Doing Business in Rural China

Front matter

DOING BUSINESS IN RURAL CHINA

STUDIES ON ETHNIC GROUPS IN CHINA

Stevan Harrell, Editor

Contents

Foreword by Stevan Harrell vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Liangshan and Its Entrepreneurs 3 1 | Nuosu Traditional Culture and Social Change 26 2 | The Liangshan Economic Setting and Private Entrepreneurs 39 3 | Private Sector Development in Nine Liangshan Counties 51 4 | Comparative Profiles of Nuosu and Han Entrepreneurs 82 5 | The Effect of Entrepreneurs on Local Politics 121 6 | Entrepreneurs and Social Change 150 7 | Entrepreneurs and Ethnic Relations 170 8 | Entrepreneurs and Ethnic Identity 186 Conclusion : The Influence of Nuosu Entrepreneurs 206 Notes 215 Bibliography 223

Foreword

The publication of Thomas Heberer’s Doing Business In Rural China marks at least three mileposts for the University of Washington Press series on Studies on Ethnic Groups in China, its editor, and its authors. This is the tenth book in the series, and it appears in the first return of the Year of the Pig, which saw the inaugural volume Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers. And it appears in the dinghai Year of the Golden Pig, the birth year and thus sixtieth birthday year both for my dear friend and age mate Thomas Heberer and for me.

Professor Heberer is justly known for re-introducing the study of the Nuosu, or Yi of Liangshan, to the scholarly literature in Western languages. As an editor and translator for Peking Rundschau (the German edition of the Chinese government magazine Peking Review) in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was granted what was then rare access to the minority areas of southwest China, in particular the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in southwestern Sichuan. His visits to the prefectural capital of Xichang and to the counties of Zhaojue, Meigu, Xide, and Yuexi led to the publication, in 1984, of his pioneering work Nationalitdtenpolitik und Entwicklungspolitik in den Gebieten Nationaler Minderheiten in China (Nationality politics and development politics in national minority areas of China). This was his first monograph and the first work in a European language to treat the Nuosu in detail since Lin Yaohua’s 1947 Liangshan Yijia (translated into English as Lolo of Liangshan in 1962). The general and theoretical sections of Heberer’s monograph appeared in a very abridged, but nonetheless informative and influential English edition, China and Its National Minorities: Autonomy or Assimilation (1987), but the rich ethnographic and empirviii Foreword ical sections dealing with his initial research in Liangshan remained inaccessible to those unable to read German.

Since that first book, Thomas Heberer has written or edited a long series of monographs and volumes of essays, on topics as diverse as the political legacy of Mao Zedong, corruption in China, women’s political participation in Asia, and Chinese rock music. But he has never given up his interest in Liangshan or the Nuosu people who live there, and in the intervening years he has published many articles in German, English, and Chinese, as well as organized two museum exhibits of Nuosu arts and crafts. He was a participant in the First International Conference on Yi Studies, held in Seattle in 1995, and organized the Second International Conference at his former University of Trier in 1998. Most notably, he secured the funding to endow a large elementary school in the county seat of Meigu, where the opening ceremonies were held for the Fourth International Conference in 2005. In the years from 1999 to 2002, he had the opportunity to return to his scholarly roots in Liangshan and to collaborate with colleagues at the Liangshan Prefecture Nationalities Research Institute in a four-year study of an important, emerging phenomenon—the rise of entrepreneurs among a people for whom business and commerce were previously despised occupations. Through four summers of rain, mud, jeeps, and drink, Heberer and his colleagues visited almost all of Liangshan’s seventeen counties, interviewed more than a hundred Nuosu and Han entrepreneurs, and collected reams of statistics on local economic development and the role of entrepreneurs in the local economy and society.

When Professor Heberer approached me about including a prospective monograph on Liangshan entrepreneurs in the Studies on Ethnic Groups in China series, I was enthusiastically receptive. Because of differing styles of writing and editing in German- and English-language scholarly publications, and because of the vagaries of translation, it has taken longer than any of us wished to bring the book to fruition. But it has been well worth the wait. This is the first study in a Western language of minority entrepreneurs anywhere in China, and one of the most detailed ethnographic accounts of any facet of Nuosu life or culture. In it, Heberer combines his scholarly training as a political scientist with his natural talent as an ethnographer to present us with both the daily life of Nuosu entrepreneurs and the larger social, political, and developmental contexts in which they live and work. His discussions of entrepreneurship and poverty, entrepreneurship and development, entrepreneurship and ethnicity have implications far beyond the detailed study of one remote region in China, shedding light

Foreword ix on the role of entrepreneurs in economic peripheries all over today’s globalizing world.

What makes this work so special is perhaps best expressed by my memory of a conversation with the author and his wife, Jing, about the benefits of doing long-term fieldwork in China. Man lernt so viel, he said, “One learns so much.” Von Thomas Heberer haben wir alle so viel gelernt.

STEVAN HARRELL Seattle, April 2007

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the support of many individuals and institutions. The Institute of Nationalities Studies of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Xichang (research partner with the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen) received the funding and equipment for the research project through a generous grant from the German Volkswagen Foundation. Moreover, four Yi scholars had the opportunity to receive further training in empirical research methods at the Institute of East Asian Studies in 2000 and 2001 through funding by the Volkswagen Foundation, which also funded my research trips to Liangshan.

Above all, I would like to express my heartfelt appreciation to my Yi colleagues at the Institute of Nationalities Studies, who worked with undoubted commitment and did their utmost to enable the implementation of this project on the ground. During our joint field research, they shared not only scholarly success and happy events with me, but also hardships and difficulties. Without their guidance, I would not have been able to understand many of the socioeconomic structures and processes in Liangshan. I am therefore very grateful to Luohong Zige (Luo Cong), director of the Institute, and his deputy, Mgebbu Lunzy (Ma Erzi), as well as senior research fellows Bajie Rihuo and Gaga Erri. I am also grateful to Li Jin and Dong Hongqing, two Han scholars from Liangshan Agricultural College who participated in our research, for their support. Wang Bin, from Meigu County, also contributed notably to the project. My sincere gratitude goes as well to the Party committees and governments of the counties of Butuo, Ganluo, Jinyang, Meigu, Mianning, Puge, Yanyuan, and Zhaojue, without whose support this research project could not have been so successfully managed. I am very xi xii Acknowledgments grateful, too, to the large number of officials and entrepreneurs who, through their various efforts, facilitated the success of this research.

I would like to express special thanks to Stevan Harrell for his valuable comments and advice, and for the opportunity to publish this book in the series Studies on Ethnic Groups in China. Lorri Hagman at the University of Washington Press was particularly supportive and provided fruitful advice throughout the publishing process. Further thanks go to Timothy J. Gluckman, who translated most of the text from German into English, and especially to Victoria Polling who brought the English text into splendid form. Finally, I would like to thank Rene Trappel, Peter in der Heiden, Julian Schollmeyer, and Michael Petzold, who helped format the manuscript.

THOMAS HEBERER Duisburg, March 2007

DOING BUSINESS IN RURAL CHINA

MAP 1. China