Negotiating Modernity At Chinas Periphery

This thesis examines how people living in one of China's poorest and most isolated rural communities are negotiating the wide-scale social and economic transformations associated with economic development. My analysis draws upon ethnographic research and government documents collected in the Gongshan Dulong and Nu Nationalities Autonomous County (hereafter Gongshan), Nujiang Prefecture, northwest Yunnan Province. Until recently, Gongshan's largely ethnic minority population lived as subsistence farmers, relatively cut off from the national economy beyond the county border. However, over the past ten years the confluence of several major government development interventions has contributed to the marginalisation of traditional agriculture livelihoods and greater community dependence upon government. These interventions are: the increased policing of the local Nature Reserve, the Sloping Land Conversion Program, the centralisation of schools, free nine-year compulsory education, and the promotion of outward migration for work. I argue that these interventions, along with the expansion of social and economic infrastructure, have been a particularly effective vehicle for further integrating Gongshan's ethnic minority population into the Chinese Party-state. My theoretical framework is primarily based upon the concept of modernity. I employ Anthony Giddens' work on modernity to demonstrate that one of the consequences of recent economic development in Gongshan is that the local population is becoming increasingly "disembedded" from their local context. Major advances in mass communication, transport and the freer flow of capital are bridging spatial and temporal divides between nation-states, as well as between central governing authorities and marginal communities such as Gongshan. The people of Gongshan are being "lifted out" of their immediate social and economic context and exposed to national and global forces that are reshaping their local context. My analysis highlights the significance of "population quality" (renkou suzhi) discourse to contemporary China, whereby official and popular narratives privilege urban subjectivity while reifying rural China as a backward repository of "low quality" (di suzhi) human subjects holding back national development. It also highlights the growing tendency of government, understood in terms of the "conduct of conduct" or governmentality, to use a variety of techniques and forms of knowledge that aim to shape the conduct of people from China's rural, ethnic minority communities by evoking and working through their desires and aspirations. In examining development at the periphery of the Chinese Party-state I shed light on the critical challenges China faces as it rapidly develops. My findings will be useful to researchers investigating the impacts of development interventions upon isolated rural communities elsewhere in China and in other parts of the developing world.