In 1997 I arrived on China’s southwest borders planning to spend a year researching ethnic minority folklore. The only problem, as I discovered when I arrived, was that there wasn’t any.

Instead, government culture bureaus and Chinese entrepreneurs had turned the region into an adults-only playground for tourists –most of them male Chinese urbanites traveling in groups. Sipsongpanna, Yunnan was peopled with dancing women in tight ethnic sarongs, swaying palm trees, exotic fruits, peacocks. Perhaps equally important were plentiful and inexpensive alcohol, drugs, gambling, jade, and sex workers. While many tourists visiting southern Yunnan province came for the illegal pleasures, they spent their days attending performances staged for Chinese and foreign tourists – living dioramas in state-run “ethnic theme parks”, dances in “ethnic dining halls”, reconstituted “living ethnic villages”, and the like.

But these performances were not just the product of commodified tourist schtick, as they might have been elsewhere. They were also official policy: direct outgrowths of the government’s intervention over decades in creating, pruning and regulating public expressions of minority ethnic identity.

However, it took time and persistence to gain access to this subterranean ethnic culture. Ethnic revival in China, I learned, had to be done carefully, below the government’s radar, in order to avoid political repercussions.

Understanding the strange gap between the “front stage” of performances for tourism and the “back stage” of ethnic revival in Yunnan took time. Eventually, it also required slipping back in time in order to understand the context in which this gap had first appeared. I had come to Jinghong to study folklore, but found it could not be separated from this context of modernization, contest and debate. The book I eventually wrote was titled “Song and Silence”, because while my clunky field tape recorder captured a lot of songs, I soon found there were many silences – things that could not be said, or would not be said, about the realities of life as a Tai in China.

The Place
Ethnic minority groups, some of which once had independent or semi-independent states, occupy China’s national borders and much of its arable land. Sipsongpanna is one of the smallest such regions, but because of a tourist boom in the late 1990s it is one of the best known within China.

Xishuangbanna Dai Nationality Autonomous Prefecture (“Xishuangbanna
Daizu zizhizhou”) lies on the southern tip of Yunnan Province, on the borders of Burma and Laos. The subtropical, mountainous region covers about 7,400 square miles. Sipsongpanna’s contemporary name comes from a sixteenth-century Tai Lüe name, Muang Sipsongpanna, which literally means “the city-state of twelve townships.” Administratively, Xishuangbanna is divided into three counties: Jinghong County, with Jinghong as the prefectural capital; Meng Hai County to the west, bordering on Burma; and Meng La County to the east, bordering on Laos (see map 1).

The region has an ethnically diverse population of roughly one million. Over a third are Tai Lüe, another third are Han Chinese, and the last third are made up of a number of other ethnic minorities. These include the variously named Akha (in Chinese, “Aini” or “Hani”), Blang (in Chinese, “Bulang”), Karen (in Chinese, “Jinuo”), Wa, Yao, Hmong (in Chinese, “Miao”), Lahu, Khmu and others. Official counts of the number of ethnic groups in Sipsongpanna range from thirteen to sixteen. The Tai are valley-dwellers who cultivate wet rice and practice Theravada Buddhism.

Before what the Chinese Communist Party refers to as its “liberation” of Sipsongpanna in 1953, Tai Lües here formed a small kingdom that was partially colonized by a series of Chinese empires but that from day-to-day was largely left to run itself and to form its own alliances with neighboring states.

After “liberation”, contacts with those across the new Chinese borders were restricted. Projects aiming to reform land ownership, political systems, agriculture, education and local culture, all run by Beijing, created a new sense of Tai Lües as subordinates within the new nation. Minorities like the Tai Lüe benefited by receiving electricity, medical care, new roads and other improvements. But they were always junior comrades, sometimes “little brother minorities.”

By the time I reached Jinghong in 1997, it was a mid-sized town undergoing major changes. A tourist boom had hit the region. In the years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, central planners took a new tack in border regions, aiming to better incorporate them into the state via economic development. Yunnan and some other regions were chosen for the targeted development of a national tourism industry.

But with Sipsongpanna’s state-inspired tourism boom also came waves of new migrants: Han Chinese from other rural areas and sometimes from the cities looking for new economic opportunities. In 1999, Mette Halskov Hansen reported that while Hans made up less than one-third of the population of Sipsongpanna, they made up 48 percent of the residents in Jinghong, the region’s capital. She adds, “Since only those who are registered as having permanently moved to Sipsong Panna are counted in these statistics the actual proportion of Han Chinese is considerably higher.”

The new migrants had Chinese-language skills, education and capital that made them stronger competitors than local minorities for jobs and businesses serving the tourist market. They brought with them a flood of Chinese-language music, books, films, and culture that dwarfed the meager local government productions in Tai Lüe language. While some embraced the change, other ethnic minorities began to fear total assimilation into the Han Chinese mainstream.

Dean MacCannell calls tourist shows the “front stage” of the industry. In order to attract tourists to southwest China, local and national governments ahd to reinvent the previously unstable borderlands and make them a space of play. Traveling in Jinghong, visitors could see theme parks that turned local ethnic peoples into objects of visual pleasure. They could see dance shows set to new Chinese pop tunes in ethnic-themed restaurants, villages turned into round-the-clock showcases, elephants, peacocks, and more. Many people in China are taught in primary school to sing songs about southwestern minorities and develop deep feelings of nostalgia about those peoples. Louisa Schein and Dru Gladney have rightly called this constructed identity “internal orientalism”. Like all identities, it is constructed; in this case, as part of the twin processes of nation-building and a vast, coordinated land-grab.

The Need for Unification
In 1949, having won a long civil war, the leaders of the new People’s Republic of China faced a highly fragmented country. The remains of the last dynasty, the Qing, had been split into bits by half a century of chaos. Warlords had ruled China for decades, and because there had never been national education or anything like a national media, the country was a patchwork of localities with diverse languages, cultures and customs. In much of the country, residents of one town could not understand those in the next one.

Moreover, while the new leaders aimed to reclaim the land that had belonged to the last imperial dynasty, the presence of semi-independent ethnic peoples all around the borders posed an obstacle. Roughly 60 percent of the new nation’s landmass was occupied by 10 percent of its population. As Ma Yin succinctly observes:

Minority nationalities live in places with the following common
characteristics:
1) A wide expanse of land with a sparse distribution of population. Many minority peoples have traditionally established their villages in mountains and pastoral areas, on high plateaus and in deep forests.
2) A wide range of products and abundant mineral resources.
3) Strategically important as border regions for the whole country.

Security was an especially urgent concern. While these resource-rich, land-rich and potentially disloyal ethnic peoples sat on the borders, vanquished troops were gathering nearby. Sometimes funded and trained by the United States and other Western countries, they were launching periodic guerrilla attacks on the weakest points of the new socialist state.

It was urgently necessary to simplify the complex problems of loyalty and territoriality posed by the chaos of the whole nation and in particular to bring those open, fluid borders under control. To do this, China’s new leaders engaged in an ambitious project to radically reorganize ethnic identity and bring newly-constituted minorities under the umbrella of nationhood.

Ethnic Classification
While fighting the revolution, the Chinese Communist Party had promised the ethnic minorities who assisted them (such as the Tai Lüe) self-determination, regional autonomy and the right to secede. But having achieved power, the Party withdrew the promised right to secession and instead began to speak of the importance of Beijing’s help in overcoming ethnic “backwardness.” Newly “autonomous regions” were established for ethnic minorities, but autonomy was always to be subject to the leadership of the Party and through it, Beijing. Local Party representatives delivered instructions to ethnic leaders and approved their decisions.

But now the Party faced the problem of political representation for the ethnic groups at the national level. As China’s foremost anthropologist, Fei Xiaotong, wrote, the new People’s Republic was committed to ethnic equality on the one hand, but, on the other hand,

the principle would have been meaningless without proper recognition of existing nationalities. For how could a People’s Congress allocate its seats to deputies from different nationalities without knowing what nationalities there were? And how could the nation effect regional autonomy for the nationalities without a clear idea of their geographical distribution.

The state invited ethnic minorities to come forward and self-identify as distinct groups. In 1955, Fei tells us, more than 400 different ethnic groups registered, 260 of them in Yunnan. This created what, in retrospect, sounds like panic in Beijing; tribesmen would overrun the majority Han Chinese government. Ethnic identity had to be simplified.

To do this, China launched a massive research project in “ethnic identification.” In 1953, the government dispatched teams of ethnographers to border regions containing minority peoples. These researchers spent years collecting data on ethnic politics, institutions, agriculture, myth and language. Ethnographers categorized groups as ethnic nationalities based on Stalin’s criteria of nationalities as defined by shared language, territory and “psychology.” They also placed the new nationalities on a social-evolutionary scale, drawing from Marxist theory and from the work of American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan; inevitably, nationalities were placed on the lower rungs of the evolutionary hierarchy, while the majority Hans were placed on the top.

The end result was a comprehensive list of fifty-five minority nationalities, folding some of the original 400 back into the Han and melding together some (such as the Tai Lüe and Tai Neua, now both named “Dai”) that had previously had little or no contact. Fifty-five was apparently a more manageable number of groups than 400, and folklore had emerged as a catchall answer to several questions about how best to unify the new nation.

Ethnographic study teams then produced reports summarizing everything there was to know about each ethnic minority group. Many of these reports were serious ethnographies that continue to be resources for researchers today.

However, some less reliable subsequent books popularized the information gathered in these ethnographic reports. Typical examples presented short overviews of Tais adorned with illustrations of women singing and dancing, women performing the famous “peacock dance,” and Buddhist reliquaries and palm trees. The books described the Tai minority as a tiny group exclusive to China, without reference to the links with related kingdoms across the borders. They referred to Tai feudalism and slavery, “primitive spirit worship,” and the much vaunted (though factually inaccurate) “freedom of young men and women” to practice “free love.” Summarizing their expressive culture, Ma Yin comments, “they love to sing and dance.”

Based on the research by Chinese ethnographers in the 1950s-1960s, Tais were categorized as a feudal society and as slave-owners, placing them somewhere above the “cannibalistic” Wa but, perhaps inevitably, below the majority Han. For the most part, this research was used as a tool to solidify the position of ethnic minorities at the bottom of a social-evolutionary hierarchy within the Chinese nation. Some social scientists, such as Fei Xiaotong, took a nuanced and thoughtful view of ethnic identity, but his was not the view that triumphed over time; less sophisticated minds used this initial research to codify misunderstandings and stereotypes, using those to justify an ethnocentric hierarchy that became (in fact, continues to be) the basis of state ethnic policy.

From Categorizing to Improving
As the research and categorization concluded, ethnic folklore became just one of many aspects of the newly-consituted minority groups that needed improving and modernizing under the leadership of the Party.
To lead the cultural aspects of this improvement project, the government established a number of state organs. The state set up culture bureaus in each ethnic region and at the provincial level to manage the nationalities’ song-and-dance troupes. In addition to the culture bureaus, the government established local government-run news media in minority regions to broadcast news in minority languages.
Researchers and government culture bureau officials explicitly encouraged and promoted elements of minority culture deemed positive, socialist and modern, while carefully pruning elements deemed counterproductive, counterrevolutionary or primitive. For instance, traditional minority clothing was a positive expression of ethnic identity, to be celebrated and promoted. Minority religious rituals, however, were counterrevolutionary and economically wasteful, and as such were discouraged.

Dances and oral literature were studied and in some cases “improved” by state choreographers and authors. In fact, much of the culture now performed for tourists as minority culture was created during this period.

The Simplifying Project: Folk Songs
Many of the songs sung for tourists in Chinese ethnic theme parks are sung in Chinese. By any standard, it is a stretch of the imagination to call them folk songs. Tai folk songs are, of course, traditionally sung in the Tai language. In Sipsongpanna, as in much of mainland Southeast Asia, they are performed by highly trained professional oral poets in the form of duet/duels between men and women singers who may range in age from thirty to eighty. The duets often become scathing put-downs and are highly bawdy. Some are also sacred, involving the citation of arcane texts and the narration of Buddhist epic legends (jataka tales) in literary language. Whether sacred or raucously profane, these folk songs are performed according to complex rhyme schemes that are recited against the rhythm of a free-reed instrument made of bamboo.

By contrast, songs sung for tourists as part of ethnic shows in theme parks and dining halls are quite different. These nostalgic songs – “Moonlight Under the Bamboo” is one especially beloved around China -- usually praise the harvestand the lovely region, and stage a kind of idealized yet sexually naiive flirtation between a young man and young woman. Musically, the songs for tourists are different, using instruments from various regions to play melodies that are traditionally Chinese in style. Many were composed and written first in the 1980s by Han Chinese songwriters.

The Simplifying Project: Dance
From the 1950s to the early 1960s, groups of culture bureau workers also engaged in a related project to collect, document and improve upon other forms of ethnic folk performance besides oral narrative. One such group, led by choreographer Chin Ming, traveled from Beijing to the borderlands of Yunnan to conduct field research and “spent a happy month with the Tai people.” There they “fell under the spell of the subtropical scene” and were entranced by a ritual dance that they saw while listening “to the light rustle of the breeze in the coconut palms” and “the muted boom of distant ‘elephant leg’ drums.”

This dance, which is probably related to a Shan ritual kinnaree dance still performed at Buddhist temple festivals across the borders in northern Burma, is traditionally performed by an elder wearing a bird mask made of papier-mâché, wings on his arms, and a long train like a peacock’s tail.

Chin Ming wrote that with some creative thinking he and his colleagues were able to improve on this ritual dance:

Our idea was to make it a group dance for girls so as to intensify the glory of the peacock in a resplendent scene. If the clumsy accessories were discarded, we decided, more emphasis could be laid on a portrayal of the spirit of the bird. . . . Without the mask there could be facial expression, and without the wings there would be much greater freedom of movement.

Once shorn of these distracting elements and of its Buddhist context, the feminized and dramatized kongque wu (“peacock dance”), later popularized by the famous Tai Lüe dancer Dao Meilan, became renowned all over China. It became a staple of the prefectural and provincial song-and-dance troupes, and it is performed in hotels and dinner halls in Kunming and Sipsongpanna.

As a result of the dance fad, the peacock has become nationally synonymous with the similarly exotic, colorful and elegant Tai Lües of Sipsongpanna: “It is the animal most beloved by the Dai nationality,” people often say. The peacock is a ubiquitous symbol in the tourism industry, painted onto the buildings of the international airport and the sides of tour buses, and printed on brochures and T-shirts. A touropop CD with the song “Xishuangbanna, My Hometown” features a picture of a beaming dancer in a peacock dress. In several villages I saw young Tai Lüe girls teaching this state-concocted ballet to each other as “our traditional Tai folk dance.”

I asked a local government official, Aye Zai Guang, about the peacock. “The peacock is not our symbol,” he said emphatically. “It was chosen for us by others. If we had to have an animal to symbolize us, it would be the elephant because that was what we used to ride into warfare.” Other Tai Lües expressed similar views. Perhaps a warlike elephant is a more potent and dangerous symbol to choose to stand for the borderlands than a pretty and feminine bird.
As the simplifying project proceeded, other ballets and operas were edited also. One, named after its hero, Prince Sudun (“Chao Sudun”), is based on an episode in one of Sipsongpanna’s oral-narrative epic poems, “The Ten-Headed King.” Some scholars believe the tale derives from the “Ramayana,” an Indian epic narrative. During the 1950s, the tale called “Prince Sudun” was cleansed of any religious or ritual meaning and rewritten as a socialist fable. An opera based on the fable was banned during the Cultural Revolution but now has been revived as a tourist show, performed daily for visitors at Jinghong’s Chunhuan Park.

Simplified script
While song and dance were “improved” by culture bureau workers and are now presented as folklore, probably no cultural “improvement” of the Tai minority has been more controversial locally than the government’s efforts to improve the Tai Lüe script.

In the 1950s, the government announced that the old Tai Lüe script was unwieldy and set out to reform it. The result of these efforts was a decrease in literacy in the minority script and the production of a generation cut off from their own written traditions. The old Tai Lüe written alphabet, almost identical to the script used by Tai Khuns in Kengtung, Shan State, has more than 60 letters, and even those expert in the script disagree about exactly how many there are. Because historically it has been taught in temples, for the most part only Tai Lüe monks and former monks are able to read and write it. In the past, women were not generally taught the script, though some did learn it from male relatives.

Official Chinese rhetoric often refers to presumptive low levels of literacy among all border peoples, without distinction. This was often said to be because of flaws in their scripts, as well as flaws in the pre-“liberation” educational systems. Thus scripts like those of the Tai Lüe, Tibetans, Uyghurs and others were banned and replaced with new, “simplified” scripts created by linguists to facilitate literacy. Other ethnic minorities who had historically been nonliterate had new scripts invented for them. In Yunnan, language teams, working with members of the Tai elite, came up with a simplified Tai Lüe alphabet (“xin Daiwen”) that had fewer letters than the traditional alphabet.

This became the official language, to be written on street signs and used in government documents alongside the simplified Chinese script.
Given the lack of access to Tai Lüe historical records (none are archived in China), it is difficult to assess how widespread literacy was in Sipsongpanna before 1949. American missionary William Clifton Dodd, who was literate in Tai, reported a high degree of literacy during his first visit there in 1897. He traveled along the Mekong Delta with copies of his Tai-language translation of the Bible and found the Tai Lüe of Sipsongpanna to be avid readers:

Never before, in any place, have I met such receptivity, as well as such unbridled curiosity. . . . They take books, they beg books, they clamor for books.

In Sipsongpanna he interviewed a local headman, who reported that “of the Lu [sic] of his district, one-third of the men could read, one-third could barely read, and one-third could not read at all. Only one woman, his wife, could read.” If these estimates were representative of the region, we could speculate that overall literacy in Sipsongpanna might have been roughly comparable to the literacy rates among Hans during the same period. Evelyn Rawski estimates that throughout China in the late Qing between one-half and one-third of school-age males had basic literacy. In previous eras of Chinese imperial history, because of lack of access to education, literacy among Chinese-speakers was probably far lower. Given the temple education system, it seems likely that Tai Lüe literacy was actually relatively high, and certainly higher than the Chinese government has reported.

It is clear that the new Tai Lüe script has not promoted increased literacy. Many Tai Lües note that the state has published almost nothing in the new script, making it in effect useless. The twice-weekly four-page newspaper, Xishuangbanna bao, is one exception. Public pressure caused the Xishuangbanna bao to switch back to old Tai Lüe script during the 1990s before returning to the new Tai Lüe script in 1995 in response, reportedly, to pressure from the provincial government. In 1997, some Tais believed that the newspaper would switch back to the old Tai Lüe script again and were trying to establish a publishing house to produce books in old Tai Lüe; they have not yet been successful. Worse, many Tai Lües pointed out what they saw as government hypocrisy: despite officially promoting the new Tai Lüe script for over 40 years, the state had never produced a dictionary for it. At the main temple in Jinghong, Tai Lüe Buddhist monks succeeded in compiling a modest dictionary for the old Tai Lüe script in 2000. Two years later, after a long political struggle with the provincial government, the dictionary was published in Kunming.

Some educated Tai Lües told me that they had never been properly taught the new script and so could not read it: “They only ever taught us new Tai script for one hour a week in secondary school,” said one young government official. “I just never really learned it. Anyway, it doesn’t have any use,” because nothing is published in it. Many noted that those literate in the new script could not read the old script, so that literacy in the new script in effect cuts younger Tai Lües off from their own written traditions. There is no library or archive in China that houses books in the old Tai Lüe script published before 1949.

Today, the politics of language shapes class and status in Sipsongpanna. Most residents of larger towns, especially Jinghong, speak a common local version of the provincial dialect of Mandarin, Jinghonghua, or “Jinghong-ese.” Tai villagers are more likely to speak Tai only, which itself has several dialects in neighboring towns, but many young village children, surrounded by Chinese-language television, radio and music, can understand Tai but not speak or read it. Sipsongpanna residents who work in the tourist industry or for the government tend to be those with better education who speak and read standard Mandarin. But as a result of controversial government interventions in the minority alphabet, few Tai Lües are literate in any form of their own language.

In sum, the early government language policy was probably motivated by idealism and the goal of promoting widespread literacy. But if the reforms are aimed at aiding ethnic minorities, and ethnic minorities overwhelmingly reject the reforms, why continue them? The state’s dogged adherence to the new Tai Lüe script in the face of widespread opposition, combined with the lack of any archive for classical texts, suggests to many in Sipsongpanna a cynical effort by the state to create illiteracy by promoting a new alphabet designed to become obsolete. In recent years, the Tai Lüe script written on street signs in Jinghong has been removed. Tai Lüe officials report that fewer government documents are published even in the new Tai Lüe script. These moves have only fueled local fears of a conspiracy by the state to eradicate their language.

Intentionally or otherwise, through their involvement in script reform, publishing and censorship, officials undermined ethnic institutions and written traditions to effectively create a semi-literate border people. As Anderson tells us, an empire is organized around a high civilization, one with an elite culture and a sacred text. But for those ethnically and linguistically distinct peoples who are incorporated into the new state, the reimagining of the nation as a horizontal comradeship described in shared texts does not result in greater equality but instead in greater marginalization from the dominant group who speak another language.

The Simplifying Project: Folktales
While language committees simplified ethnic alphabets and languages, without ever archiving the original texts, culture committees simplified ethnic minority oral traditions in edited volumes of ethnic folklore. Dozens of these volumes, such as The Seven Sisters: Collected Chinese Folk Stories, were produced (and are still produced today), and they share a number of commonalities.

First, the folktales in these collections were presented as authorless. They were presented not as the creations of individual tellers, who might put their own spin or interpretation on the tales for princes or peasants, but rather as essential, idealized texts produced by a homogeneous group that spoke with one voice. This lack of authorship unified the group that the tales are intended to represent, while at the same time suggesting a lack of ability by members of the group to think critically or individually.

The tales in these folklore collections also tend to be simple, even childlike in style and language. They are published in the national vernacular, usually without passing through an intermediate stage of recording and notating in the original language. Thus complexities of repetition, allusion and indirection are edited out at an early stage, as are references to specific places or times; this places the folk group in an eternal present. References to texts and to religious literature are omitted. There are no puns or wordplay. The tales are cleansed of the sexual joking that characterizes Tai Lüe oral poetry, and the adult flirtation is replaced with innocent romanticism. In effect, this infantilizes the collective that the songs are said to represent, bringing them down to a manageable stature.

The tales or discussions of them also often emphasize an ethnic intimacy with nature. For instance, the Simple History of the Dai Nationality refers to a Tai legend in which an ancestor marries several women who are part-tiger as evidence of the “chaotic” nature of Tai Lüe marriage practices.

Finally, the politics of the tales are nationalized. Poems that may have originally ironically satirized local nobility were replaced by unambiguous praise for the Party; editors of folktale collections could thus claim that the tales “reflect the pursuit of an ideal society and happiness of the Dai people.” References to other places in mainland Southeast Asia were often omitted, and where there was mention of a location outside of Sipsongpanna, that location was always Beijing. Such texts reoriented border-crossing minorities such as the Tai Lüe toward their new center and emphasized their containment within the borders.

Collectively, these tales have served as instructional tools for the discipline of minorities, teaching them what kind of ethnic culture would be permissible in the public realm and what would not. They also teach Chinese readers browsing through bookstores all over Yunnan and the rest of China, who are wound into the national narrative in the vernacular language that joins center with periphery. The edited collections often place a Han story alongside stories by Hui, Mongol, Miao, Zhuang, Tibetan and other ethnic groups, all equally free of local history, local language, ethnic religion or local specificities.
Similarly, the tales have become part of foreign policy. Chinese ethnic folktale books like the Seven Sisters series, published in English, teach international audiences how to think about Chinese ethnic groups through tales that “embody a simplistic dualistic vision of reality that is distant and distinctive from the complicated ambiguity found in literate culture.”

From Simplified to Silenced
By reinventing folktales, folk dances, ethnic dress and even local scripts, China’s simplifying project changed the Tai Lüe and other ethnic minorities like them from peoples with complex oral and written traditions, into simple and romantic “folk,” and ultimately into silenced and commodified spectacles—feminine bodies on display.
The end result of the state’s intervention in ethnic culture in this region was to create a public image of Tais as simple, happy, dancing people. Yet while some Tais, including government officials, cheerfully participated in this process and profited from the results, others felt alienated by it all. Many told me that they felt they could not recognize themselves in the state’s public representations of their ethnicity. As one Tai put it, “There are two Sipsongpannas. Hans see the one they want to see.”

In effect, the Han conquest of southwest China was done through culture, and via the strategic deployment of dancing girls. The approach was always carrot and stick: those who participate in the songs and dances for tourists could profit nicely, but those who tested the limits – like Tibetans in Yunnan’s neighboring province – felt the repercussions. Tais I met in Yunnan spoke of Tibet, always with a warning tone. They knew what happened to monks and lay activists there, and were not eager to replicate the Tibetan experience in this border region.

While Tais were involved in reviving and reinventing their culture, it was largely done quietly, away from the all-seeing eye of the state. Many Tais feared that allowing a foreign ethnographer to document their oral poetry and songs, especially Buddhist oral traditions, would lead to political repercussions. Thus, when I arrived in 1997 with my tape recorder in hand, looking for epic oral poets, performances were difficult to track down. Singers lied and said that they never performed anymore; some made appointments and then slipped quietly out of town; many said that they knew nothing about performances and that I should ask someone else. At first I thought I had flown a great distance for nothing. Fortunately, this was not the case, and my Tai language lessons at a local Buddhist temple opened the door to a parallel, underground word of living culture.

The Rock Concerts – a glimpse
The crowd of Tai villagers surged forward as I scrambled on my knees in the dust to protect the tape recorder and microphone, aimed up at the lip of a handmade stage. The crowd smelled of sweat and dust. Little boys in long-billed baseball caps and small girls in long skirts, lipstick and earrings crammed around, torn between staring at the stage and staring at the foreigner.

Above us, on a stage festooned with pastel paper cutouts of Buddhist dharma wheels and lotus flowers, a rock band was playing, and a short, muscular man with long hair and a string of blue tattoos on his arm was singing in Tai Lüe:

Tais, Tais, Tais, should speak the Tai language
Tais, Tais, Tais should learn the Tai alphabet...

This was the second Tai pop concert and it was being held in the courtyard of Wat Pajay, on the anniversary of China’s granting of “religious freedom” to its citizens. That date had begun a gradual resurgence in Tai Lüe Buddhism. By the year 2000, there were 560 village temples and more than 7,000 monks and novices in Sipsongpanna. Most villages had their own local temples, supervised by Wat Pajay.

In many villages where the crumbling state education system failed minority students, the temple was the only place to study. Some Tai Lüe parents preferred the temples to the public schools anyway, because in public schools Tai Lüe children were taught that the Hans were more advanced and minorities were backward. In the temples they heard about Buddhism and Tai Lüe history, learned to read the old Tai Lüe script, and had the high status of holy men of learning.

At Wat Pajay, where I began to study spoken and written Tai language, I saw young Tai men (and sometimes women) who were daily engaged in thinking about and debating what it meant to be minority in China. They were actively and self-consciously engaged in excavating past traditions, finding things about their past that showed they could be civilized, complex, mature, and sacred – rather than primitive, simple-minded, child-like and adorable.

The monks had two brand-new Power Macs donated by businessmen in Thailand, and a few disks, passed along by a friend, containing a font developed in Kengtung, Burma, which enabled them to print in the old Tai Lüe script. Using this font, they had begun a small-scale publishing project, typesetting the novices’ primer, a few old scriptures and a calendar for the temple. Now, they were opening up their temple grounds for some young laymen and women to promote Tai Lüe culture in a slightly different way. Some of the monks invited me to stop by, and said it would be fine to record some of the songs.

On the day of the rock concert, thousands of Tais packed the courtyard, though the only advertising the organizers had done was a handful of posters. Word of mouth—in Tai Lüe—had done it all, bringing thousands from around the prefecture.

E Guang, a traditional oral poet, climbed onstage to an ovation. She wore a dazzling blue dress, gold jewelry and makeup, her hair in its Tai Lüe bun decorated with plastic flowers and ribbons. She began an a cappella song in the genre called “Heaui heaui naw,” for its opening phrase, literally, “Hey hey now.” This genre is usually sung by a women as part of an improvised duet with a man in which they challenge each other. Typically, their rendering in Chinese videos and recordings is as lyrical love songs performed by pretty girls, but they are not always so simple in practice; in the hands of a skilled singer, they are an invitation to a duel. E Guang sang:

Hey hey now,
At sunset, when the sky turns yellow,
We two agreed to meet in a certain place.
I have waited since sunset for you,
Waited for too long, looking around, waiting,
I did not see you,
I stood up for a while, then sat down again,
Took a palm tree leaf to sit on in the grass,
And stayed until it had turned yellow and withered.
The leaf I had wrapped rice in
Turned bitter and yellow,
The salt I had wrapped up (as a love token) turned brown.
Why have you still not come out of the house?

Meanwhile, a man of about her age, accompanied by a few women, walked backstage and asked the monk who was engineering the sound for a microphone. The monk, puzzled, turned it over to him, and encouraged him to join E Guang onstage. The man with the microphone declined with a wave of his hand and sat down backstage, where E Guang could not see him. After another line or two from E Guang, he interrupted with a sung lyric:

Hey hey now,
E Guang, you great lady poet,
You are as lovely as a cucumber flower.

The audience laughed and began to call for him to come onto the stage. E Guang looked around to see where the voice was coming from but could not see the singer. She smiled wryly and responded to his challenge, inviting him to join her onstage.

The man responded: E Guang should not wait for him anymore; like the banana leaf she used to wrap her rice, the bloom of her youth was also beginning to fade.

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

Why are you singing from a place where I can’t see you?
Brother, perhaps I could fall in love with you,
You should not hide in the dark and be so shy.
A man should be like water in a village well,
Deep and glimmering, a jewel that emits light for all to admire.
But you—you hide in the dark like a mushroom.

The audience roared. E Guang continued,

Perhaps I won’t be able to love you after all,
Perhaps it is not meant to be.

The concert was one of many I was ultimately able to document, including both rock concerts and epic Buddhist oral narrations performed for rituals, for family celebrations, monk initiations, and temple openings. I learned to sing a song in Tai and on some occasions was even compelled to sing it in public. The song, “Sao Tai Bai Fon Muang Haw,” tells of a Tai girl who goes 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 down the bumpy hill that led from the temple to Manting Road, a group of teen novices raced past on motorcycles, heading home to a nearby village temple. In the light of a heavy full moon, their robes whipped out behind them like wings.

The revival of ethnic traditions in the context of a tourist boom had created a space for the expression of “coded dissent”—subversive messages delivered under the eyes of the dominator, in ways that the dominators might not recognize. The monks and their lay friends had created a cultural and religious movement that was now firmly part of the Yunnan landscape, but how far could it go?

A land in flux
While the concerts were peaceful and tremendously popular events, the state shut them down the year after I left Jinghong, telling Wat Pajay they were inappropriate for temple grounds.

Meanwhile, however, the region’s Buddhist temples continued to organize well-attended rituals and ceremonies. Some drew thousands of worshippers from as far away as Laos, Thailand and Burma. Today, the Sipsongpanna temple continues to be a powerful force in the region and a platform for cultural and educational programs. UNESCO now has a commendable program, working with the institution to train monks in temple restoration techniques, so that some of Sipsongpanna’s hundreds-year-old temples may be preserved for future generations.

Since 1997, Tai pop singers and recording artists have become prolific, producing numerous VCDs (Chinese DVDs) of vibrant Tai-language pop songs about such issues as social change, HIV/AIDS, and environmental degradation of their homeland. The lyrics, karaoke-style, typed in the old banned Tai script, scroll across the bottom of the television screen.

How is it that Tais have succeeded in reviving Buddhism and in creating new cultural materials in a once-banned writing system – rock songs, even – when other Chinese minorities seem to face ever-greater restrictions?

The answers are complex. For one, Sipsongpanna Tais have never openly challenged China’s right to “improve” them, or its 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 takes place behind the scenes, off the beaten track, and far away from the front stage of the tourism industry.

As long as they continue to hide below the radar, their ethnic revival will probably be safe. Despite what those of us critical of its human rights record might think, China doesn’t need or want to eradicate all its ethnic minorities. The goal is rather to keep minorities in a very specific place on the national hierarchy. Before “liberation”, some minorities might have had the idea that they were the center of their own worlds. As part of incorporation into the new nation-state of the People’s Republic, they had to be taught that they were no longer at the center. The center was now Beijing, and their new job was to mark the borders. Ethnic minorities, and their “primitive, simple” culture, marks the edge of the national map, the limits of the known, and the low point beyond which no one cares to go: Here lie serpents.

China has created a clear social compact with its border peoples. Certain kinds of ethnic identity are perfectly fine in China: those that have been created by the state, carefully pruned and managed; those that are non-threatening, playful, entertaining. Perform this identity for pay, and you may be enriched, may even be held up as a model minority to the rest of the nation, celebrated on television shows and in newspapers. Go outside the box, as some Tibetans, Mongolians and Uyghurs have dared to do, and you face prison, torture, even execution.

It is important to note, therefore, that another reason why their cultural activism may be tolerated is that Tais in Yunnan have never advocated for separatism. Rather, they have taken what little space they could, and gradually nudged at its edges, diplomatically dancing around the edges of state rhetoric, and expanding their political space inch by careful inch over the years.

Conclusion: The Party Leads the Way Again
In this regard, it may be illuminating to describe an instance of deft Tai management of the authorities that I witnessed during an Buddhist epic storytelling performance. The story was performed in the middle of a ceremony to celebrate the promotion of six Buddhist monks to the status of khuba, or master. This ceremony marked the first time since the Cultural Revolution that Sipsongpanna had promoted its own khuba, and as such it was a major event. After a day of feasting and rituals, the temple hosting the ceremony invited two top changkhap (Tai oral poets) to perform “Sithat auk boht”, the legend of the Buddha’s enlightenment. Hundreds of Tai villagers, mostly women, crowded into the courtyard to listen, raptly, to the all-night performance.

The two storytellers, a man and a woman, took turns continuing the tale, weaving witticisms, flirtations and praise into their lyrics about the Buddha’s quest for wisdom. As the male narrator began a chapter, there was a rustle at the back of the crowd. A few Tais and a Han Chinese man of about thirty climbed into the circle, and everyone in it tensed.

The Chinese man was cheerful with drink, having made the rounds of a series of village feasts celebrating the ceremony. Surprised to see a foreigner in this gathering who could speak Chinese, he introduced himself: He was the Communist Party Secretary, the highest-ranking official in the area. The Party Secretary did not speak Tai; he was an educated young man of about my age, and perhaps he had not been in the area very long. He beamed around at the crowd and then began to question me in a normal speaking voice, while Aye Kham Naun, the performer, continued to sing.

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

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

“What’s the point of that?”

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

This surprised him. “What for?”

“To put it in a library in America.”

“Do you actually understand this stuff? I don’t understand a word!”

Aye Kham Naun sang,

Now,
The Communist Party has come to lead the way again,
The Party Secretary has come to sit here,
he sits for a long spell, making up half of a happy pair—
a young lady chats with him politely.
Whoever enters this place today, may he live to a ripe old age!

“He is praising you,” one of the elders across the circle said to the Party Secretary in Chinese.

“Ta shuo nide hao hua! He’s saying good things about you!” said another elder, loudly.

“Thank you!” said the Secretary, folding his hands together in a gesture to the singer. He sat fidgeting for another few minutes, then reeled out mid-lyric to go to another banquet.

The gathering visibly relaxed, closing the circle again. No one had gotten into trouble, and the performance could go on.

This article is excerpted from Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China's Southwest Borders (Columbia University Press, 2005; Silkworm Books, 2006). For a pdf with footnotes, please see China Rights Forum, www.hrichina.org.

Anthropology News

In 2002, I left the academic track and took a position at Human Rights Watch as a China researcher. Almost immediately, I was overwhelmed by the fast pace of the job.

Fast-Paced Campaigns

I began the job in the summer, expecting this would give me time to unpack my boxes and settle in. But on the first day, my new boss rushed into the office to say that according to news reports, Yahoo! had just signed an agreement to aid government censorship in China. She asked me to draft a press release. I had never done that before, but wrote something and sent it to her. Now, back to those boxes, I thought.

But this in turn was just one step in a much longer campaign on the role of US corporations in Chinese Internet censorship which came to include press releases, advocacy meetings, op-eds, and a year after I left HRW, a full-length report.

This campaign in itself could have been a full-time job. But while we were working on Yahoo!, the world kept turning. Chinese activists were imprisoned, prisoners released, protests squashed, lawyers beaten, scandals covered up and uncovered. As China researcher, my job was to stay on top of all of it—by monitoring Chinese-language news and developing a network of sources. I also had to learn enough about international law and the organization’s mandate to be able to answer the question, “What should HRW do about this?” Occasionally the answer was another press release; more often we waited and collected more information, or raised the issue behind the scenes.

This steady barrage of crises requires a researcher to do constant triage: juggling emails, phone calls, and people at the door while keeping a long-term strategy in mind. The hectic pace can be tiring, but it can also be exciting. Meanwhile, and this was the second key difference from academic life, I was learning to work as part of a team.

Working as a Team

A junior academic aims to establish her individual prestige, while a human rights worker builds the power of the organization. An academic speaks of how “I” published an article or invented a new theoretical paradigm, but, I learned, a human rights researcher talks in the first person plural: “we published a report,” “we ran a successful campaign.”

This is because HRW and similar groups are made up of dozens of experts—on countries and issues—as well as professional advocates. (Advocacy is the art of persuading global political leaders to take action. Just publishing a report accomplishes little if you don’t also knock on the doors of power holders, hand them the damning evidence and request specific actions.) Several of these internal experts have input into every word the organization publishes, meaning a report that took three months to write might take another six months to publish. Publishing in a peer-reviewed journal was a walk in the park by comparison.

Everything is collaborative. On a good day, this interdisciplinary approach meant that my China research benefited from experts who had worked on the same issues in South Africa, Kazakhstan or California. On a bad day, debates got heated—most human rights workers are lawyers who don’t back down from an argument. But even those fights can lead to smarter strategic decisions. Fortunately, unlike some simmering academic feuds, human rights debates seemed to flare up and die down quickly.

But I found the most challenging difference between human rights work and academia when I planned my first project, on discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS in China.

Strategic Research Reports

Instead of soaking up observations and gluing them together with high theory, I now had to learn to design short-term research projects whose parameters were set by international rights law and whose scope was national, not local. Human rights reports can be used to force dictators from power or press criminal charges, so I had to become a positivist, meeting strict standards of evidence.

However, foreign human rights groups are forbidden to do research in China. Openly working with anyone could lead to their imprisonment. The country where I had studied and worked for years had suddenly become hostile to my presence. I struggled to get even a handful of the dozens of interviews needed to corroborate facts. Still, despite the severe risk to them, quite a few Chinese activists seemed eager to have contact with foreign human rights groups.

Some China experts warned us that because HRW took a critical stance, condemning state abuses, the government would ignore us. Certainly, most Chinese officials refused to meet openly with us. But a few told us privately which human rights issues forward-thinking officials were concerned about which informed our team’s strategy. While the Chinese government publicly condemned our reports, behind the scenes, some officials were using the same reports to do internal lobbying.
HRW’s first report on discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS in China came out in 2003. It included interviews with young men who had been turned away from hospitals and denied treatment because they were HIV-positive. I probably won’t ever forget the voices or the despair of those teenagers.

The report came out just as the UN and international officials began to call on China to confront AIDS, and so it got global media coverage which leveraged our position in advocacy meetings. As HRW traveled to meet with UN, EU, and US officials, giving them the report and urging them to raise the issue in China, we found them receptive. Global pressure grew, while Chinese activists also pushed from inside.

Soon there were some changes. In fall of 2003, for the first time, China’s premier publicly called on the country to fight AIDS. China began to offer access to treatment to some people with AIDS. A few provinces passed policies prohibiting hospitals from refusing care to people with AIDS. We’ll never know how heavily the HRW report weighed in these changes; but that’s also the nature of teamwork.

Shifting from academe to human rights work is challenging, and it is probably not for everyone. It was a good fit for me personally; in fact, I am now starting my own organization, Asia Catalyst, to support local human rights groups in Asia. Over time, I’ve become resigned to the fact that I’ll probably never unpack those boxes.

Asian Wall Street Journal

MANDALAY, Burma -- Despite the military junta's authoritarian rule, the Moustache Brothers are keeping a Burmese tradition alive -- scathing political satire. Lu Maw, Lu Zaw and Par Par Lay, better known as the Moustache Brothers, say that their form of a-nyeint folk performance is as old as the city of Mandalay. It's too bad the ruling generals don't share their sense of humor.

In impoverished Burma, a-nyeint folk comedy -- which weaves humor around dancing women -- is still in style. On special occasions, families host all-night performances for whole villages. Performing troupes travel from town to town. "In the old days, we went to Kachin State, Shan State, all over. We built a stage and slept on it at night," Lu Maw recollects. "If it rains, we sleep underneath."

Today they are blacklisted, and may perform only in their living room for tourists. The show walks a fine line: The brothers mostly stick to old-school folk dance, but they throw in the occasional jab at corrupt traffic cops, deposed generals and government spies. Such humor is part of a grand tradition for the Moustache Brothers, whose father and grandfather were all a-nyeint comedians. "We keep the tradition, the old customs, we are old fogies," says Lu Maw. "Watching a-nyeint used to be like reading a newspaper."

Lu Maw, squatting with an old radio microphone and puffing on a cheroot in the dark, says that the authorities have cut off his electricity tonight because they know it's showtime. "Never mind!" he screeches, in English. "We have generator! We make own power!" He waves his hand: With a thump, the lights come on, and the foreign audience cheers.

The joke is bittersweet. Today, visitors enjoy many privileges that are unimaginable for most Burmese. Free speech is one of them. Inadvertently, the Moustache Brothers have become a human rights minstrel show, mugging for foreigners in their home.

But that doesn't stop them from making fun of their new patrons. Every night, the brothers pose for photos with each audience member, grinning like mad as they hold a sign that reads, "Moustache Brothers are under surveillance." The tourist, smiling more awkwardly, holds a sign that reads "CIA," "Mossad," or "MI5," depending on her nationality.

Lu Maw sights down his arm like a rifle at each well-dressed, well-fed foreigner. "You tourists, you easy money for Moustache Brothers. You sitting duck! I take you out!" He giggles with glee, pointing the imaginary rifle at each of us, then adds, "I joking, I am comedian."

Meanwhile, trishaw drivers glimpse the show as they wait by the doorway to take tourists back to their hotels. They lounge in the unlit street, legs propped on bike handlebars, smoking and laughing. And every evening in Mandalay, an elderly trishaw driver would pedal up to me on the street and ask, hopefully, "Par Par Lay?"

Asian Wall Street Journal

February 20, 2006

As if China's peasants didn't have enough woes. Now, they have to contend with local officials who hire thugs to enforce their will and silence opposition.

Jiang from Shanxi was one such petitioner. He limped into our interview on crutches, and told us that his disability dated to the time when he began complaining about graft committed by the deputy Communist Party secretary of his village. The deputy secretary, he alleged, hired a gangster and drove him to Jiang's home on the back of his motorcycle. The gangster went inside and attacked Jiang with a lead pipe, attempting to kill him but instead shattering his leg. While Jiang and his wife fought for their lives, the deputy Party secretary waited outside on his motorcycle to give the thug a ride home.

A group of farmers from a suburb of Beijing had equally bloody accounts. The township deputy mayor, they alleged, sold their land to a private fishing farm without consent of the village. A village woman organized over three hundred villagers to sign a petition in protest. The day after she submitted it, she disappeared in the middle of the night. Her family believes she is dead.

The farmers decided they would camp out on their land to defend it. The deputy mayor, they said, sent a gang of a hundred and twenty thugs wielding clubs to force them off the land. Faced with the clubs, they fled. We asked the farmers if they had tried taking their case to court. "The local court refused to accept the case," said one. "We have a saying," added another. "Guanguan xianghu -- officials take care of one another."

This idiom -- "officials take care of one another" -- sums up the experiences of many who tried to file complaints about attacks on them by hired thugs. "We went to the city police, the city government, and the county police, everyone," said a Henan petitioner, who reported that he and his family had been attacked and nearly killed by a strongman in the pay of county authorities. "I did it for two years and no one cared. Nothing happened."
Moreover, their attempts to petition about these assaults in Beijing only exposed petitioners to the risk of further violence. Many local officials send "retrievers" to Beijing -- out-of-uniform police and hired gangsters who track down petitioners, threaten and beat them, and often, throw them in detention on trumped-up charges -- all to prevent their complaints.

Though our interviewees came from a range of provinces and social backgrounds, their accounts, shocking at first in their brutality, quickly began to acquire a numbing sameness. Taken together, they painted a picture of a system rotting from the ground up. Without accountability, some of the officials who hire goons to terrorize farmers today will climb the ranks tomorrow, gaining ever greater responsibility. In the worst-case scenario, China could descend into warlordism.

For now, Beijing has tried to force the problem back on the local officials themselves, urging them to exercise greater restraint and "resolve" problems locally. To encourage this, Beijing police are rounding up petitioners en masse and shipping them back to their home towns. But this, of course, merely creates incentives for gangster officials to enforce silence through violent measures. While this may calm the streets of Beijing for a few months, before long we will see larger explosions in the countryside.

What is needed is for the government to launch an investigation into the use of thugs. China's criminal law prohibits kidnapping, violence and threats. Chinese police and prosecutors should use this law to prosecute thugs and officials who hire them. There have been some tentative steps in this direction: On Feb. 9, authorities convicted a Hebei official who hired muscle men to beat and kill protesters.

The knottier problem is that China needs a fair and impartial court system: a procuratorate that can build cases against officials, and an independent judiciary able to hear those cases impartially. Unless China develops institutions that enable villagers to hold local officials accountable for their misdeeds, jailing one or two officials will not bring about systemic reform.

Far Eastern Economic Review

November 2005

Earlier this month, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture makes his first official to visit Tibet, on a mission aimed at documenting the truth, or otherwise, of persistent reports of torture of Tibetan prisoners. As in Tibet, in the wake of the devastation wrought during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76), a second generation of ethnic activists all along China’s borders has begun to quietly pick up the pieces, finding their old relics and putting together fragments of traditions that were hidden in the villages. But since Tibetans’ efforts to excavate their past and shape their future is linked to independence movements, they have received much harsher treatment than other ethnic groups—including some that are similarly reviving cross-border Buddhism.

Both Tibet and the region known as Sipsongpanna (in Chinese, Xishuangbanna) were formerly independent or semi-independent states in which the majority groups were Buddhist. Both groups are repeatedly told by government officials, including some of their own ethnicity, that indigenous religious traditions are “backward,” and that to attain modernization requires cutting off ties with the past and assimilating to secularized mainstream China.

But the similar rhetoric does not lead to similar policies. While Tibetan monks who wish to study in temples outside of China are strictly forbidden to do so, teenage Tai Lue monks go to Thai temples each year with official Chinese visas and government approval. While Tibetans who have contacts with external Buddhist organizations are denounced as puppets of a “Dalai Lama clique,” Tai Lues regularly invite prominent senior Buddhist monks from Burma, where they are honored by thousands of Tai Lue pilgrims.

In the past twenty years, Tai Lues have excavated, revived and reinvented their centuries-old Buddhist institutions. They have rebuilt and renovated 550 Buddhist temples in Sipsongpanna villages, and ordained thousands of boys as novices and monks. The novices, boys as young as nine or 10 years old, study the formerly banned classical Tai Lue script and scriptures in temple classrooms. The senior monks who are their teachers print Buddhist sutras and textbooks out on Macintosh computers owned by the temples, using a Tai Lue font developed in Thailand.

What is more, in the late 1990s, these same monks found a way to make the old written language and ethnic identity “cool” to teenage Tai Lues. As monks in Southeast Asia often do, the Sipsongpanna monks held pop concerts in which rock stars from Sipsongpanna, Burma, Laos and Thailand were pressed by chanting, happy crowds to “sing in Tai.” Some of the Tai Lue pop songs advocated for language use and environmental protection—rapid overdevelopment in Sipsongpanna has led to the wholesale destruction of the rainforests.

Most of this activity would be unthinkable in Tibet, where an ambitious grassroots program that aimed to rebuild Tibetan Buddhist institutions led to a brutal crackdown and the imprisonment of hundreds of monks and nuns in the mid-1990s. Tibetan young people are forbidden to enter Buddhist temple grounds or to own religious objects. According to work forthcoming by Columbia University’s Robbie Barnett, monks and nuns are not even allowed onto university grounds.

Tai Lues have not accomplished their ethnic revival without friction. The abbot of their main temple, Khruba Zhaum, said to me once in passing, “Every time the government looks at me, they think of Tibet. But Tibet is not the same.” Clearly. But I have yet to hear of any political prisoners in Sipsongpanna. There are three key reasons why Tai Lues have a different experience than their Tibetan Buddhist brethren: first, because of the flexibility offered by their crossborder connections; second, because Tai Lues have never demanded independence and have regularly ceded political ground when pushed to do so by the state; and third, because given persistent international criticism, China needs at least a few groups to hold up as an example of success in managing ethnic religion.

There are only one million Tai Lues in China, and most of these live in Sipsongpanna, on the southern tip of China’s southwest Yunnan province. Yunnan, a popular tourist destination because of its temperate weather, striking mountains and ethnic diversity, borders Tibet to the north, and Burma, Laos and Vietnam to the west and south. Sipsongpanna (the Tai Lue name means “twelve rice fields,” a reference to its past political structure) is hilly, subtropical and laid-back. Tai Lues are the dominant ethnic group in Sipsongpanna, and 13 other officially-recognized ethnic groups also live in the prefecture.

However, while a small group within Chinese borders, these Tai Lues are a member of a much larger Tai-Kadai language family that spreads across upland Southeast Asia and southwest China, numbering millions of people. Sipsongpanna has close linguistic, cultural and historical links with people in northern Laos, northeast Thailand, and parts of Burma’s Shan State. I conducted field research in Sipsongpanna from 1997-98, while studying the Tai Lue spoken and written language. I have supplemented this research with numerous additional visits and contacts over the following years.

Most ethnic regions of China have shared some similar experiences. In the years before the founding of the PRC, Tibetans and Tais were both promised the right to secede and declare independence after the nation was established. Both had their promises reneged upon, and instead were given the nominal autonomy that has turned out in both cases to be no autonomy at all. Both faced active government intervention in shaping their official and public identities. During the Cultural Revolution, both experienced the desecration of religious sites, forced secularization of monks, persecution of respected elders, and the wholesale destruction of temples. In the late 1990s, I met one young monk who carried around in his robes a treasured slip of paper on which his uncle had written a list of sacred sites that had been desecrated or destroyed.

Faced with government repression during the 1960s, many Tai Lues packed their belongings and slipped across the borders (often little more than a fence) to stay with Tai Lue cousins in Burma, Laos and Thailand. These flexible borders gave people who would have been dissidents a safe space to wait out the political storm.

Today, the ease of travel and contacts across the borders is beneficial in a second way for young Tai Lues who are interested in not only reviving the past, but in coming up with ways to be ethnic and modern. Today, as all four countries have lifted many restrictions on crossborder travel in order to promote trade, some of those who fled are returning. Young Chinese Tai Lues looking to retrieve their past visit frequently, bringing back texts and information that were destroyed in China. While Chinese official rhetoric often locates minority ethnic identity of any kind in the primitive past, and urges ethnic minorities to modernize by learning Chinese ways and leaving their traditions and languages behind, Tai Lues who travel to Thailand speak of seeing a country that has kept their language and religious traditions alive, and modernized anyway.

Lessons learned on trips to Thailand and Burma have fueled many late-night debates between younger and elder Tai Lues about how best to proceed in the future. These debates, some of which participants spoke to me about, have drawn on indigenous strategies that ethnic minorities have developed over the years to manage their dominators. This cultural strategizing is a second reason why Tai Lues appear to have ducked some of the harsher consequence meted out in Tibet. Tai Lue nobility joined the Communist Party during the revolution, and many high-ranking noblemen were appointed to positions in the local government after “liberation” in 1955. Activists in Sipsongpanna have been careful not to push beyond the limits of official tolerance, and the experiences of Tibetans have shown what those limits may be.

Thus, while Tibetan monks and laypeople have organized pro-independence demonstrations and faced harsh punishments for doing so, Tai Lues have been careful to never call for independence. Some of this is practical: as one Tai Lue activist put it, “Of course, we’ve discussed [independence]. Do you think we don’t know what happens in the rest of the world? But if Sipsongpanna were an independent nation, we would be like Laos or Nepal....No one would care what happens to us.”

Another said that the success of the Tai Lue religious and cultural revival has owed something to the care they have taken to avoid conflict: “We are not confrontational.” Conversations in the late 1990s about forming an organization of former monks to promote Tai Lue cultural revival led to a collective decision to not do so, after some Tai Lue elders pointed out what happened to similar kinds of groups in Tibet.

Such strategies may also owe something to the lessons learned during Chinese imperialism. During much of Sipsongpanna’s past, a Chinese official and a Tai Lue prince each governed the region from separate quarters—the Chinese official from his fortified barracks, the Tai Lue prince from his wooden palace. In this period, Tai Lues found, as Hsieh Shih-chung observes, that “The best strategy was to declare oneself a vassal first, and then do as one pleased.”

During research into Tai Lue Buddhist storytelling, I saw this done on numerous occasions—one memorable one in particular. Once, about halfway through an epic performance of a Buddhist legend to which thousands had come to see, the Communist Party Secretary, the highest-ranking party official in the region, was ushered into the courtyard. Slightly the worse for the many rounds of toasts he had shared at other village feasts, and astonished at the presence of a foreign woman with a tape recorder, he began to question me, loudly, in Chinese, about my presence and purpose there. The circle tensed.

Then the oral storyteller began to weave into his narrative some improvised words of praise for the leadership of the Communist Party, calling down blessings on the Party Secretary. The elders sitting across the circle leaned over and said, loudly, to the Party Secretary in accented Chinese, “He is praising you! He’s saying good things about you!” Pleased, the Secretary thanked them, folded his hands in a formal greeting to the singer, and then reeled out of the performance to go to another feast. By wining and dining official delegations and bestowing praise and gifts on them, Tai Lues gave face to Chinese conquerors while maintaining a parallel, subterranean political structure which was where local politics took place.

The Tai Lue ethnic revival has been built on many such small instances: a strategic combination of face-giving and the inch-by-inch retaking of political ground lost in the past. When ordered to stop doing something by the state—for instance, in 1999 they were instructed to stop holding rock concerts on temple grounds—they quickly back down. But their flexibility and tactful persistence has paid off over time—in 2004, they were authorized to construct a concert venue where performances could be held indoors.

Today, many of China’s ethnic peoples face similar challenges. Chinese government policies, though framed as support for economic development, has led to massive in-migration of Han Chinese into all of China’s contested borderlands, resulting in a loss of economic opportunities to local minorities and creating new threats to ethnic language and culture via a flood of Chinese-language mass media. The construction of large-scale infrastructure projects—in Tibet, a railway; in Yunnan, a superhighway linking Kunming to Thailand—may have brought some benefits to border regions. However, such projects have also sped up Chinese resource extraction from the borderlands, and have caused destruction of ethnic villages, destruction of historic and sacred sites, and displacement of impoverished ethnic peoples.

Hence, the third reason why Tai Lues and some other southwestern ethnic groups appear to get off a little more lightly than Tibetans. To minimize open dissent as it dominates and incorporates the ethnic borderlands, China has gradually developed a carrot-and-stick policy. The unspoken message goes something like this: Behave “well,” like the Tai Lue, Miao, Naxi and other southwestern groups, by never engaging in open critique of state policy and never demanding genuine autonomy or independence, and you will be rewarded. These rewards may include economic prosperity, flattering depictions and praise in official media, and a little extra political and social space on the ground.

But behave “badly,” like Tibetans and Uighurs, by organizing pro-independence demonstrations and resisting state control, and you will be severely punished with imprisonment, torture, even execution.

The Tai Lue are a small group, and the extent of their ethnic and religious revival may be anomalous, but like other ethnic peoples on China’s contested borderlands, they know the cost of every potential action and weigh it carefully before acting. No ethnic group in China dares to engage in any unofficial cultural or political activity without calculating how their actions might figure in the Tibet equation.

Amazon.com

Columbia University Press

Barnes and Noble

Tuesday, November 14 - Los Angeles
Dutton's Books, Beverly Hills
7 pm
Book reading

Thursday, November 16 - San Jose, CA
American Anthropological Association annual meeting
4-5:45 pm
Panel discussant, "Engendering Textual Authority"

Asian Wall Street Journal

August 25, 2005

This summer, I took a research team to Beijing to document police abuse against petitioners for an upcoming Human Rights Watch report. In pairs and small groups, over the course of two weeks, the victims straggled into our various meeting rooms, hidden around the city. Some were on crutches after beatings in detention, while others had lost fingers to torture. Many had the blank gaze acquired over long months of imprisonment. Together, they formed a river of internal refugees fleeing state violence. In thick local dialects, they recounted experiences of police violence, including attacks by local police who came to Beijing to prevent them petitioning.

To be fair, in some cases, police chiefs are honest officials who act fairly. But others are the same police chiefs formerly ordered by local officials to beat petitioners, torture them, imprison them, and stop them from getting to Beijing in the first place. In a few cases -- and imagining these meetings boggles the mind -- they will be the very police officers who are the subjects of the original complaints.

Without basic protections against retaliation, this new program could open the door to a raft of new abuses. China must engage in thorough police reform as part of any long term solution to its dysfunctional petitioning system.

There is no question that the petitioning system, a uniquely Chinese cultural-legal institution, needs some fixing. Each year, tens of thousands of farmers and others throng Beijing in the hope that some national official will intercede in their local cases. Many are victims of official corruption, forced resettlement, and police brutality. These "petitioners," are exercising an ancient Chinese right, protected in national law, that allows anyone to submit a complaint to the government.

Many petitioners have tried their local courts first and failed to find justice. Petitioning in Beijing is the court of last resort. However, few find satisfaction there either. Many spend their life savings while waiting for an official reply to their appeals, and wind up encamped in a shantytown of Dickensian squalor known as the "petitioners' village" where they live on scraps scavenged from the streets. Though the labyrinthine system fails many, there are few other options under China's weak legal system, and so the numbers of petitioners continues to grow. In the first quarter of 2005, the State Council Petitions Bureau in Beijing reported an increase of more than 90% in the numbers of letters and visits compared to the same period last year.

However, petitioners complaining in Beijing can make provincial authorities look bad to their supervisors in the capital. Thus, provincial governments send plainclothes police and thugs to Beijing, where they lie in wait for petitioners from their home province. When they find petitioners, these officers -- known as "retrievers" -- often beat or threaten them. Sometimes, they bundle petitioners into cars and take them back home. Some are released there, while others are thrown into detention without trial.

One man we met from Henan province in central China had been petitioning for decades and been "retrieved" many times. His saga began when a local official hired thugs to kill his father over a land claim. Finding no justice in Henan, he petitioned in Beijing. There he was grabbed by provincial "retrievers" who permanently crippled his two middle fingers, and then took him to a detention center in Henan -- in fact an unused army barracks. They kept him there to cook for them for a while, but after a blizzard shut down the unheated facility, the police told him he was free to go. He immediately returned to Beijing to petition, and said he had been seized in the same way and beaten multiple times. He no longer dares to leave the petitioners' village.

His tale was extreme, but not unusual. Petitioners are often imprisoned in local detention centers for exercising their legally-guaranteed right to petition. One petitioner in her sixties told us that when she demanded to know why she was being imprisoned, "The officers said, `You've done nothing illegal. This is to stop you from petitioning.'"

Ironically, and tragically, many of the petitioners thus mistreated are petitioning over police abuse in the first place. We interviewed several parents who began petitioning after sons died in police custody.

It is commendable that the Public Security Minister Zhou Yongkang, is ready to take action on the petitioning problem. Mr. Zhou recently announced that he would require police chief to meet with petitioners from their region. Almost immediately, he reported high success rates in resolving petitioners' cases. But in the context of widespread police abuse, this should give pause for thought. Exactly what does Minister Zhou mean by "resolved"? How many cases have been resolved by leaving petitioners battered in jail cells or working 18-hour days in reeducation-through-labor camps?

Mr. Zhou should tell China and the world exactly what concrete steps his ministry will take to investigate and hold officials and police accountable for retaliation against petitioners. Then the whole police force should be retrained, each last officer.

Such measures are critical if there is ever to be an end to the petitioning problem. Some petitioners told our research team that they have nothing left to lose. Anything less than thorough reform will leave Beijing without a dam against a swelling river of battered, traumatized, and angry rural petitioners.

Asian Wall Street Journal

July 4, 2005

AIDS still poses a fundamental challenge to China's top-down, hierarchical system, even if Chinese officials deserve praise for finally beginning to confront the epidemic with a raft of new public statements and policies. In order to fight HIV/AIDS, Beijing must give up its stranglehold on civil society, and let a hundred organizations bloom.

Asian Wall Street Journal

By Sara Davis and Mickey Spiegel

February 18, 2005

China's grim 19th century style mines -- many of them little more than holes in the ground -- claimed yet more lives this week. A gas explosion ripped through the Sunjiawan coal mine in the northeastern province of Liaoning on Monday, killing at least 210. And a blast at an illegal coal mine in Fuyuan County in the southwestern province of Yunnan claimed at least five more lives Tuesday. They were just the latest casualties in a familiar story of mining accidents, which routinely claim the lives of dozens of young miners every month. China must begin to supervise these companies and the international community must ensure that they do.

South China Morning Post

March 20, 2004

The National People's Congress closed its session this month by ratifying a constitutional amendment promising "to protect and safeguard human rights".

International Herald Tribune

August 25, 2004

At the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games on Sunday, Athens will pass the Olympic flag to China and officially begin the countdown to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. But while China uses the Olympic flag to polish its international image and attract global investment, local officials in China continue to cover up one of the world's worst AIDS epidemics.