China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer and Chair: Rubie S. Watson, Harvard University
John Kennedy, University of California, Davis; Weijing Lu, University of California, Davis
The two-story Mao Zedong memorial hall stands in the remote village of Gushui, Northwest Shaanxi province. The Hall, erected in 1993, sits along side the Jade emperor temple and four other Taoist shrines. The official title of the building is huai ying ge (Hall of the Heroes); however, the villagers call it a miao (temple), and use it as place of worship. A year later, in Shaanxi, two more such temples were built along side older Taoist shrines.
The appearance of Mao temples in Shaanxi raises several questions. What does this phenomenon reveal about rural society of Northwest Shaanxi in the 1990s? What does it tell us about farmers’ lives—their hopes, anxieties and struggles in the years of economic reform? How does the phenomenon fit into the popular religious practices in Chinese tradition? And how is it related to the broader trend of Mao worship taking place in the late 1980s and early 1990s? This paper will take an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenon, and will examine the following dimensions: the socio-economic changes that have been brought to bear on the Northern Shaanxi villages, the psychological consequence that the local people experience, due to the uneven gains made in the reform period, and the processes involved in creating a "historical" god.
The paper will draw on a variety of sources, including original pamphlets from the Mao temple, author’s interviews with the main sponsor of the Mao Temple, the chair of the various local religious associations, villagers, and other first-hand materials.
Sydney D. White, Temple University
The starting point for this paper is an outing undertaken during the summer of 1994 with several old friends from Kunming to the (then) recently established Yunnan Minzucun. The Minzucun is a "living culture" theme park, established along the same lines as the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawai’i, in which nine of Yunnan’s official twenty-five "minority nationalities" are represented (or at least were as of 1994) in eight "villages" (cunzi). The intent of the paper is not to dwell on the ritual of the outing, but to use it as a context for framing the key characteristics of emerging narratives of P.R.C. modernity in late post-Mao era Kunming. The paper presents a situated focus on the multiplex discourses manifested during the outing. These include state discourses on minorities in general as well as specific Yunnan government discourses on minorities, both of which are reflected in the representations of the Minzucun; they also include the discourses of minority "representatives" themselves which are in turn reflected in these individuals’ simultaneously collusional and counter-hegemonic representations of their respective minzu identities. From the additional perspective of "receptivity," discourses of nostalgia and of romanticism represent other layers of meaning which were brought to the Minzucun by my primarily (Han) Cultural Revolution generational cohort of accompanying friends, most of whom had been "sent down" to specifically minority areas of the Yunnan countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Ethnographically situated analyses of both the representations of each minority village and of the positionalities of each of the friends are provided in order to ground the discursive analyses. Video and photographic analyses provide additional visual depth.
Mary Cingcade, University of Washington
The paper examines the socio-cultural and economic effects of tourism in Tibet which have transformed Tibet’s identity at local, national, and international levels since the reopening of Tibet to tourism in 1980. The five main actors in tourism are: the Chinese state, homeland Tibetans, exiled Tibetans, Han migrants, and Western tourists. Through these five groups of actors, I analyze the role of tourism as political campaign; as economic opportunity; and as a means of socio-cultural transformation, specifically through the commodification of local culture and the commercialization of major cities. These effects of tourism have not figured into the popular debate over the role of tourism in Tibet which relegates it to the limited context of its political impact, while ignoring the implications of tourism for Tibet’s identity and the everyday lives of Tibetans.
The paper demonstrates how the intersection of the actors’ agendas produces the transformative conditions at hand and details the nature of each of these. The actors in tourism temper their own agendas with the demands of tourist consumption: the state’s economic and political goals in tourism compete with Han and Tibetan entrepreneurs’ desire to benefit from the tourist influx while attempting to satisfy tourists’ craving for the experience of an "authentic," open, and paradoxically "Shangri-la" Tibet. The result is an imperfect picture of the direction of Tibet’s transformation via tourism, but one that carries important consequences for Tibet’s local population, its role in the Chinese nation, and its image in the Western imagination.
Shanshan Du, University of Illinois
This paper explores how the patriarchal Han and the Lahu people—one of China’s ethnic minority groups whose cultural tradition fosters gender equality—have encountered the Marriage Law of the PRC since it was passed in 1950. Designed to achieve the socialist ideal of liberating women, the Marriage Law promoted marriages of free choice as well as women’s right to divorce. However, the implementation of the law incurred strong resistance from Han peasants, and many of the Han women who requested divorce either committed suicide or were murdered. As a result, the CCP soon softened their enactment of the law, in particular abandoning its policy of making divorces easy to obtain. After this revamped policy began to be enforced on the Lahu region, it was interpreted by many local party leaders as a strict injunction against divorce. Ironically, this new policy strongly reinforced the traditional Lahu value not only of marriage but also of gender unity (in stark contrast to Han patriarchal tradition). However, the state-induced socialist practices have seriously destabilized Lahu kinship structure in many other arenas and have thus exacerbated marital conflicts. Thus, the state’s de facto prohibition of divorce has further inhibited alternative solutions to such conflicts. Tragically, this has led to a dramatic increase in the rate of love-pact suicides by thwarted Lahu lovers. My study demonstrates the discrepancy between the ideal and the practice of the Chinese state’s social policies, as well as its varying efficacy in encountering with multiple cultural traditions.
Wen-hui Tang, Harvard University
This paper examines the effects of democratization on the development of social policy in Taiwan from 1949 to early 1996. It analyzes the intersections of gender and politics in the formation of state social policy. I argue that the enactment of social policy in Taiwan represents a state-centered rather than a society-centered phenomenon, in contrast to prevalent models of social movement theory which view social policy changes as the result of grassroots initiatives.
I argue that the state initiated policies either as a reaction to democratization or as an autonomous response to the failing legitimacy of the political elites. I maintain that a polity-centered approach and gender analysis are the most useful perspectives for explaining the history of social policy in Taiwan. In particular, in the area of social insurance, the state instituted a paternalist, family-centered welfare regime that privileged the interests of working men and placed the burden of welfare responsibility on women and the family.
A comparison of successful and unsuccessful social welfare legislation highlights the gender politics of state policy formation. Three major factors explain the successful passage of the National Health Insurance legislation in 1994: the legacy of the former corporatist state social policy, international trends, and domestic political competition. The defeat of the Women’s Welfare Law was determined by the stability of the paternalist state, and the particular strategies employed by women’s organizations which directed their efforts toward disadvantaged women (e.g. single mothers, child prostitutes, and sexual-assault victims), rather than women in general.