Abstract
This chapter analyzes competing claims to heritage in Ping’an, the most popular tourism village in the Longji Terraced Fields Scenic Area in Guangxi. Claiming heritage in Ping’an is comprised of overlapping processes of identity construction and commercialization by various actors, from the ethnic Zhuang village residents, to migrant entrepreneurs from across China and overseas, to the tourism company working with local government to manage and promote the area. The chapter argues that strategies for creating and asserting heritage rely upon and reconfigure actual spaces in the village and the scenic area, creating “fences” that reinforce larger claims to cultural authority.
…Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down….
Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)
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Notes
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- 2.
Studies in Ping’an village, for example, indicate that tourism development has significantly contributed to household incomes. Huang (2006) found that annual incomes rose from 4,000 RMB before tourism (no exact date is given) to between 10,000 and 30,000 RMB annually; Sha et al. (2007) found that 61.7 % of surveyed households reported an annual per capita income of 2,000 RMB, or approximately 10,000–12,000 RMB/year. My own data from Ping’an, collected in 2007, suggested that annual household incomes ranged between 10,000 and 20,000 RMB (Chio 2009b).
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This was the full price charged to individual tourists who were not traveling as a part of a tour group. The group price for tickets was 40 RMB/person.
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Actually, prior to 2011, I always saw Longji Old Village referred to in English as Longji Ancient Village; the swapping out of “ancient” for “old” in the English translation is something I have only noticed in the new scenic area map online.
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The national “Golden Week” holidays in China were created in 1999 to promote domestic leisure spending; they encompassed the national holidays of Spring Festival in late winter, May 1, and October 1. Beginning in 2008, the “Golden Weeks” were revised to include only Spring Festival and October 1, and new national holidays were created for the Dragon’s Boat Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival in order to make up for the days lost in eliminating the May 1 “Golden Week.” Regardless of the revisions, because these are national holidays, the pressures and strain on national transport infrastructure are immense, although it was also during these holidays when village businesses in Ping’an earned a major proportion of their annual income.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the residents of Ping’an village, local and migrant, for sharing their opinions, concerns, and hopes with me over the years, as well as to the employees of the tourism management company who have always welcomed me into the scenic area. Thanks are also due to the editors of this volume for inviting me to contribute an essay and for their insightful feedback on earlier drafts. Support for this research came from the Fulbright Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award program, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and various units at the China Research Centre, University of Technology, Sydney and the University of California, Berkeley.
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Chio, J. (2013). Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: Claiming Heritage in the Longji Terraced Fields Scenic Area. In: Blumenfield, T., Silverman, H. (eds) Cultural Heritage Politics in China. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6874-5_8
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