tea, Tibetan’s daily drink, was one of the most important and precious goods sought out in Songpan. In exchange, Tibetan business men offered their Han counterparts livestock, fur, silver, and other goods.

The historical Tea and Horse Road passed across the majority of the Qiang territories, from Wenchuan to Songpan. Tax was collected along the road, as carriers passed each of the officially-established fortresses. To maximize the profit, carriers would take the shorter, rougher, and fortress-free routes locally known as the “small roads” (xiaolu 小路). Longxi is located on one of the small roads. From Dongmen, along the narrow trail walked out by their predecessors to E’er Village, and climbing over the mountain of about 3000 meters high, the group would reach Sanlong of Maoxian, and take a short-cut to Songpan. “That would save them a day or two,” Donglin said, “And they avoided the taxing fortresses in both Wenchuan and Maoxian.” Not only did

Donglin’s grandfather manage a big number of tea carriers, he also connected well with and bribed many of the local officials to acquiesce his lucrative business. Jisheng Tang then became the richest landlord of the township.

At the cheerful family dinner table on the Chinese New Year’s Eve, Donglin told me more about the family history. “My grandfather owned so many farmlands during his prosperous years, not only [lands in] Longxi, but [those in] Lixian, Wenchuan County, and, guess what, Dujiangyan, before he, his wives, and sons started to smoke the opium.

They would lay on the lounge chairs all day to smoke, rest, and smoke again. The family

[fortune] was gradually ruined. Until my father’s generation the Tang family already declined.” During the Land Reform in 1955, the grandfather’s complex house was divided into three separated houses where families of Zedi (Weijun’s mother; daughter of

131 the second wife of Tang Jisheng), Aunt Tang (daughter of the first wife of Tang Jisheng), and Linping (Donglin’s mother; Aunt Tang’s full sister) lived before the earthquake.

The additional 25,000 yuan aid offered by the Hong Kong Red Cross prompted

Weijun to finally build a new house in early 2009. The new house was built on his only remaining piece of farmland. To make a living, he had to reclaim a piece of wild land along the steep slope of the mountain. I followed him once to his newly reclaimed land. It took us almost an hour to climb up and down the mountain along a makeshift trail to get to his new land, on which he planted mostly cash fruits including watermelons and apples.

The way back was much harder because he had to carry 5 big, ripe watermelons along with a bag of apples on his back, and trail on the abrupt slopes. His entire coat was wet when we finally returned Dongmen, and each day, he had to make at least one trip to the land.

Weijun, however, did not seem to regret his choice of reconstruction. After all, it was his only choice at the time given limited funding and time allowance. Next to the main door of his new house hung a red plank on the wall, indicating that the house was a

“Hong Kong Red Cross Aid Project.” At my first visit in 2012, Weijun, sitting on the leather sofa of the tiled living room, proudly said to me, “The Red Cross’s quality standard is very high. This house has a reinforced concrete frame structure. The steel bars

I used were so big that the house was designed to resist against 8.0-magnitude earthquakes.” When he led me to the second floor of the house, where the bedrooms of his two grown-up children were turned into guest rooms, he re-emphasized the steadiness of the house. He added, “The house [referring to Jiafu’s house] you are staying at was not built this way. There are no reinforced steels in it. Like my old house, it [Jiafu’s house] is

132 already tilted.” After the reconstruction, Weijun set a step into the old house once only, just to show me around. The old house was rented with extremely low rental fees by the

Sunshine Company, a Chengdu-based real estate company, which aimed to redecorate it into a hotel. Yet the house was still left intact when I finished my fieldwork in 2015. This example indicates that challenges to preserve historic houses can come from both State planning and personal choices. The preservation of such houses require not only monetary support, but also time, planning, and more importantly, a respect for history. In the context of the swift reconstruction, much of the history and tradition was sacrificed to ensure the ostensible “miraculous reconstruction.”

“Miraculous Reconstruction” as Ecological and Cultural Damaging Mechanism

Increasingly drawing researchers’ attention is the vital role that disaster aid, national and international alike, plays in disaster response and recovery. Quick and sufficient emergency aid is frequently necessary to reduce the often devastating damage wrought by disaster. Disaster aid can act as “an agent of disaster by nurturing long-term risk through short-term remedies” (Torry 1978:302). Recognizing the “continuous we- they dichotomy” (Oliver-Smith 1996:306) between disaster victims and aid, anthropologists have been particularly concerned with long-term impacts of the oftentimes excessive, short-lived, and culturally-insensitive deployment of national and international disaster aid. As “powerful strangers or trespassers” (Simpson 2013:2), the overloaded short-term aid agencies, through forcefully tampering with ecological and social resources upon which affected people rely, weaken local capacities and support for recovering on their own, making them ever “dependent on remote, unpredictable, and

133 poorly-devised bureaucratic solutions” (Torry 1978:302,; see also Dudasik 1982,

Alexander 2013, Marchezini 2015).

Despite the imposing investment, the State-led reconstruction threatened the sustainable and culturally sensitive living of the Qiang villagers, perpetuating the vulnerability-engendering practices that caused their plight in the first place. First of all,

Longxi was quickly rebuilt on a land already very dangerous and largely unsuitable for human living. The construction-concentrated projects, however, failed to mitigate the frequent landslides and mudslides that continue to threaten lives of the villagers. All, planners, officials, and villagers alike, were alerted of the fact that Longxi was no longer, or never had been, a safe place for living. Debates of the post-earthquake condition of the township between the two experts mentioned in the previous chapter were widely circulated among all people in Longxi. Many agreed with Yi Zhi’s point that Longxi, as well as most parts of Wenchuan, was vulnerable to secondary disasters such as landslides and mudslides before the next earthquake took place. Such fear and worry became even more appalling as one actually set steps in Longxi. The towering mountains on both sides can easily bury all villages in between the valley if another earthquake strikes. On ordinary days, rocks and dirt along the naked slopes could fall at any moment, killing people, smashing cars, and flooding houses and farmland.

According to the Zhanjiang planners, in general, Longxi’s resource bearing capacity was dangerously low to accommodate the needs and development of the several thousand remaining residents. According to the survey by the planners after the earthquake, none of the potential residential locations surveyed were geologically

“adaptable,” or “basically adaptable” for living. Only a handful of the locations were of

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“low adaptability,” and the rest “non-adaptable” (Xiao and Chen 2009:82). Low adaptability meant that “the land could barely pass the standard for living after a series of amendments…[Even after the amendments], these lands were only good for constructing public service facilities, rather than residential houses,” Xiao and Chen explains

(2009:83-84). In order to find space for all the public facilities and villages, planners had to pick some relatively safer areas in the low-adaptable locations for village reconstruction. To them, “It was like picking one or two less moldy ones out of a big basket of rotten oranges” (Xiao and Chen 2009:84).

After the reconstruction, the new water, electricity, and gas system, and inter- village roads; the primary school, kindergartens, hospital, police station, government building, and entertaining centers; the hundreds newly-reconstructed villager houses were either at the foot of the arduous mountains or along the steep slopes. The only solutions proposed by the planners were, first, to rebuild on the “less moldier” grounds, and also, to build buildings strong enough to resist another 8.0-magnitude earthquake. Every bit of the remaining flat land was put to use in spite of the threats of falling rocks and lose ground. As a result, the new township roads under reconstruction were already repeatedly destroyed by the constant landslide. “At the present the road looks sturdy. But I know that it is not. There are big cracks on the roads. We could only fill them with dirt, and make it flat. The road will collapse again shortly. Someday soon, a new route would be built [when the previous one is totally damaged],” Wang Ping, Longxi’s then vice- township head, told a reporter (Bao 2009).

Major problems emerged in the rather reckless swift planning and reconstruction in addition to the skyrocketing construction cost. Just to take Wenchuan for example,

135 little time was left for carefully planning for, placing, and reallocating the more than 100 thousand affected population and dozens of factories, companies, and schools, projects so important that would affect their destinies for a long time to come. Even less time was offered to harness the landslides or mudslides before new roads were built along the mountains covered with lose rocks and dirt. As discussed in Chapter 2, landslides and mudslides have remained frequent hazardous threats to various regions of Wenchuan since the reconstruction. At the same time, villagers of different townships complained to me of the quality issues of the reconstructed houses. In 2012, only two years after the reconstruction, a villager in Jina Qiang Village showed me several long cracks on the walls of his kitchen and living room. According to him, the swift reconstruction sacrificed the house’s quality for a speedy project completion.

The planners hired by Zhanjiang’s team were very unfamiliar with Longxi.

Without a proper knowledge of the places they were supposed to help, the outside planners ran the risk of planning projects unsuitable or unsustainable for the affected regions. None of the Zhanjiang planners ever worked in mountainous regions, or planned reconstruction for ethnic villages. They did not even have a complete satellite image of

Longxi until days after their arrival. Most of their design and planning was based on their urban planning experience at the coastal Zhanjiang city. In this case, several of the projects were later proved ineffective. For example, the inter-village water pipelines were constantly plugged after the reconstruction, cutting off water supply for villages like

Dongmen and others. A Longxi official, when inspecting the water pipelines, complained to me, “The pipelines are too thin that the dirt and small rocks can easily plug them. The

136 planners from the coastal cities didn’t know how many rocks and dirt there were in the mountains.”

Initially, the partner assistance policy was upheld as a demonstration of the

Chinese State’s commanding power of controlling and dispatching massive State and provincial resources for grandeur State projects. It also served to prove the advantages of a socialist political structure which ensured that “when one is in trouble, help will come from all places” (yifang younan, bafang zhiyuan; 一方有难，八方支援). At the same time, with a high-level official as leader of the team and massive reconstruction resources, the assisting team assumed the actual power to design and plan for the reconstruction of the affected areas. As Feng Luo once confessed to me, “They [Zhanjiang] sent a vice- mayor here. The highest ranking official of Longxi was the Township Party Secretary.

[With a sharp difference in ranking], it is very hard to pretend that [Zhanjiang and Longxi] have equal decision power.” Consequently, without adequate input of local knowledge and expertise in the process, the outsiders-led reconstruction may not be as safe, quality, and culturally sensitive as desired.

A reconstruction planning excluding the opinions or participation of local villagers, the “miraculous reconstruction” caused a great chasm of the overwhelming

State planning and the culturally paced rhythms of reconstruction. The State requirement of a swift reconstruction left little room for villagers to carefully, patiently, and socially- appropriately reconstruct houses and hometown. Instead of carefully preserving the historic houses, villagers abandoned or tore down those houses to build new ones eligible for State and other subsidies. Instead of retaining the culturally informed and socially

137 agreeable practices of reconstruction, villagers were pushed to rebuild houses with makeshift locations, modern technology, and hired labor to ensure a quick completion.

The loss of land further bankrupted their ability to continue their familiar ways of living. After the earthquake, Longxi’s already limited arable land reduced in half.

Worse still, over 85% of such land is along the mountain slopes, threatened by the constantly mud- and land-slides after the earthquake. Much of the little available land left, however, was used for hasty house reconstruction and expropriated to build tourism- related facilities and sceneries, damaging the economic bases for the agriculture/fruit- based economy essential to the villagers’ sustainable development. In Dongmen, more than half of the previously arable land was expropriated by the local government to build a new section of the village where the majority of the scenic spots were located. All rural land is owned by the peasant collectives in China, while villagers only have the right to use. One-time compensation is paid to the villagers when a land is used by the local government for public affairs. However, villagers would lose the stable income from farming. Most of them became vulnerable to the financial vagaries of the emerging tourism industry and versatile market economy. As one villager poignantly said, “We peasants must have land of our own. There is no guarantee of life without land.”

Conclusion

This chapter explores the “miraculous reconstruction” in Longxi Township where many of the villages were swiftly reconstructed and instantaneously “modernized” with major State funding managed by Zhanjiang city, Longxi’s partner assistance city.

Disaster zones turned into “scenic sites,” homelands into “gardens,” the “miraculous reconstruction” also led to a new thriving of the Qiang culture and promising economic

138 opportunities through the development of the Qiang heritage tourism there. The

“miraculous reconstruction,” however, paid a high environmental and socio-economic cost. Not only did it fail to mitigate the environmental hazards that endanger the lives of the Qiang in the first place, the reconstruction achieved the “miraculous” speed at the cost of sacrificing the culturally-informed norms and speeds of reconstruction for the

Qiang.

Despite claiming a specific aim to rescue and preserve the affected Qiang culture, the State rescue efforts, from the very beginning, altered the local Qiang’s relationships with the environment, and dismembered the Qiang’s habitual life world. They destroyed the particular socio-ecological context for the continuance of the familiar ways of living, and rendered the restoration and recovery of local cultures a problematic ideal. It thus became ironic that a series of State-sponsored programs were later carried out to

“excavate,” “upgrade,” and “develop” the Qiang culture in places like Longxi where the context and environment for the survival of the very cultural practices were destroyed.

Longxi’s post-earthquake cultural transformation served an exemplar of a State-led rescue and reconstruction of the Qiang culture. The next chapter is devoted to the discussion of the politics of reconstructing the culture of a Chinese ethnic minority group after a major disaster.

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Chapter 5 “Excavation,” “Upgrade,” and “Development” of the Qiang Culture

As described in previous chapter, cultural sensitivity is a defining characteristic in representation of the post-Wenchuan Earthquake reconstruction of the Qiang communities. As one of my American colleagues commented, “It took this much

[destruction] for people to notice them, huh?” This comment suggests the politics of recognition and development of Chinese ethnic minority groups in relation to the Chinese

State. Das and Poole (2004) analyze groups at the “margin of the state” as in a dynamically contested relationship with the state where the latter exerts its power unevenly, and sometimes irrationally, within the geographically bounded nation. The concept of marginality does not only refer to spatial peripheries. As Makley (2014:374) succinctly summarizes, “[Margins] pervade the very body politic as morally charged interactions in which claims to sovereignty over bodies and lands are continuously performed and challenged.” The Chinese State’s post-earthquake attention to and efforts of restoring and recovering the Qiang culture thus became a process where the State, in a time of crisis, legitimized claims of the subaltern culture, and its significance to the development and harmony (hexie 和谐) of the multi-ethnic nation.

“Inherit and carry forward local culture and protect ecology” was listed as one of the eight basic principles in the State Overall Planning for Post-Wenchuan Earthquake

Restoration and Reconstruction. Also in the Overall Planning, seven chapters and ten sections directly mentioned the affected ethnic minorities (mainly the Qiang), where

140 rescuing and recovering the local culture were paramount (Huang and Bonschab

2010:146). A close study of the Overall Planning reveals that specific strategies to rescue and recover Qiang culture could be classified in four main aspects: 1). Infrastructure reconstruction, especially the reconstruction of rural housing; 2). Rescuing and recovering natural and cultural heritage by repairing historic Qiang houses and watch towers, and reconstructing local Qiang cultural museums; 3). Rebuilding local industry by developing tourism and the cultural industry represented by the Qiang embroidery and other crafts; and 4). Constructing the “spiritual homeland” of the Qiang through establishing Qiang Cultural Ecosystem Experimental Conservation Area (Huang and

Bonschab 2010:146-148).

Embedded in such “cultural reconstruction” principles were particular assumptions about “culture,” “development,” “modernization” and “homeland” for the rural, ethnic Qiang people in China. First, the “cultural reconstruction” mainly referred to the restoration and reconstruction of the physical features of the Qiang villages and lives, including historic houses, architecture (stone towers and worshiping pagodas), museums, ethnic clothing, and physical transformation of the entire village to fit the imagination and interpretation of a “traditional” Qiang settlement. Second, the “cultural reconstruction” aimed to promote the economic development for the villages through ethnic tourism. Third, the “cultural reconstruction” was an indispensable part of modernizing the Qiang where ethnic culture restoration and revival were designed to make the ethnic Qiang clean, modern, “civilized” and culturally sensitive members of the

Chinese nation. Finally the “spiritual homeland” to be constructed was later made into the

141 national Qiang Cultural Ecosystem Experimental Conservation Area as part of the

Chinese State-led ICH protection campaign.

The recovery, continuance, and transformation of local culture after major disasters have always been the focal topic for anthropologists of disaster. Ethnographic case studies have repeatedly argued that culture is oftentimes ignored in post-disaster planning. In a few cases when local culture is being noticed, it is usually rendered static, physical, and homogeneous. Saved and managed in terms of tangible or intangible cultural heritage, culture is usually regarded as a single unit in terms of post-disaster relief and recovery (see Button 2013, Maldonado 2016). More importantly, the “local culture” being considered is oftentimes products of the culture, such as the customs, rituals, and artifacts worthy of commercialization (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009).

Instead, the process of people in their everyday activities and relations that enact and enliven the “culture” are variously disregarded or submerged. Cultural recovery, at the same time, is also imbued with economic and political incentives which largely shape and valorize the meaning and significance of the cultural practices. Repeatedly, we see that local culture is “alternatively subjected to malign neglect, coopted, or scapegoated in efforts of disaster risk reduction, prevention, mitigation, response, and recovery” (Faas and Barrios 2015).

The Qiang’s experience is especially important because it presents a rare case in which the cultural recovery is led by top-down, State planning. This chapter is devoted to investigating what aspects of the Qiang culture were restored, preserved and promoted and how. Particularly, the focus is on examining the State-sanctioned and extremely problematic discourse and practice to “excavate” (wajue 挖掘), “upgrade” (tishen 提升),

142 and “develop” (fazhan 发展) the Qiang culture. Such discourse and practice repeatedly appeared in various governmental reports and my interviews with planning officials, experts, and tourism company managers. These three strategies showcased the Qiang’s historical marginalization, political vulnerability, and economic disadvantage. The Qiang culture was to be “dug out” and so be known by the public, “uplifted” to be significant and meaningful in State planning, and ultimately, marketed through heritage tourism to boost the lagging local economy for the villagers involved.

Also clearly stated in State Overall Planning was that economic viability was an important standard for cultural restoration and preservation projects, where aforementioned cultural features were picked and marketed as attractive tourist commodities. The reconstruction displayed State-certified and interpreted Qiang cultural heritage as a member of the multi-ethnic national family. An analysis of the selective cultural features being “excavated,” “upgraded,” and “developed” in the process, in turn, provides a window to examine how culture was perceived and manipulated in official

Chinese disaster mitigation and reconstruction schemes, as well as how ethnic culture was interpreted and integrated in Chinese policies to promote multi-ethnic nationalism in time of crisis.

Cultural “Excavation”: Representing the “Ancient” and “Mysterious” Qiang

After the earthquake, the lack of understanding of the Qiang culture challenged the planners’ capacity to do culturally sensitive planning. The earthquake-stricken areas were “relatively rich in resources, the said areas also see a concentration of world cultural and natural heritage sites and natural reserves with abundant tourist resources” (State

Overall Planning 2008:7). Wenchuan, in particular, was a small unknown county of the

143 northwest frontier of Sichuan Province which virtually had no tourism before 2008. In the

Wenchuan County Plan of Qiang Cultural Ecosystem Conservation Experimental Area

(2010), “to collect, rescue, excavate, sort out the resources in the county, to develop conservation plan, and to implement conservation procedures” was listed as work goals between 2008 and 2010. The very practice of “excavating culture” revealed the long-time negligence towards the Qiang, their lifestyle and living environment in Chinese society.

Prior to the earthquake, there was little research on the Qiang culture; the early studies were conducted mainly by foreign missionaries and ethnographers, as well as Chinese scholars who happened to pass by the Qiang region in the southwestern frontier of the country. Comparing with studies of other “famous” Chinese ethnic groups such as

Tibetans, Hui, Zhuang, and Yi, those on Qiang culture and life were relatively few. More importantly, in public and political sphere, the Qiang remained marginal and silent. After the earthquake, research and displaying the Qiang culture became a meaning-laden political assignment for officials, planning experts, project contractors, and relevant scholars.

With the State reconstruction principle to “inherit and carry forward” local culture came a surge of interest in restoring and promoting the Qiang culture in the reconstruction planning. Dongmen’s post-earthquake transformation served an exemplar of a State-led “excavation” and reconstruction of the Qiang culture. In early 2009,

Dongmen engaged in a series of “style transformation” (fengmao gaizao 风貌改造) projects to restore and represent the Qiang culture of the village. As instructed by

Wenchuan County Party Secretary, Lidong Qing, Dongmen was to be transformed into the Qiang People’s Valley folk culture display center. Donglin, the former Dongmen

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Village head, insisted being the meritorious statesman for Dongmen’s culture transformation by convincing Lidong Qing to initiate the “style transformation” project there. Donglin claimed to be the Party Secretary’s teacher of Qiang culture and tradition, through a close relationship with him. “Lidong Qing came to Longxi in late 2008, and I showed him around the village. We sat in my front yard and talked for a long time,”

Donglin recalled. According to Donglin, they discussed the lack of culture sensitivity in

Zhanjiang’s initial reconstruction plans, and the advantages of Dongmen as a potential ethnic tourism site.

At that time, Qing had little knowledge about the Qiang culture. The former Party

Secretary of Nanjiang County in Sichuan’s Bazhong City, Qing was appointed as

Wenchuan’s Party Secretary six months after the earthquake. A Han and native of

Sichuan’s northeastern Nanchong City, Qing confessed to the reporters that he had never been to or thought about working in A’ba, the Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan. He said:

A few days before I was appointed, an official of the provincial Organization Department came to talk to me. He told me that I would be sent to a place which people all around the world were watching and yet afraid of. I had a big headache. I had never been to A’ba. I had never thought of [working there]. I checked the map to look for Ma’erkang [A’ba’s capital], but only found a description [of Ma’erkang] of fewer than 300 words. I had never been to Wenchuan or Ma’erkang. I did not prepare to work in Wenchuan (Chen and Tao 2009).

Qing indeed needed to learn about the Qiang culture. As “excavating” and preserving the

Qiang cultural elements in rebuilt villages were his official orders, Qing was famously known for saying to Donglin and other relevant staff that “Qiang culture is to be discovered, and produced out of the thin air (wu zhong sheng you 无中生有) at the same time.”

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Quickly, Zhanjiang reconstruction planning group went to Longxi for the second time to “gain an in-depth understanding of Qiang culture” (Xiao and Chen 2009:107). In their summary, Qiang culture was distilled into a practice with “ancient history,” “pure and primitive religious belief,” and distinctive legends and language. It also included

“shibi culture” which combined “all elements in Qiang New Year Celebration: barley wine, salang [Qiang circle dance], spirit worshiping, huotang [Qiang kichten, fire place, and worship place], and white-stone worshiping.” In Xiao and Chen’s report,

“representative aspects” of the Qiang culture included white stones, shibi chanting scripts,

Qiang pickled pork, and stone watchtowers. And finally, steps to “let the planning be rooted in the soil of the ethnic culture” comprised of “displaying Qiang culture to the world” and “having all Qiang villagers live in Qiang-style buildings.” As a result, a

Qiang folk culture displaying center was constructed in Dongmen, and all reconstructed architecture in the village was decorated in a “Qiang style” according to the Architecture

Style Control Scheme edited by the Wenchuan County Planning and Construction Bureau.

After the planning group’s initial survey, the Chengdu-based Sichuan New View

Urban-Suburb Planning and Research Company was hired by Longxi township government to design Dongmen Village’s reconstruction as the Qiang folk culture display center in December, 2008. The complete reconstruction plan was presented to

Longxi government in May, 2009. The plan declared that the theme of Dongmen’s reconstruction was to present the “resilient Qiang reborn out of ashes.” The reconstruction aimed to achieve three goals: making Dongmen a fine exemplar of the

Qiang Cultural Ecosystem Conservation Experiment Area; developing tourism and modern agriculture; and reconstructing comfortable and convenience living environment.

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Longxi was projected as “the origin place of ancient Qiang shibi,” and Dongmen as a representative “ancient Qiang village” where “five dragons met.” The “five dragons,” referred to the four mountains and Longxi Creek surrounding Dongmen village.

According to the planning document, Dongmen Village resided at the center place where the “five dragons” met, an auspicious sign of Dongmen’s good feng shui (wind water; the flow of energy that brings harmony and well-being of a particular locale).

According to a 102-page Power-Point presentation, three kinds of construction projects were designed to “reproduce the historical cultural space [of the Qiang],”

“transmit shibi culture,” and “protect animistic life philosophy.” Based on the principle of

“reconstructing the old as old” and “repairing the old as old,” planners designed to construct a new township gate, suspension bridge, two stone watchtowers, Qiang theater pavilion, and water mill, following “traditional” Qiang style and aesthetics. Most of the damaged historical Qiang “big houses” (da yuan 大院) were repaired with stone and wooden structures. To promote shibi culture, a new Dalabu Square (Dalabu means

Dongmen in Qiang language) displaying shibi stories and bronze shibi group sculptures were to be constructed. The reconstruction also included upgrading the sewage, electricity, and water system throughout the village.

At the same time, the Chengdu-based Muyi Design Studio was hired by the New

View to design the totem poles, bronze shibi group sculpture, and relief walls in the

Dalabu Square in 2009. Each of the eight 4.5-meter tall, granite totem poles was carved with patterns displaying Qiang music and opera, dance and watch tower, shibi culture, language, cultural relics, embroidery, hunting, agricultural, wine culture, and New Year

Festival respectively. The shibi group sculpture featured an elder shibi holding a bell and

147 spiritual rod at the middle, surrounded by four dancing, drum-beating shibi. According to

Muyi Design Studio, one of the relief walls displayed the scenery of E’er Village as an

“original, well-preserved, authentic Qiang village.” The other relief wall depicted the story of Adayingji (阿达因吉), a legendary love story between a Qiang girl, Adayinji, from Bulan Village and the Dragon God, to present the Qiang’s animistic spirit. A replica of the earthquake-destroyed “spiritual tree” of Kuapo Village, believed to have blessed the villagers for thousands of years, was also established to “memorize the village damaged by the earthquake.”

The main aim of the first style transformation, according to Donglin, was to make

Dongmen Village an “historic Qiang settlement.” Every Dongmen building was painted in grey cement, and decorated again with grey concrete imitation stone pieces and wooden frames, reflecting the region’s stone and wood architecture tradition. The political grafting of the Qiang culture refers to the creation and transplanting of various aspects of Qiang cultural symbols and ritual practices in rebuilt Qiang villages of the earthquake-stricken zones (Zhang 2012). In Dongmen, such practices were easily observable. Two “stone” watch towers were erected at the gate and in the middle of the village respectively, both made in concrete but decorated with the concrete imitation stone pieces. Although watchtowers are widely found in many Qiang villages, no watch tower was ever built in Dongmen. Different from the historic ones, the newly erected watchtowers were mainly for decoration purpose rather than having any actual use.

Throughout my fieldwork, the towers only opened to the public once during a major governmental event when journalists and visitors were allowed to climb the ladders to have a bird’s eye view of the whole village.

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A Qiang theater pavilion was built in the middle of the village across from the watch tower, with pictures of Longxi’s scenery, Qiang wedding, worship, and dance on the walls. The pavilion was a major gathering space for local villagers and tourists, who often danced the Qiang-style circle dance (guozhuang 锅庄) on or in front of the pavilion during weekends and holidays. Qiang embroidery items were widely displayed in

Dongmen after the “style transformation,” whilst in the past, those items were only for personal use. Many houses were decorated with the embroidery patterns of various themes and sizes made by the female family members. The hand-made embroidery work was also the most popular souvenir for sale. Since the ancestors of the Qiang people are believed to be shepherds, images of sheep, sheep herding and sheep heads were frequently painted on the walls of several buildings—an entirely a new way of decoration.

More importantly, the shibi culture, regarded as the core of the Qiang culture, was repeatedly and intensively presented in Dongmen, although no shibi ever lived in the village before. Entering the township gate, one was at once welcomed by bronze sculptures of a dancing group, led by an elder shibi in the middle. These sculptures demonstrated the Sheep-skin Drum Dance of the Qiang, listed as the Chinese national

ICH by the Ministry of Culture in 2008. The dance is often performed during formal rituals. The sculputures included a shibi, wearing a fur hat, dressing in a long gown, and griping a cane with a carved human head on the one hand and a bell on the other, leading the dance. These sculptures seemed to announce that, shibi, the quintessential representatives of the mysterious Qiang, were the very first thing that Longxi wanted to offer to not only scholars, but also all other curious outsiders. In Dongmen Village, the shibi culture was variously displayed. A plank road was constructed along the Longxi

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Creek beneath the Dalabu Square towards the watchtower in the middle of the village, providing visitors an alternative shady pathway. The plank road was named “Shibi

Corridor” where stories of the shibi were introduced. On the other side of the Longxi

Creek, on a 4-meter high, 20-meter long wall attached reinforced wooden boards with paintings from the book—Picture Illustrations of the Shibi Scripts—an ancient and never fully deciphered picture book which recorded the origin stories of the Qiang shibi and detailed instruction of their skills. Several wooden totem-like poles and painted stones were placed in front of the wall, completing the shibi cultural display with what the information board called the “Wood and Stone Worship.”

The partial and discriminative effects of essentializing and othering minority cultures are well documented by anthropologists studying Chinese ethnic minority groups

(see Harrell 1995 and 2001, Litzinger 2000, Schein 1999 and 2000). The “excavation” of the Qiang culture in Dongmen’s cultural reconstruction managed to display a selective number of Qiang cultural landmarks and folk rituals collectively constituting the “ancient” and “mysterious” image of the Qiang. The alterity of the Qiang culture, comparing with the modernizing and urbanizing image of contemporary China, was constructed through the emphasis of the Qiang’s “ancient history,” the discovery of their “pure and primitive religious beliefs,” the reverence for the “mysterious” shibi culture, and the representation of “historical Qiang-style buildings.” This representation echoed Harrell’s (1995) analysis of “primitivizing” the Chinese ethnic groups, which associated the Qiang culture with “unchanging tradition,” as well as “primitive,” “barbarian,” and “uncivilized” status in the “civilizing roadmap” of all ethnic groups in China (Fan 2016). This is the idea that

150 the values, practices, and ways of knowing of some populations are caught in a condition of stasis since time immemorial (Fabian 1983).

Dongmen’s “style transformation” focused on restoring the external features of the “culture”—the architecture, village layout and decoration, clothing, and atmosphere of the Qiang. Oftentimes such “mimetic faculties” (Tausig 1992) are a coarse and twisted imitation of the cultural symbols. Cases of the concrete imitation stones, lavish township gate, and concrete “stone” watchtowers were good examples of how material cultural symbols were superficially copied and transplanted in the newly-established village.

Similar to Taussig’ s (ibid) observation of how the mimetic figurines are seen to have similar powerfulness of the subjects they imitate, the newly-established physical forms of the cultural symbols were, despite their coarseness and manipulated presentation, believed by the planners to be sensitive restorations of the “authentic” cultural forms. The reconstruction invented many cultural symbols and new customs in the village. The

Qiang theater pavilion was one example. Although Qiang drama scripts are recorded in several books and were played in some areas long before the earthquake, there is a lack of evidence that the Qiang ever performed their drama on a Han-style pavilion like the newly built one in Dongmen. Throughout fieldwork, not a single play was performed on the theater pavilion. Yet the signage in front of the pavilion carefully introduced the

“tradition” of the Qiang drama at a great length.

While inventing several new “traditions,” the reconstruction at the same time replaced, destroyed, or misrepresented the historical cultural practices and beliefs in the region. Take the building of the stone tower for example. Qiang people created and continued a unique architectural style in building Qiang watchtowers. Traditionally built

151 with stones, dirt, and planks, historic watchtowers represented the advanced architecture skills of the Qiang people. One amazing aspect of such architectural arts lied in the fact that these complicated houses and watchtowers were built without a blueprint, suspension wire, pillars or framework structure. Qiang people used traditional skills, accumulated experience, and surrounding natural resources in building this architecture. Some of these extremely sturdy traditional constructions stayed intact while many other modern buildings collapsed in the Wenchuan Earthquake. However, neither of the Dongmen’s new watchtowers was built by the local stone masons or with any of the customary skills, but instead by outside construction workers with concrete and heavy-duty machines.

Ironically, the Qiang Watchtower Construction Skills were listed as Chinese ICH after the earthquake.

In Dongmen, the reconstruction rebuilt the village into a collection of ritual practices and architectural styles that temporally framed community life in an idealized past that never actually existed. This encouraged a new State-sponsored memory of

Qiang villages that denies decades of socio-political marginalization at the hands of the

State. As a result, the reconstruction not only deliberately confined the Qiang in a time- space negatively distanced from fellow Chinese ethnic groups, especially the majority

Han, but also reduced the diversity of the Qiang life to a few selective features. Such cultural “excavation” failed to promote cultural conversations that should be the ultimate goal of such a cultural policy. The display of some eye-catching structures and unfamiliar ritual practices made the Qiang a distanced “ethnic other,” a population preserved to represent the past of the nation.

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Cultural Upgrade: “Culture of Yu the Great” and “Red Culture”

The Qiang’s culture reconstruction went beyond exoticizing the ethnicity’s ancientness and marginality. In fact, exoticizing ancientness or marginality was only a tourism by-product of the culture’s reconstruction. The more important goal entailed in the reconstruction was to “upgrade” (tisheng 提升) the Qiang culture to convey its political and social validity and vitality as a uniting, patriotic, and thriving member of the multi-ethnic nation. The Qiang’s cultural reconstruction was an important project to

“modernize” and “civilize” the life of the Qiang, where a State-sponsored culture was expected to become “civilized” (wenming 文明) and “forward-going” (jinbu 进步). I was first shocked by the term “upgrade” during my survey of the reconstruction planning when I found out that Longxi and many other reconstructed regions throughout A’ba

Prefecture went through a project titled “Culture Upgrade” (wenhua tisheng 文化提升) in late 2010. The project was part of the A’ba Prefecture’s prefecture-wide campaign of

“Building Happy and Beautiful Homes” (xingfu meili jiayuan jianshe 幸福美丽家园建

设).

Specifically in Dongmen, “Culture Upgrade” projects aimed to “beautify,”

“modernize,” and “civilize” living environment and lifestyles of the Qiang. They included restructuring kitchen, toilet, water, and pigsty facilities, clearing village sludge and ditches, and constructing asphalt roads and clean-energy supply in most villages.

“Culture Upgrade” projects suggested the kind of “civilizing” projects (Harrell 1995, see also Oakes 1998). Ethnic minorities have long been recognized as “backward” and

“peripheral” members of the nation in terms of social development. A variety of State projects were implemented to advance and uplift their living, economic, educational, and

153 health conditions. With the betterment of the ethnic minorities’ lives, such advancement, in turn, was nationally celebrated as the “great transformations” of the ethnic communities since the establishment of the Communist China (Fan 2016). Essentially, it served to showcase the authority and power of the State, and was intended to nurture the ethnic groups’ admiration and patriotism towards the Party-led China as an ideological campaign for the unity and solidarity of the nation-state.

The Qiang culture “upgrade,” however, did not stop there. My discovery of another equally important, yet often overlooked, aspect of the culture upgrade for ethnic minorities was enlightened by a casual comment of a Wenchuan County official. In summer 2013, I was guiding the then vice-editor of the State-controlled People’s Daily newspaper and accompanying Wenchuan officials to visit Dongmen. I volunteered in many similar events as numerous officials, reporters, and researchers went to inspect

Dongmen, a “star” reconstructed Qiang village, during my research. While the township government took advantage of my free labor, I was able to hear and observe the visitors’ reactions to the reconstruction. Normally the township government would pay 100 yuan

($65) per group visit to the locally-trained villager/tour guide, such as my friend Lijuan. I was called when Lijuan and other tour guides were absent or too busy.

After being informed of my research project, the vice-editor cheerfully expressed, or taught me his views of culture, as many elder Chinese bosses would do to young students. After the vice-editor droned on for half an hour about the importance of

“correctly understanding one’s own culture,” one of the accompanying officials came to me and said in a regretful tone, “We the Qiang do not have any heroes or great men, especially great Communist leaders.” He continued, “You know, Yilong, such a tiny

154 county of Sichuan, has now become so famous because it is the birthplace of De Zhu. It was already made into a national Four-A tourist attraction.” De Zhu is a Chinese household figure. He was one of the Ten Marshals of the People’s Liberation Army, and founding fathers of the Communist China who fought closely with Zedong Mao. The county official’s comment was significant. An ethnic group proved its political viability and social significance in part by being a heroic and “red” (a common meme referring to loyalty to the Communist regime in China, and leaning towards Communism and

Socialism elsewhere) member of the nation. Qiang people were expected to assert their political position as contributing and patriotic members of the multi-ethnic nation. The

Qiang’s connection with and contribution to the formation of the so-called Chinese nationality (zhonghua minzu 中华民族) had to be discovered and given regard as such.

More pressingly, only when the Qiang’s history and experience were positively integrated into the nationalist discourse of the “shared history” among all Chinese ethnic groups would the Qiang’s “group membership” and “great transformation” be confirmed and celebrated. In this vein, the Qiang’s historical status, propaganda of the culture of Yu the Great (dayu wenhua 大禹文化), and the Qiang’s tight involvement in the Communist

Party’s revolutionary past became major components of the Qiang culture “upgrade.”

In academia and public media, the Qiang are praised as the “blood-donating” ethnic group (Fei 1989), believed to be the ancestor group of many Chinese ethnic groups, including the Han. Renowned Chinese anthropologist Fei Xiaotong (ibid), when discussing the pluralistic unity of the Chinese people, concludes that, in the formation of the Chinese people, “the Qiangs, which in fact is a collective name given to an estimated

150 ethnic units in the west of central China, decreased, giving up members so that other

155 groups could grow. Many ethnic groups, the Hans included, received blood from the

Qiangs.” The Brief History of the Qiang, a standard oft-cited textbook, begins by explaining the word “Qiang” as “sheepherders of the western regions” as found in an early Chinese dictionary Shuowen Jiezi (Explaining Graphs and Analyzing Characters 说

文解字) (Ran, Li and Zhou 1984:1). The name “Qiang,” for a long time, was not used exclusively to refer to one specific group; instead, it was a name describing the groups residing to the western part of the Central Plain (ibid 1-2, see also Wang 2008).

The Qiang’s long-term migration and mingling with other groups are also carefully described in the Brief History of the Qiang (Ran, Li and Zhou 1984) and other books about the ethnicity. The ancient Qiang people referred to the groups of people who originally lived in the present northwestern plateau of China, including present-day

Gansu and Qinghai provinces, where part of the Kunlun Mountains extends. Many of them were herdsmen (ibid 1-2). Gradually groups of the ancient Qiang tribe migrated southwest, entering the Upper Reach region of the Min River since the Qin Dynasty

(221-206 BC) and further into other regions of southwestern China (Li 1963:167-168).

The Qiang of the Upper Reach of the Min River are in fact a mixed group of a dozen of migrating ethnic units. Li Shaoming, China’s esteemed ethnologist and pioneering Qiang specialist, was among the first scholars pointing out the fact that many

Chinese ethnic groups, who now live in the migration route of the ancient Qiang and collectively belong to the Tibetan-Burma linguistic group, are offspring of the ancient

Qiang (Li 1963:168). Later studies have shown that, in addition to the southwestern ethnic groups, the ancient Qiang also had close relationship with the Han who originally lived in the Central Plain, and other ethnicities in Xinjiang and Tibet (see Wang 2009:43).

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The contemporary Qiang ethnic group, officially recognized by the People’s Republic in the 1950s, is a remaining branch of the ancient Qiang that mainly live in the Min River and Fu River valleys of Sichuan Province, with a handful in other parts of the country. In my own family, my father accidentally found out that his mother’s family was originally from Longxi County, Gansu Province, in calligraphy by his eldest uncle. After I told him the story of the Qiang’s migration, he somehow proudly believed that he and I were offspring of the Qiang (although we are recognized as Han as are members of my grandmother’s family), and that my study of them was predestined.

The Qiang’s substantial contribution to the formation of Chinese nationality was widely discussed and celebrated in the reconstructed Qiang villages. When I first arrived in Dongmen in summer 2012, Donglin came over to Aunt Tang’s house and excitedly explained to me his own version of the Qiang’s history, “We, the Qiang, the oldest ethnic group, originated from the Kunlun Mountain in the northwest. Xi Wangmu (Queen

Mother of the West 西王母) was the mother of all of the Qiang.” I was entertained by his

“folk” explanation since the Xi Wangmu is a legendary Daoist goddess traditionally associated with prosperity, longevity, and eternal bliss in the Han culture. This argument suggests the Han cultural influence in this Qiang settlement (see also Wang 2008). “Then the Qiang divided into four tribes,” continued Donglin, “The first tribe went east and became ancestors of the Mongols; the second went west and became ancestors of people in Tibet and Xinjiang; the third, the ancestor group of Qiang here, settled in the northwest of Sichuan and mingled with the Han; and the forth tribe went southwest and became ancestors of many ethnic groups in Yunnan. The Qiang King in this region had nine sons; each son and his offspring formed a subgroup of Qiang.” “We, the Qiang, are the

157 ancestors of many ethnic groups, including you, the Han,” Donglin proudly concluded.

Donglin’s story was questionable, but his pride and excitement greatly impressed me. His comment reflected the education and inculcation of the Qiang-as-ancestor narrative popularized in media presentation, museum displays, and academic work especially in recent years, challenging the previous Han-dominant origin story of the “Chinese nationality.” Such narrative greatly reinforced the Qiang’s important and indispensable membership in the great multi-ethnic, nation-state of China through the recent change of perspectives especially among the Qiang scholars and ordinary members.

Yu the Great is widely-known as an ancestor and one of the founding fathers of the Chinese nationality. Since the earthquake, Yu the Great was re-presented and popularized as the representative of the Qiang’s greatest contribution to Chinese nationality, as well as a Qiang moral model in his patriotism, intelligence, and diligence.

He is believed to be the founding emperor of the legendary first dynasty of China—the

Xia. Yu is praised as a wise and virtuous leader. In the myth of his controlling of the flood (dayu zhishui 大禹治水), he creatively channeled the water to the sea in adition to simply constructing dams. He worked so hard that refused to enter his own house when passing by many times. Yu also earned the emperor position by his virtuous conducts.

Shun, former leader of Yu’s tribe, appointed Yu as his successor instead of passing the crown to his own son. After becoming the tribe’s leader, Yu defeated and united other tribes to establish the Xia dynasty. Although Xia’s existence has not been fully corroborated with archaeological evidence, it holds an important status in Chinese history and worldview. For example, Chinese people (mainly the Han) are habitually self-

158 claimed as offspring of the Huaxia ethnicity (huaxia zisun 华夏子孙 where hua means

Chinese).

The belief that Yu the Great was Qiang originally is based on a note in Shiji

(Records of the Grand Historian 史记) that “Yu was born in western Qiang region.” Shiji has long been held as one of first and greatest book written by Sima Qian, a Han-dynasty official, who recorded the history of the ancient China from the legendary Yellow

Emperor to Emperor Wu of Han Dynasty. According to another influential book

Huayang Guozhi (Chronicles of Huayang 华阳国志), the oldest extant gazetteer of regions of southwestern China written between 348 and 354 AD, Yu’s specific birthplace was in Shiniu, Wenshan Jun. As early as in Han Dynasty, Wenshan Jun (Jun is similar to today’s province, but an administration unit exclusively of ethnic minorities.) governed residents in contemporary Wenchuan, Lixian, and Maoxian counties, officially recognizing the predominant existence of the Qiang there (Geng 2010:98). The exact location of “Shiniu” is still a matter of debate that Wenchuan, Beichuan, Lixian, and other counties all have places called “Shiniu.” Nevertheless, the belief of Yu the Great as ancestor of the Qiang, model of the Qiang, and a great Chinese hero, was created, constructed, and broadcast among the Qiang scholars as well as ordinary Qiang villagers more sweepingly after the earthquake (Li Shaoming 2006:2, Wang Mingke 2008:230-

231).

The recognition of the Qiang ethnic identity of Yu the Great, shared hero and ancestor of the Chinese nationality, was vital in subliming the political and cultural significance of the Qiang. Not only did the myth of Yu the Great suggest the shared root and origin of the Qiang and fellow Chinese compatriots, it also extoled the historical

159 contribution and high moral values of the Qiang, represented by this ethnic hero. The patriotism, wisdom, diligence, and resilience that Yu embodies were also lauded as the

“Qiang spirit” (Qiangren jingshen 羌人精神). Yu the Great became important cultural and tourism resource for post-earthquake Wenchuan. In late 2010, Wenchuan County

Government led a campaign of establishing the “Yu the Great Cultural Tourism Zone” as a national Four-A tourist attraction. The Yu the Great Culture Tourism Zone consisted of several townships in northwestern Wenchuan including Longxi.

Wenchuan County has since been advertised as “the birthplace of Yu the Great”

(dayu guli 大禹故里). A majestic Yu the Great Sacrificial Altar was constructed just outside the Wenchuan county seat with an investment of 44 million yuan. Ironically, this project was later criticized of its high cost and low functionality. My informants told me that several officials in charge were punished for abusing the reconstruction aid money to construct the altar. The large-scale altar consisted of a grand Yu the Great Worship

Palace, a giant Yu the Great statue, a colossal worship altar, Yu the Great Culture

Research Center, and other facilities. At the entrance of the Yu the Great Worship Palace hung two antithetical couplets (duilian 对联). One of them applauded that all Chinese compatriots shared the same “root” [as offspring of Yu the Great], and the other honored

Yu the Great as the founding emperor and flood-mitigation hero of the first Chinese dynasty. The giant Yu the Great statue presented the emperor image of Yu the Great where he wore the emperor’s hat and coat. Another Yu the Great statue was erected at the crossroads of the entrance to Wenchuan county seat from Chengdu. It, however, depicted

Yu, wearing a straw cap and rain cape, standing still with a firm and concerned look in his efforts to battle the flood.

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Notwithstanding the mythic greatness of Yu, he remains an ancient legendary figure. As a county official today noted, the Qiang still needed to confirm their loyalty to the Communist regime, and celebrate their own “red culture” (hongse wenhua 红色文化).

The “upgrading” of the Wenchuan Qiang’s “red culture” centered on their involvement in the Long March of the Communist Red Army (1934-1935). As described in the Red

Culture section of the newly-established Wenchuan Museum funded by the reconstruction aid, the “awakened suffering” Qiang and other ethnic minority groups

“enthusiastically supported and joined” the Red Army when the army passed Wenchuan in mid-1935. The Qiang were the only ethnic group completely “red-ized” by the

Communist Party and the Red Army in the 1930s, according to Qiang scholar Geng

Shaojiang (2010:419). Dongmen was the base of the Fourth Front Army, a major troop of the Long March Red Army at the time, when it fought against the Nationalist forces in

Wenchuan for three months in 1935. Officially, Dongmen’s “embrace” and “support” of the Red Army were displayed and eulogized through the preservation of a few carved stones with the Red Army slogans including “Down with Imperialism” and “Overthrow the Nationalist Party.” The carved stones were listed as “Cultural Relics Protection Units” of Wenchuan.

Villagers also remembered the turbulent times. “My grandfather’s big house was occupied by the commanders for several months,” Donglin said. What Donglin did not say was that the big house was occupied in the Red Army-led “Punish the Local Tyrants and Divide the Land” (da tuhao fen tiandi 打土豪分田地) campaign during the Long

March, where properties of landlords, notoriously denounced as “local tyrants” (tuhao 土

豪) were forcefully confiscated and re-distributed by the Red Army. Donglin jokingly

161 said that it was very hard to distinguish a revolution from robbery in that context. The big house was later divided into three individual ones during the Land Reform period (1950s) until the earthquake struck. Donglin said, “My grandfather’s submission actually saved the whole family. As we lost our properties and land in the campaign, we became poor peasants like all others, which saved us from suffering in the Cultural Revolution.” The

Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) did not spare this remote township. One could find slogans carved on stone tablets from that turbulent era in the villages. One of them read,

“Forever Loyal to Chairman Mao’s Revolutionary Path.” The Qiang’s loyalty to the

Communist regime was also made prominent in the post-earthquake reconstruction, as revealed in the grateful (gan’en 感恩) culture discussed in the next chapter.

Cultural Development: Heritage Culture for Tourism Display

After the earthquake, Wenchuan County faced an accelerated transformation of its industrial infrastructure, which became the key to Wenchuan’s “great leap” development- oriented reconstruction. The provincial plan also required “the reconstruction of local industries to optimize the economic layout, and transform the methods of development”

(Sichuan Daily 2011). As the earthquake destroyed much of the resources for the development of land-based agriculture and mineral-based heavy industry, the service industry became the pillar of Wenchuan’s economic development (Yang and Ye 2008).

Tourism was the most important component of the service industry. In early 2009,

Wenchuan County Government announced tourism development around four tourism brands: “Birthplace of Yu the Great”; “Hometown of the Pandas”; “County of the Qiang

Embroidery”; and “Yingxiu the Epicenter.” Among a number of reconstructed Qiang villages, Qiang heritage tourism became the key post-earthquake development policy. In

162 the reconstructed Qiang villages, historic Qiang architecture, folk arts and crafts, rituals and festivals were all turned into tourist attractions. Yet the making of a Qiang heritage tourism destination required particular planning and promotion. In Longxi for example, this section maps the practice and strategies of making a popular Qiang heritage tourist site.

To commercialize and industrialize the heritage culture for cultural and economic development was a major challenge for many local governments with little experience in developing tourism prior to the earthquake. In Longxi, such cultural development through tourism was mainly led by a planning campaign to construct tourist facilities, as well as display performative and distinctive aspects of the Qiang cultural practices for tourism.

The tourism development required a major investment in infrastructure construction. In

2010, Dongmen Village in its campaign as one of the 100 “High-end Tourist Villages” of

A’ba went through another round of reconstruction and beautification. Tourism facilities and services including parking lots, cement roads for large tour buses, and maps of all scenic areas were constructed and created under this project. The most surprising investment was the construction of a luxurious public restroom inside the Dongmen

Villagers Recreation Center (The building was later repurposed as a tourist reception center.). The high-standard public restroom was estimated to cost half a million yuan

($75,000). It was locked when I first arrived in Longxi in 2012; most villagers told me that it was long broken. Many regretted that they did not use it before it was no longer in service. The “half a million restroom” since served an example of wasteful investment that many villagers used to attack the government’s wrongdoings.

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Individual villages and family houses were also reconstructed to be both “happy and beautiful” homes and quality tourist destinations to showcase the “expanded function” of the reconstructed built environment (Sichuan Daily 2011). As revealed in the study of

Sichuan Province’s “development-oriented reconstruction,” representing characteristics of “ethnic architecture” and “ethnic cultural styles,” the reconstructed village settlements should become “beautiful scenic sites and best tourist destinations.” The rural houses not only serve the function as a living space, but also have the “tourism and production functions” (Sichuan Daily 2011).

In late 2008, the Zhanjiang aid construction team led to redecorate most of the reconstructed concrete houses throughout Longxi by uniformly painting them in light yellow and attaching one-meter high light-grey stone pieces onto the house walls, based on the Zhanjiang Planning Group’s design. Such decoration, according to Donglin, consulted the look of the Han rural houses of western Sichuan, which failed to even superficially retain the Qiang-ness of the village. Donglin’s comment revealed the fact that the outside planners had little knowledge of the Qiang material landscape. The decoration represented the Qiang along with Han aesthetics. More interestingly, the homogeneous decoration of the multiple houses followed the same template in

“traditionally” styled urban housing developments in Chengdu and Beijing. In this case, such a decoration became a mechanical reproduction of housing that was linked to modernist systems of commodity production, reducing historicity and heterogeneity of the village to appeal the urban imagining of a rural ethnic community. During later “style transformation” projects, those buildings were redecorated with grey concrete imitation

164 stone pieces and wooden frames to look “historical” and “Qiang,” according to Donglin, who helped with the design.

The twice-made outside walls of Dongmen buildings reflect the critical politics and poetics of infrastructures (Larkin 2013), and specifically the “‘infrastructuralization’ of state power” in China (Chu 2014). As Larkin argues (2013:329), infrastructures’

“peculiar ontology lies in the facts that they are things and also the relation between things.” Therefore, they are things and embodiment of the “built things, knowledge things, or people things” (ibid). Chu (2014) further contends, “As relations of relations, infrastructures typically manifest as second-order agents of distribution; they are partial objects always gesturing to other ﬂows and transactions for their completion as meaningful social forms.” Infrastructures are analyzed anthropologically as unique things and relations that “reveal forms of political rationality that underlie technological projects and which give rise to an ‘apparatus of governmentality’ (Larkin 2013:328). In Chu’s analysis (ibid) of the demolishing and redevelopment of a historic neighborhood in southeastern Fuzhou city, she pointly observes the Chinese bureaucratic and legal reforms which “attune[d] citizens, as well as their government adversaries, to what we might call the ‘infrastructuralization’ of state power.” The decoration of Dongmen buildings’ outside walls embodies complex politics in the “unbearable modernization of infrastructures” (Larkin 2013:323). The light yellow and light-grey decoration by the

Zhanjiang designers appeals to the Han outsiders’ imaginazation of “modern” and “clean” southwestern Sichuan rural houses that they would like to bring to the reconstructed villages. The wooden frames and dark-grey imitation stone pieces added by Wenchuan

165 government attest the government’s particular tourism development agenda where the

“old” and “ethnic” are the most popular.

The decoration also helps shape a particular “sensory politics” (ibid:338, see also

Fennell 2011). Dongmen villagers and visitors gave me varied responses when asked for their opinions of the old and new outside wall decorations. One villager said, “I like the first one. The stone pieces were real. They cost a lot of money. The new [stone pieces] are made of concrete. They come off of the walls very easily.” Another villager told me,

“The first [decoration] was more beautiful. The walls were smooth, neat, and tidy.” In their attitudes, being neat and tidy with fresh paint and real stone pieces were highly regarded as symbols of beauty and modernity. However, their asthetics sharply contrasted with that of the visitors. “To construct an ancient Qiang village, [we] need stone pieces and wood,” One villager said, “The visitors like to look at them. We would rather like to see the high-rise buildings in the cities.” I once encountered a conversation between a tourist and her host. The visitor said, “Look at the stone pieces and wood, so traditional and so pretty. Didn’t it [your house] look like this before?” Her host answered, “It [the house] never looked like this. But now it indeed looks pretty.” Interestingly, villagers enact and reshape their subjectivity and sensibility of being Qiang in the rebuilt garden- like Qiang cultural “scenic site.”

The development of heritage tourism required specific strategies of commodifying and marketing elements of the Qiang culture for tourism business. In

Dongmen, Manager Ge, head of the Chengdu-based Sunshine Company, generously shared with me his ideas for what he called the “cultural development of Chinese Qiang areas.” Working with the Longxi government, the Sunshine Company invested several

166 million yuan in Dongmen to promote its tourism. The company aimed to introduce diverse and mostly urban entertainment activities into the village, and provide upscale tourist services. According to Ge, the Qiang cultural tourism development needed to

“cater to people’s modern and fashionable lifestyle.” For example, the company rented and renovated two historical houses in the middle of the village, transforming them into a

Qiang-style restaurant and bar, while introducing karaoke and alcohol (mostly branded beer and red wine) consumption into Dongmen. The company renovated another house into an upscale restaurant called the “Qiang Restaurant” that for a long time, only government officials and tourist groups would visit. In 2013, when I returned to

Dongmen, the “Qiang Restaurant” was already closed due to lack of business. Other investments of the company included turning a historic village house into a disco bar only open at night time. Being repeatedly complained to be too noisy, the disco bar was closed before I arrived in Dongmen in 2012. The company rented and redecorated another village house into a pricy home hostel with individual bathrooms, televisions, and karaoke equipment.

More interestingly, Manager Ge had a particular vision for the Qiang’s “cultural development.” In our conversation, he told me, “What is culture? Culture is a myth, and myth can be made into business (wenhua jiushi shenhua, shenhua jiuyao chanyehua 文化

就是神话，神话就要产业化).” He continued, “The study of the Qiang culture is a task for scholars and cultural experts like you. The task for a company like mine is to display culture, finding ways to commercialize and industrialize it.” Thus, in Ge’s view, the

Qiang culture needed to “expand” (kuozhan 扩展) its content and ways of displaying to achieve a “magnificent turn” (huali zhuanshen 华丽转身). The cultural development

167 aimed to discover and “concentrate on displaying” (jizhong zhanshi 集中展示) the performative aspects of the Qiang culture, including the clothes, architecture, dance and singing, and traditional skills.

For example, at the door of one of the company-run restaurant/bar, an advertisement stated, “Thousand-year-old Qiang ancient house welcomes you to rest, eat, drink, and have fun inside,” although these houses were only decades-old. To best resemble the “traditional” Qiang life inside, the company kept the houses’ original dirt floors, stone walls, and wooden beams instead of covering them up. Some rusty Qiang family furniture and kitchen utensils were placed inside to create a sense of authenticity.

Qiang embroideries made by local women were hung on the walls, enhancing the

“exoticness” of the minority group. During busy weekends, female embroiders were summoned to collectively work at their craft in the restaurant, thus showcasing their skills to interested tourists. The restaurant saved the house’s original huotang, the Qiang kitchen, which also served as the space of socialization and worshiping of the food and fortune related gods. It purposely hung several huge pieces of the Qiang pieckled pork of many years’ old, the local favorite meat there. Old and dusty Qiang household and kitchen items were placed around the huotang. Also in the huotang kept a big pot of the barley wine. The barley wine was traditionally made of fermented barley used to be grown in the mountain villages. It took months to make the barley wine, and the wine was usually saved for major celebrations where both men and women would drink while dancing and eating. Manager Ge also planned to invite the village wine makers to display the process of barley wine-making.

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Large-scale displays organized by the company throughout the village included sheep-roasting parties, Qiang circle dance, Sheep-skin Drum Dance, and worship ceremonies during major events. At the sheep-roasting party, a group of village women dressed in the colorful embroidered long gowns were hired to dance around the bonfire where the sheep is roasted. Sheep-skin Drum Dance and worship ceremonies, led by traditionally-dressed shibi, were performanced at formal Qiang events, such as the New

Year Festival and funerals, as will be discussed in Chapter 7. But according to Ge, a dance or performance by tens of people is a great “mass activity” (qunzhongxing huodong 群众性活动) that can draw large crowds. Ge claimed, “I understand that there are sacred parts of the dances and worships not intended for public viewing, but our job is to discover the commercializable part of it, such as the clothes, dance steps, and drum beating, and to display them for tourists to know and enjoy.” After all, Ge concluded,

“The excavation, protection, inheritance, and promotion of the Qiang traditional culture must be supported by a modern thinking model, management model, and business model.”

The Qiang cultural development should help “increase the profit of the [company’s] investment, villagers’ income, and [the Qiang culture’s] social impact.”

The cultural “reconstruction” aimed to market the fixed Qiang culture for heritage tourism, making it a vital economic development method. My use of “fixed,” in this case, builds on Diane Nelson’s (1999) use of the term, where state actors decide which of a group’s traditional practices stand for that culture, represent these carefully selected repertoires as vestiges of a tradition that has remained unchanged since “time immemorial.” The actors often purport to, in the process, repair what they consider to be the developmental delays of the culture in question—and, in this case, also address the

169 post-disaster recovery. Ge’s version of the Qiang cultural development, as realized in

Dongmen and many other reconstructed Qiang villages, resulted in disembedding the cultural practices from their context. The Qiang culture comes to be represented as a superficial veneer of different textiles and staged rituals that can be mobilized as a commodity for a globalizing capitalist tourism industry (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009).

This is a process where State planners and tourism agencies reduces a complex culture into a simplified commodity that could then be transformed into a tourism product. This commodification presented the newly rendered Qiang “culture” as “authentic traditional

Qiang culture” in itself, hiding the socio-political relations in reconstruction that produce it and, in effect, making a fetishized commodity (a commodity that hides the social relations that produced it) (Zhang and Barrios forthcoming). Ge’s vision of the Qiang cultural development aimed to bridge such a gap by providing quality urban services and recreated entertainment in the rural Qiang village. Such a practice inevitably perpetuates the urban-rural inequality structurally established and spatially displayed in rural ethnic tourism (see Chio 2014, Park 2014, Schein 1999). It also creates a contested space that invited transformed performances and perceptions of being Qiang in the reconstructed villages, which is the focus of the next chapter.

Conclusion

In Dongmen, explanation boards were erected in front of each rebuilt and repaired

Qiang cultural markers, such as the watchtowers, Shibi sculpture, and historic houses, to describe their architectural features, historical significance, and cultural meanings. In a description of a watchtower, the watchtower’s Qiang name—Denglong—was first introduced. Secondly, it stated the watchtower’s long history, “Dating back to 2,000 years,

170 in the Biography of History of Eastern Han Southwestern Yi [Hou Hanshu·Xinanyi

Zhuan 后汉书·西南夷传], there is the record about Qiang people ‘who live by mountains and build house with stones. The tallest house can be as tall as over 10 zhang

(丈, a unit in Chinese lineal measurement slightly longer than ten feet).’” Thirdly, it emphasized the tower’s “cultural value,” “When they [watchtowers] were built, there was no drawing, no suspension line and no column supports and they were built by the builders with their excellent skills and experience. The buildings are stable and firm and last a longtime. The watchtower is one of the most characteristic buildings, with a high cultural value.” Finally, the watchtower was introduced as a guardian of hope and well- being. In the other description, the watchtower was “Dongmen’s fengshui watchtower, and the guardian god of peace and prosperity.” Tourists were invited to climb up the watchtower to “listen to the ten-thousand-year-old Tuojiang River’s blessings with a peaceful mind.” As revealed here, the official interpretation of the Qiang culture fell in a specific pattern and style. The “cultural value” of the group’s folk practices and beliefs was determined by its long history, distinct ethnic style, and positive message in building a harmonious society.

When homelands become “gardens” and “scenic sites,” the built environment is turned into a kind of “security apparatuses” with which biological populations—the

Qiang—are reconfigured as “living organisms” under the government’s care and forstering (Foucault 1978 and 2003, see Marchezini 2015). In Dongmen’s cultural reconstruction, the Qiang culture turns into an alienated, state power-consolidating representation. Importantly, Dongmen Village, along with many reconstructed Qiang settlements, is rebuilt according to the perspective of the State, where modernist and

171 architectonic planning are upheld as efficient and effective (Scott 1999). The reconstruction is implemented to offer State designed and approved interpretation and construction of the Qiang culture’s status and significance, showcasing the ethnic group’s

“membership” and “great transformation” under the leadership of the Communist regime.

Ultimately, the cultural reconstruction creates a representation of an ethnic group which effectively helps nurture patriotism and endorsement of the ruling State, especially in time of crisis. The cultural reconstruction, however, cuts off the complex human- environment and social relations within which rituals are situated and redefined spiritual practices as entertaining staged performances. Such officially-organized theatre is

“ethnicized in the language of officialdom, as ‘minority nationality’ practices” (Schein

1999:367). The selective representations objectify the culture into compartmentalized features such as architecture, embroidery arts, songs and dances, and ritual practices.

Not just exoticizing the Qiang, the State investment in Longxi also seems to try to

“raise their standards” of living conditions, cultural aesthetics, and political status.

Moving beyond the dichotomous viewpoints towards Han and ethnic minorities, the reconstruction demonstrates the processes in which the State becomes more inclusive and sensible to the Qiang in its seemingly new found interests in “culture” and “diversity”

(see also Chu 2014). However, such modernizing projects leave villagers with infrastructures not tied to anything where plumbing did not work and stellar restrooms no one used. A main part of the “Qiang culture” is thus missed: the affect and agency of the ordinary villagers. Maldonado (2016:57) writes, in disaster reconstruction, all of the critical dimensions of race, gender, ethnicity, and ethnocentrism are unconsciously practiced and enacted in the affective voice. Dongmen villagers formed particular

172 aesthetics and perceptions of the “modern” living in the rebuilt houses. As the post- earthquake cultural reconstruction provided an opportunity of new thriving for a

“vanishing” culture, it also created new cultural space and social interactions that involved the ordinary Dongmen villagers in the tourism business. Through their engagement of the culturally-oriented reconstruction, the Qiang have been constructing their new identity and subjectivity.

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Chapter 6 Grateful Qiangjiale

In Dongmen, I was able to observe closely how a group of villagers had learned to do tourism from its nascence in 2012. In particular, tourism in the reconstructed Qiang villages like Dongmen carried two significant, but different, meanings. On the one hand, it was a beautifully reborn village that embodied and exemplified the “miraculous reconstruction,” serving as an optimistic memorial site to demonstrate state power and benevolence. Dongmen and many other reconstructed tourist Qiang villages as a whole were made into destinations embodying the “grateful culture” (gan’en wenhua 感恩文化).

Gan (感) in Chinese means to thank, while en (恩) means benevolence. The Qiang were educated and advertised to show their humble gratitude towards the enormous amount of help that they might never completely return or repay. On the other hand, as discussed before, Dongmen village was also selected as an exemplary site to display and perform the newly “excavated” and celebrated Qiang cultural elements, and the post-earthquake rejuvenation and advancement of the Qiang life.

Tracing the growth of successful Qiang family tourism business operated by Aunt

Tang’s family and others, and approaching ethnic tourism through the viewpoints of the family members, I was especially concerned with how the mostly self-educated tourism business operators grappled with the intrusion and opportunities brought by their misfortune and marginality through the promotion of the Qiang heritage culture and grateful culture. Specifically, as the group of pioneering business villagers continuously

174 fought against the inconsistent policies and overwhelming administrative power of the

State, as well as oftentimes condescending concerns and curiosity expressed by the tourists, they also gradually came to terms with the newly instrumental meanings of

“Qiang culture.” All these forces simutaneously complicated their identity as “lucky survivors,” as well as ethnic and modern members of contemporary China.

Disaster, Heritage, and “Grateful Culture” Tourism

As revealed in Chio’s (2014) research, the kind of tourism business where rural villagers redecorate their own homes into restaurants/hostels to host mainly urban tourists is nationally known as nongjiale (peasant family happiness 农家乐) in China. In many ethnic areas, the business is renamed to reflect the regions’ ethnic culture, such as the

Miaojiale (Miao family happiness) studied by Chio (ibid). Tourism in Dongmen, in this case, is advertised as Qiangjiale (Qiangjiale 羌家乐). The name is self-explaining that such rural-based ethnic tourism invite tourists to the homes of the local hosts to be entertained with activities particularly agrarian, ethnic, and intimate. Not only does this tourism type reveal the humble beginning of Chinese rural tourism where hotels or large- scale vacation theme parks are absent, nongjiale, more importantly, is purposefully managed individually in scattered, small-scale village home hostels catering to the majority urban tourists’ nostalgic and idyllic imagination of the natural and relaxing lifestyle (Chio 2014, Park 2014, Su 2010).

The fact that tourists are hosted by local people at their own homes further strengthens the imagined “authenticity” and “genuine-ness” desired by those looking for

“a home away from home.” Threatened by surging food quality concerns in the Chinese market, Chinese tourists are also hoping to find “naturally-grown” and “hormone-free”

175 meat, vegetables, and fruits inside the nongjiale (Park 2014). Aligning tourism development projects with the national policies for rural development (mainly through the program of constructing a New Socialist Countryside), Chio carefully argues that

“tourism in China was bound tightly with explicit attempts to construct a new Chinese countryside, a new Chinese tourist, and a new rural Chinese subject” (ibid: 97). Such a new subjectivity and power relationship was enacted by “the act and the imagination of travel” which has become “key nodes through which tourists, migrants, ethnic minorities, mainstream majorities, rural villagers, and urban dwellers negotiate and make sense of current social, economic, and political conditions” (ibid:xvii).

Qiangjiale distinguishes itself from the rest of rural-based ethnic tourism through its unique standing as the State-rescued and lavishly-promoted member of the Chinese heritage tourism market. It is a fusion of disaster, Qiang heritage and “grateful culture” tourism. As the earthquake brought the village as well as the Qiang to the attention of tourists for the first time, the reconstructed Qiang cultural destinations transformed into post-disaster tourism sites. Disaster tourism or “dark tourism” refers to the travel to original sites of death, disaster, war, and other tragic events (Foley and Lennon 2000,

Sharpley and Stone 2009a). Disaster tourism sites, such as World Trade Center, Nagasaki

& Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and Pompeii, are distinctively irreplaceable. The serious and sacred significance of such sites give strong emotional shock to the tourists. In Sichuan, select dark tourism sites were established to showcase the cause, destruction, and characteristics of the crustal movements of the Wenchuan Earthquake. Particularly,

“Yingxiu the Epicenter” (zhenzhong yingxiu 震中映秀), now the national Five-A tourist attraction, was branded to include Niupenggou Valley Epicenter Spot (with a 2-kilometer

176 long landslide buried by dirt and rocks that gushed from deep in the earth), Sky Rock

(tianbeng shi 天崩石, an 8-meter high, 12-meter long rock falling on the road), and

Baihua Bridge (a major bridge on the 317 National Highway broke in half during the earthquake).

The most well-known site In Yingxiu was the relics of Yingxiu Xuankou Middle

School. The first floors of the main teaching building and student dormitories sank into the earth, and the rest of the buildings were distorted like crumpled papers. At the entrance of the school, a huge cement replica of the school clock, which fell down and broke in pieces during the earthquake, was placed in the middle of the playground, clock hands reading 2:28, the time of the earthquake. On the side of the cement clock stood a memorial relief wall made of white marble and granite, commemorating “the extensive damage caused by the great earthquake and the heroic earthquake-fighting and disaster- relief work of the Chinese people led by the Party and the Central State” (Wenchuan

Yingxiu Zone 2016). The earthquake victims, however, were memorialized in a public cemetery on the other side of Yingxiu. The preservation of the earthquake relics, in this case, mainly showcased the relief efforts rather than the tragic event and its severe damage, reinforcing the heroic image taken by the Central State, as was the case in other earthquake relic sites in the earthquake-stricken zones. The relief described a group of soldiers, doctors, and common villagers carrying a wounded student on a stretcher.

Leaving Yingxiu and heading northwestern from Yingxiu to Dongmen, tourists could witness a number of earthquake relics, such as collapsed rural houses and falling stones, along the 317 National Highway. In Dongmen, a few cracked and half-collapsed stone houses were also kept in the outskirt of the village for the same purpose.

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Disaster tourism, on the other hand, consumes others’ tragedies and misfortunes.

Central to disaster tourism is the commodification of death which “raises fundamental questions of the interrelationships between morality, mortality and contemporary approaches to death, dying, and (re)presentation of the dead” (Stone 2013:307-308).

Visits to disaster sites can create opportunities of acceptance and grieving for visitors and the hosts alike, where the former become emotionally affected and attached (Coats and

Ferguson 2013). The visits also connote particular political and social implications where the commodification of tragic memories “requires inoculation and thus rendering into something else that is comfortable and safe to deal with and to contemplate” (Sharpley and Stone 2009b:127). For economic profits, others’ loss and pain are repeatedly displayed and promoted so as to attract the tourists’ curious, and sometimes superior, snooping gaze. The morality of dark tourism, in this case, fundamentally lies in the interrelationships and associations between the tourist experience and the cultural condition of the society (Stone 2013:314).

In Sichuan, visits to the earthquake-stricken sites were widely broadcast as acts of love and remembrance (Huang 2012, Zhang 2012). State officials’ visits during the anniversaries and other important national holidays to the earthquake-stricken zones were broadcast as acts of care and benevolence. Ordinary tourists were appraised as caring fellow compatriots. Tourist consumption in Yingxiu and other sites was regarded as lending a helping hand to the survivors. Wenchuan County’s post-earthquake tourism boom was appraised, in government annual reports and media propagandas alike, as the booster for Wenchuan’s economy, the fellow citizens’ annual income, as well as the fame and influence of the small, marginal county.

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In Wenchuan, the newly emergent tourist enterprise was by no means characteristic of typical disaster tourism, which tended to be driven by the enduring devastation of a disaster, such as the case of Hurricane Katrina flood tourism in New

Orleans (Hartnell 2009). Disaster tourism displayed the fascinating and significant transformation of the previously marginalized and impoverished Qiang villages into popular tourism destinations. In the wake of destruction, the earthquake gave the Qiang a chance for revival. If not for the earthquake, the existence of the Qiang might remain largely unrecognized. Places being destroyed and renewed gave people trememdous hope and amazement.

Qiangjiale were the primary sites to display the high-cost, “modernizing,” and culturally sensitive State reconstruction project where the Qiang are enjoying prosperous and “cultured” new ways of life. The Qiang disaster and heritage tourism sites became representatives of the newly excavated Qiang culture. Qiangjiale were exciting destinations showcasing a vivid and touching story of how a marginal, devastated, and vanishing ethnic culture could survive and thrive with major State support. As discussed in the previous chapter, Dongmen village was established to showcase the cultural sensitivity of the reconstruction where an old culture was given major attention, official interpretation, and a newly thriving result. In Dongmen, tourists were invited to appreciate the rejuvenation of a historical ethnic village with strong State support and serious sensitivity to culture.

At the first sight, Dongmen overwhelmed tourists with a high-finished reconstruction investment. Who would imagine a Disney-like Qiang cultural theme park inside of the remote mountainous region of Sichuan? In Dongmen, the spacious Dalabu

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Square welcomed tourists with the totem poles, shibi group sculpture, and relief walls.

Two lofty stone watchtowers also sought to win over their admiration. The uniformly decorated buildings were meant to satisfy their imagination of the wooden and stone ethnic architecture style, and also to surprise them with large scale and lavish materials.

Dongmen was a small village with a full range of new tourist attractions. For example, a flowery garden with a fish pond separated the new part of the village and the old part, where all Dongmen villagers lived before the earthquake. Along the path to the pond were several wooden ladders standing erect, simply carved and widely used in two-and- half story Qiang houses. These ladders were collected from Qiang households or carved anew. The old part of the village also featured the renovated hundred-year-old stone family houses rented and decorated by the Sunshine Company, the Chengdu-based real estate company where Manager Ge worked.

The “modern” look and advanced facilities of the village further won the hearts of the tourists. Pre-earthquake dirt paths were remade with anti-slippery concrete, their surfaces decorated with patterns of footprints and palms. As part of the Wenchuan

County’s campaign of “Building Happy and Beautiful Homes” (jianshe xingfu meili jiayuan 建设幸福美丽家园), major electricity and communication wires, as well as water and sewage pipes, were buried into the ground. Landscaping designs decorated the villages with new trees, flowers, and wall paintings. Pigsties were required to hide inside the basements where the doors and walls are decorated with wooden planks and paintings of dancing figures or sheep heads. Interestingly, several feeding troughs were re-made into decorative flower pots placed alongside the main village path. In New Orleans, the reconstruction of the flooded houses designed and supported by Tulane Architecture

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School and especially Brad Pitt’s “Make it Right Foundation” also brought about a kind of new beauty into some of the historic Afro-Creole neighborhoods, introducing the individualistic modernism contesting the shared cultural landscape of the neighborhood.

The “Make it Right” project introduced energy-saving and futuristic looking structures into historic New Orleans neighborhood to give it new hope and vitality. On the contrary,

Qiang villages’ reconstruction aimed to find hope and prosperity by referencing “history.”

The “modernity” more stunningly reached the Qiangjiale home hostels. Many of the houses installed flushing toilets and a shower for the first time. New furniture and appliances like sofa, glass table, flat-screen color TV, DVD player, fridge, gas stove, and microwaves now equipped respective rooms. A “standard guest room” of the Qiang Scent

Garden, the more expensive type of rooms with individual bathrooms, provided a 21-inch flat-screen cabled TV, an electric water boiler, and basic toiletries in addition to the must- have bed(s) and tables. The Qiang Scent Garden also surprised guests by providing free high-speed Wi-Fi, which became its major selling point. On sunny days, guests were welcomed to lay back in the comfy sofas at the courtyard, surrounded by rare stones, blooming flowers, and fresh vegetables, while busy posting online their newly-taken travel pictures and selfies with the corn cobs and dried chilli.

Tourism itself was considered a clean, easy, and descent “modern” business comparing with laborious farming and herding (Chio 2011, Oakes 1998). The reconstruction gave Aunt Tang new life possibilities and venues for expressing herself.

Whenever she returned from the farm fields, Aunt Tang would tell me how hard it was to be a peasant, carrying heavy baskets and getting dirty all the time while the yields were so unpredictable. When hosting guests, she was able to wear her decent clothes and stay

181 clean. Even after spending the whole day cleaning, cooking, and entertaining the guests,

Aunt Tang would tell me that it was a much easier work than being a peasant. The home hostel transformed her from a poor peasant to a profit-making, self-employed manager.

Known for her outgoing personality and knowledge of the village, she met and befriended many visiting officials, news reporters, and research groups as a representative of the Dongmen Village leadership. Her name and face appeared in a dozen of news reports and television programs. In this case, tourism provided Aunt Tang, and many other villagers, with “promise of new and liberating subjectivities” that characterized the “essence” of being modern promoted by Chinese ethnic tourism (Oakes

1998:7-11) .

The emerging disaster and heritage tourism also served to demonstrate the economic effectiveness of the State-orchestrated cultural reconstruction. The Qiang were given an opportunity to make a living by marketing and commodifying their rural, ethnic heritage and lifestyle. Home hostels were created and/or redecorated, according to the owners’ tastes and preferences, to attract tourists to “authentic” Qiang living, dining, and entertaining experiences. Many home hostels were given Qiang-style names. Qiang Scent

Garden was one good example. Another popular home hostel was named “Na Ji Na Nu,” a Qiang expression of “best wishes.” There was “Qiang Third Sister Xu,” where the owner was the third oldest child of her family. Other names included “Happy Qiang

Family” and simply, “Qiang Village Family.” Some home hostels were named after the owners to highlight its homey qualities, like “The Jiao Family House,” “Runyuan House”

(Runyuan was the owner’s first name), and “Qi Chuan Xin Yuan” (Qi and Xin were first names of the owner’s grandsons), “Qunhuan House” and “Jichang Guest House”

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(Qunhua and Jichang were first names of the wives of the owners).

Not only did the home hostels have Qiang-style names, their interior decoration and business were centered, in different ways, on promoting and selling Qiang-related service and products. For example, the Qiang Scent Garden was decorated with a big character “羌” (Qiang), corn cobs, and chilli peppers inside. In Runyuan House, several pieces of old jackets made of sheep skin and wool, decorated with embroidered patterns were hung on the walls of main yard. The jackets used to be worn by Qiang men during hunting and herding in the cold days. From time to time, the owner of Runyuan House would wear one of them to host guests, despite his wife’s loud complaints of its dirtiness and shedding fur.

The home hostels all advertised selling only locally-grown, green, and traditional food. Almost all hostels sold “homemade” and “age-old” Qiang pickled pork and sausages using the meat of their own pigs. Fed with corn, pig grass, and leftover food for about eight months, the Qiang family-raised pigs were believed to produce healthier and tastier pork with a perfect balance of fat and lean meat, comparing with the market-sold, factory-produced meat. Once the pork was marinated with salt, it was hung above the huo tang (the Qiang kitchen space) and smoked in the everyday cooking fire. Some of the smoked pork was ten years or more old, and according to the owner still good to eat. In a few families, a complete piece of pig back meat, including the head and four limbs, was preserved and hung for display alongside a pot in the kitchen. When the business was just starting, all of the pork was indeed homemade and age-old. As the rising business called for more pork supply, some villagers started to purchase pickled meat from the county seat market.

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Other featured Qiang dishes included wild vegetables such as walnut tree flowers and wild ferns, sticky potato soup with pickled cabbage, hand-ground bean curd, among other local Sichuan dishes. More of the dishes were vegetarian, using the home-grown and wild-found vegetables. These food items were popularly sought by the mostly urban tourists who tended to have high-fat and high-cholesterol dietary habits. A few home hostels marketed fresh-picked vegetables and fruits. Jichang Guest House, for example, had steady customer groups who stayed there for a period of two weeks each summer when watermelons and apples ripened. Qi Chuan Xin Yuan, on the other hand, was known for its large front yard where tourists could participate in agrarian activities of picking grapes, eggplants, and other vegetable and fruit items. In recent years, during the increasingly famous annual cherry festival in early May, tourists were invited to pick cherries in the peasants’ own fruit gardens.

More significantly, Qiangjiale was an important destination for the officially- framed “grateful culture” and “grateful education.” Being grateful is perceived as an expected response of praise from the earthquake victims—grateful for all those that have helped after the earthquake. Grateful education was a top-down, political campaign. In early 2009, before the Spring Festival in January, China’s government website first published an article titled, “Being thankful and hardworking (gan’en fenjin 感恩奋进),

Sichuan quake zones pay a New Year’s call to fellow compatriots through practical actions (shiji xingdong 实际行动)” (Xiao and Yuan 2009). Since then, being thankful and hardworking, as advocated by the affected provincial and county governments, was upheld as the new mission and moral standard for all quake survivors. Most of the disaster tourism sites, such as Yingxiu Xuankou Middle School relics, were turned into

184 educational bases to “carry forward the spirit of the great earthquake relief and promote grateful education for the masses” (Wenchuan Yingxiu Zone 2016).

As an example of the practical actions of being thankful, in 2010, Sichuan provincial government initiated the project of constructing “Three Bases and One

Window” (san jidi yi chuangkou 三基地一窗口) sites across the province, transforming a number of reconstructed townships, facilities, museums, and others into educational

“bases” for patriotism, a socialist core value system, and ethnic unity and development, as well as a “window” to display Chinese development model and the vitality of Chinese development. Longxi was selected as a representative “Three Bases and One Window” site. Gratitude related signs and slogans were variously established around Dongmen. A small park adjunct to the Dalabu Square was named Gratitude Filial Piety Civil Park

(gan’en xiaodao wenming gongyuan 感恩孝道文明公园). Besides the Qiang theater was a wooden sign reading “A Thankful Heart; Thanking You Very Much” (gan’en de xin, ganxie you ni 感恩的心，感谢有你) (Figure 6). Another slogan carved into the side road read “to return the [favor of] burst of spring with a drop of water at a time” (Yongquan zhi’en, Dishui xiangbao 涌泉之恩，滴水相报). This was a rephrasing of a Chinese proverb that a drop of water shall be returned with a burst of spring. Two of the

Qiangjiale home hostels were named “Gan’en Qiangjiale” (Grateful Qiangjiale) and

“Gan’en Nongjiale” (Grateful Rural Family Happiness) respectively.

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Figure 6: A Wooden Sign reading “A Thankful Heart; Thanking You Very Much” in Dongmen Village. Photo by Qiaoyun Zhang

Primarily, being grateful was to thank the benevolence of the Party and central government for the strong and enormous earthquake relief and reconstruction efforts. The

State was to be thanked for its wise and important policies and decisions (yingming juece

英明决策). The reconstructed Qiang heritage tourist villages, such as Dongmen, thus became the sites for the masses to “witness the miraculous reconstruction” and

“appreciate the rise of the great love.” The top government officials were to be thanked for their loving care (qinqie guanhuai 亲切关怀). Particularly, such officials’ visits to the quake-affected zones were widely reported and regarded as acts of loving care. In

Dongmen’s Jiao Family House, a huge framed photo was hung in the most conspicuous place of the house. On the top of the photo it read, “The Premier comes to my home.” In the photo, a group of people sat in around a round table, chatting and eating candies, peanuts, and sunflower seeds; the middle-aged man sitting in the middle was Liangyu

Hui, then Chinese Vice Premier, who were surrounded by the Old Jiao, patriarch of the

186 family, his wife and oldest son, both dressed in traditional Qiang long gowns, and local officials. In another photo also titled “The Premier comes to my home,” the old Jiao tightly held the hand of Hui with his two hands, while bowing his body forward.

In 2011, Hui made a quick visit to Longxi during his trip to inspect the reconstruction results at the end of the three-year plan. The Jiao Family House was selected because, on the one hand, the Old Jiao was a long-time village head and

Communist Party member and, on the other hand, the house was located on the main path connecting the old and new parts of the village. At that time, the Jiao Family House’s gatepost couplet (menlian 门联) was “Hold High the Great Banner of Socialism with

Chinese Characteristics; Strive for New Victories in Building a Moderately Prosperous

Society in all Respects,” the theme of then President Jintao Hu’s report at the

Seventeenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2007, which was also the State-set national economic and social development goal until Hu left office in 2012.

The horizontal scroll (hengpi 横批) for inscription read, “The Communist Party is Good”

(gongchandang hao 共产党好). The Jiao Family House could be regarded as the exemplar of the “grateful Qiangjiale,” where the Qiang villagers, dressed in ethnic clothes (minzu fuzhuang 民族服装), humbly and cheerfully thanked the visits of the top officials and the magnificent help of the Party, in their newly-reconstructed house.

The top officials’ visits, no matter how brief, also helped boost the fame and business of the home hostel. Since Hui’s visit, the Jiao Family House became the most famous and popular home hostel of Dongmen. Popularly called “the house where the

Premier visited,” it hosted streams of visitors who would like to stay in a place where the

Premier once set foot in. To a lesser degree, fellow Chinese people, particularly common

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Party members, and other organizations, such as the Red Cross and many other nongovernmental organizations, were being thanked for their selfless donation and volunteerism. Houses receiving Hong Kong Red Cross funding were clearly marked as

“Hong Kong Red Cross Aid Projects.” Facilities funded by donations of Party members, such as the villagers’ activity centers, were identified as “Special Party Membership Fee

Aid Projects.”

“Grateful Qiangjiale” produced a new identity of the Chinese Qiang. It profited from the quake survivors’ tragic experience, ethnic marginality, and subordinate status in the gift economy. The Qiang were framed as politically-indebted minority “victims” (zai min 灾民) whose survival and advancement were forever owed to the State’s spectacular benevolence and overwhelming power, and others’ good will. The Qiang were celebrated as direct beneficiaries of the State-led swift, massive, and transformative “miraculous reconstruction.” The Qiang were regarded as the “fortunate” State rescued minority group whose material life and “traditional” culture were instantaneous advanced and promoted.

In this case, the focus and ultimate goal of the “grateful Qiangjiale,” and the whole post- earthquake reconstruction project at large, were to showcase the stunning and successful rescue and reconstruction efforts of the Party and central government, who led and channeled the resources of the Army, fellow Chinese people, overseas Chinese, and international humanitarian groups, to win the great battle with the earthquake.

The success belonged to the “good” Communist Party and national government, and the experience of the Qiang was used as a non-arguable, real-life example of it.

Consequently, the Qiang were marketed as a “model minority” in contemporary China.

They rose from ruins, and thrived as “modern,” prosperous, cultured, and grateful

188 members of the nation. Since the reconstruction, representatives of the Qiang survivors, especially the nationally-recognized Qiang ICH transmitters, appearred in all kinds of local, national, and international events, some of the most famous ones including 2009

Chinese New Year’s Gala, 2010 Shanghai Expo, and 2014 Smithsonian Folklife Festival featuring China. Numerous reports and interviews were produced with the Qiang quake- survivors and ICH transmitters.

In the same time, the Qiang villagers were represented as “fortunate” gift receivers due to the misfortune of the disaster. Qiang villagers, in the eyes of many outside visitors, domestic and international alike, were essentialized as “lucky” State- saved earthquake “victims” whose lives were instantaneously “improved” with unprecedented amount of aid and care. Researchers have cautioned that disaster aid is often used as not only a gift for disaster survivors, but more importantly a resource for wielding political power (Barrios 2014, Faas 2015, Gamburd 2014). The imbalanced donor-receiver relationship oftentimes imposes the interest of the aid agencies onto those being politically framed as dependent, vulnerable, and powerless (see Benadusi 2013,

Schuller 2015). In Sri Lanka, survivors of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami would complained that the insensitive international aid made the country “a nation of beggars,” where in local custom gift-givers were perceived as magnanimous and politically- influential, and the receiver of goods as lower in status (Gamburd 2014). After Hurricane

Katrina in 2005, the former U.S. First Lady, Barbara Bush, would light-heartedly denounce that most of the Katrina-victims were “underprivileged anyway” (New York

Times 2005:1, cited in Zhang 2016:88), suggesting that these historically-marginalized groups should be grateful for whatever help they could receive, despite the lateness,

189 scarcity, and insensitivity of the federal aid.

Notwithstanding that the overwhelming State aid tended to subordinate the Qiang the abstract state power, as the Qiang were given few choices on how and what to reconstruct their homes, I argue that the Qiang were not necessarily looked upon as

“beggars” in such a post-earthquake gift economy. As discussed in Chapter 3, the aid and care for the affected population were mostly inspired by the compassion for human suffering. It would not do justice to either the donors or the recipients if their relationship was simply reduced to power contestation, where the donors, most of whom offered their help and sacrifice out of good intention, were rudely condemned as condescending givers.

The critical issue to be investigated here was how the help and gift were represented in the State-led media as well as the locally-circulating discourse, and its impacts on the perceptions and practice of the villagers in Longxi and other places. Once forcing the

Qiang and other affected populations into the “grateful culture” campaign, the government at various levels unwisely categorized the helpers, including the State itself, and villagers into two bodies of imbalanced power and rights. In so doing, it obliterated the bond and comradery established at the time of the earthquake. After all, gratitudes cannot be coerced, and complaints prohibited.

A minority among the ethnic minorities, the Qiang were given extraordinary State support for development in the fierce resource competition among the minority groups since the Wenchuan Earthquake. In this angle, the Qiang were regarded as being

“fortunate” victims. Yet such “fortune” carried with it complex impacts and heavy moral burden. The aid receivers would get into great moral torture to criticize or condemn the gift offered out of “great love.” Framed as “fortunate” beneficiaries of the enormous aid,

190 the Qiang, alone, shouldered the moral and material responsibility to repay and reciprocate the gift. Their complete gratefulness and compliance were expected, and often, coerced. Consequently, the experiences and expectations of the quake-survivors were rendered less important. Their sufferings were downplayed to the minimum in the official propaganda, and only used to contrast the “greatness” of the earthquake relief.

The Qiang’s own struggle and desires for the new life were largely ignored. The creation of the “indebted and grateful” Qiang not only socially and culturally alienated the minority group as the vulnerable other, it also limited their ability and rights to express, expect, and strive for their specific needs and desires. A pressing fact often overlooked in the nation-as-the-savior discourse is that disaster aid is short-lived and unsustainable, while the survivors’ lives are long and challenging. Too quickly, Qiang quake-survivors were asked to be grateful without much consideration of the real and long-time effects of the State aid. More detrimentally, as revealed in the next section, the Qiang were made to be grateful to the degree that any acts of doubt or denial of their indebtedness would be regarded as ungrateful, and morally disputable.

“Wait?” “Depend?” and “Beg?”

Challenges of Doing Tourism at Home

The question and dilemma left to all Dongmen villagers were, first, the extent to which they could take advantage of the State aid to survive and prosper and, on the other hand, how they could cope with the radical life transformation. A popular speculation, and sometimes blame, regarding the earthquake survivors was that they were passive recipients of the State and other funding. As such they were spoiled with thoughts of

“waiting, depending, and begging” (deng, kao, yao 等、靠、要) (see also Sorace 2014).

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I first heard this condemnation from Longxi’s Party Secretary at an inspection trip to the very poor Damen Village. After listening to many villagers’ complaints of their hardships, he said to me that the thoughts of “waiting, depending, and begging” were the cause of their slow development. Chinese scholars and popular media reports called it the “victim mentality” (Sorace 2014, Zhang and Gong 2009). Some earthquake survivors were viewed as simply waiting for others to rescue them, lazily dependent on government subsidies, and endlessly beg for more support instead of relying on one’s own effort (zi li geng sheng 自力更生).

When I returned Qiang Scent Garden and discussed with Jiafu of the “victim mentality” of “waiting, depending, and begging,” the slightly alcohol-inebriated young man agitatedly replied, “I? Wait? Depend? Beg?” He turned his head away from me, and sniffed at my comments, a too familiar signal that he did not want to talk to me anymore.

After many talks at the dinner table, with many cups of the home-made cherry wine, and many casual talks and interviews inside the newly-reconstructed houses and front yards, with more cups of home-made fruit wine, I gradually pieced together the survival story of this booming home hostel, as well as that of many others. The State-led disaster aid and tourism development planning was challenged by the villagers’ long-term survival, and also bring about unintended problems and predicaments. The villagers were left alone to cope with the opaque, inconsistent, and sometimes misleading policies, to adapt to the radical transformation of lifestyle, and to negotiate and reconcile with their new ethnic, gender, and victimized identity.

As is the case with many other kinds of humanitarian aid globally, the Chinese

State-led and other disaster aid seems excessive but is unfortunately short-lived,

192 superficial, and unsustainable (Torry 1978). Admittedly, roads and facilities around the township were significantly improved; and the township gained fame and new means of development through tourism. However, despite the State’s large investment, individual families were still deeply in debt from rebuilding houses and opening up the home hostels.

A family could get a maximum of 47,000 yuan ($6800) subsidies for house reconstruction (22,000 yuan from the State for a family of six and more, and 25,000 yuan from the Hong Kong Red Cross), plus a 20,000 yuan ($3000) 5-year-long, interest-free loan from a local bank. The construction of a moderate size, three-story, decorated home hostel, however, cost 200,000 to 250,000 yuan ($30,000 to $36,000). As Jiafu revealed,

“I built this house myself with a big sum of borrowed money. No one told me then that tourism was to be developed in Dongmen. I built the house for my own use, and had to borrow money again to redecorate the second-floor rooms into guest rooms. I redecorated the kitchen and made a dining hall all by myself.” After the three-year reconstruction period, villagers had no outside resource to wait or depend on. Only limited funding was assigned every year to maintain the high-cost tourist facilities after the reconstruction.

Due to lack of funding, training, and management experience, officials and villagers were finding it difficult to sustain the tourism project in the long term.

Villagers had to endure the opaque, inconsistent and unthoughtful policies, as well as empty promises and false hopes. Few villagers were informed of the tourism development plans until one day, government-hired workers showed up to attach the wooden frames and concrete stone imitation pieces here and there in the houses. Many had to increase their investment to run tourism business. Some of them, such as Jiafu, had to spend extra money converting rooms into guest rooms. Other villagers, represented by

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Xueqing, who had no space, money, or manpower to run guest houses, took a loan to open small Qiang embroidery shops and/or variety stores. As the market economy gradually replaced subsistence agriculture patterns, many Longxi villagers’ livelihoods were at the mercy of the “invisible hand” of the market. The reconstruction projects also impacted villagers’ relationships to the local environment and habitual subsistence patterns. Much of the village’s already limited farmland was expropriated to build tourism-related facilities and sceneries. However, villagers so lost the stable income from farming. Most of them became prey to the financial vagaries of the tourism industry.

No villager was ever consulted or included in the planning of reconstruction projects. Yet their absolute compliance with the planning was expected, sometimes forced. The local government also failed them with empty promises. The Qiang Scent

Garden was one of the first home hostels in Dongmen because Aunt Tang took the lead among the village Party leaders to start the tourism business, as a support for the

Wenchuan County government’s planning for Longxi’s tourism development. “The township officials said that we would get extra subsidies for opening early, but they never mentioned that again,” Jiafu said. Instead, the family received a wooden plank medal awarding them as “Advanced Communist Party Members,” which was randomly placed among Jiafu’s rock collections. Xueqing, on the other hand, still vividly remembered the time when local officials went to her house every day to try to convince them to sell their land for tourism development. At some point, the persuasion turned into coercion.

Xueqing said, “They came here every day, sitting on this same bench that you are on, holding the contract for us to sign. They said that we would be preferentially considered for job opportunities once the tourism started. And they made other promises, too. But

194 again, they came here every day until we agreed to sign the contract.” Xueqing and her husband did not get a wooden plank medal, let along any jobs.

Villagers received little training or support in running the new tourism business.

The development of Qiangjiale required a process of learning to manage tourism as a business and way of life. Jiafu said, “No one taught me how to cook dishes or run the business.” He taught himself in establishing a successful family business. First in the village, he added an individual bathroom in each guest room, and upgraded the interior decoration with hanging flat-screen televisions. In addition to the State’s subsidies and loans, he ended up spending an extra 150,000 yuan ($22,000) for the renovation. A debt he still had to pay off. Jiafu was a born chef; the Qiang Scent Garden was the most popular hostel in Dongmen due to its comparatively upscale decoration and his delicious dishes.

All of the business strategies and tactics were learned through trial and error.

Villagers learned about being branded differently, both visually and service-wise, to stand out (see also Chio 2014). As described above, each Qiangjiale home hostel was decorated with specific themes and marketed with respective selling points when the owners realize that no one would profit much if every hostel was marketing the same

“home-made Qiang pickled pork.” Increasingly, they learned about the tourists’ desire for more performative and interactive entertainment. The mere photo taking around the village could quickly bore the visitors, prompting them to leave sooner before spending money on food or lodging. Gradually nightlife entertainment, such as lamb-roasting bonfire parties, home karaoke, and Mahjong playing, emerged in the village where previously most of the families went to bed around 9 o’clock. Jiafu, for example, was the

195 first one in the village to offer Wi-Fi at his house, display the rock collections for sale, and organize lamb-roasting bonfire parties with help from his cousins. Aunt Tang was the most active host I ever met. She was always ready to greet the guests who pass by the iron burglar-proof double-door; always volunteered to share stories of hers with guests and guide them around the village. When asked, she never refused to sing drinking songs to the guests at the dinner table or lead the circle dance around the bonfire at lamb-roast parties, displaying her talent in singing and dancing, learned by growing up in the village.

It is interesting to investigate further the complex dynamics involved in the development of Qiangjiale in the reconstructed Qiang village. As researchers observe, nongjiale has developed at the time when China is overwhelmed with rapid urbanization, expanding income and social gaps between urban and rural populations, severe environmental pollution, and food insecurity (Chio 2014, Park 2014). There is a well- established body of anthropological literature that deals with these issues in the context of tourism (Chao 2013, Comaroff and Comaroff 2009, Notar 2006, Nyíri 2006). Much of the research on Chinese nongjiale, conducted from the tourists’ viewpoints, discusses how it provides “a significant locus of rural-urban encounters, social-boundary making, and identity politics between peasant hosts and urbanite guests” (Park 2014:519). As

Choong-Hwan Park (ibid) discusses in her research on rural tourism development in

Beijing suburbs, the majority urban tourists travelled to the countryside for “authentic” and “nostalgic” rural experience, but preferred hygienic and well-decorated restrooms and guestrooms. The idealized landscape of reconstructed Qiang villages, in turn, became its own exoticized cultural setting that stood in stark contrast to the city life of urban visitors. This contrast worked as a dialectical engine that drrove tourist desires.

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Jenny Chio (2014) thought-provokingly explores the aspects of “doing tourism”

(gao lvyou 搞旅游) on the part of the rural ethnic hosts. Studying through the angle of the rural members’ (im)mobility and modernity, Chio (ibid:101-132) argues that “rural family happiness” (nongjiale 农家乐) renders a kind of rural modernity without mobility, where rural villagers are expected to “leave the fields without leaving the countryside.”

According to Chio (ibid), part of the ethnic tourism development plan was to retain rural residents in the countryside and attract migrant workers to return. Chio researched several quite successful migrant workers who later decided to return home and run their own rural family happiness there. These people’s migrant working experience, interestingly, allowed them to “see the world” (jianshimian 见世面), and consequently made them appear more educated and having more common sense and worldliness (ibid:114). These people were also more competitive in doing nongjiale because, based on their first-hand experience in cities, they could tailor their business to the needs and tastes of the urban tourists. Thus, Chio (ibid 2014:130) comments that, while requiring the rural residents to be immobile, nongjiale demonstrated “the particular order of mobility that allows for and encompasses a socially meaningful way of making sense of the inequalities produced by differing forms of mobility.”

What I observed in Dongmen, however, was an even more complex web of relationships that influenced the villagers’ attitudes and decisions towards doing tourism at home. Many of Chio’s (2014) discussions revealled that doing tourism proved to be profitable for many villagers she encountered, and more importantly, the villagers had a choice whether to return home or migrate to cities. Jiafu’s story, in this case, can help us investigate many more nuanced considerations which led him to stay in Dongmen and

197 run Qiang Scent Garden. Such considerations included family responsibility, filial obligation, gendered identity, and surely, mobility.

Jiafu always told me that if not for his mother, he would have closed Qiang Scent

Garden long ago and gone back working in Dujiangyan or Chengdu. Having become a widow at a young age and lost her first daughter in an accident, Aunt Tang cherished the fact that her only son, instead of working far away from home in some construction sites, could stay with her in the family house and make a decent living. It is a common practice in rural Han Chinese villages where the youngest son, in this case, the only son, inherits the family house and takes care of the parents. The recent surge of rural to urban migration of young adults causes many threats to such traditional family structure where aged parents live alone with their left-behind grandchildren. The development of rural tourism, as Feng Luo, Longxi Township Party Secretary, claimed, could help villagers make money without leaving home or rejecting family responsibilities. Aunt Tang and

Jiafu did not seem close, and always had small quarrels. Yet whenever Jiafu revealed the thoughts of closing the Qiang Scent Garden and working elsewhere, Aunt Tang would come up with many reasons to stop him, or simply ignore such talk.

At the same time, Jiafu, a thoughtful middle-aged man, had many considerations.

Resignedly he complained, “I decided to stay in Dongmen for my mother’s sake. I am a slave here. I never wanted to work in the kitchen. Who does? If not for this hostel, I would work for my previous boss in Chengdu, not here in Longxi, not laboring myself in the kitchen.” Being the only child of four living with his mother, Jiafu took seriously his responsibility of caring his mother, particular after witnessing the early death of his father, accidental death of his older sister, and her younger sisters marrying away from home. He

198 continued, “No one except me could run this business. My mother? She talks more than she does. She agreed to open up the home hostel without the faintest idea of how to actually manage it. My wife? She is not strong enough to manage business. I cannot leave the business to two women at home.” Interestingly, Jiafu frequently told me that he hated cooking and buying groceries, which traditionally are the women’s jobs in rural Chinese communities. He felt that his masculine identity was challenged by running tourism business, and particularly, being a chef at home. A lot of times when he put on the apron and started cooking at home, he jokingly complained that “this is women’s work!” Local

Sichuan dialect has it that married women’s everyday work is revolving around stir- frying woks and their children (weizhe guobian zhuan, weizhe haizi zhuan 围着锅边转,

围着孩子转). Instead, men are always expected to leave home and achieve something big (nan’er zhizai sifang 男儿志在四方).

David Sutton’s (2014) most recent ethnography on family kitchens of a small

Greek island further reveals how kitchen is perceived as an intimate yet hierarchical space where women of different generations tend to assert their identity and power through competing different skills of cooking. Jiafu’s cooking skill was by far better than that of his mother or wife. He understood clearly that his cooking was one of the selling points of his business. Many tourists kept returning to the Qiang Scent Garden because of his featured dishes. Instead of perceiving it as a form of power, as did the grandmothers and mothers at Greek kitchens, Jiafu felt a bit embarrassed being the best chef at home.

Sometimes, he complained that he sacrificed his “big and bright” future to staying at home, and cooking.

Growing up poor and quitting school at a young age, Jiafu had struggled to get out

199 of the poor village and made good money in the cities. He worked at construction sites in cities like Chengdu and Dujiangyan in Sichuan, which allowed him to live there for a few years and save up quite a bit. Jiafu’s eyes sparkled whenever he talked about how much he was liked by his boss in Chengdu, “My boss trusted me the most. He would let me manage an entire project and lead other workers. He always told me that I should lead a team of my own and work with him. I am good at the work. I learned to use the machines quickly, and I know how to build houses right.” He was starting to establish himself in the city, getting the right connections and organizing his own construction team before the earthquake took place.

It is very hard to tell if Jiafu really preferred to work for his former boss in

Chengdu or be a boss here in Dongmen in spite of his constant complaints after having some drinks. Tourism brought him significant money, and renewed his sense of being a

Qiang. He named the hostel Qiang Scent Garden to remind guests of its ethnic identity.

He established an online chat group among friends, relatives, and customers to solicit guests and advertise tourism in Longxi. Intentionally he named the group “Wenchuan

Ancient Qiang Tribe,” and called himself “Generous Qiang Big Brother.” For him, being a member of the mysterious yet modern, powerful yet hospitable Qiang was a new branding strategy; it might at the same time reveal what in his mind is an ideal image of a contemporary Qiang. Along with the transformed life came the restructuring of gender roles in his family, and the new negotiation of the rural-urban dynamics. The reversed gender role in the house might threaten his manhood and status as the master of the family. Gradually Jiafu felt the pressure from his wife, Meilin, now in charge of the family fields, the second most important source of income for the family. Jiafu had to

200 listen to Meilin’s arrangement of when and what to plant in the fields, and be there when he was needed. His mother habitually challenged his decisions. Sandwiched between the two women and burdened with trivial household chores, Jiafu was reluctantly adjusting to the changed power structure at home.

It is also questionable if Jiafu could enjoy the same freedom and managerial privilege in the city. On the one hand, he claimed that he had many good friends and strong connections in Chengdu, which could easily help him find a good job. On the other hand, he often complained to me how sly and untrustworthy the Chengdu people were, and how he got cheated by an interior decoration company from Chengdu. As discussed in Chapter 2, the Qiang for a long time viewed Chengdu (and Dujiangyan) people as the most cunning. Such a perception was not only a historical product of the long-time resource competition among the three groups where those closer to the center

(Chengdu) had better access, but also shaping how rural ethnic groups in Sichuan interacted and struggled with the seemingly more versatile outsiders. Opinions already diverged at Jiafu’s family table. On a larger scale, villagers of various situations, such as those who lost land in the earthquake, those who made a fortune in the reconstruction, those who came to power through the process, and those who were unable to engage in any kind of the tourism business and stayed poor, all encountered tourism in differently challenging manner. At the core of such debates, I argue, is the complex dynamics of family responsibility, filial obligation, gender ideologies, rural-urban mobility, and Han- ethnic contestations that cannot be simply solved by money or “seeing the world.”

“Face Projects” versus Sustainable Development

Jiafu was always annoyed by the tourists’ comments that their donation and State

201 money had funded his new house and business. The large investment, as many villagers complained, was wrongly used to decorate the village into a nice-looking tourist site.

“Decoration” was the word constantly used by the villagers, emphasizing that the reconstruction only managed to change the appearance of their communities and failed to fully address their pre-disaster condition of political and economic marginality, and sustainable living in a long run. The reconstruction, in many ways, became a face project

(mianzi gongcheng 面子工程) characterized by superficial decorations, short-term effects to please the higher officials, and rampant suspicion of corruption and cronyism of the local officials who have pocketed most of the funding (Steinmuller 2013:198-221).

Oftentimes, the face projects were also called achievement projects (zhengji gongcheng

政绩工程) established to showcase the achievements of the local officials to the inspecting bosses (Sorace 2014).

In Dongmen, multi-million yuan was spent on decorating the village buildings and roads, and constructing tourist scenic spots where visiting officials and tourists can see such results. For example, in order to welcome Premier Hui, the Old Jiao was offered a large sum of money to upgrade the front door, yard, and interior decoration of his house.

In summer 2012 as the rumor ran out that another top official was planning to visit

Wenchuan, Longxi township government was offered tens of thousands yuan to upgrade

(tisheng 提升) the look of the village. The government hired a Qiang specialist to re- name all the village paths with names in Qiang language, add a Qiang-style wooden door and lock in one home hostel, and even dig a huotang in a villager’s newly-tiled living room. The owner of the house so angrily objected to the plan that the head of the

Organization Department of Wenchuan County paid a visit to his house, trying to

202 persuade him. They finally abandoned that plan only because the top official changed his plan and never traveled to Wenchuan.

Rumors, suspicions, and evidence of corruption and cronyism were widely spread in the village. No villager was ever convinced that a simple decoration of their house with wooden planks, concrete-imitation stone pieces, and random painting would cost the officially-budgeted a hundred thousand renminbi each house. Much of the money, as many assumed, went to the local officials’ pockets. After the reconstruction, one of the

Longxi village heads was able to build a brand-new three-story house entirely dedicated to operating Qiangjiale. The newly-elected village head, a cousin of the Lianhe village head, was “elected” through bribing the voters with 100 yuan per vote, and bullying the opponents. Another villager, notoriously known as the richest person of Dongmen, was condemned for making his fortune out of the hundreds of reconstruction project contracts obtained by bribing the officials and behind-the-door deals.

Different from other face projects which largely boosted the “achievements” of local officials and waste State money, the face projects in the reconstruction led to one particular detrimental effect. Notwithstanding the fact that most of the villagers failed to benefit much from it, they were expected to be grateful and indebted to such

“achievements.” Fed up with a visitor’s presumptuous appreciation of the donation money, Jiafu, at one occasion, calculated the cost of his house and business in front of the visitor. With an unconvinced look, the visitor left by saying, “Well, we donated so much money after all.” There was another time that the Qiang Scent Garden was fully booked, and that groups of tourists had to wait to be seated for lunch. One waiting tourist half- jokingly said to Aunt Tang, “You have made so much money through the reconstruction.

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You should relax and receive fewer guests.” Aunt Tang, busy sweeping the front yard and cleaning the trash, loudly retorted, “I do want to relax. But who would pay me salary?

Would you?” The tourist laughed off Aunt Tang’s query, and repeated that she was too business savvy to take a break.

Comparing this unpleasant incident with Longxi Party Secretary’s “waiting, depending, and begging” comment, one can more clearly understand the double damage caused by the excessive yet ineffective State aid. On one hand, villagers not benefiting from or doing well enough after the reconstruction were blamed for their “victim mentality.” The political misconduct, economic inefficiency, and social ignorance along with the implementation of the State aid which hegemonically shaped their vulnerability were completely neglected. On the other hand, villagers who apparently bore the fruit of the reconstruction, despite of their combats and complaints, were viewed as profit-thirsty and victim-playing choosing beggars. As Sorace (2014:408) pointedly argues:

According to this explanatory framework [gan’en education], local residents’ low evaluation of the post-earthquake reconstruction is directed away from the state’s failure to address their needs adequately and reframed as a personal failure to adapt to, and be grateful for, the new conditions the state has provided. Instead of civil society, a new form of Maoist biopolitics is emerging in which so-called unruly rural residents are being trained in how to become good, obedient and grateful citizens.

The Qiang were denied the power or freedom to reject or refute the ineffective and corrupt aspects of the State aid. Worst of all, they were deprived of the option or opportunity to receive useful, sensitive, and sustainable help for years to come.

Conclusion

This chapter explores the transformation of Dongmen villagers’ lifestyle and subjectivity prompted by the State-led post-earthquake reconstruction and tourism

204 development projects. In a tourist village like Dongmen, many villagers have become involved in the business of “grateful Qiangjiale.” Similar to other Chinese nongjiale,

Qiangjiale displayed and attracted tourists to the villagers’ rural and ethnic lifestyles through family-based, rural-life-oriented services. “Grateful Qiangjiale,” however, stood out as a profitable yet controversial business where the quake-survivors’ tragic experiences and expected gratitude were made into eye-catching commodities. As a result of State-sponsored development plan and State-promoted education program, “grateful

Qiangjiale” was advocated as a destination to showcase the new life of the rescued Qiang, who were presented as “modern,” economically independent, culturally aware and proud.

It was designed to demonstrate the “excavated” Qiang culture, officially-sanctioned as unique, historical, and patriotic. Above all, “grateful Qiangjiale” served as a primary site to exhibit and appraise the great, incomparable, and unassailable state power and leadership in rescuing, leading, and constructing lives of the surviving “victims.” It was where the generous State gift, like a burst of spring, was expected to be recognized. The discourse that the “gift” could never be fully reciprocated further enhanced the complex impacts of such aid. In this case, the Qiang were forever indebted to the disaster aid and reconstruction policies of the State.

Villagers’ survival stories and struggles with the nascent tourism business, however, evidenced that they might be rendered powerless, with their survival depending upon compliance with the State orders. The State took the credit for the “miraculous reconstruction,” while villagers were blamed for the problems and predicaments mostly caused by the unsustainable, inconsistent, and corrupted planning and project implementation. More important, their doubts about or refusal of aid were ignored, if not

205 condemned. A detailed ethnography of the villagers’ varied experiences revealed that their long-term thriving based on Qiangjiale was both promising yet challenging. While giving a silver lining to reducing the impacts of urbanization, lagging rural economy, and fulfilling personal responsibilities, Qiangjiale might have brought about new problems to solve.

The generous State disaster aid was never a free gift. The State’s benevolence went hand-in-hand with its authoritative power. In this case, a comment from a Chengdu municipal vice-secretary solicited during Christine Sorace’s research on the “unruly” quake survivors articulated the dilemma. The official asked, “If I gave you a present, but it didn’t suit you, you didn’t need it, and you didn’t even want it, but I was adamant about giving it to you, does it still count as a present?” (Sorace 2014:424). It reminds us of

Bourdieu’s (1991) analysis of gift economy as mechanisms of producing the sociopolitical hierarchy that sustains the exchange relationship in the first place.

Paraphrasing the legendary French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, if it is a gift that one cannot refuse, it is a gift that one cannot refuse to reciprocate.

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Chapter 7 Emergent Qiang Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection

Qiang New Year Festival

My busiest and most exciting day of the fieldwork was November 2nd, 2013. It was the Qiang New Year Festival—the most important annual event for the Longxi

Qiang. The Festival falls on the first day of October in Chinese lunar calendar, which would be around early November in the now officially-used solar calendar. Dedicated to celebrating harvest and worshiping gods for their blessings and mighty power, the festival was long a village celebration monitored by shibi, Qiang ritual specialists. A celebration would only be held when there were consecutive good harvests and no loss of lives for three years. In Longxi, the last major, village-wide, self-organized celebration took place in 1988. In the Qiang language, this kind of major celebration was called gua ba er, meaning “conversing with the sky god, sending offerings to the sky god (Zhao

2010:148). Zhao’s explanation was confirmed by shibi Beimen Yu, shibi of E’er Village, in my interview. Therefore, this event was long a folk ritual of the animistic Qiang, an occasion when they humbly thanked the gods for good and peaceful times. The transformation of the ritualistic celebration as the Qiang New Year Festival (qiangnian

羌年), similar to that of the Dai Water Splashing Festival as the Dai New Year Festival, was a collaborative “invention of tradition” by the State multi-ethnic policy, intellectual elites, and official media. While tradition constitutes itself a kind of reinvention of the past (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), in China there is an endemic process of reshaping

207 tradition driven by officials in collaboration with intellectual elites, as well as official media. An ethnic ritual ceremony is entailed into an official and Han-oriented discourse of the New Year Festival, promoted as an ethnicity-specific event showcasing their good lives and “ethnic features” under the leadership of the Communist Party (see Chu 2010,

Fan 2016).

This reshaping gave a fixed calendar to the previously flexible event, arbitrarily setting it on the first day of October on Chinese lunar calendar. In 1987, the first celebration of the Qiang New Year was held in Chengdu by Ethnic and Religious Affairs

Commissions of Sichuan Province after the Cultural Revolution. In 1988, the Qiang New

Year Day became an official three-day holiday in A’ba. The Qiang New Year Festival was never widely celebrated in the past years. Then, along with the urgent post-

Wenchuan Earthquake heritagization campaign, in June 2008, the Qiang New Year

Festival was immediately named national ICH, so the Chinese government could apply for it to be listed on the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent

Safeguarding, which was accepted without question by the committee’s session in

October 2009. Celebrations of different scales, all sponsored by local governments, were subsequently held in almost every Qiang-concentrated counties and townships. In 2013,

Longxi was selected as one of the three main celebration sites in Wenchuan. The preparation of the event started in early October. Many parties were involved in the planning, under the leadership of the township government.

I got up before seven o’clock in the morning but still was the last one to leave bed.

The rest of the family were already up, busy preparing dishes for the “yard banquet”

(baba yan 坝坝宴). “Yard banquet” was a popular rural communal dining practice in the

208 region where tens or even hundreds of people ate together in an open yard of the village during weddings, birthday parties, New Year celebrations, and other events. For this year’s celebration, there were 40 tables of food to be prepared, each table for ten people.

The “yard banquet” was set up to treat visiting officials, event reporters, and interested tourists for a free meal. Several weeks before, Jiafu and other Qiangjiale owners were told that they could each contract for a maximum of four tables. “A table is 400 yuan,”

Jiafu discussed with Meilin, “How many do we want to do?” The township government subsidized each owner with 400 yuan a table. “We can ask Donglin, Xueqing, and my cousins for help. In this case, we can have four tables,” Meilin said to him.

A few days later, they were asked to make a menu of the food they would prepare.

Aunt Tang suggested, “We should make sticky potato soup (yangyu jiaotuan 洋芋搅团) because Qiaoyun hasn’t had it yet.” I felt a lot of love and pride because sticky potato soup was a very tasty but time-consuming dish. After steaming the potatoes, one had to keep stirring them into sticky paste by hand. Then the potato paste was boiled in a soup with the pickled wild vegetables, and served with chili sauce. Other dishes included on

Jiafu’s menu were pickled pork, spicy wild vegetable salad, potato pancakes (yangyu ciba

洋芋糍粑), and other signature Qiang dishes. About ten dishes were served on one table.

But this morning, Aunt Tang was a little regretful for selecting the sticky potato soup because it took so much time and energy to prepare. On the festival day, all of the home hostels were booked out. Jiafu and other owners hired cousins, neighbours, and friends of the village to help them. In this sense, the majority of the Dongmen villagers benefitted from the tourism at this occasion, while the local social network was strengthened.

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Villagers were also involved in other kinds of tourist businesses, such as barbeque stands, tea-houses, embroidery, and others souvenir shops.

Quickly I went to the township gate where groups of festively- and officially- dressed people already congregated. The gate was covered by two giant pieces of red cloth. Various participants lined up behind the gate, including two shibi and the Sheep- skin Drum Dance group of ten people from E’er Village, school children from Longxi

Primary School, village women, as well as township staff. All of the participants put on bright-colored long gowns and wore different accessories. Several elder women were laughing at each other for dressing up like “little girls” (xiao guniang 小姑娘) and putting on heeled shoes. “Your feet will ache so much after dancing with those shoes,” one woman warned another. A huge billboard with beautiful images of snowy mountains and Qiang women in ethnic attires was erected at the entrance of Longxi. On it was the theme of this year’s festival, “View the Snow Mountain, Bask in the Sun, and Visit the

Colorful Forest. Come to Longxi to Celebrate the Qiang New Year Festival” (guan xueshan, shai taiyang, shang cailin, zoujin longxi guo qiangnian 观雪山, 晒太阳, 赏彩

林, 走进龙溪过羌年). It was the idea of Manager Ge of the Sunshine Company. The

Company was also in charge of advertising the event through billboards and on line. Feng

Luo was there to make sure that all equipment and personnel were in place because the word had it that the head of the Wenchuan County might attend the event. It was chilly in

November, but everyone was in high spirits. Children were playing, women laughing, and the staff making hot tea to keep warm.

We waited and waited for hours for the opening ceremony as schools of reporters, tourists, and villagers arrived at the scene. The colorfully dressed women, led by Aunt

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Tang, went out to welcome and entertain the guests. Hired by the township government to welcome guests and tourists, these women were required to show up in typical Qiang

“ethnic clothing” (minzu fuzhuang 民族服装) with singing and dancing, presenting thus the stereotypical image of minorities as singing and dancing loving people. They lined both sides of the road, and started singing in turn. All of the songs were in Mandarin including the well-known Qiang toasting songs, Qiang folk songs, patriotic songs, and grateful songs made popular after the Wenchuan Earthquake. Then I heard someone say that the ceremony was about to start because the vice county head showed up. Soon the two shibi appeared from behind the red cloth, one of them carrying a drum, and walked towards two large wine jugs placed in the middle of the township gate with another formally dressed shibi. They were shibi Zhu Wenyi, and his cousin, shibi Zhu Guangyi.

Zhu Wenyi, E’er’s famous shibi and lead shibi of the Sheep-skin Drum Dance group, wore his well-known golden monkey fur hat, light gray hemp long gown with stripes of embroidered flowers, and black cloth shoes. Legend says that the Qiang sacred scripts written in the Qiang language was eaten by a sheep while Abamubi, the first Qiang shibi, took a rest on his descending journey to the human world. A golden monkey, a rare monkey species living exclusively in Sichuan and the neighboring provinces, suggested to Abamubi that he could kill the sheep and make a drum out of her skin. By beating the drum, the shibi would be reminded of the sacred scripts. Since then, shibi needed to wear the golden monkey fur hat and beat the sheep-skin drum when chanting during worship ceremonies. It is said that the Qiang written language was forever lost due to this incident.

Shibi from the E’er Village were noticed weeks before to prepare for the festival.

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Shibi were the leaders, monitors, and spiritual centers of the New Year Festival. They were in charge of preparing for the worship, monitoring the ritual, chanting the sacred scripts, and offering the offerings on behalf of all participating villagers in appropriate manners. On this year’s New Year Festival, the entire day of celebration began with the now celebrated “Wine Jug Opening Ceremony (kaitan yishi 开坛仪式)” performed by the two shibi. Contained in the two large wine jugs was the barley wine made of fermented barley used to be grown in the mountain villages. Barley wine was indispensable for Qiang celebrations where both men and women drink while dancing and eating. The wine took months to make. When it was ready for the celebration, a shibi was asked to perform a ritual, inviting the gods to drink the wine first, and thanking them for the blessings. Then the mass could enjoy the wine blessed by the gods. After the ritual, the wine jugs could be opened. Barley wine was locally called “sipping wine” (zajiu 砸酒) because of the way it was consumed. Placed in the center of the circle dance, everyone drank the wine from a thin, hollow bamboo stick inserted into the jug while dancing around it. Each time, they took a few sips. This prevented them from drinking too much at a time and getting drunk too quickly, according to some villagers. More important, the sipping ritual made the consumption a communal practice.

Zhu Wenyi kneed down, beating the drum rhythmically, and started chanting.

Listening to his chant, the crowd quieted. After a few minutes, he stood up, and yelled his last words in Sichuan dialect, “Wish everyone a happy and prosperous Qiang New Year!”

Cheers and hand clapping arose from the crowd. Guns were fired behind the township gate. Self-made guns were common among the Qiang who practiced hunting in the forest until it was officially banned in the 1990s. Several families still kept the guns, but gun-

212 firing, similar to the effect of firework display, was mainly performed during the celebrations. The two shibi opened the wine jugs, bamboo sticks inserted into each one, and all were invited to take a sip. Some of the village women put red cloth scarfs on the guests, a gesture called “wearing the red” (guahong 挂红) where the red scarf symbolized best wishes from the Qiang. Others, holding small wine pots, were pouring the barley wine from the opened and blessed wine jugs into small cups for guests to taste.

The huge red cloths on the gate opened from the middle as Longxi welcomed all guests. School children in festive clothes greeted everyone behind the township gate. The

Sheep-skin Drum Dance group started dancing. The Qiang Sheep-skin Drum Dance was also listed as Chinese national ICH in 2008. Sheep-skin Drum Dancers, also from E’er, were considered apprentices of the lead shibi. The dance was often performed during formal rituals, especially at funerals. The Qiang Sheep-skin Drum group dance, however, would only be played during a funeral of an elder who died of natural causes. During my fieldwork, in private, the Sheep-skin Drum Dance group, hired by the host family, only performed once at the funeral of the elder grandmother Yu in Dongmen Village. The group danced all night until the elder Yu was buried, to peacefully send her spirit to another world. In E’er, shibi Yu, who was practicing as shibi since his 20s, recited for me a few ritual lines titled “Walking on the Small Roads.” The chant described the kinds of roads that one walked when alive such as village lanes, dirt roads, difficult mountain roads, as well as the roads that they would walk to the after world. After the reconstruction, however, E’er Village’s Sheep-skin Drum Dance group were hired by

Longxi Township Government and Wenchuan County Government to perform at

213 numerous occasions in and outside of the county, such as the New Year Festival, as an emblematic display of the dance and singing Qiang.

Zhu Wenyi is the lead shibi of Longxi’s Sheep-skin Drum Dance. He was also the national ICH transmitter of the Qiang Sheep-skin Drum Dance. Other group members, wearing a long gown and sheep-skin jacket, rhythmically beat the drum and followed his steps. The Sheep-skin Drum Dance group led the guests into the Dalabu Square. The dance group then danced around a one-meter high “stone” altar with a burning bonfire in front of it. In Qiang village, a stone pagoda was erected to worship the village gods. In

E’er, the only remaining stone pagoda of the township partially collapsed during the earthquake. It was not repaired to this day. In Dongmen, this “stone” pagoda was constructed right before the festival of concrete and imitation stone pieces. However, Zhu

Wenyi stopped to perform another ceremony, offering to the stone pagoda, in front of the new structure. He knelt down in front of the pagoda, burned three incenses, and started chanting. Zhu Guangyi, the other shibi, beat the drum for him. Finishing chanting, Zhu

Wenyi bowed three times to the pagoda. Getting up, he grasped a red-crowned rooster and quickly cut open its throat. He sprinkled the rooster’s blood onto the pagoda. After the blood was drained, he plucked several chicken feathers to attach to all over the pagoda. By this ceremony, the pagoda was made into a “spirited” structure.

Finally came the most exciting performance of the day. Zhu Guangyi performed shibi magic, as part of the national heritage represented in the Qiang New Year Festival.

He was the only shibi of E’er to perform this kind of ritual. Zhu Guangyi dressed differently from Zhu Wenyi, wearing a black hat with a dried black animal half chin on the top. He later told me that the hat was made of sheep skin, and the chin was that of a

214 wild monkey. Zhu Guangyi wore a black sheep-skin vest over a cloth blue long gown, black pants, and black cloth shoes. The dried black monkey chin on the hat moved with him when he moved, like a hungry animal with an open bloody mouth. Comparing with

Zhu Wenyi who dressed in light and bright colors, Zhu Guangyi looked dark and terrifying. Zhu Guangyi sat in front of a stainless-steel pot filled with water. He pulled out about five pieces of the yellow paper money, crumpling each while quietly chanting and throwing them one by one into the water. Then he turned to the bonfire, and from the bottom of which he took out a hot iron plowshare. The plowshare was burned for so long that its surface turned paper white. Now the guests were really interested. All of the cameras faced Zhu Guangyi, who slowly walked towards the crowd, waving the burned plowshare. Some timid guests screamed and quickly stepped backward. I was scared as well. When the plowshare was close, I felt a hot wave rushing towards me. Stepping back,

I was in cold sweats.

Zhu Guangyi did not seem to be afraid at all. He picked up the stainless-steel pot, and quickly dipped the plowshare in it. With sizzling sound, wisps of smoke flew out of the pot. Many guests stepped back again. More scarily and stimulatingly, Zhu Guangyi put out his tongue to lick the burned plowshare! Some onlookers screamed, and many more took photos nonstop. Zhu Guangyi licked not once but several times as if he was eating an ice cream bar. All onlookers were astounded. “The shibi has learned and practiced this ritual for many years. He is the one with real [shibi] skills. The plowshare will not hurt him at all,” a township staff member from E’er, who had seen Zhu Guangyi perform many times, proudly said to people around him. Zhu Guangyi walked around for everyone to see his plowshare-licking. Then, he dropped it on the floor.

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The Sheep-skin Drum Dance group started to dance in circle again with drum beating, Zhu Guangyi standing in the middle and chanting. He pulled out from his pocket several thin steel needles. Some of them showed traces of stain due to long time use.

Randomly, Zhu Guangyi pulled one dancer towards him. All attention was drawn. Layers of crowd quickly surrounded the two performers. The dancer squatted a little bit, and turned his side face to Zhu. Stabling the dancer’s chin with one hand, Zhu Guangyi quickly pierced the steel needle from one side of chin into another! A young girl beside me involuntarily covered her eyes. The dancer seemed to feel nothing. Quickly he rejoined the dance group, with the steel needle piercing through his lower chin. Zhu

Guangyi pulled out another two dancers to repeat the performance. The steel needle pierced into one side of the chin, through the soft tissues under the tongue, and came out from the other side. After letting them dance for about five minutes, Zhu Guangyi stopped these pierced dancers and swiftly took the steel needle out. Onlookers flocked to check on the dancers. Not even a red spot was left on their faces. The dancers allowed some guests to touch their chins, and told them that they felt no pain. The shocking performance was indeed an eye-opening experience for many visitors. Many were amazed by the “magic” of the shibi, yet others tried to demystify the tricks used by them.

The “plowshare licking” (tian huatou 舔铧头) and “steel needle piercing” (daqian

打仟) were part of the healing and exorcism practices monitored by shibi. This explained why the lead shibi, in this case Zhu Guangyi, usually dressed in black, terrifying costumes to “scare” away the evil spirits. One popular interpretation was that “shock doctrine” was the logic behind such curing methods. Shibi would place the plowshare onto the chest of the sick person, which in the meantime, would scare them to sweat so

216 much that the virus would be let off. On the other hand, the pierced dancers dancing around the sick and the dead would suffer the pain for the latter. In Domgmen and other

Qiang villages, I observed similar “plowshare licking” and “steel needle piercing” several times, mainly inside villagers’ private homes when someone was sick, giving me an opportunity to differentiate and problematize the “frontstage” and “backstage” performances of the folk rituals (MacCannell 1973).

Soon it was near lunch time. Officials, reporters and visitors now gathered in the yard in front of the Qiang Theater Pavilion. Forty tables of dishes were waiting as they were led by the township staff to sit at designated tables. Ordinary visitors, on the other hand, fought to get a seat by the table. The late comers, such as I myself, could only envy the “mouth fortune” (koufu 口福) of the others. The vice county head gave a short welcome speech at his table. He cheerfully welcomed reporters and guests to “enjoy the beautiful scenery and sunshine, meet the hospitable Qiang people, and experience firsthand the mysterious Qiang culture” using the opportunity of the Qiang New Year

Festival. The “yard banquet” officially started. The communal dining scene was more than cheerful but chaotic. Visitors kept asking for more food, while the servers, home hostel owners and their relatives, ran through the tables like honey-gathering bees. After the “yard banquet,” the township-sponsored singing and dancing competition began.

Each village and work unit prepared a performance, ranging from group female dancing, school-children chorus, to solo unaccompanied singing. The performer that drew the most attention and laughter was an elder solo unaccompanied singer from Xige Village.

Dressed in his usual dirt-covered farm clothes, the male villager calmly started singing nonstop in front of the judges. The competition moderator had to stop him before he sang

217 the fourth song. He then quietly returned the microphone to the moderator, went back to the crowd, and lit up a cigarette. For the elder villager, singing seemed to be a relaxing break from heavy farm work, rather than a performance for a competition. Audience for the competition was mostly Dongmen villagers, as the visiting officials and news reporters left right after lunch, and tourists were busy sightseeing around the village. The whole-day event concluded with a sheep-roasting bonfire circle dance party later in the evening.

Although locally renowned for generations, shibi gained wide popularity and celebrated cultural status only after the Wenchuan Earthquake. Along with the national intangible heritage nomination, shibi scripts, practices, and equipment were recently scholarly analyzed and publicly advocated as components of shibi culture (shibi wenhua

释比文化). From well-revered folk custom to officially-appraised public culture, shibi culture is recognized and represented as a recovered ethnic tradition that served particular political, social and education purposes. The transformative status of the shibi culture and related practices reflected the contested effects of the sweeping Chinese ICH protection campaign on ethnic folk rituals, as well as the political and social significance of the emergent ICH nomination and promotion in power-consolidating reconstruction planning.

Focusing on the complicated consequences of the rapid transformation of the

Qiang New Year Festival into a representative Qiang ICH, this chapter analyzes the urgent and special measures adopted by related State agencies and scholars to rescue and protect the heritage practices and materials in time of disaster. Aspects of the Qiang culture—embroidery, Sheep-skin Drum Dance, and New Year festival—were listed as national ICH quickly after the earthquake. The Qiang ICH rescue and preservation was

218 the first large-scale, State-led experiment of emergent ICH protection in Communist

China. The State-led efforts were timely and swift as attention to and plans for rescuing and protecting the Qiang ICH emerged soon after the Wenchuan Earthquake. Investment in the rescue and preservation work was unprecedentedly enormous. A number of high- profile State-sponsored projects and events, such as the official Qiang New Year Festival celebration, were institutionalized after the earthquake. The emergent nomination and preservation of the Qiang ICH played a determining role in defining the significance and connotation of the Qiang ICH, as well as the importance and social impacts of preserving the ICH of a Chinese ethnic minority group after a major disaster. The special measures and State-sponsored programs were also vital for the protection work and development of the Qiang ICH, which at the same time, radically transformed the identity and ways of life of the Qiang villagers, especially shibi and others who participated in the festival— they were collectively regarded as ICH transmitters after the earthquake.

As revealed in Dongmen’s Qiang New Year Festival celebration, the nationally- recognized ICH was presented in the officially-orchestrated festival as a unique Qiang ritual consisting of several aspects of the folk religion long regarded “superstitious” and

“backward.” At the same time, the Qiang New Year Festival was also made into a tourism-oriented, hodgepodge show of the Qiang “culture” and life of the people to attract novelty-hunting and leisure-seeking visitors. Revealing the process of validating the Qiang New Year Festival as national and world ICH, this chapter reflects on the different explanations and representations of this ICH in official discourse and public celebration.

Official State Urgent Intangible Cultural Heritagization

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Heritagization, translated from the French term patrimonialización popularly used by heritage studies scholars, refers to the sociocultural, political, and legal process through which a space, a material culture, or a practice is transformed into a cultural or natural heritage worthy of being preserved and restored (Marmol et al. 2015). In the

Chinese context, the urgent heritagization of affected cultural practices was primarily led by State agencies. The study of “heritage regimes” has pointed out “the key role that the nation-state plays in mediating and producing heritage, both as a form of governance and as an experiential domain for citizens on the ground” (Geismar 2015:72). Understanding heritage as “a fundamental process of value formation” (ibid:73), heritage regimes legitimize a particular articulation of the ownership and (objectification) of culture and its past, and more importantly, reveal the processes in which, under such a framework, the heritage as a resource for particular economic, political, and social agendas is managed, circulated, and consumed (see also Bedix et al. 2012). Cultural heritage politics in China presents a complex process where heritage making and promotion becomes top-down mechanism of political recognition and economic entitlement for the standing and development of related material culture and cultural practices (Blumfield and Silverman

2013). As “a technology of government” (Oakes 2016), heritage entangles with rural development, tourism, urbanization, modernization, sustainability, and nationalism projects in various parts of China, cities and countryside alike. In particular, cultural practices of ethnic regions are firmly incorporated into the ofﬁcial heritage and tourism policies, mainly helping to reinforce the political construction of the multi-ethnic nation, as well as promote heritage tourism based development (Shepherd 2006 and 2009).

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Cultural heritage preservation in time of crisis has gained increasing attention among international communities. Researchers and practitioners of heritage preservation have argued the importance of cultural heritage preservation for helping recover the sense of community for affected populations, recognizing the social, psychological, and political importance of heritage preservation (Wijeratne 2008, Ida 2014, Nespoulous

2015). In post-Katrina New Orleans, the firmly continued celebration of Mardi Gras and

Super Sunday parades, in a similar vein, provided the much-needed cathartic relief, helped community members reclaim their sense of home, and allowed them a time-space to articulate their visions for the recovery (Abrahams et al. 2006, Barrios 2010, Kivland

2008). Researchers on post-2011 Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami recovery have collectively pointed out how the continuation of folk performing arts and local festivals helped the communities recover from and revive sensitively after the catastrophes

(Inagaki 2012, Hashimoto 2014, Yoshida 2014, Ida 2014, Miichi 2016).

Cultural heritage preservation always involves the politics of identity and identification whether it is led by the State, nongovernmental organizations, or individuals. Urgent heritagization projects after disasters are no exception. They may lead to arbitrary yet contested selection and interpretation of the affected cultural practices

(Winter 1995, Simpson & Alwis 2008, Lennon 2014, Falk 2014, Veselič & Slater 2014,

Hayashi 2014). Heritagization of the disaster sites and cultural practices of the affected population can be used as a powerful tool to stimulate national solidarity and patriotic emotions particularly for the governing agencies riddled with criticism or doubt from the general public (Dassie 2006, Iuso 2013). Foote (2003:265) argues that memorial sites and monuments of disaster events may become “emblems of national identity” where

221 hundreds of such sites have been “enshrined with patriotic fervor,” producing varied versions of “common themes of sacrifice, valor, and perseverance.” Similar to the effects of the spectacular Wenchuan Earthquake relief and “culturally sensitive” reconstruction of the Qiang settlements, the State-led urgent heritagization of the Qiang cultural practices was expected to promote national unity, State legitimacy, and social stability in

China.

Finally, heritagization and cultural heritage preservation lead to economic recovery and expansion. As discussed in the previous chapter, Qiang heritage tourism developed along with the recognition and promotion of the Qiang cultural practices as heritage culture, radically transforming the economic structure and social relations of the affected communities. In previous chapters, I have already discussed the problems of market commodification in the promotion of heritage tourism. In the following sections, I will use the example of the newly-heritagized Qiang New Year Festival to further discuss the impacts of the reconstruction and the ICH preservation compaign on the continuation and transformation of the cultural practices to be preserved as heritage.

State- and Scholar-Led Qiang Cultural Rescue

Qiang cultural rescue and preservation was an emergent yet brand-new challenge for scholars, policymakers, and other parties interested in China’s cultural present and future related to ethnicity and regional diversity, continuity and creativity. To the surprise of many Qiang researchers and cultural advocates, it was a group of geographers at the

Chinese Academy of Sciences that proposed the first policy recommendation concerning

Qiang culture protection. The geographers submitted Suggestions for Rescuing and

Reconstructing Qiang Ethnic Culture after the Great Wenchuan Earthquake (Suggestions

222 hereafter) to the Chinese State council on May 23rd, 2008. Ge Quansheng and Xi

Jianchao, lead authors of Suggestions, went to Wenchuan two days after the earthquake, and made a plea for cultural engagement based on their earthquake research experience.

Also it was in the Suggestions that equal attention to the Qiang tangible and intangible cultural heritage was called for (China Culture 2008). Professor L, Qiang scholar at

Minzu University of China, told me in an interview that he was ashamed and regretful that “the geographers were ahead of us to recognize the need of Qiang cultural protection”

(see also Li Shaoming 2008). The Suggestions sparked a series of actions and reactions towards Qiang cultural research, rescue and preservation.

From the beginning, such actions and reactions were top-down, State- and scholar- led. On May 22nd, ten days after the earthquake, Jiabao Wen firmly proclaimed that the Qiang culture and civilization must be well protected after the disaster in an interview amongst the earthquake relics in Yingxiu Township, Wenchuan (Cheng et al.

2008). Qinglin Jia, then Chairperson of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative

Conference (CPPCC), and Liangyu Hui, then Vice Premier of the Chinese State, made instructions on the Suggestions respectively. Jia was quoted by saying, “The Suggestions deserves the highest attention (gaodu zhongshi 高度重视). The State Ethnic Affairs

Commission of the People’s Republic of China (SEAC) should start related research and implement such suggestions as soon as possible” (SEAC 2008). Soon the SEAC responded. On May 30th, 2008, it sponsored the first State-level symposium discussing post-Wenchuan Earthquake Qiang cultural rescue and protection at its office building in

Beijing. Danzhu Angben, vice-director of the SEAC, monitored the conference. Invited to the symposium were scholars from a number of distinguished Chinese universities and

223 research institutes including Minzu University of China, Southwest Universities for

Nationalities, and the Anthropology Department of the Chinese Academy of Social

Sciences.

The SEAC, a representative State managing agency on ethnic affairs, reveals the

State’s standing interest in Qiang cultural rescue and protection through the symposium.

Although a number of scholars presented their views in the symposium, only four talks were published in SEAC’s official report, showcasing the agency’s main foci and interests. First, Qiang cultural rescue and protection was urged by the State Council and high-level officials, as revealed in Danzhu Angben’s presentation. Second, the initial emergent cultural rescue work should focus on the evaluation and collection of the Qiang cultural relics (wenwu 文物) and other material culture, to be led by the Chinese National

Museum of Ethnology. On the other aspect, Qiang ICH and its inheritors were given heavy attention at the symposium. “The essence of the Qiang culture is its intangible cultural heritage,” Qiang ethnologist Li Shaoming said, “the protection of the Qiang intangible cultural heritage should focus on protecting the inheritors.” Consequently, Li suggested establish the “Qiang Cultural Ecosystem Conservation Area” to preserve not only the “cultural environment” (wentai 文态) but also “ecological context” (shengtai 生

态) of the Qiang (SEAC 2008). Finally, the relationship between cultural conservation and economic development is stressed. Ge and Xi reasserted their viewpoints in the

Suggestions that Qiang settlements should be reconstructed close to and concentrating around the pre-earthquake areas to “establish Qiang cultural industry bases and regional cultural industry clusters, forming new points for the post-earthquake economic recovery and development” (ibid 2008).

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Li Shaoming’s awakening call for protecting Qiang ICH inheritors and establishing Qiang cultural ecological conservation area served as a hopeful beginning of the Qiang ICH rescue and protection. Yet an urgent and pressing task for all researchers was that “the Qiang culture was devastatingly attacked by the earthquake before we

[scholars] were able to systematically understand it,” said Feng Jicai, vice-chairman of the China Association for Promoting Democracy (CAPD), and president of Chinese Folk

Literature and Art Association (Xu 2008). The CAPD is one of the eight legally recognized political parties that follow the direction of the Communist Party of China under the Multi-party Cooperation and Political Consultation System. Most of the members are accredited intellectuals in education, art, and publication professions. Feng

Jicai soon became the leader of the campaign for “relieving the disaster in terms of culture” (wenhua jiuzai 文化救灾), aiming to rescue the disaster-ridden ethnicity through restoring their cultural heritage.

Feng chaired the “Emergency Qiang Cultural Rescue Symposium” held at the

Great Hall of the People, Beijing. He also led a team of scholars to conduct field research in the earthquake-stricken zones of Sichuan between late May and early June. Within just a month’s time, Feng, Li Shaoming, and other scholars wrote the Proposal for Qiang

Cultural Heritage Protection in Post-Wenchuan Earthquake Reconstruction Work

(Proposal hereafter), and delivered it to the Chinese State Council. Qiang ICH inheritors and cultural heritage items are the foci of the Proposal. In August, Feng led the publication of two Qiang cultural studies and rescue book. One of them is intended for policy makers and practitioners, titled Where is the Qiang Culture Going?: Heritage

Experts’ Suggestions for Emergency Protection of Qiang Cultural Heritage. The other

225 one is Student Reader on the Qiang Culture, for educating the Qiang children who have little knowledge of their ethnic culture. A publication ceremony for the Student Reader of the Qiang Culture was held in the Great Hall of the People, in Beijing.

Urgency and special measures characterize most ICH protection in times of disaster. Due to the unpredictable nature of the event, most of the ICH items and its inheritors would disappear too quickly for any protection takes place. The timely salvage and preservation of what is left and fragile requires massive material and manpower investment. In China, emergent Qiang ICH protection took advantage of a willing and overwhelming State to react quickly to the urgent need of ICH rescue and recovery.

Consequently, the State, represented by its various related agencies, led, sanctioned, and monitorred the protection practices. The Chinese State’s major attention to this matter was revealed not only in the involvement of high-level officials, but also by the significant venues where the symposiums and related ceremonies were held.

Chinese emergent Qiang intangible cultural heritage recovery was led by a select group of scholars, trusted and sponsored by the State to make plans for the Qiang ICH nomination, rescue, and protection. A lot of them, represented by Feng Jicai, joined the leadership due to the extreme urgency and grave destruction of the Wenchuan Earthquake.

Most of them did not have field research experience on the Qiang culture or ICH. Despite their passion and important initial work, such scholars’ attention and devotion was short- lived. For example, Feng quickly shifted his work focus to Mongolian paper-cut art, another national ICH, after the publication of the Student Reader of the Qiang Culture.

From the beginning, the Qiang ICH practitioners and inheritors were excluded from this process. In the few times when they were mentioned in the reports or planning,

226 they were presented as hurt, helpless, and passive victims in need of urgent help. Most of the time, the practitioners and inheritors were reduced to numbers. For example, as described in the SEAC report, “The earthquake fatally destroyed the Qiang ethnic culture….According to an incomplete study, three Qiang stone watchtowers of Lixian’s historical Taoping Qiang Village collapsed. The earthquake destroyed 100% of the houses in Wenchuan’s biggest and oldest Luobo Qiang village, causing a death toll of 44.”

Excluding the practitioners and inheritors from the decision-making and denying their active agency in preserving their own cultural practices, the Chinese State agencies and related scholars gained the dominant power in defining, salvaging, protecting, and promoting the Qiang ICH. More importantly, as discussed later, Qiang ICH inheritors were molded into indebted and grateful representatives of the surviving Qiang culture.

Urgent Heritagization as Heritage Knowledge Production and Identity Transformation

In the massive campaign to urgently recognize and preserve the Qiang ICH, particular measures and contingent processes were adopted to identify related cultural practices as a national and/or world cultural heritage. In turn, these cultural practices and their practitioners obtained the status and resources to be systematically preserved and displayed mainly by officially-designated representatives after the Wenchuan Earthquake.

In this section, I use the making of the Qiang New Year Festival as the Chinese and

UNESCO-recognized ICH, to showcase the arbitrariness and politics of the State uergent cultural heritagization.

A particular characteristic of the urgent cultural heritagization is that it requires spontaneous and swift actions as little protection can be planned ahead of a crisis or disaster. The urgency of the disaster always calls for special measures. As revealed in the

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Proposal, it called for “special treatment (teshu zhaogu 特殊照顾)” to the national-level inheritors to allow them to live comfortably among the Qiang and teach apprentices. The

Proposal urged to “discover and promote” outstanding provincial- and county-level inheritors, and make entire villages or schools as ICH inheritance units. Specifically, it argued that “emergent” (jinji 紧急) and “special” (tebie 特别) strategies should be taken to quickly apply Qiang disaster sites (such as the ruined old Beichuan county seat), tangible (such as Qiang watchtowers and historical villages), as well as ICH (including

Qiang epics, embroidery skills, and New Year Festival) as national and world cultural and ICH. Selected Qiang traditional cultural practices were urgently heritagized as provincial, national, and UNESCO-recognized ICH. Previous to the earthquake there were two Qiang elements listed as Chinese national ICH: the Qiang Wa’er’ezu Festival, and Qiang Flute Playing and Making Skills. In June 2008, five more Qiang cultural practices were included on the national ICH list: Kouxian (Jew’s harp) Playing Skills,

Sheep-skin Drum Dance, Embroidery, the New Year Festival, and Polyphonic Singing.

In 2009, the Qiang New Year was inscribed as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. In 2011, three more Qiang items were promoted as national ICH: the Legend of Yu the Great, the Qiang epic story Ge Great War, and Qiang

Watchtower Construction Skills. Most of these items did not follow the usual application procedure, which requires each element to be first approved at the lower hierarchical level for several years before being eligible for upgrading to the next hierarchical level, from local, to provincial, to national. Thanks to the “urgent” and “special” strategies stated in the rescue plan, Qiang ICH items went rapidly through the steps. Another special measure was to quickly establish the Qiang cultural ecological conservation area,

228 the nation’s third of its kind. It followed the State’s “integrated protection” principle of

Chinese ICH protection, which aimed to “comprehensively protect the natural and cultural ecology of the intangible cultural heritage” (Ma 2013).

The “special treatments” (teshu duidai 特别对待) urging to quickly heritagize some of the representative Qiang cultural practices requires a fast determination of the scope, meaning, and significance of such practices. In this scenario, a number of emergent and arbitrary Qiang cultural concepts and conducts were quickly determined to meet the urgent demand of the ICH application and State requirement of cultural conservation, while prior to the earthquake, the heritagization of Qiang cultural practices were slowly implemented. Such quick planning resulted in a high-pressured and highly- centralized decision making among a few players, including several Qiang scholars in

Chengdu who worked very closely with Professor Li Shaoming on the effort. The scholars involved were given dominant power in the application process. The local government, as the main applicant and implementer, had the final say. One important fact is that in China, local and specifically county-level governments are the main applicants, regulators, and managers of the ICH items identified in their territories (see Chen 2015,

Liang 2013, You 2015). In the application for the Qiang New Year to be on the UNESCO list, Sichuan Ministry of Culture was listed as the main managing agency (zhuguan jigou

主管机构); Culture and Sports Bureaus of Wenchuan, Lixian, Maoxian, Songpan counties of A’ba, and Culture and Tourism Bureaus of Beichuan and Pingwu counties of

Sichuan’s Mianyang city were the community organizations and representatives (shequ zuzhi, shequ daibiao 社区组织, 社区代表). Thus, the nomination of the folk rituals as national and world ICH items is sanctioned by the local governments, which, at the same

229 time, serves the State’s political, social and economic governing purposes down to the noted localities.

Arbitrariness in this context is an amoral evaluation. It refers to the subjectiveness and contingency involved in the scholars’ judgments and the local governments’ research of the meaning and content of the Qiang ICH. Major advocates and policy makers involved were concerned Chinese Qiang scholars, represented by the leading scholar Li

Shaoming. Li devoted the majority of his research career to the study of the Qiang, and proposed meaningful suggestions and cautions on the Qiang ICH preservation planning.

A renowned Chinese ethnologist and Qiang specialist, Li Shaoming was well aware of the importance of people and context in cultural recovery and preservation. Li (2008) clearly articulates his concerns about the reconstruction. He argues for recognizing the agency (zhuti 主体) of the Qiang people in the process, respecting the cultural laws

(wenhua guilv 文化规律) and local customs of recovery and reconstruction, reconciling the interest conflicts and content disputes of the Conservation Area establishment, and resolving social unrest induced by relocation and settlement of Qiang villages. Other scholars also share similar concerns and comments. However, Professor Li’s untimely death in May 2009 was regarded as a huge loss in the scholarly campaign for the Qiang cultural recovery. As revealed in my interviews and, interestingly many failed interview attempts, with scholars involved in the nomination processes, the heavy demand and political urgency of the task did not allow them to formulate an ideal plan for the Qiang

ICH protection.

Essentially, the official emergent heritagization of the Qiang New Year and other

Qiang practices became a pressured political task for the scholars involved. In the case of

230 the Qiang New Year Festival, scholars, working with and, to a great extent, for the local governments, were urged to first, establish planning guidelines for the Qiang Cultural

Ecological Conservation Area to define the range and scope of the Qiang ICH protection and, on the other hand, apply for the New Year Festival as the UNESCO List of

Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. The Qiang cultural ecological conservation area was established within a year of the Wenchuan Earthquake.

The establishment followed an unusually fast time line. In June of 2008, the planning of the conservation area started. In July, Planning Outline of Qiang Cultural Ecological

Conservation Area (Planning Outline hereafter) was officially published. In November,

Qiang Cultural Ecological Experimental Conservation Area was nominated by the

Ministry of Culture in the Great Hall of People.

I was turned down repeatedly when trying to interview Professor M, a Qiang scholar and former student of Professor Li Shaoming, who worked very closely with Li on establishing the Planning Outline at a university in Chengdu. I then changed my strategy by asking him of his experience of working with Li, whom until this day, he still called Teacher Li. Professor M instantly became very sentimental. Handing me a draft planning outline on which Li and he together made many comments, he said to me, “I still remember the days when Teacher Li and I worked right here in this office on the

Planning Outline. We were basically trapped here until we made a plan in the fastest time possible.” Pausing for a moment, he confessed, “It [the Planning Outline] is essentially a few men’s work. Teacher Li and I sat here, looking at a map [of China], and mapped the regions to be included in the conservation area. If we say it is [included], then it is

[included].” Claiming to be too sad to recall the details, Professor M refused to say more.

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Nevertheless, what was implied in his comment was indeed an arbitrary decision-making process greatly affected by a tight timeline and political agenda. Arbitrariness, in this occasion, refers to the fact that the emergent policies and decisions produced were results of the subjective judgments of the officials and scholars made with limited research materials, in an urgent time frame, and, oftentimes, in closed offices.

Not only does the recognition of the Qiang ICH require quick and arbitrary decisions of the scholars, the heritagization also involves a State-sanctioned redefinition and representation of the status and significance of the relevant Qiang cultural practices, as revealed in the application of the Qiang New Year Festival for UNESCO-recognized

ICH. Intangible cultural heritage is a nascent, culturally alienating, yet politically energizing concept in contemporary Chinese campaign for heritage protection and promotion. A little more than a decade ago, China joined the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2004. The National

Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage was launched by the Chinese

Ministry of Culture in 2005. Since 2006, China Heritage Culture Day has been celebrated on every second Saturday of June, where the ICH has played a major part in a wide array of festivals and other public displays. Worth mentioning is that the Chengdu-excavated

Golden Sun Bird foil (taiyang shenniao jinbo 太阳神鸟金箔), representative artifact of the Jinsha Ruins of presumed ancient Shu Kingdom, was elected as the symbol of the

Chinese cultural heritage. Longxi Township is identified as an important archaeological site contributing much of the jade excavated in the Jinsha Ruins. Only until recently, the concept and ICH protection campaign has entered Chinese public purview as an increasing number of formerly-claimed “traditional” cultural practices were listed as

232 national ICH (1219 items in 2011). China currently possesses 37 world intangible heritage culture items (including items in Need of Urgent Safeguarding), surging as the nation with the largest number of world ICH items.

Yet ICH has been a morphologically and culturally alienating concept. Widely recognized anthropologist and folklorist Gao Bingzhong of Peking University, notes that

ICH conceptually starts with a negative initial determiner and contains an odd number of characters, a very rare and customarily unfavorable morphological structure for popular

Chinese phrases (2013). Previously, tangible cultural heritage was more popularly referred to as historical sites (guji 古迹) and cultural relics (wenwu 文物). The sense of ruin and ancientness suggests the items’ negativity, stasis, outdatedness, and irrelevance to contemporary life. On the other hand, a large number of the now-celebrated ICH items were long regarded as “disparaged” folk arts, folklore, or folk cultures that connoted little cultural or social importance in aesthetic, intellectual, or social terms. In particular, rituals, such as the Qiang New Year Festival, the ethnic Bai’s Worship of Three Spirits Festival, the ethnic Han’s custom of visiting sacred relatives of Shanxi Province, and the Dragon

Tablet Fair of Hebei Province, among others, were historically described as “feudal superstitions” and officially banned or condemned in the early years of the Communist regime (Chen 2015, Gao 2014, Gros 2012, Liang 2013, Oaks 2013, You 2015).

Nevertheless, the discourse of cultural heritage, tangible and intangible alike, bestows the previous folk cultural practices a new significance of belonging to “cultural categories”

(Gao 2014:558), indicating their social and educational relevance and significance. Such transformation of their status of being heritage also announces the historicity and current impacts of such cultural practices on contemporary Chinese life.

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The heritagization of folk rituals such as the Qiang New Year Festival is a process of knowledge production and identity transformation in which the folk ritual is officially reinterpreted and upheld as heritage culture. Specifically, the heritagization is a distinctive culturalizing process to integrate the “superstitious” practices into new and promising “cultural categories” (Gao 2014:558) so as to be politically and publicly acceptable and appraised. Culturalizing, in this particular context, recognizes and represents the folk rituals’ political viability, scientific validity, educational utility, and social positivity, essential for the nationalist construction of a modernizing and harmonious multi-ethnic China. The heritagization of the folk rituals is nothing short of a

State-led social campaign, a new kind of “cultural revolution,” and a political movement

(Gao 2014).

To achieve the status of ICH, folk rituals have to present their political importance in the nationalist construction of the united, multi-ethnic nation. The Qiang New Year

Festival, in the official description, is framed as a ritual used by the Qiang to express

“respect and admiration to all spirits, the motherland, and the ancestors” (ICHChina

2013a). The worship and respect of the spirits are then extended to that of the nation, acting as a uniting event and gesture. More importantly, the Festival is specifically represented as an “ancient, authentic, and ethnic” ritual that characterizes the ethnic group’s “primitive” and “other” status in the nationalist discourse (Liang 2013). In Liang

Yongjia’s (2013) research on the ICH nomination of the ethnic Bai’s Worship of Three

Spirits, he further points out that such practice simutaneously demonstrates the State efforts of safeguarding a marginal and vanishing ethnic culture threatened by modernization, urbanization, and market economy. Other ethnic minority New Year

234 festivals, such as the Dai Water-splashing Festival and Yi Torch Festival, are also accredited as occasions that “increase the ethnicity’s self awareness” and that “promote ethnic unity and harmony” (ICHChina 2013b).

During the New Year celebration, however, Qiang shibi, women, and children were above all pushed to the forefront for the tourists’ entertainment. They barely engaged in “community rituals,” related to the New Year Festival celebration, busy selling goods, cooking, serving tourists and officials. In any case, the New Year Festival, focus of national and international interest and funding, was not a Qiang cultural practice in the first place. The so-called “ancient,” “authentic,” and “ethnic” ritual carries nationalist clichés and prejudices about what is seen as “primitive,” “mysterious,” and

“feminine” minority ethnic groups (Harrell 1995, Liang 2013). Worth noticing is that in the festival, the Qiang language was not used. Women sang Qiang songs in Mandarin, including the well-known Qiang toasting songs, folk songs, and “gratitude songs”

(gan’en gequ 感恩歌曲) made popular after the Wenchuan Earthquake. Even though

Qiang language is only spoken in remote villages, elsewhere Qiang people use the

Sichuan dialect and adults are often unable to speak Mandarin in Qiang villages of

Wenchuan. The heritagization initiatives induced by the “cultural recovery” therefore perpetuated the long-running forced assimilation of standardized language. After the earthquake, aside from a few hours of teaching in local primary schools, there were few proposals to revive the Qiang language. While scholars constantly call for more attention to the issue, those people primarily concerned do not necessarily feel the same way.

Local villagers often said to me that “there is no need to learn Qiang” since “so few people are using it now.”

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The heritagized folk rituals have to carry scientific values and educational functions in the public celebrations. The animistic spirit worship represented in the Qiang

New Year Festival is framed into activities promoting environmental protection awareness and ecological conservation. The Festival is described to celebrate the Qiang’s

“awe to the nature” and appreciation of “a harmonious human nature relationship” in the application for the UNESCO recognition. Such a respect and appreciation is also appraised as a “civilized” conduct to help sustainable living and environmental protection.

The dance and singing activities involved, on the other hand, are promoted to showcase the distinctive “artistic values” of Qiang ritual. In China, celebration of the ICH event is often made into “a public space for scientiﬁc and cultural activity” (Gao 2014:557-558).

Gao (ibid) observed several educational boards displaying “standards for the informed consumer,” “urging ﬁlial gratitude,” and “Four After-Dinner Don’ts” around the temple where the Dragon Tablet Fair, Chinese national ICH, was held. Similarly, in Dongmen, educational boards including information of “civilized tourism” (wenming lvyou 文明旅

游) and filial piety conduct were permanently erected in Dalabu Square where most of the Qiang rituals were performed.

Social positivity refers to the benign (shan 善) and positive (zhengmian 正面) spirit and energy that the folk rituals now behold. “Positive energy” (zhengnengliang 正

能量) has become a nationally celebrated idiom to describe things and conduct of good and inspirational values (Du 2014). I would argue that most of the heritagized folk rituals are endowed with similar benign, inspirational, and oftentimes patriotic “positive energy.”

As described in You Ziying’s research on the Customers of Visiting Sacred Relatives

(2015), a folk spirit-worshiping ritual of Hongtong County, Shanxi Province, the folk

236 ritual was celebrated as practices showcasing the harmonious kinship and friendship as well as positive hope for the future, among other cultural values. The Water Splashing

Festival, in a similar vein, is described to celebrate “the ethnic Dai’s nature-revering, water-loving, pious, calm and tender characteristics” in the official introduction of this ritual (ICHChina 2013b).

The entertaining elements of such folk rituals also help elevate their social positivity. The Bai Worship of Three Spirits, Dai Water Splashing Festival, Yi Torch

Festival, and Qiang New Year Festival, among others, are variously represented as cheerful and collective carnivals comprising of dancing, singing, banqueting, and other performances. Exotic customs (qifeng yisu 奇风异俗) can soon draw crowds of tourists.

As Nick Spitzer commented on my observation of the shibi’s “plowshare licking” performance, “physical danger” is always the most “amazing” to the tourists. However, as discussed in Chapter 4, the touristic exoticizing and othering of the carnivalized folk rituals often disembed the rituals from the cultural and practical context, and reduce them as fetished commodities for tourism consumption. The Qiang New Year Festival is no exception.

In the post-Wenchuan Earthquake context, the heritagization of the “New Year” and other Qiang cultural practices were lavishly organized by the local government to demonstrate the State’s “loving care” (亲切关怀) for the affected Qiang. The “revival” of

Qiang traditional practices was extensively upheld as a positive and resilient image of the

Qiang people after the earthquake. During the New Year yard banquet, vice-head of

Wenchuan County made a public speech in front of thousands of guests, welcoming them to “experience the special glamour of the Qiang culture” (linglue qiangwenhua de dute

237 fengcai 领略羌文化的独特风采) and “witness the happy lives of the Qiang earthquake survivors” (jianzheng shouzai qiangmin de xingfu shenghuo 见证受灾羌民的幸福生活).

At Longxi, the township government erected large billboards in the village, exhibiting pictures of before and after the Wenchuan Earthquake to praise the “miraculous reconstruction” under the leadership of the Communist Party. Wenchuan rebuilt villages gave tourists the impression of an efficient post-disaster recovery in comparison with the journey through earthquake relics sites. As for the Qiang villagers, they were presented as grateful beneficiaries of the State funding and other donors’ good will. In the official introduction, the New Year Festival is framed as a ritual traditionally used by the Qiang to express respect and admiration to all spirits, the ancestors, and the motherland (ICH

China 2013a). The characteristics of the original ritual are extended to the worship of the nation, acting as a uniting event and gesture.

The heritagization of the Qiang New Year Festival and other ethnic folk rituals convey a process of “state superscription” of ethnic religion in contemporary Chinese

ICH protection campaign (Liang 2013). In his influential article on myth-making in

China, Prasenjit Duara (1988:779-780) proposes the concept of “the superscription of symbols,” reflecting on the negotiation of the multiple states and diverse folk efforts in the historical construction and confirmation of the mythical image of Guan Yu, a legendary Chinese hero and god of fortune, in which “cultural symbols are able to lend continuity at one level to changing social groups and interests even as the symbols themselves undergo transformation.” Liang Yongjia (2013), developing Duara’s concept, discusses the “limits of state superscription” in the heritagization of the ethnic Bai

Visiting Three Spirits ritual. The ritual is reinterpreted through the process under the

238 nationalist discourse of preserving and promoting diverse ethnic cultures and “primitive” religious practices. Involved in the process is what Liang calls “self orientalism” where the Bai ritual is made into a marginal and struggling ethnic practice in contemporary

Confucianism-dominated China (see also Notar 2006). Excluding the local practitioners in the application, the nomination of the Bai Visiting Three Spirits as the national ICH is thus a heritagization of the ritual through the perspectives of the State (Scott 1999). But on the other hand, the state superscription has limited capacity in overwriting the cultural and religious meaning of the ritual as understood locally. Contested in this process is the folk ritual’s particular significance of sustaining reproductive vitality and personal fortune through visiting spatially and culturally othering spirits. In the State’s interpretation, such social meaning is ambiguiously claimed as the Bai’s cultural fair and wedding festival. As Liang concludes (ibid), the State’s heritagization program fails to represent and interpret the Visiting Three Spirits ritual in a socially-meaningful manner, rendering the State nomination as another gimmick for tourism promotion.

Multivocality of the Qiang Intangible Cultural Heritage Practice

The Qiang New Year Festival celebration observed in my fieldwork tended to represent the performative aspects of the folk rituals to attract tourists, while such representation concealed the rituals’ sacredness and social meaning. For example, before

Zhu Guangyi performed the “plowshare licking” and “steel needle piercing,” I noticed that he quietly hid beside the bonfire, while Zhu Wenyi’s offering ritual attracted most of the guests’ attention. Zhu Guangyi burned three incenses and several pieces of yellow paper money (zhiqian 纸钱), while chanting in Qiang in a low voice. He only stood up when made sure that all of the paper money was burned into black ashes. Zhu Guangyi

239 was conducting the “informing” (gaojie 告解) practice. Before displaying their ritual skills, each shibi had to inform the generations of shibi masters from whom he received his training to ask for their support. Also, they had to inform other shibi on the scene of their upbringing, asking for the latter’s permission and support.

The “plowshare licking” (tian huatou 舔铧头) and “steel needle piercing” (daqian

打仟) were part of the healing and exorcism practices monitored by shibi. About one month before the Qiang New Year Festival, a shibi of Kuapo Village was invited by

Donglin to “evaluate” (pizhi 批治) his mother, who was diagnosed with lung cancer.

“Evaluation” (pizhi 批治) in this context referred to the shibi’s ability to communicate with the spirits to learn ways of curing. The shibi performed the “plowshare licking” and

“plowshare stepping” (stepping on the burning plowshare with a bare foot) beside the lady’s sickbed. Furthermore, the shibi even placed the plowshare onto the chest of the patient, and rolled it back and forth. Some believed that the virus would be let off when the patient was extremely scared. In Dongmen and other Qiang villages, the practice of inviting shibi to “evaluate” the severely ill patients was widely conducted. According to

Xueqing, Donglin’s sister, although she knew very well that shibi could not cure her mother’s cancer, she believed that the shibi’s visit brought solace to the latter. It also showed their filial piety by organizing a ritualistic healing for their mother.

The folk rituals in practice and those at the display bore sharply different distinctions. The former, especially among the animistic Qiang, were sacred, ritualistic, functional, and symbolic in the cultural terms. They had to be monitored by shibi, carried out after “informing” the spirits and ancestors, and performed for a cause so that the spirits could be properly worshiped and all necessary procedures strictly followed. The

240 folk rituals on display, at Dongmen’s Qiang New Year Festival celebration, selectively, fragmentally, and to some extent, exaggeratedly performed parts of the rituals seen as attractive to tourists. Entailed in the ritual as display was a process of “folklorization,” where traditional rituals were extracted from the life world in which they produced meaning, and performed in context for tourist consumption (McDowell 2010).

“Folklorization” may seem as a threat to folk life and traditional culture. As Guss (2010) argues, “folklizing” can easily lead to “de-folklorize.” However, McDowell (ibid), in his research on folklorization in Ecuador, proposes that “folklorization” is characterized by

“multivocality,” where a folk ritual displays multiple diverse voices and meanings when presented to different audiences and performed by varied practitioners in distinct manners.

According to McDowell (ibid), local Ecuadorian artists’ performative recitation of

Quichuan folk tales to tourists, as well as their selling CDs of Runa folk songs, not only helped retain the “protocols” of the folk practices, but also creatively expressed their yearning to the disappearing traditional ways of life and reflection of the contemporary lifestyle in artistic and popular forms. Such artistic performance and products served as a bridge for audience from both the local and the foreign, country and city, to find meanings in the folk culture.

After the urgent intangible cultural heritagization and culturally-oriented reconstruction, shibi practices in Longxi demonstrated their “multivocality.” As Gao

(2006) argues, traditional Chinese cultural practices usually have different “names” in their political expressions, one “accepted among the intimate circle,” and the other

“serving the public interest.” Shibi practices are variedly adapted, performed, and cherished in different manners, serving different yet also important purposes, where the

241 significance of such practices is enriched and sustained. After the Wenchuan Earthquake, shibi were given special care. A month after the earthquake, a number of the remaining shibi of E’er Village were invited to Beijing to participate in the 3rd National Cultural

Heritage Day, displaying the beautiful Sheep-skin Drum Dance and soliciting more attention for the affected Qiang culture. Later in 2009, a larger group of shibi of E’er was invited to Beijing again, reporting the reconstruction results and displaying the traditional dance in the Great Hall of People.

Since then, E’er Village’s Sheep-skin Drum Dance group, led by shibi Zhu Wenyi, were repeatedly invited to perform at numerous occasions, in and outside Wenchuan.

Throughout my year-long stay in Longxi, they performed at least once a month in

Dongmen Village for visiting officials or important guests, and were frequently invited by outside agencies. Several shibi were often away from home when I was in E’er

Village, telling me each time on the phone that they were performing somewhere. The

Sheep-skin Drum Dancers were also adapting their performances as their fame increased.

According to Zhu Wenyi, parts of the sheep-skin Drum Dance could be adapted for tourism display, where the dancers’ colorful costumes and cheerful dancing steps were especially suitable for large-scale celebrations and other events. He suggested that new dancing steps, different from the sacred dance patterns performed only at funerals and exorcism, could be designed specifically for performance purposes. Nowadays, many villagers would constantly criticize Zhu Wenyi of improvising “meaningless” dance steps and worship chanting (such as what he did at the aforementioned Qiang New Year

Festival celebration) in his performances. On the other hand, tourists of little knowledge

242 of the Qiang culture or religion especially adored Zhu’s artistic performances, regarding them as distinct Qiang folk rituals.

At the same time, shibi rituals experienced a revival in local life. Shibi were constantly invited to Dongmen to “evaluate” the sick. Even when performing in Yingxiu

Township away from home, E’er’s shibi were asked by a local resident to conduct exorcism in the middle of the night. Shibi were also increasingly invited to monitor rituals of “placing the family door” (anjiamen 安家门), “placing the family shrine”

(anjiashen 安家神), and other housebuilding and worshiping rituals rarely performed prior to the earthquake. Another interesting phenomenon emerged after the Wenchuan

Earthquake. Increasingly, shibi were asked to perform “sending the red” (guahong 挂红) onto villagers’ new cars and minivans, while in the past they only dealt with worships and other major community events. Under the windshield of Jiafu’s minivan was a long red cloth, placed by a shibi from E’er, as a way of blessing. Having the Sheep-skin Drum

Dance group perform at the elders’ funeral was increasingly seen as a display of economic advancement and filial piety of the host families. At the aforementioned elder grandmother Yu’s funeral in Dongmen, hiring the E’er’s Sheep-skin Drum Dance group cost the Yu family 3,500 yuan ($530). Yet all Dongmen villagers agreed that the elder grandmother Yu’s funeral was the grandest in recent years as her oldest grandson was recently appointed as the commander of the A’ba military district. Most of such shibi rituals were performed in private setting where shibi strictly followed the required procedures. At the occasions, Zhu Wenyi would stop making jokes, and chant the “real” scripts along with his in-law shibi Yu and others.

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There seemed to be a clear distinction between the “frontstage” and “backstage” performances of the folk rituals (MacCannell 1973). For example, Qiang Sheep-skin

Drum Dance was traditionally reserved for Qiang funerals, performed to send the deceased elders to the other world peacefully and safely. However, sculputures of the

Sheep-skin Drum Dance group were erected at the new gate of Longxi Township after the reconstruction to showcase the Qiang’s dance and ritual traditions. The different perspectives of such by the villagers and outsiders also lead a villager mockly said to me,

“How could they [the government] put sculputures of Sheep-skin Drum Dancers [at the gate] to welcome tourists? They [the dancers] are usually sending the dead away!” Shibi and the villagers were well aware of such differences, and adapted the rituals accordingly.

The promotion of the Qiang ICH led to the new development of both performative and sacred aspects of the rituals. The emergent Qiang ICH protection provided adequate resources and opportunities for the folk rituals to survive. In addition to the “fake” cultural display at the government-organized celebrations, villagers also safely and creatively took advantage of the ritual practices for their own good.

Admittedly, tourism consumption and local ritual practice unavoidably influence each other. Studying the Toshidon, a Japanese New Year’s Eve ritual where masked demon-deity figures go from house-to-house scaring and disciplining children on Shimo-

Koshikijima Island, Foster (2011) explores how the UNESCO recognition impacted the ritual and local lives. He points out that the repeated displays of Toshidon for tourism and education purposes rendered the previously much-anticipated once-in-a-year time ritual

“exotic” cultural shows for the outsiders. The “normalization” of the performance might negatively affect the status and significance of the Toshidon. Some Sheep-skin Drum

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Dance performers confessed to me that it was extremely difficult to separate the “sacred” and “performative” aspects of the dance as the dance was created for ritual ceremonies.

The contemporary Sheep-skin Drum Dance at display was a new form of cultural expression; many performers found it difficult to accept it as both a Sheep-skin Drum

Dance and a profit-making performance for entertainment.

In the meantime, several “fake shibi”—those who claimed to know something about the shibi Qiang—emerged in Longxi. They became popular interviewees of some researchers and journalists, and mistakenly explained many aspects of the shibi culture.

Many also made small fortunes providing such information to the outsiders, despite open scolding and being despised by many villagers. The latter angrily condemned that these

“fake shibi” had polluted the sacredness and authenticity of the Qiang culture. Another group of villagers, claiming a full knowledge of the Sheep-skin Drum Dance, complained about being excluded from performing. The disappointment and distrust, brought by the passive, mismanaged reconstruction planning and unbalanced income and status, forever changed the local daily practice and social network. The young and resourceful were busy running around in the outside world; the old and traditional were regretfully adjusting to the radical change of minds and environment. Yuan Zhang, anthropology professor of Southwest University for Nationalities in Chengdu, grievously concludes after his three-year project in E’er Village, “[Since the reconstruction] social relationships with the outside world were quickly reconstructed where personal networks and perceptions of the village were altered by such clashes....This kind of interventionist reconstruction in which the subjectivity of the villagers was greatly lacking ultimately led to the out-migration of many young Qiang” (Wu 2012).

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Conclusion

The emergent heritagization of the Qiang cultural practices, especially the Qiang

New Year Festival, demonstrates the Chinese State’s particular conception of what heritage is and how it should be protected in time of crisis. On the one hand, the emergent heritagization of the Qiang traditional cultural life reveals the particular “heritage emotions” (Fabre 2013) stimulated by the tragic events where the act of safeguarding cultural heritage not only helped promptly salvage the hard-hit cultural practices, but also highlighted the State’s “loving care” for the vulnerable ethnic group. On the other hand, the emergent heritagization process reflects the complex dynamics entailed in the

Chinese State’s campaign for ICH protection. The application of national ICH status for many folk rituals, including the Qiang New Year Festival, is a State-driven culturalizing process where folk rituals are represented as politically, economically, educationally, and socially acceptable and viable practices. The Qiang rituals and customs are advertised as entertaining moments of celebration, educational occasions of Chinese great and diverse history, and officially-approved display of the state power and generosity since the

Wenchuan Earthquake.

The emergent Qiang ICH protection has brought about complex impacts among shibi and other Qiang villagers involved. The Qiang ICH protection is heavily influenced by the State cultural promotion programs and tourism development schemes. Along with the processes are the transformed perceptions and practices towards the Qiang New Year

Festival, and its backbone—shibi culture—among the contemporary Qiang.

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Chapter 8 Conclusion

Reconstruction, Resilience, and Sustainability of the Qiang Communities

This dissertation has examined the complex dynamics of a State-sponsored and culturally-oriented disaster recovery of Chinese ethnic minority Qiang villages. It begins with a discussion of the historic vulnerability and marginalization of the Qiang, with

Longxi villagers as an example. The Qiang were severely affected by the Wenchuan

Earthquake where an estimated 8% of the total population were lost to the catastrophe, let along the heavy destruction of the Qiang’s material and intangible cultural heritage.

Many of the Qiang settlements were located in the mountainous and earthquake-prone southwestern frontier areas. Earthquakes, including the devastating Wenchuan

Earthquake, and unregulated lumbering already led to frequent flooding and landslides.

Most of such areas were geographically remote, poorly industrialized, and struggle in the fast-growing market economy. With limited farmland and declining crop prices, the

Longxi Qiang were impoverished and lacking resources prior to the earthquake. A small ethnic group heavily influenced yet often discriminated against by the neighboring majority Han, the Qiang were socio-culturally marginalized as the ethnic other. They were regarded and self-identified as poor, cut-off, illiterate, and vulgar “barbarians of the valleys.”

The Wenchuan Earthquake of 2008 is both a catastrophe as well as a chance to recover and thrive for the Qiang. The Chinese State-led post-Wenchuan Earthquake

247 rescue and recovery is unprecedentedly massive and overwhelming. Chinese rescue efforts are internationally acclaimed to be swift and efficient. Under the State agencies’ aid and leadership, no epidemics took place afterwards despite a large number of deaths.

The injured and other survivors were well assisted to prevent further loss of life or social unrest. The State’s relief served to enhance the state power. Its power is represented by the central and local officials, PLA soldiers, and the masses mobilized by the State-led

“fighting against the earthquake” campaign. The State proclaimed itself the powerful, compassionate savior and commander of the affected population, reinforcing its paternalistic strength and unifying power. Arguably, the State relief program is also politically neutralizing in response to the disaster’s socio-political repercussions. The

State agencies invested unparalleled human and material resources in the rescue efforts to the affected areas. The officially-claimed “miraculous reconstruction” refers to the swift, massive, “modernizing” reconstruction projects. Longxi, a small and remote township of northwestern Wenchuan, is only one of the thousands settlements reconstructed after the

Wenchuan Earthquake. Its transformation is the most sweeping and radical in its long history. With generous monetary and material aid from its partner-assistance Zhanjiang

City of Guangdong Province, Longxi witnessed “great leap development” with instantaneous “modernizing” projects to improve its transportation, public service, and living standards, which led Longxi to “advance at least twenty years” as commented by

Longxi Township Party Secretary.

The foci of this dissertation have been on the “culturally sensitive” reconstruction of the Qiang villages, as well as the preservation of the Qiang cultural practices after the earthquake. The recovery and preservation of the Qiang cultural practices and tradition

248 gained tremendous attention from both the State agencies and general public. Not only did Premier Jiabao Wen contend that Qiang culture and civilization must be well preserved, but inheriting and carrying forward local culture were also listed as basic principles in the State Overall Planning for Post-Wenchuan Earthquake Restoration and

Reconstruction (2008). The recovery and preservation of the Qiang communities and their culture serve multiple political, economic, and cultural purposes. The Qiang, an ethnic minority group heavily affected by the Wehnchuan Earthquake, were presented as especially vulnerable “victims” in comparison with other affected population, mainly the

Han. The special attention and assistance to the Qiang, consequently, highlighted the

State’s paternalistic benevolence towards the affected ethnic member of the nation rendered as helpless or powerless. Programs aiming to protect and promote the Qiang material culture and ICH channeled funding and human resource to the research and preservation of such cultural heritage and the inheritors. Several items of the Qiang cultural practices, including the embroidery, Sheep-skin Drum Dance, New Year Festival, and watchtower construction skills, were urgently nominated as national ICH. More importantly, the emerging heritage tourism and the marketing of the Qiang cultural products led to new opportunities of economic development for the Qiang.

This dissertation has studied three major aspects of the “culturally sensitive” reconstruction of the Qiang villages and recovery of the Qiang culture. First, it explores the specific processes and ideologies involved in “excavating,” “uplifting,” and

“developing” the Qiang culture as a model ethnic minority culture worthy of preserving and promoting, in the perspectives of the State. “Culture” in this context was unfortunately reduced to a set of bounded and ahistorical characters reified for political

249 and commercial ends. The “excavation” of the Qiang culture, implemented in the reconstruction of Longxi’s Dongmen Village as a “historic Qiang settlement,” resulted in representing the Qiang as “ancient,” “primitive,” and “mysterious” ethnic group. It not only essentialized the Qiang’s othering, and consequently “uncivilized,” image comparing with the majority Han, but also misrepresented the traditional skills or cultural practices, reducing them as fetishized commodities for tourist consumption. The “culture upgrade” projects focused on the promotion of the “culture of Yu the Great” and “red culture.” The “culture of Yu the Great,” promoting Yu the Great, a legendary heroic emperor of ancient China, as ethnic Qiang, asserted the Qiang’s contribution to and patriotic standing in the nationalist construction. The advertisement of the Qiang’s “red culture” reaffirmed the Qiang’s support and loyalty to the Communist regime. Aligning the origin and history of the Qiang, long regarded as an ethnic group of China’s western frontier, to the discourse and construction of the historical multi-ethnic Chinese nation under the leadership of the Communist Party, the “culturally sensitive” reconstruction projects brought tremendous political and tourist attention to the survival and protection of the Qiang cultural practices and people. Culture “development” projects centering on tourism development in the reconstructed Qiang villages and assembling features of the

“ancient,” “mysterious,” and nostalgic rural lifestyle, made the villages popular destinations of disaster, heritage, and rural tourism for mainly urban tourists.

The “culturally sensitive” reconstruction led to the emergence of tourism in the reconstructed villages, where tourism became the pillar industry for most of the poorly industrialized and resource lacking settlements. Tourism in Longxi was a fusion of disaster, heritage, and “grateful culture” tourism. While providing visitors first-hand

250 experience of the earthquake destruction, Longxi, a previously poverty-stricken ethnic township revived and “modernized,” was also made a destination of “light” tourism, a

“happily ever after” story of a phoenix out of ashes. The newly-heritagized Qiang cultural practices, including embroidery skills, watchtower construction skills, Sheep-skin Drum

Dance, and New Year Festival, were also variously performed and presented in Longxi for the entertainment of visitors mainly from nearby cities. A number of Longxi’s

Dongmen villagers became owners of the Qiangjiale, redecorating their houses into home hostels to host and serve tourists. Longxi was also established as an educational base of the “grateful culture” campaign, cultivating and showcasing the “victimized” Qiang’s

“gratitude” to the generous aid and help for their recovery.

Finally, aspects of the Qiang cultural practices were urgently and quickly nominated, preserved, and promoted as national and UNESCO-recognized ICH, a major component of the State’s benevolent and “culturally sensitive” gifting to the affected

Qiang which guaranteed continuous State funding in support of related cultural practices.

Revealing the urgent “heritagization” of such practices as State- and scholar-led, high- pressured, and high-centralized agendas, this research emphasizes how the official nomination and promotion led to processes of knowledge production and identity transformation. The previously neglected and oftentimes negatively condemned folk practices gained new standing and significance in the nationalist construction of a modernizing and harmonious multi-ethnic China. The now institutionalized celebration of the heritagized Qiang New Year not only secured State funding for preserving such folk tradition and its transmitters, but also became a profitable tourist event for local villagers.

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This dissertation investigates how the various social positives in the State-led post-Wenchuan Earthquake recovery can reinforce state power and authority, multi- ethnic national solidarity, environmental awareness, as well as promot China’s world cultural legacy and local rebuilding of society and culture. More importantly, the research focuses on how such social positives may be reconciled with the many problems the

Chinese State allowed and encouraged in overgrowth, pollution, rapid urbanization, limited access to free and diverse information, and growing economic and social gaps between social classes reinforced by power relations. Given the Qiang’s severe destruction and relatively small population, the State’s experiment on the “cultural recovery” of the Qiang presented a hopeful sustainable development blueprint for the affected regions. In the dissertation I first show the many problems faced by the Qiang villagers of Longxi, including environmental risks of landslides and earthquakes, poverty and lack of development opportunities, and cultural-political marginalized ways of life.

The massive and overwhelming State post-earthquake aid aimed to lead a “great leap development” of the Qiang, both economically and culturally. The achievement and advancement embedded in the reconstruction discourse seems to symbolically mitigate the problems of ecological degradation, unsustainable development, and improper manipulation of the cultural heritage manifested in the reconstruction projects. In an increasingly urban consumer society, carefully regulated cultural tourism, stimulated by the earthquake and validated by ICH protocols in the rural and ethnic villages, can attract urban vacationers to the exotic and bucolic depopulated areas where all is well and good on the land in China. While proving to be financially beneficial, these projects also help reinforce the leadership of the State and Party.

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Nevertheless, the Longxi Qiang were required to reconstruct their new houses and lives in the same geographically unsafe mountain valley where the geophysical hazards were still inadequately managed. The speedy, State-orchestrated, and tourism-oriented reconstruction left little room for the villagers to freely pursue a reasonable and culturally sensitive recovery of their own, and at the same time destroyed the very ecological and social context which nurtured the Qiang cultural traditions. The villagers were all of a sudden involved in a fast-growing tourism business. Not only did they have little money or training to carry on the new business, the villagers quickly discovered the unsustainability and insecurity of the tourism development, threatening their long-term ability to thrive with little farmland. Along with the new interpretation and promotion of the Qiang cultural practices through the State heritagization processes were the contested changes of the cultural significance in related practices as well as social relations among the villagers. Turning worship rituals or traditional skills into fetishized commodities, heritage transmitters into professional performers, the State’s “culturally sensitive” recovery failed to reach its goals of preserving and continuing the heritagized items, rather than inventing new identities of such items. The framing of the Qiang as helpless

State-saved disaster “victims” further reinforced their political subordination to the abstract state power, as well as social alterity to fellow compassionate donors and helpers.

In this case, the challenges of sustainable and resilient living after disaster still haunt the Longxi villagers. Disaster recovery is a long-term transformative process where disaster mitigation sometimes requires fundamental change in the entrenched environmental degradation, economic structure, political liabilities, and social inequalities. In the Chinese experiment, the structural and political injustice including the

253 haphazard dam construction, bureaucratic decision-making, and rapid and monumental development planning, which rendered the Qiang’s marginality in the first place, was not properly addressed. Instead, the State-imposed reconstruction further destroyed the ecological, cultural, and social resources, such as the unsustainable use of land and radical economic restructuring—both of which made the Qiang’s lives less resilient. The

“Qiang culture” was unfortunately reduced to physical structures, selective symbols, or staged performances. Culture, as it is lived and practiced, is a dynamic process mutually influenced by historical conditions and contemporary changes that cannot be “preserved.”

The projects also failed to bring a sense of cultural continuity to the affected populations in the post-earthquake context. Instead, the imposition of State interpretations of

“traditional culture” guaranteed that disaster survivors experienced a sense of cultural displacement, as Han imaginings of their culture were represented to them in their own villages.

An anthropologically-informed approach to culturally sensitive reconstruction is one that would prioritize the voices and experiences of Qiang villagers, giving local knowledge equal if not higher status in relation to the decisions, development imaginaries, and knowledge of State planners and reconstruction experts. It would be foolhardy to assume that Qiang communities were idyllic “cultures” that existed independent of State development projects prior to the disaster and that their cultural setting was a pristine and monistic human ecology before 2008. Certainly, Qiang villagers existed in relation to

China’s urban and manufacturing centers, either through the effects of government development policies that limited their access to natural resources, or in the form of migrant labor to support the State-controlled political economy. Nevertheless, State

254 reconstruction programs failed to consider how the Qiang themselves envisioned their agricultural production practices and human-environmental use in relation to China’s industrial juggernaut. What were the meanings and values attached to agricultural production and the ritual life that accompanied it? How did they perceive their relation to

China’s booming consumer culture and urban lifestyles? What did it mean to them to be

21st Century Qiang? Continuous research should be conducted to investigate the long- term effects of the “culturally sensitive” reconstruction, and more importantly, the transformation of the Qiang along with that of the Chinese society as a whole.

Longxi in 2015: An Expanding Scenic Site

Dongmen Village changed a great deal when I returned in winter 2015. Dalabu

Farm (dalabu zhuangyuan 达拉布庄园), a large-scale so-called “health-preserving entertaining farm” (kangyang nongzhuang 康养农庄), was constructed on the outskirt of

Dongmen, on the farmland expropriated by the township government before the

Wenchuan Earthquake. Dalabu is the Qiang language for Dongmen. The Farm was modeled after an “ancient Qiang village” with a high village gate and surrounding walls.

Most of the concrete structure inside was coated with wooden and stone imitation concrete pieces. According to the locally spread rumor, brother of Tang Yongliang (host of the “Sending Celebration Rice” ceremony on the day of the earthquake) won the bid for the tourism development planning of this piece of land with an investment of close to

10 million yuan ($1.5 million) to manage the Dalabu Farm with funding from the township government. Dalabu Farm’s tall and towering gate was completed by that time.

On the gate, below the five Chinese characters of “达拉布农庄,” were five carved characters totally unrecognizable to me.

255

Entering the gate, dozens of workers, including several Dongmen villagers, were paving the roads and building the concrete fences around the Farm. The three-story, glass-walled Dalabu Restaurant, which could host as many as 1,000 guests at the same time, was at the final stage of interior decoration. In the center of the restaurant was a large stage where various Qiang cultural performances would be shown every night. Half of the Dalabu Farm was made into agricultural demonstration land, where a variety of fruits, vegetables, and medicinal herbs were being planted by the workers. Tourists, mainly urban dwellers, could visit and labor in the agricultural demonstration land to experience the farm work. On the other half of the farm, near the bank of the Longxi

Creek, two-story wooden decks were erected so that tourists could lie on the beach chairs to enjoy the sunshine. Construction workers were putting tiles onto the walls of several pools, big and small. Two of them were reserved as outdoor swimming pools, and others fish ponds. A number of wooden pavilions were being reinforced and painted across the

Farm, while landscaping trees were planted.

“What you see today is only part of the Dalabu Farm,” Donglin said to me in his newly-constructed two-story home hostel next to his old one, “Yongliang’s brother planned to build a hotel behind the restaurant with all kinds of entertainment facilities. He also talked about starting raft floating business on the Longxi Creek. You see,

Dongmen’s tourism is growing so big.” This might be why Donglin opened the second home hostel with bank loans. On regular days, he contracted with local tourist companies to provide lunch for the passing tourists. Dongmen Village is a promoted spot on tourists’ way to the world natural heritage sites of Jiuzhaigou Valley and Huanglong Park, regarded as China’s Yellowstone and Yosemite Parks. Tourists are taken to Dongmen for

256 their lunch breaks, while they spend about an hour sightseeing the village. “After the opening of Dalabu Farm next year,” Donglin said, “Tourists will have many more things to do in Longxi. Longxi will become their final destination instead of a waypoint.”

Across the village lane, the Yu family built a much bigger four-story home hostel, probably for the same reason. The new home hostel was named “Amu Eji Leisure Farm,” where “amu eji” means “the Yu family” in the local Qiang dialect.

Aunt Tang was as cheerful as ever, leading us into the familiar Qiang Scent

Garden and quickly starting to exchange her experience with my mother on taking care of my newborn daughter. Jiafu, Meilin, and many family members were busy preparing the food items for the next day which happened to be their “year pig slaughtering” (sha nianzhu 杀年猪) day, when they would kill the two pigs raised over the year to make pickled pork and sausages. It usually takes more than 10 young men, led by a skilled pig killer, to take down a big fat pig. Jiafu invited his relatives and good friends of the village to help. A big banquet is held on the “year pig slaughtering” day where family members and helpers are invited to eat dishes made of fresh pork and other foods. It is one of the few times in a year that the Qiang villagers eat fresh pork. Since 2013, the “year pig slaughtering” day also has become a tourist event in Dongmen, promoted as the start of a series of celebratory events for the New Year lasting from December, when most of the pigs were slaughtered, to the end of Chinese Spring Festival in February. Tourists are attracted to the village to have a first-hand experience of pig slaughtering, and more importantly, to consume the fresh pork. As pigs there are mostly fed on corn, vegetables, and human food wastes instead of processed pig fodder or growth hormones, the pork is considered “healthy” (jiankang 健康) and “green” (lvse 绿色) by tourists, and becomes a

257 much sought-after “souvenir” of the village. Doubtful of the meat quality in Chengdu,

Aunt Tang kindly gave me more than 5 pounds of fresh pork, insisting that the “green” pork was healthy for me, the breast-feeding mother, and in turn, my baby.

Most of the family members were working in the house across the narrow village lane. The house used to belong to Jiafu’s deceased sister and is saved as her teenage son’s

“wedding house” (hunfang 婚房), a must-have item of bride price in rural China. After discussing with his nephew, his sister’s teenage son, Jiafu redecorated the rooms on the second floor into guest rooms, as his nephew, who was working in a nearby hydroelectric station, decided to return home and run the rural family happiness with his uncle. The

New Year couplets sent by the township government hung on the doors of the house. The written words, very similar to the characters carved on the Dalabu Farm gate, were again unrecognizable to me. “These are the Tangut scripts,” Donglin said, “They are believed to be very close to the ancient Qiang written language.” Will the Tangut scripts become the Qiang written language in the near future? Or, are these logographic scripts used to add to the Qiang’s ancientness and exoticness? At least, Donglin was very proud of teaching me the meaning of those characters, which, according to him, meant “happy new year” and “happy reunion.”

The much unexpected construction of the Dalabu Farm may reveal the new development direction Longxi Township takes. Dalabu Farm represents another essentialized image of the Qiang. The Qiang “cultural performances” inside, including shibi worship rituals, barley-wine drinking, and Qiang dances, as well as the adoption of the Tangut scripts, reinforce the exoticization, commodification, and entertainment form of Qiang cultural heritage. However, Longxi seems to find new opportunities in the fast-

258 growing “wellness tourism” in China (Heung and Kucukusta 2013, Huang and Xu 2014).

An increasing number of mainly middle and upper-middle class population tend to use tourism as opportunities to relax as well as improve their health through activities including nature tourism, ecotourism, consumption of healthy food, and physical exercise.

In China, “wellness tourism” has gained popularity among the majority of urban citizens increasingly concerned with environmental pollution, as well as a growing number of seniors. For example, more and more retired men and women chose to stay in a nongjiale home hostel in mountain villages such as Dongmen throughout summer to escape the heat and pollution in cities.

Taking advantage of the clean air, cool weather, and small-scale family-run agricultural production, Longxi can be a popular destination for mainly urban dwellers upset by poor food safety and air pollution, the worst nightmares and drawbacks of

China’s unrestrained economic growth. As Meilin told me at the dinner table, “The sales of the cherries and pork meat will make up much of our income if the nongjiale does not work anymore (buxingle 不行了).” The Longxi Qiang are forming a new volatile relationship with the nation’s fast development and the rural-urban divide. The new income seems a mixed blessing in exchange for a way of life. The biggest concern is how their advantageous natural environment, the most valuable resource for the “wellness tourism,” can be protected from deforestation, land loss, tourism construction, as well as waste and pollution brought along with the increasing tourists. For example, due to the lack of waste processing facilities, many villagers threw their daily trash and other waste directly into the Longxi Creek. The Sunshine Company also proposed to “open up” (kaifa

开发) the E’er Valley, located in a sacred mountain with Longxi’s last virgin forest, as a

259 new tourist destination. The plan included cutting down trees and blowing up part of the mountain to make room for new roads and hotels. While predominantly investing in building and improving tourist facilities and activities, villagers, tourism developers, and township government officials had little environmental protection awareness, let along taking any measures to preserve the environment before it is too late. It will not be so long before villagers engage in new negotiations with tourism, environmentalism, and spirituality, as do people of many other “green” tourism destinations in Chinese ethnic regions (see Wang 2016).

Disasters “both reveal and become an expression of the complex interactions of physical, biological, and sociocultural systems” (Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 2002:5). The radical transformation of Longxi Township provides a valuable case study of the negotiation of the state-ethnic relationships as well as the contested developmental agendas and sensibilities in contemporary China. In addition to tensions between the

State’s overwhelming power and the Qiang’s marginal status, the reconstruction displays the the friction, as well as overlapping interests, between the State and the local in their representations of “traditional” ethnic minority culture and planning for development and modernization. While some efforts ends up perpetuating the Qiang’s “erotic” and

“primitive” cultural image, the discouse of Yu the Great as Qiang, Longxi villagers’ and shibi’s renewed awareness of the Qiang’s dynamic agency as “grateful” survivors and thriving tourism beneficialries, as well as their limitations and leverages in China’s ecologically detrimental development schemes demonstrate the complex relations between the State and society, Han and ethnic minorities, and urban and rual populations.

Under the seemingly inclusive and “culturally sensitive” State policies, the Qiang’s

260 material, cultural, and social “standards” are evidently raised. However ironically, their political rights and cultural subjectivity are larged disregarded.

When disaster zones are made into “scenic sites” and homelands into “gardens,” infrastructural advancement overweighs sensible living, culture becomes products for display and sale, and people and their lived experiences are muted. For Longxi and China as a whole, their fortune and misfortune, pride and problems, may well be embedded in the accelerated development which oftentimes turns into a disaster of its own kind for community-based culture. The accelerated reconstruction and development alter people’s relations to the built environment where the construction pace, methods, and aesthetics are forced to attune to state power. The accelerated reconstruction and development takes into account of the products of culture—the architecture, ICH items, and histories— rather than the people and processes of culture, where iconic social types are removed from their contexts. The accelerated reconstruction and development frame new affects of benevolence and gratitude while the gift arrangement conceals the economic and political interests in reproducing ethnic and class structures. The accelerated reconstruction and development are appallingly engendering precarious environmental, economic, political, and social problems that the whole country is now facing. In the nation’s apparent new found respect for “culture,” “diversity,” and “environment,” Longxi’s post-earthquake transformation is a complex example of the problems encountered when a top-down system of official authority tries to manage a community-centric culture that is grounded in a local, intimate continuity and creativity of expressions and ways of life that are imperiled by the very detached modernity and power exemplified by the state.

261

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