The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 5 | Issue 2 | Article ID 2362 | Feb 02, 2007

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Dance, Or Else: The Politics of Ethnic Culture on China'sSouthwest Borders

Sara L. M. Davis

Dance, Or Else: The Politics of EthnicCulture on China’s Southwest Borders

By Sara L. M. Davis

An American researcher examines how therequirements of political assimilation havethreatened the unique culture of China’s Taiminority, and the Tai response.

Fields and hills in western Sipsongpanna

In 1997 I arrived on China’s southwest bordersplanning to spend a year researching ethnicminority folklore. The only problem, as Idiscovered when I arrived, was that theredidn’t appear to be any.

Instead, government culture bureaus andChinese entrepreneurs had turned the regionin to an adu l t s -on ly p layground fortourists—most of them male Chinese urbanitestraveling in groups. Sipsongpanna, Yunnan was

peopled with dancing women in tight sarongs,swaying palm trees, exotic fruits and peacocks.Perhaps equally important were plentiful andinexpensive alcohol, drugs, gambling, jade andsex workers. While many tourists visitingsouthern Yunnan province came for the illicitpleasures, they spent their days attendingperformances staged for Chinese and foreigntourists—living dioramas in state-run “ethnictheme parks,” dances in “ethnic dining halls,”reconstituted “living ethnic villages” and thelike.

But these performances were not just theproduct of commodified tourist shtick, as theymight have been elsewhere. They were alsoofficial policy: direct outgrowths of thegovernment’s intervention over decades increating, pruning and regulating publicexpressions of minority ethnic identity.

At first I concluded, as many visitors to theregion had before me, that these plasticperformances—swaying girls in tight dresses,peacocks in overcrowded zoos and deforestedgreen hills—were all that was left of localculture. However, while many ethnic minoritiesin Sipsongpanna participated and profited fromthe state-approved marketing of their ethnicidentity, behind the scenes was simultaneouslya roiling debate among some ethnic minoritiesabout who they were and what their “real”culture was and should be. In hundreds oftemples springing up across the region, seniormonks were initiating new monks and revivingnearly obliterated Buddhist traditions. Youngmen were writing and performing rock songs

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about social issues in the minority language forcrowds of thousands. Women oral poets wereperforming epic oral narrations in minoritylanguages for crowds of thousands.

However, it required persistence to gain accessto this subterranean ethnic culture. Ethnicrevival in China, I learned, had to be donecarefully, below the government’s radar, inorder to avoid political repercussions.

Understanding the strange gap between the“front stage” of performances for tourism andthe “back stage” of ethnic revival in Yunnantook time. Eventually, it also required slippingback in time in order to understand the contextin which this gap had first appeared. I hadcome to Jinghong to study folklore, but found itcould not be separated from this context ofmodernization, contest and debate. The book Ieventually wrote was titled Song and Silence,because while my clunky field tape recordercaptured a lot of songs, I soon found there weremany silences—things that could not be said, orwould not be said, about the realities of life as aTai in China.

The Place

Ethnic minority groups, some of which oncehad independent or semi-independent states,occupy China’s national borders and much ofits arable land. Sipsongpanna, as the Tai call it,is one of the smallest such regions, but becauseof a tourist boom in the late 1990s it is one ofthe best known within China.

Xishuangbanna Dai Nationality AutonomousPrefecture (“Xishuangbanna Daizu zizhizhou”,its Chinese name) lies on the southern tip ofYunnan Province, on the borders of Burma andLaos. The subtropical, mountainous regionc o v e r s a b o u t 7 , 4 0 0 s q u a r e m i l e s .Sipsongpanna’s contemporary name comes

from a sixteenth-century Tai Lüe name, MuangSipsongpanna, which literally means “the city-state of twelve townships.” Administratively,Xishuangbanna is divided into three counties:Jinghong County, with Jinghong as theprefectural capital; Meng Hai County to thewest, bordering on Burma; and Meng LaCounty to the east, bordering on Laos.

Map of Xishuangbanna Dai Nationality AutonomousPrefecture (Sipsongpanna)

Map by John Emerson

The region has an ethnically diverse populationof roughly one million. Over a third are Tai Lüe,another third are Han Chinese, and the lastthird are made up of a number of other ethnicminorities. These include the variously namedAkha (in Chinese, “Aini” or “Hani”), Blang (inChinese, “Bulang”), Karen (in Chinese, “Jinuo”),Wa, Yao, Hmong (in Chinese, “Miao”), Lahu,Khmu and others. Official counts of the numberof ethnic groups in Sipsongpanna range from13 to 16. The Tai are valley-dwellers whocultivate wet rice and practice TheravadaBuddhism.

Rice fields in a Tai Lue village in Ganlanba (Meng Han),Sipsongpanna

Before what the Chinese Communist Partyrefers to as its “liberation” of Sipsongpanna in

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1953, the Tai Lüe here formed a small kingdomthat was partially colonized by a series ofChinese empires, but from day-to-day waslargely left to run itself and to form its ownalliances with neighboring states. [1]

Map of major Tai towns in the Mekong delta

Map by John Emerson

After “liberation,” contacts with those acrossthe new Chinese borders were restricted.Projects aiming to reform land ownership,political systems, agriculture, education andlocal culture, all run by Beijing, created a newsense of the Tai Lüe as subordinates within thenew nation. Minorities like the Tai Lüebenefited by receiving electricity, medical care,new roads and other improvements, but theywere always junior comrades, sometimes “littlebrother minorities.”

By the time I reached Jinghong in 1997, it wasa mid-sized town undergoing major changes. Atourist boom had hit the region. In the yearsafter the end of the Cultural Revolution, centralplanners took a new tack in border regions,aiming to better incorporate them into the statevia economic development. Yunnan and someother regions were chosen for the targeteddevelopment of a national tourism industry.

But with Sipsongpanna’s state-inspired tourismboom came waves of new migrants: HanChinese from other rural areas and sometimesfrom the cities looking for new economicopportunities. In 1999, Mette Halskov Hansenreported that while Han made up less than one-third of the population of Sipsongpanna, theymade up 48 percent of the residents inJinghong, the region’s capital. She adds, “Sinceonly those who are registered as havingpermanently moved to Sipsong Panna arecounted in these statistics the actual proportionof Han Chinese is considerably higher.” [2]

The new migrants had Chinese-language skills,education and capital that made them strongercompetitors than local minorities for jobs andbusinesses serving the tourist market. Theybrought with them a flood of Chinese-languagemusic, books, films and culture that dwarfedthe meager local government productions inTai Lüe language. While some embraced thechange, other ethnic minorities feared totalassimilation into the Han Chinese mainstream.

Dean MacCannell calls tourist shows the “frontstage” of the industry. [3] In order to attracttourists to southwest China, local and nationalgovernments had to reinvent the previouslyunstable borderlands and make them a space ofplay. Traveling in Jinghong, visitors could seetheme parks that turned local ethnic peoplesinto objects of visual pleasure. They could seedance shows set to new Chinese pop tunes inethnic-themed restaurants, villages turned intoround-the-clock showcases, elephants,peacocks and more. Many people in China aretaught in primary school to sing songs aboutsouthwestern minorities and develop deepfeelings of nostalgia about those peoples.Louisa Schein and Dru Gladney have rightlycalled this constructed identity “internalorientalism.” Like all identit ies, it isconstructed; in this case, as part of the twinprocesses of nation-building and a vast,coordinated land-grab.

The Need for Unification

In 1949, having won a long civil war, theleaders of the new People’s Republic of Chinafaced a highly fragmented country. Theremains of the last dynasty, the Qing, had beensplit into bits by half a century of chaos.Warlords had ruled China for decades, andbecause there had never been nationaleducation or anything like a national media, thecountry was a patchwork of localities withdiverse languages, cultures and customs. In

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much of the country, residents of one towncould not understand those in the next one.

Moreover, while the new leaders aimed toreclaim the land that had belonged to the lastimperial dynasty, the presence of semi-independent ethnic peoples all around theborders posed an obstacle. Roughly 60 percentof the new nation’s landmass was occupied by10 percent of its population. As Ma Yinsuccinctly observes:

Minority nationalities live in placeswith the fol lowing commoncharacteristics:

1) A wide expanse of land with asparse distribution of population.Many minority peoples havetraditionally established theirvillages in mountains and pastoralareas, on high plateaus and indeep forests.

2) A wide range of products andabundant mineral resources.

3) Strategically important asborder regions for the wholecountry. [4]

Security was an especially urgent concern.While these resource-rich, land-rich andpotentially disloyal ethnic peoples sat on theborders, vanquished troops were gatheringnearby. Sometimes funded and trained by theUnited States and other Western countries,they were launching periodic guerrilla attackson the weakest points of the new socialist state.[5]

It was urgently necessary to simplify thecomplex problems of loyalty and territoriality

posed by the chaos of the whole nation and inparticular to bring those open, fluid bordersunder control. To do this, China’s new leadersengaged in an ambitious project to radicallyreorganize ethnic identity and bring newlyconstituted minorities under the umbrella ofnationhood.

Ethnic Classification

While fighting the revolution, the ChineseCommunist Party had promised the ethnicminorities who assisted them (such as the TaiLüe) self-determination, regional autonomy andthe right to secede. But having achieved power,the Party withdrew the promised right tosecession and instead began to speak of theimportance of Beijing’s help in overcomingethnic “backwardness.” Newly “autonomousregions” were established for ethnic minorities,but autonomy was always subject to theleadership of the Party and through it, Beijing.Local Party representatives deliveredinstructions to ethnic leaders and approvedtheir decisions.

But now the Party faced the problem ofpolitical representation for the ethnic groups atthe national level. As China’s foremostanthropologist, Fei Xiaotong, wrote, the newPeople’s Republic was committed to ethnicequality on the one hand, but on the otherhand,

the principle would have been meaninglesswithout proper recognition of existingnationalities. For how could a People’sCongress allocate its seats to deputies fromdifferent nationalities without knowing whatnationalities there were? And how could thenation effect regional autonomy for thenationalities without a clear idea of theirgeographical distribution? [6]

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The state invited ethnic minorities to comeforward and self-identify as distinct groups. In1955, Fei tells us, more than 400 differentethnic groups registered, 260 of them inYunnan. [7] This created what, in retrospect,sounds like panic in Beijing: tribesmen wouldoverrun the majority Han Chinese government.Ethnic identity had to be simplified.

To do this, China launched a massive researchproject in “ethnic identification.” In 1953, thegovernment dispatched teams of ethnographersto border regions containing minority peoples.These researchers spent years collecting dataon ethnic politics, institutions, agriculture,myth and language. Ethnographers categorizedgroups as ethnic nationalities based on Stalin’scriteria of nationalities as defined by sharedlanguage, territory and “psychology.” They alsoplaced the new nationalities on a social-evolutionary scale, drawing from Marxisttheory and from the work of Americananthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan; inevitably,nationalities were placed on the lower rungs ofthe evolutionary hierarchy, while the majorityHans were placed on the top.

The end result was a comprehensive list of 55minority nationalities, folding some of theoriginal 400 back into the Han and meldingtogether some (such as the Tai Lüe and TaiNeua, now both named “Dai”) that hadpreviously had little or no contact. Fifty-fivewas apparently a more manageable number ofgroups than 400, and folklore had emerged as acatchall answer to several questions about howbest to unify the new nation.

Ethnographic study teams then producedreports summarizing everything there was toknow about each ethnic minority group. [8]Many o f these reports were ser iousethnographies that continue to be resources forresearchers today. However, less reliablesubsequent books popularized the information

gathered in these ethnographic reports. Typicalexamples presented short overviews of Taiadorned with illustrations of women singingand dancing, women performing the famous“peacock dance,” and Buddhist reliquaries andpalm trees. The books described the Taiminority as a tiny group exclusive to China,without reference to the links with relatedkingdoms across the borders. They referred toTai feudalism and slavery, “primitive spiritworship” and the much vaunted (thoughfactually inaccurate) “freedom of young menand women” to practice “free love.” [9]Summarizing their expressive culture, Ma Yincomments, “they love to sing and dance.” [10]

B a s e d o n t h e r e s e a r c h b y C h i n e s eethnographers in the 1950s–1960s, the Taiwere categorized as a feudal society and asslave-owners, placing them somewhere abovethe “cannibalistic” Wa but, perhaps inevitably,below the majority Han. This research wasused as a tool to solidify the position of ethnicminorities at the bottom of a social-evolutionaryhierarchy within the Chinese nation. Somesocial scientists, such as Fei Xiaotong, took anuanced and thoughtful view of ethnic identity,but over time this initial research served tocodify misunderstandings and stereotypes andto justify an ethnocentric hierarchy thatbecame (and continues to be) the basis of stateethnic policy.

From Categorizing to Improving

As the research and categorization concluded,ethnic folklore became just one of manyaspects of the newly constituted minoritygroups that needed improving and modernizingunder the leadership of the Party.

To lead the cu l tura l aspects o f th i simprovement project, the governmentestablished a number of state organs. The state

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set up culture bureaus in each ethnic regionand at the provincial level to manage thenationalities’ song-and-dance troupes. Inaddit ion to the culture bureaus, thegovernment established local government-runnews media in minority regions to broadcastnews in minority languages.

In discussing these and similar efforts in theethnic border regions, Stevan Harrell coinedthe term “civi l iz ing project”. [11] InSipsongpanna and similar ethnic regions, wecan chart a subset of the “civilizing project”,the “simplifying project”. This was a stateprogram to systematically rewrite the cultureof an ethnic minority group within its bordersby editing out all complexity, ambiguity andsophistication from the group’s public self-representations, establishing new parametersfor that self-representation. The simplifyingproject was at the same time both part of thelarger process of domination and incorporationof ethnic peoples, and also part of therhetorical justification for domination.

In China, this simplifying project took thefollowing form: Researchers and governmentculture bureau officials explicitly encouragedand promoted elements of minority culturedeemed positive, socialist and modern, whilepruning elements deemed counterproductive,counterrevolutionary or primitive. For instance,traditional minority clothing was a positiveexpression of ethnic identity, to be celebratedand promoted. Minority religious rituals,however, were counterrevolutionary andeconomically wasteful, and as such werediscouraged.

Dances and oral literature were studied and ins o m e c a s e s “ i m p r o v e d ” b y s t a t echoreographers and authors. In fact, much ofthe culture now performed for tourists asminority culture was created during this periodin which ethnic culture was completely

t rans formed . The end resu l t s wereoversimplified caricatures of ethnic culturesthat, as things turned out, also sometimeshappened to have market value in a liberalizingeconomy that thrives by sel l ing suchcaricatures to consumers. What follows is adiscussion of how this process worked in theareas of folk song, dance, written language,and folk literature.

The Simplifying Project: Folk Songs

Many of the songs sung for tourists in Chineseethnic theme parks are sung in Chinese. By anystandard, it is a stretch of the imagination tocall them folk songs. Tai folk songs are, ofcourse, traditionally sung in the Tai language.In Sipsongpanna, as in much of mainlandSoutheast Asia, they are performed by highlytrained professional oral poets in the form ofduet/duels between men and women singerswho may range in age from 30 to 80. The duetsoften become scathing put-downs and arehighly bawdy. Some are also sacred, involvingthe citation of arcane texts and the narration ofBuddhist epic legends (jataka tales) in literarylanguage. Whether sacred or raucouslyprofane, these folk songs are performedaccording to complex rhyme schemes that arerecited against the rhythm of a free-reedinstrument made of bamboo.

A young apprentice oral poet performs a poem, holding a

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fan. Her teacher, Ai (Bo) Saut, accompanies her on the bi,or free reed instrument.

By contrast, songs sung for tourists as part ofethnic shows in theme parks and dining hallsare quite d i f ferent . These nostalgicsongs—“Moonlight Under the Bamboo” is oneespecially beloved around China—usuallypraise the harvest and the lovely region, andstage a kind of idealized yet sexually naïveflirtation between a young man and youngwoman. Musically, the songs for tourists useinstruments from various regions to playmelodies that are traditionally Chinese in style.Many were composed and written in the 1980sby Han Chinese songwriters.

The Simplifying Project: Dance

From the 1950s to the early 1960s, groups ofculture bureau workers also engaged in arelated project to collect, document andimprove upon other forms of ethnic folkperformance besides oral narrative. One suchgroup, led by choreographer Chin Ming,traveled from Beijing to the borderlands ofYunnan to conduct field research and “spend ahappy month with the Tai people.” There they“fell under the spell of the subtropical scene”and were entranced by a ritual dance that theysaw while listening “to the light rustle of thebreeze in the coconut palms” and “the mutedboom of distant ‘elephant leg’ drums.” [12]

This dance, which is probably related to a Shanritual kinnaree dance still performed atBuddhist temple festivals across the borders innorthern Burma, is traditionally performed by amale elder wearing a bird mask made of papier-mâché, wings on his arms, and a long train likea peacock’s tail. Chin Ming wrote that withsome creative thinking he and his colleagueswere able to improve on this ritual dance:

Our idea was to make it a groupdance for girls so as to intensifythe glory of the peacock in aresplendent scene. If the clumsyaccessories were discarded, wedecided, more emphasis could belaid on a portrayal of the spirit ofthe bird. . . . Without the maskthere could be facial expression,and without the wings there wouldbe much greater freedom ofmovement. [13]

Once shorn of these distracting elements and ofits Buddhist context, the feminized anddramatized kongque wu (“peacock dance”),later popularized by the famous Tai Lüe dancerDao Meilan, became renowned all over China.It became a staple of the prefectural andprovincial song-and-dance troupes, and it isperformed in hotels and dinner halls inKunming and Sipsongpanna.

As a result of the dance fad, the peacock hasbecome nationally synonymous with thesimilarly exotic, colorful and elegant Tai Lüesof Sipsongpanna: “It is the animal most belovedby the Dai nationality,” people often say. Thepeacock is a ubiquitous symbol in the tourismindustry, painted onto the buildings of theinternational airport and the sides of tourbuses, and printed on brochures and T-shirts. Atouropop CD with the song “Xishuangbanna,My Hometown” features a picture of a beamingdancer in a peacock dress. In several villages Isaw young Tai Lüe girls teaching this state-concocted ballet to each other as “ourtraditional Tai folk dance.”

I asked a local government official, Aye ZaiGuang, about the peacock. “The peacock is notour symbol,” he said emphatically. “It waschosen for us by others. If we had to have ananimal to symbolize us, it would be the

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elephant because that was what we used toride into warfare.” Other Tai Lüe expressedsimilar views. Perhaps a warlike elephant is amore potent and dangerous symbol to chooseto stand for the borderlands than a pretty andfeminine bird.

As the simplifying project proceeded, otherballets and operas were edited. One, namedafter its hero, Prince Sudun (“Chao Sudun”), isbased on an episode in one of Sipsongpanna’soral-narrative epic poems, “The Ten-HeadedKing.” Some scholars believe the tale derivesfrom the “Ramayana,” an Indian epic. Duringthe 1950s, the tale called “Prince Sudun” wascleansed of any religious or ritual meaning andrewritten as a socialist fable. An opera basedon the fable was banned during the CulturalRevolution but now has been revived as atourist show, performed daily for visitors atJinghong’s Chunhuan Park.

A government dance troupe performs the play “ZhaoSudun” for tourists in a Jinghong park.

Simplified Script

While song and dance were “improved” byculture bureau workers and are now presentedas folklore, probably no cultural “improvement”of the Tai minority has been more controversiallocally than the government’s efforts to

improve the Tai Lüe script.

In the 1950s, the government announced thatthe old Tai Lüe script was unwieldy and set outto reform it. The result of these efforts was adecrease in literacy in the minority script andthe production of a generation cut off fromtheir own written traditions. The old Tai Lüewritten alphabet, almost identical to the scriptused by Tai Khun in Kengtung, Shan State, hasmore than 60 letters, and even those expert inthe script disagree about exactly how manythere are. Because historically it has beentaught in temples, for the most part only TaiLüe monks and former monks are able to readand write it. In the past, women were notgenerally taught the script, though some didlearn it from male relatives.

Official Chinese rhetoric often refers topresumptive low levels of literacy among allborder peoples, without distinction. This wasoften said to be because of flaws in theirscripts, as well as flaws in the pre-“liberation”educational systems. Thus scripts like those ofthe Tai Lüe, Tibetans, Uyghurs and others werebanned and replaced with new, “simplified”scripts created by linguists to facilitate literacy.Other ethnic minorities who had historicallybeen nonliterate had new scripts invented forthem. In Yunnan, language teams, working withmembers of the Tai elite, came up with asimplified Tai Lüe alphabet (“xin Daiwen”) thathad fewer letters than the original. Thisbecame the official language, written on streetsigns and used in government documentsalongside the simplified Chinese script.

Given the lack of access to Tai Lüe historicalrecords (none are archived in China), it isdifficult to assess how widespread literacy wasin Sipsongpanna before 1949. Americanmissionary William Clifton Dodd, who wasliterate in Tai, reported a high degree ofliteracy during his first visit there in 1897. He

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traveled along the Mekong Delta with copies ofhis Tai translation of the Bible and found theTai Lüe of Sipsongpanna to be avid readers:

Never before, in any place, have Imet such receptivity, as well assuch unbridled curiosity. . . . Theytake books, they beg books, theyclamor for books. [14]

In Sipsongpanna he interviewed a localheadman, who reported that “of the Lu [sic] ofhis district, one-third of the men could read,one-third could barely read, and one-thirdcould not read at all. Only one woman, his wife,could read.” [15] If these estimates wererepresentative of the region, we couldspeculate that overall literacy in Sipsongpannamight have been roughly comparable to theliteracy rates among Han during the sameperiod. Evelyn Rawski estimates thatthroughout China in the late Qing between one-half and one-third of school-age males hadbasic literacy. [16] In previous eras of Chineseimperial history, because of lack of access toeducation, literacy among Chinese-speakerswas probably far lower. Given the templeeducation system, it seems likely that Tai Lüeliteracy was actually relatively high, andcertainly higher than the Chinese governmenthas reported.

It is clear that the new Tai Lüe script has notpromoted increased literacy. Many Tai Lüenote that the state has published almostnothing in the new script, making it in effectuseless. The twice-weekly four-pagenewspaper, Xishuangbanna bao, is oneexception. Public pressure caused theXishuangbanna bao to switch back to old TaiLüe script during the early 1990s, only toreturn to the new script in 1995 in response,reportedly, to pressure from the provincial

government. In 1997, some Tai believed thatthe newspaper would switch back to the old TaiLüe script again and were trying to establish apublishing house to produce books in old TaiLüe; they have not yet been successful. Worse,many Tai Lüe pointed out what they saw asgovernment hypocrisy: despite officiallypromoting the new Tai Lüe script for over 40years, the state had never produced adictionary for it. At the main temple inJinghong, Tai Lüe Buddhist monks succeeded incompiling a modest dictionary for the old TaiLüe script in 2000. Two years later, after a longpolit ical struggle with the provincialgovernment, the dictionary was published inKunming.

Some educated Tai Lüe told me that they hadnever been properly taught the new script andso could not read it: “They only taught us newTai script for one hour a week in secondaryschool,” said one young government official. “Ijust never really learned it. Anyway, it doesn’thave any use,” because nothing is published init. Many noted that those literate in the newscript could not read the old script, so thatliteracy in the new script in effect cuts youngerTai Lüe off from their own written traditions.No library or archive in China houses books inthe old Tai Lüe script published before 1949.

Today, the politics of language shapes classand status in Sipsongpanna. Most residents oflarger towns, especially Jinghong, speak acommon local version of the provincial dialectof Mandarin, Jinghonghua, or “Jinghong-ese.”Tai villagers are more likely to speak Tai only,which itself has several dialects, but manyyoung village children, surrounded by Chinese-language television, radio and music, canunderstand but not speak or read Tai.Sipsongpanna residents who work in the touristindustry or for the government tend to be thosewith better education who speak and readstandard Mandarin. But as a result ofgovernment interventions in the minority

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alphabet, few Tai Lüe are literate in any form oftheir language.

In sum, the early government language policywas probably motivated by idealism and thegoal of promoting widespread literacy. But ifthe reforms are aimed at aiding ethnicm i n o r i t i e s , a n d e t h n i c m i n o r i t i e soverwhelmingly reject the reforms, whycontinue them? The state’s dogged adherenceto the new Tai Lüe script in the face ofwidespread opposition, combined with the lackof any archive for classical texts, suggests tomany in Sipsongpanna a cynical effort by thestate to create illiteracy by promoting a newalphabet designed to become obsolete. [17] Inrecent years, the Tai Lüe script written onstreet signs in Jinghong has been removed. TaiLüe officials report that fewer governmentdocuments are published even in the new TaiLüe script. These moves have only fueled localfears of a conspiracy by the state to eradicatetheir language.

Intentionally or otherwise, through scriptreform, publishing and censorship, officialsundermined ethnic institutions and writtentraditions to effectively create a semi-literateborder people. As Anderson tells us, [18] anempire is organized around a high civilization,one with an elite culture and a sacred text. Butfor those ethnically and linguistically distinctpeoples who are incorporated into the newstate, the reimagining of the nation as ahorizontal comradeship described in sharedtexts results not in greater equality but insteadin greater marginalization from the dominantgroup who speak another language.

The Simplifying Project: Folktales

While language committees simplified ethnicalphabets and languages, without everarchiving the original texts, culture committees

simplified ethnic minority oral traditions inedited volumes of ethnic folklore. Dozens ofthese volumes, such as The Seven Sisters:Collected Chinese Folk Stories, were produced(and are still produced today), and they share anumber of commonalities. [19]

First, the folktales in these collections werepresented as authorless. They were presentednot as the creations of individual tellers, whomight put their own spin or interpretation onthe tales for princes or peasants, but rather asessential, idealized texts produced by ahomogeneous group that spoke with one voice.This lack of authorship unified the group thatthe tales are intended to represent, while at thesame time suggesting a lack of ability bymembers of the group to think critically orindividually.

The tales in these folklore collections tend to besimple, even childlike in style and language.They are published in the national vernacular,usual ly wi thout pass ing through anintermediate stage of recording and notating inthe original language. Thus complexities ofrepetition, allusion and indirection are editedout at an early stage, as are references tospecific places or times; this places the folkgroup in an eternal present. References to textsand to religious literature are omitted. Thereare no puns or wordplay. The tales are cleansedof the sexual joking that characterizes Tai Lüeoral poetry, and adult flirtation is replaced withinnocent romanticism. In effect, this infantilizesthe collective that the songs are said torepresent.

The tales or discussions of them also emphasizean ethnic intimacy with nature. For instance,the Simple History of the Dai Nationality refersto a Tai legend in which an ancestor marriesseveral women who are part-tiger as evidenceof the “chaotic” nature of Tai Lüe marriagepractices. [20]

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Final ly , the pol i t ics of the ta les arenationalized. Poems that may have originallyironically satirized local nobility were replacedby unambiguous praise for the Party; editors offolktale collections could thus claim that thetales “reflect the pursuit of an ideal society andhappiness of the Dai people.” [21] Referencesto other places in mainland Southeast Asiawere often omitted, and where there wasmention of a location outside of Sipsongpanna,that location was always Beijing. Such textsreoriented border-crossing minorities such asthe Tai Lüe toward their new center andemphasized their containment within theborders.

Collectively, these tales have served asinstructional tools for the discipline ofminorities, teaching them what kind of ethnicculture would be permissible in the publicrealm and what would not. They also teachChinese readers browsing through bookstoresall over Yunnan and the rest of China, who arewound into the national narrative in thevernacular language that joins center withperiphery. The edited collections often place aHan story alongside stories by Hui, Mongol,Miao, Zhuang, Tibetan and other ethnic groups,all equally bereft of local history, locallanguage, ethnic religion or local specificities.

Similarly, the tales have become part of foreignpolicy. Chinese ethnic folktale books like theSeven Sisters series, published in English,teach international audiences how to thinkabout Chinese ethnic groups through tales that“embody a simplistic dualistic vision of realitythat is distant and distinctive from thecomplicated ambiguity found in literateculture.” [22]

From Simplified to Silenced

By reinventing folktales, folk dances, ethnic

dress and even local scripts, China’ssimplifying project changed the Tai Lüe andother ethnic minorities from peoples withcomplex oral and written traditions into simpleand romantic “folk,” and ultimately intosilenced and commodified spectacles—femininebodies on display.

The end result of the state’s intervention inethnic culture in this region was to create apublic image of the Tai as simple, happy,dancing people. Yet while some, including Taigovernment officials, cheerfully participated inthis process and profited from the results,others felt alienated. Many told me that theyfelt they could not recognize themselves in thestate’s public representations of their ethnicity.A s o n e T a i p u t i t , “ T h e r e a r e t w oSipsongpannas. Hans see the one they want tosee.”

In effect, the Han conquest of southwest Chinawas done through culture, and via the strategicdeployment of dancing girls. The approach wasalways carrot and stick: those who participatein the songs and dances for tourists could profitnicely, but those who tested the limits—likeT ibe tans i n Yunnan ’ s ne ighbor ingprovince—felt the repercussions. Tais I met inYunnan spoke of Tibet, always with a warningtone. They knew what happened to monks andlay activists there, and were not eager toreplicate the Tibetan experience in this borderregion.

While Tais were involved in reviving andreinventing their culture, it was largely donequietly, away from the all-seeing eye of thestate. Many Tais feared that allowing a foreignethnographer to document their oral poetryand songs, especially Buddhist oral traditions,would lead to political repercussions. Thus,when I arrived in 1997 with my tape recorderin hand, looking for epic oral poets ,performances were difficult to track down.

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Singers lied and said that they never performedanymore; some made appointments and thenslipped quietly out of town; many said that theyknew nothing about performances and that Ishould ask someone else. At first I thought Ihad flown a great distance for nothing.Fortunately, this was not the case, and my Tailanguage lessons at a local Buddhist templeopened the door to a parallel, undergroundword of living culture.

The Rock Concerts—A Glimpse

The crowd of Tai villagers surged forward as Iscrambled on my knees in the dust to protectthe tape recorder and microphone, aimed up atthe lip of a handmade stage. The crowd smelledof sweat and dust. Little boys in long-billedbaseball caps and small girls in long skirts,lipstick and earrings crammed around, tornbetween staring at the stage and staring at theforeigner.

Above us, on a stage festooned with pastelpaper cutouts of Buddhist dharma wheels andlotus flowers, a rock band was playing, and ashort, muscular man with long hair and a stringof blue tattoos on his arm was singing in TaiLüe:

Tais, Tais, Tais, should speak theTai language

Tais, Tais, Tais should learn the Taialphabet...

This was the second Tai pop concert and it wasbeing held in the courtyard of Wat Pajay, on theanniversary of China’s granting of “religiousfreedom” to its citizens. That date had begun agradual resurgence in Tai Lüe Buddhism. Bythe year 2000, there were 560 village temples

and more than 7,000 monks and novices inSipsongpanna. Most villages had their ownlocal temples, supervised by Wat Pajay.

In many villages where the crumbling stateeducation system failed minority students, thetemple was the only place to study. Some TaiLüe parents preferred the temples to the publicschools anyway, because in public schools theirchildren were taught that the Hans were moreadvanced and minorities were backward. In thetemples they heard about Buddhism and TaiLüe history, learned to read the old Tai Lüescript, and teachers had the high status of holymen of learning.

Panel of a narrative mural in a Buddhist temple near MengZhe, Sipsongpanna

At Wat Pajay, where I began to study spokenand written Tai language, I saw young Tai men(and sometimes women) who were dailyengaged in thinking about and debating what itmeant to be minority in China. They wereactively and self-consciously engaged inexcavating past traditions, finding things abouttheir past that showed they could be civilized,complex, mature and sacred—rather thanprimitive, simple-minded, child-like andadorable.

The monks had two brand-new Power Macsdonated by businessmen in Thailand, and a few

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disks, passed along by a friend, containing afont developed in Kengtung, Burma, whichenabled them to print in the old Tai Lüe script.Using this font, they had begun a small-scalepublishing project, typesetting the novices’primer, a few old scriptures and a calendar forthe temple. Now, they were opening up theirtemple grounds for some young laymen andwomen to promote Tai Lüe culture in a slightlydifferent way. Some of the monks invited me tostop by, and said it would be fine to recordsome of the songs.

On the day of the rock concert, thousands ofTais packed the courtyard, though the onlyadvertising the organizers had done was ahandful of posters. Word of mouth—in TaiLüe—had done it all, bringing thousands fromaround the prefecture.

E Guang, a traditional oral poet, climbedonstage to an ovation. She wore a dazzling bluedress, gold jewelry and makeup, her hair in itsTai Lüe bun decorated with plastic flowers andribbons. She began an a cappella song in thegenre called “Heaui heaui naw,” for its openingphrase, literally, “Hey hey now.” This genre isusually sung by a woman as part of animprovised duet with a man in which theychallenge each other. Typically, their renderingin Chinese videos and recordings is as lyricallove songs performed by pretty girls, but theyare not always so simple in practice; in thehands of a skilled singer, they are an invitationto a duel. E Guang sang:

Hey hey now,

At sunset, when the sky turnsyellow,

We two agreed to meet in a certainplace.

I have waited since sunset for you,

Waited for too long, lookingaround, waiting,

I did not see you,

I stood up for a while, then satdown again,

Took a palm tree leaf to sit on inthe grass,

And stayed until it had turnedyellow and withered.

The leaf I had wrapped rice in

Turned bitter and yellow,

The salt I had wrapped up (as alove token) turned brown.

Why have you still not come out ofthe house?

Meanwhi le , a man of about her age ,accompanied by a few women, walkedbackstage and asked the monk who wasengineering the sound for a microphone. Themonk, puzzled, turned it over to him, andencouraged him to join E Guang onstage. Theman with the microphone declined with a waveof his hand and sat down backstage, where EGuang could not see him. After another line ortwo from E Guang, he interrupted with a sunglyric:

Hey hey now,

E Guang, you great lady poet,

You are as lovely as a cucumberflower.

The audience laughed and began to call for him

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to come onto the stage. E Guang looked aroundto see where the voice was coming from butcould not see the singer. She smiled wryly andresponded to his challenge, inviting him to joinher onstage.

The man responded: E Guang should not waitfor him anymore; like the banana leaf she usedto wrap her rice, the bloom of her youth wasalso beginning to fade.

E Guang sweetly asked again why herchallenger did not dare to join her onstage:

Why are you singing from a placewhere I can’t see you?

Brother, perhaps I could fall in lovewith you,

You should not hide in the darkand be so shy.

A man should be like water in avillage well,

Deep and glimmering, a jewel thatemits light for all to admire.

But you—you hide in the dark likea mushroom.

The audience roared. E Guang continued,

Perhaps I won’t be able to love youafter all,

Perhaps it is not meant to be.

The concert was one of many I was ultimately

able to document, including both rock concertsand epic Buddhist oral narrations performedfor rituals, for family celebrations, monkinitiations and temple openings. I learned tosing a song in Tai and on occasion was evencompelled to sing it in public. The song, “SaoTai Bai Fon Muang Haw,” tells of a Tai girl whogoes to dance in a dining hall in a Chinese city.“Don’t go so far away... Lovely Tai girl,wherever you go, don’t forget how to speak Tai,don’t forget our Tai homeland.”

That evening, as I biked in the darkness downthe bumpy hill that led from the temple toManting Road, a group of teen novices racedpast on motorcycles, heading home to a nearbyvillage temple. In the light of a heavy full moon,their robes whipped out behind them likewings.

The revival of ethnic traditions in the context ofa tourist boom had created a space for theexpression of “coded dissent”—subversivemessages delivered under the eyes of thedominator, in ways that the dominators mightnot recognize. The monks and their lay friendshad created a cultural and religious movementthat was now firmly part of the Yunnanlandscape, but how far could it go?

A Land in Flux

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Sipsongpanna flooded during the annual monsoon

While the concerts were peaceful andtremendously popular events, the state shutthem down the year after I left Jinghong, tellingWat Pajay they were inappropriate for templegrounds.

Meanwhile, however, the region’s Buddhisttemples continued to organize well-attendedrituals and ceremonies. Some drew thousandsof worshippers from as far away as Laos,Thailand and Burma. Today, the Sipsongpannatemple continues to be a powerful force in theregion and a platform for cultural andeducational programs.

Since 1997, Tai pop singers and recordingartists have become prolific, producing

numerous VCDs (Chinese DVDs) of vibrant Tai-language pop songs about such issues as socialchange, HIV/AIDS, and environmentaldegradation of their homeland. The lyrics,karaoke-style, typed in the old banned Taiscript, scroll across the bottom of the televisionscreen.

How is it that the Tai have succeeded inreviving Buddhism and in creating new culturalmater ia ls in a once -banned wr i t ingsystem—rock songs, even—when other Chineseminorit ies seem to face ever-greaterrestrictions?

The answers are complex . For one ,Sipsongpanna Tais have never openlychallenged China’s right to “improve” them, orits right to engage in a “simplifying project”that warps and distorts their public identity.They play the game, for the most part.Meanwhile, all alternative ethnic culture takesplace behind the scenes, off the beaten track,and far away from the front stage of thetourism industry.

As long as they continue to hide below theradar, their ethnic revival will probably be safe.Despite what those of us critical of its humanrights record might think, China doesn’t needor want to eradicate its ethnic minorities. Thegoal is rather to keep minorities in a veryspecific place on the national hierarchy. Before“liberation,” some minorities might have hadthe idea that they were the center of their ownworlds. As part of incorporation into the newnation-state of the People’s Republic, they hadto be taught that they were no longer at thecenter. The center was now Beijing, and theirnew job was to mark the borders. Ethnicminorities and their “primitive, simple” culturemark the edge of the national map, the limits ofthe known, and the low point beyond which noone cares to go: Here lie serpents.

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China has created a clear social compact withits border peoples. Certain kinds of ethnicidentity are perfectly fine: those that have beencreated by the state, carefully pruned andmanaged; those that are non-threatening,playful, entertaining. Perform this identity forpay, and you may be enriched, may even beheld up as a model minority to the nation,celebrated on television and in newspapers. Gooutside the box, as some Tibetans, Mongoliansand Uyghurs have dared to, and you faceprison, torture, even execution.

It is important to note, therefore, that anotherreason why their cultural activism may betolerated is that Tais in Yunnan have neveradvocated separatism. Rather, they have takenwhat little space they could, and gradually,diplomatically danced around the edges of staterhetoric, expanding their political space inch bycareful inch over the years.

Conclusion: The Party Leads the Way Again

In this regard, it may be illuminating todescribe an instance of deft Tai management ofthe authorities that I witnessed during aBuddhist epic storytelling performance. Thestory was performed in the middle of aceremony to celebrate the promotion of sixBuddhist monks to the status of khuba, ormaster. This ceremony marked the first times ince the Cu l tura l Revo lu t ion tha tSipsongpanna had promoted its own khuba,and as such it was a major event. After a day offeasting and rituals, the temple hosting theceremony invited two top changkhap (Tai oralpoets) to perform “Sithat auk boht,” the legendof the Buddha’s enlightenment. Hundreds ofTai villagers, mostly women, crowded into thecourtyard to listen raptly to the all-nightperformance.

The two storytellers, a man and a woman, took

turns continuing the tale, weaving witticisms,flirtations and praise into their lyrics about theBuddha’s quest for wisdom. As the malenarrator began a chapter, there was a rustle atthe back of the crowd. A few Tais and a HanChinese man of about 30 climbed into thecircle, and everyone in it tensed.

The Chinese man was cheerful with drink,having made the rounds of a series of villagefeasts celebrating the ceremony. Surprised tosee a foreigner in this gathering who couldspeak Chinese, he introduced himself: He wasthe Communist Party secretary, the highest-ranking official in the area. The Party secretarydid not speak Tai; he was an educated youngman of about my age, and perhaps he had notbeen in the area very long. He beamed aroundat the crowd and then began to question me ina normal speaking voice, while Aye KhamNaun, the performer, continued to sing.

“What are you doing?” he asked, pointing atthe cassette recorder.

“I’m taping the tale,” I whispered. I didn’t wantto alienate the Party Secretary, but it had notbeen easy to get into this performance.

“What’s the point of that?”

“I’m going to write it down and translate it intoEnglish.”

This surprised him. “What for?”

“To put it in a library in America.”

“Do you actually understand this stuff? I don’tunderstand a word!”

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Aye Kham Naun sang,

Now,

The Communist Party has come tolead the way again,

The Party Secretary has come tosit here,

he sits for a long spell, making uphalf of a happy pair—

a young lady chats with himpolitely.

Whoever enters this place today,may he live to a ripe old age!

“He is praising you,” one of the elders acrossthe circle said to the Party secretary inChinese.

“Ta shuo nide hao hua! He’s saying good thingsabout you!” another elder, loudly added.

“Thank you!” said the Secretary, folding hishands together in a gesture to the singer. Hesat fidgeting for another few minutes, thenreeled out mid-lyric to go to another banquet.

The gathering visibly relaxed, closing the circleagain. No one had gotten into trouble, and theperformance could go on.

This article is adapted from Song and Silence:Ethnic Revival on China’s Southwest Bordersby Sara L. M. Davis. Copyright ColumbiaUniversity Press 2005. Used by arrangementwith Columbia University Press. An earlierversion of this article, “Dance or Else: China’s

Simplifying Project,” appeared in China RightsForum, No. 4 (2006): 38-46. Posted at JapanFocus on February 23, 2007.

Sara Davis is founder and director of AsiaCatalyst.

Notes

[1] Hsieh Shi-chung, “On the Dynamics ofTai/Dai-Lüe Ethnicity: An EthnohistoricalAnalysis,” in Cultural Encounters on China’sEthnic Frontiers, ed. Stevan Harrell (Seattle:University of Washington Press, 1995), 301–28.

[2] Mette Halskov Hansen, “The Call of Mao orMoney? Han Chinese Settlers on China’s South-Western Borders,” China Quarterly 158 (June1999): 397.

[3] Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A NewTheory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley and LosAngeles: University of California Press, 1999).

[4] Ma Yin, China’s Minority Nationalities(Beijing: Foreign Languages Press,1989), 3.

[5] In June 2001, Tai Lües in Shan State,B u r m a , w h o w e r e o r i g i n a l l y f r o mSipsongpanna, told me they had fought ininsurgencies against China that were supportedby the U.S. CIA during the 1950s. See alsoBertil Lintner, “The CIA’s First Secret War:Americans Helped Stage Raids Into China fromBurma,” Far Eastern Economic Review, 16September 1993, 56–58.

[6] Fei X iaotong, Toward a People ’sAnthropology (Beijing: World Press,1981), 60.

[7] Fei, People’s Anthropology, 64.

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[8] For Sipsongpanna, see for instance the“Minzu wenti wu zhong congshu,” inXishuangbanna Daizu zhonghe diaocha(Collected investigations into XishuangbannaDai nationality) (Kunming: Yunnan minzuchuban she, 1983).

[9] Guojia minwei minzu wenti wu zhongcongshu pianli weiyuanhui, ed., Zhongguoshaoshu minzu (Chinese ethnic minorities)(Beijing: Renmin chuban she, 1981), 342–43.

[10] Ma Yin, China’s Minority Nationalities,266.

[11] Stevan Harrell, “Introduction: CivilizingProjects and the Reaction to Them,” CulturalEncounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers(Seattle: University of Washington Press,1995), 3-36.

[12] Chin Ming, “How the Peacock DanceReached the Stage,” China Reconstructs(March 1963): 10. I am indebted to Helen Reesfor sharing this article with me.

[13] Ibid, 11.

[14] William Clifton Dodd, The Tai Race, ElderBrother of the Chinese: Results of Experience,Exploration, and Research of William CliftonDodd, D.D., Thirty-Three Years a Missionary tothe Tai People of Siam, Burma, and China,Compiled and Edited by His Wife (1923;Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 1996), 188.

[15] Ibid., 187.

[16] Evelyn Rawski, “Economic and SocialFoundations of Late Imperial China,” inPopular Culture in Late Imperial China, ed.David Johnson, Andrew Nathan, and EvelynRawski (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1985), 11.

[17] See also interviews with administrators atSipsongpanna schools and colleges in whichthey explicitly state that their aim is tofacilitate the phasing out of Tai language;Mette Halskov Hansen, Lessons in BeingChinese: Minority Education and EthnicIdentity in Southwest China (Seattle: Universityof Washington Press, 1999), 129–30.

[18 ] Bened ic t Anderson , Imag inedCommunities: Reflections on the Origin andSpread of Nationalism (London: Verso Press,1983).

[19] The Seven Sisters: Collected Chinese FolkStories (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press,1965).

[20] Daizu jianshi bianxie zu (Simple history ofthe Dai nationality editorial group), Daizujianshi (Simple history of the Dai nationality)(Kunming: Yunnan renmin chuban she, 1986).

[21] Yan Wenbian, Zheng Peng, and Gu Qing,eds. and adapters, Dai Folk Legends (Beijing:Foreign Languages Press, 1988), ii.

[22] Lucien Miller, ed., South of the Clouds:Tales from Yunnan, trans. Guo Xu, LucienMiller, and Xu Kun (Seattle: University ofWashington Press, 1994), 36.