Commoditizing Ethnicity in Southwest China

In a nation where 94 percent of its 1.1 billion inhabitants are ethnically Han Chinese, the remaining 6 percent, comprising 55 other "nationalities," are indeed "exotic" to the majority. China has a long history of intrigue and strife over ethnic boundaries, symbolized to the north by the Great Wall. Official Marxist cultural evolution theory maintains that minorities are "less evolved" than people in "modern" society, but that they are capable of reaching an ultimate goal of assimilation. Since the mid-1050s, the People's Republic of China's (PRC) nationalities policy has granted minority ethnic groups specific "autonomous" reserves - areas officially governed for and by local indigenous peoples - and specific legal rights at the state's discretion. Who comprises an ethnic group and where group lands are located is defined by the state. Minority reserves vary in size from small counties to large province-sized units, including Guangxi (Zhuang Autonomous Region) and the long-contested Xizang, or Tibet, homeland of many Tibetan peoples (see W. Smith 1989). Meanwhile, the local population, Han and minority alike, has been relegated to the sidelines. Peasants farm the countryside and fish the ocean. Some 40,000 Miao and 700,000 Li peoples live in an autonomous prefecture in the south-central part of the island. Hainan Island's center is being developed for ethnic tourism, as hotels, minorities "them" restaurants, and tours into Wuzhi mountain minority villages spring up. Minority women work as hostesses for guests attracted by packaged "primitiveness," an ironic imitation of Taiwan's bourgeois aboriginal tourism business. In an article on China's "Hawaii of the Orient" (Biers 1988), a young Li researcher is quoted as saying that all development in the autonomous region is for show: in areas away from the visitor's view, "the central government is not providing money to improve the standard of living." Certainly if the state judges the local peoples as being too backward to shape the commoditization of their cultures, and actual benefits that they will derive from tourism are hard to find. One repercussion of the Sani's easy accessibility to tourists has been the image of them as "typical" indigenous folk. The Sani are often the only non-Han a foreign tourist sees, and Sani embroidered bags are sold throughout China and exported as generic ethnic goods. Indeed, a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (1989) report on tourism ranks "Sani satchels" along with jade