The Making of Ethnic Yunnan on the National Mall

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival (SFF): Cultural Brokerage

A salient, institutionalized paradigm for cultural representation and “the public face of a national cultural agency” (Diamond and Trimillos, 2008), the SFF was founded in 1967 on the American democratic ideal of cultural diversity. The Smithsonian Institution launched its first Festival of American Folklore (FAF), the predecessor of the SFF, as “an addition and alternative” to the Smithsonian national museums, to redefine the popular roots of American national culture and to produce a “public American celebration of self” (Kurin, 1997: 118). With “nationalism as a festival constant”(Satterwhite, 2008: 13), the FAF in its early years presented and celebrated America’s traditional, regional, and minority grassroots cultural heritage, or “quintessential Americanness” (Satterwhite, 2008: 18). ²

Evolving from its early emphasis on national image and cultural conservation (Bauman, Sawin, and Carpenter, 1992; Cantwell, 1991; Bronner, 2002), the SFF has recently experienced a transition from national to international programming, exemplified by its production of the single-themed international program “Silk Road” in 2002. In 2007, when forty artists from ten ethnic nationalities ³ in Yunnan presented crafts, religious rituals, folksongs, and dances at the SFF, they performed together with artists from the other Mekong countries, Northern Ireland, Senegal, and the U.S. state of Virginia. But, as the SFF has matured as a global festival, its ideological foundation of preservation, heterogeneity, and cultural democracy, as some scholars have observed, has remained unchanged (Kurin, 1998; Diamond and Trimillos, 2008). In his welcome statement at the 2007 SFF, Kurin praised the knowledge, skills, and artistry of these participants as “the human treasures of diverse cultures.” And their valuable traditions were offered there to share and to teach, as knowledge “respected and appreciated by their fellow human beings” (Kurin, 2007).

However, the SFF is not merely a symbolic place for exercising ideology (Cantwell, 1991) nor is what it does entirely its organizers’ own choice. It is also a large-scale public display produced through complex processes of negotiation among all of those involved. Reflecting on his own working experience in CFCH, Kurin characterizes the SFF as a product of “cultural brokerage” (Kurin, 1997: 13). It is subject not only to the values and criteria of its producers and curators but also to “corporate funding, directives of local government, special interest groups, and the whims of changing administrations” (Diamond and Trimillos, 2008: 5). Sommers (1994), a contracted curator for the Michigan program at the 1987 FAF, observed that the Smithsonian ideology of cultural preservation and empowerment determined that threatened, pre-industrial traditions were more likely to appear than those lacking time-depth. At the same time, the Smithsonian organizers’ selection of artists had to be partly tailored to sustain the positive political image of the Michigan state administration, which insisted on including an Asian American artist so that all of “the protected groups” were represented at the festival. ⁴

Satterwhite, in studying the festival images of Appalachia in 1976 and 2003, points out that the shift from regionalist Americana to international exotica is “exemplified in particular by changing funding sources for the SFF,” which in 1976 included labor unions and by 2003 featured tourist associations (2008: 10). In a similar vein, Kurin discusses negotiations with corporate sponsors for the exhibit “America’s Smithsonian” in 1996, in which CFCH found itself with little influence or no role in working with companies as they developed exhibits for their spaces. The partners were entitled to produce these exhibits in return for their sponsorship (Kurin, 1997: 42). The mediation between ideology and praxis discussed here depicts a multifarious scenario of collaboration and resistance among myriad political and economic interests. These varied forces always condition the programs that are presented at the SFF and the ways in which they are presented.

In the SFF’s international programs, the bridging of multiple interests and discourses through cultural brokerage may have unforeseen results. In his case study of “The Festival of India” at the 1985 SFF, Kurin unfolds the complex, divergent perceptions of the programs from the viewpoints of the festival organizers and the artists. While the CFCH curators framed the presentations of Indian arts as authentic, rooted in tradition, this group of low-caste artists performed their art as a political act, showing their struggle for the right to practice their art at home in India. Kurin states that “their existence rather than their texts constituted their most compelling feature” (1997: 152). In 1998 when the Philippines decided to participate in the SFF as part of the centennial celebration of its independence from Spain, Trimillos observed that the Filipino planning group strategically advanced its nationalist agenda when faced with the SFF policy of prohibiting the display of national flags. The decorative banderitas at the site displayed the colors of their national flag and became a coded but very public form of resistance in service of national image (Trimillos, 2008: 70).

These case studies show that the perspective of “cultural brokerage” is crucial in understanding program production at the increasingly globalized SFF. The current CFCH involves and mobilizes international groups of special interests, corporations, the tourism industry, and foreign governments more than ever before to make this event possible and appealing to a broad and large audience. International forces play an active role in shaping festival presentations and productions as presenters, sponsors, and cultural brokers. The recognition of these groups as strategic communicators rather than as “the presented” helps to broaden our view of what is performed on the stage, how it reaches that stage, and how the reality of ongoing domestic change is expressed internationally. Thus, through examining the brokering of ethnic performing arts of Yunnan and their final presentation on the National Mall, the following sections explore the encounters of divergent conceptions of cultural representation, their underlying political agendas, and the way Yunnan officials artistically transformed the 2007 SFF stage into an arena of their own to display Yunnan’s provincial identity and further its economic development scheme.

Bringing Yunnan to the National Mall: The Ethnographic and the Theatrical

The 2007 SFF project resulted from Ms. Grace’s long-term endeavor to preserve and to globally present Yunnan’s grassroots ethnic performing arts. During her dance research trips in 2000, 2002, and 2003, Ms. Grace visited minority regions in Yunnan and was impressed by the appeal of ethnic folksongs and dances performed by village artists. She was struck by the difference between these grassroots performances and what Chinese mainstream society perceived as ethnic performing arts, such as the professionalized performance “Achi Mugua” (interview, August 11, 2008). At the same time, Ms. Grace also observed “the degradation, if not the destruction” of Yunnan’s ethnic cultural heritage because of the rapid pace of Yunnan’s economic and social development, especially ethnic tourism. In order to keep Yunnan’s ethnic performing arts “vital” in this changing environment, Ms. Grace engaged in what she called “cultural mediation” even before she approached CFCH and Yunnan for the 2007 SFF program, through her documentation, presentations at academic conferences, and the organization of an American tour of a group of ethnic native musicians from Yunnan in 2005. ⁵

To borrow from Cantwell’s and Sommers’ discussions of the SFF, Ms. Grace’s “cultural mediation” demonstrates the practice of influencing “cultural processes through cultural processes” (Cantwell, 1991: 151), with a shared ideology of preserving and diffusing local knowledge. The 2005 American tour could be viewed as an “ideal” model of this practice given that it was created in congruence with the producer’s own values and definitions (Sommers, 1994: 181). The tour foregrounded “folk-ness” by selecting artists who had never been trained in China’s formal art schools. They brought to the audience what they sang and danced in their own villages and communities. They performed on small stages and participated in exchange programs that enabled them to interact with their American audiences. To use the poetic language of CFCH, the performances on this tour represented the supposedly unscripted display of slices of life. ⁶

However, the production of Yunnan’s 2007 SFF project was a different story. Except for four folk artists who had either performed in the 2005 American tour or were “fought for” (zhengqu) by Ms. Grace, Yunnan’s high-profile minority folksong and dance performances were the work of professionals employed in the governmental troupes. These professionals, favored by the Cultural Department of the Yunnan provincial government, consisted of fourteen dancers from the Flower Lantern Troupe and seven ethnic native singers. The former performed Lisu and Jingpo ethnic dances that were specifically adapted and choreographed for the 2007 SFF by a dance professor at the Beijing Dance Academy. ⁷ The performances of ethnic native singers, who appeared on the central stage at symbolic moments of the festival such as the opening and closing ceremonies to represent Yunnan, ranged from hometown folksongs to professionally composed or re-arranged songs from their native places. Interestingly, Pumi singer Rongba Xinna, Tibetan and Lisu singers of the Shangri-La quartet vocal group, and Yi singer Gao Hongzhang were all award-winning star singers at provincial or national singing competitions, such as the prestigious biennial Chinese Youth Singing Contest (Zhongguo qingnian geshou dajiangsai) broadcast nationwide in China since 1984.

During the selection process, Ms. Grace wrote to Yunnan’s cultural officials that the proposed programs featured professionals instead of folk artists and, with glitzy costumes and the use of pre-recorded music on stage, suffered from production values meant for television. She argued that the official preference for “modernizing” ethnic performing arts “sacrificed the very spirit and essence that make the traditional arts so relevant and necessary to our time.” In her view, in spite of the great pride Yunnan’s arts professionals and cultural officials took in the rich cultural traditions of Yunnan, there was some “confusion” over how these traditions could best be kept vital and presented to a broader public both in China and abroad (email communication, February 7, 2007).

While the Yunnan officials agreed on the suitability of “peasant artists from fields and villages” (tianjian dijiao) for the SFF, Mr. Fan pointed out in his interview:

But at the same time we felt that this was such an influential event, we needed the participation of professional troupe members. We selected the programs in the same way, systematically integrating the two, because folk (minjian) artists often performed individually or in a pair. It was somewhat monotonous and dull (dandiao). [The National Mall was] such a significant site, so many people, our performances needed to produce a certain atmosphere (qifen). If a dance was performed by ten or twenty people, the atmosphere would be better. . . .

We kept introducing [our ideas], and in my opinion, it was not true that one artist could not be a folk artist only because he/she graduated from an art academy. . . . We needed to see whether the content and performance style could embody the characteristics of ethnicity and folk-ness. . . . All of our programs were meticulously selected, drawing their materials from the folk and coming from the folk. And eventually we brought them to the United States. So I confidently say that every performance was warmly received [by the audience].

Mr. Fan interpreted “folk-ness” as a matter more of artistic re-creation or performance style rather than an expression of local knowledge. Professionalized ethnic performing arts could still possess their “folk-ness” if the singing or choreography embodied characteristics of the original folk versions. And the professionalized “folk-ness,” or the integration of folk-ness and professional performance in Fan’s words, was actually regarded as more successful in achieving a favorable audience reaction by avoiding tedium or dullness. This perspective reflected an entrenched practice of privileging the professional over the folk in China’s mainstream art schools and troupes. In this tradition, folk performing arts are highly recognized as being the fresh, vigorous fountain available for professional re-creation, inspiring artists to distill the essence from folk art and, further, to endow it with more desirable artistic appeal. And, as Ms. Grace observed during her dance research trips, professionalized folk-ness has long been conventionally used to represent ethnic performing arts on China’s mainstream stages.

As in Bulgaria (Silverman, 1983), the Uzbek SSR (Slobin, 1971), or socialist Tanzania before the 1980s (Edmondson, 2001), China has historically institutionalized ethnic folk performing arts through establishing state-run troupes, conservatories, and art schools (Liu, 1993; Lau, 1996). Mackerras states that “professionalization is the single most important phenomenon to affect the performing arts of the minority nationalities since 1949” (Mackerras, 1984). In the 1950s and 1960s, journeying to minority regions to search for “vocabulary” (yuhui) and “elements” (yuansu) for professional stages was vigorously practiced among the early generations of socialist China’s artists (Jin, 2009). Their professionalized practices and aesthetics have been transmitted to later generations through institutional training and have simultaneously molded public taste and perceptions of ethnic performing arts. It is not surprising that Mr. Fan’s perspective on folk-ness was shared by the professional musicians and dancers of the Yunnan delegation regardless of their ethnicity. Thus, Mr. Fan’s views indicate that Yunnan’s resistance to Ms. Grace’s presentation of the 2005 tour was not because of “confusion,” but because of his belief that unrefined “folk-ness” could not fully produce what Yunnan officials expected to achieve, which was the “atmosphere” that excited and enchanted the audience through the aesthetic effects of professionalized performances.

Yunnan’s pursuit of aesthetic effects also reminds us of a common practice in cultural exchange performances worldwide. Trimillos argues that, when performing to an audience of a different culture, artists walk a fine line between garnering applause and keeping the integrity of tradition. Performances cannot avoid the fate of problematic adaptations if they try to achieve “the immediate effect” of so-called “one-night stands” (Trimillos, 1995: 29). In his research on the renowned state folk dance troupes from the former Soviet Union, Mexico, Croatia, Egypt, Greece, and Turkey, Shay points out that, when performing on world stages, they shared choreographic strategies of juxtaposing folk-ness and professionalism, including geometric floor patterns, the use of primary colors and cultural contextualization (e.g., ritual, festival related dances), and dramatic performing styles, in order to produce “perfect spectacle” (Shay, 2002: 216). The pursuit of the aesthetic effects of the art of dance instead of dance as ethnography precisely reveals the locus of tension between Yunnan’s and Ms. Grace’s presentation choices. This conflict shows that what the Yunnan officials endeavored to bring to the National Mall was not so much “local knowledge” or “slices of life” as theatrically designed artistic products of professionalized folk-ness. These highly crafted performances were designed to be shown on stage, assuming the responsibility to create an authoritative and aesthetically impressive display of both the “characteristics” of Yunnan’s minority folksongs and dances and the performers’ artistic excellence. In fact, the appeal of these performances had been proven even before the SFF by the growing fame and success in China of these newly rising ethnic star singers.

The Yunnan program was not the first at the SFF to bring the disjuncture between the ethnographic and the theatrical to the fore. As scholars have observed, though CFCH poetically imagines the SFF as a site of cultural exchange and sharing, there has been a tendency for the festival fieldworkers, organizers, and artists to select or to favorably feature on stage the inherently performable, “flashy” songs and dances that readily engage audiences (Bauman, Sawin, and Carpenter, 1992; Sommers, 1994; Diamond and Trimillos, 2008). When programming “Music of the Peoples of the Soviet Union” for the 1988 FAF, the festival staff similarly encountered a conventional practice of former Soviet folklorists, which was to theatrically perform folklore on public festival stages. For these performances, as Kurin comments, ethnographic reality may be a source or an inspiration for a displayed performance, “but highly valued innovation and artistic control are vested in a professional staff” (Kurin, 1997: 173). And when Kurin was invited to bring the American delegation to the folklore festival organized by the former Soviet Union in the same year, they unsurprisingly found that, to the great dissatisfaction of the Soviet artistic director, their performances “failed to fill the stage.” However, while the Smithsonian staff had managed in the end to re-work the former Soviet folklorists’ theatrical approach in 1988, Yunnan officials effectively embedded the theatrical into “splendid” (jingcai) folksong and dance performances on the National Mall.

Imaging “Ethnic, Aesthetic Yunnan” on the National Mall: Provincial Identity and Place Making

With the expectation of garnering applause and “truly” representing Yunnan as Mr. Fan emphasized, what images did the Yunnan provincial government intend to present to the festival audience? How did these professionalized, theatrical presentations help to shape the ways the audience looked at and thought of Yunnan? And how did the crafted images transmit the state’s representations of Yunnan and its ethnic cultures back in China?

At the performance site, a sense of unfamiliarity and the exotic was created through intense sensory stimulation, including color, costume, dance movement, and song lyrics in ethnic languages. All the singers sang in their native tongues, not in Mandarin, which the young ethnic star singers often adopted in their performances back in China. Though none of the Flower Lantern dancers could speak either the Lisu or Jingpo language, they were required to memorize and to perform the lyrics in order to convey the indigenous nature of the dances. And the indigenous was further enacted by replacing recorded music and modern instruments with vocal music accompanied by the instruments that ethnic locals commonly use in their entertainment, including tambourine, small hand-held drum, the Tibetan two-string fiddle, the Lisu four-string fiddle, the Dai gourd-bamboo flute, and the Yi gourd pipe and tree leaf.

But the exotic was not intended to alienate the SFF’s “thoroughly modern audience” (Camp and Lloyd, 1982: 68). The performances, whether the folk or the professional, were ready to be embraced through their short and strongly expressive stage presentations. For instance, the Naxi folksong “Marrying-off the Daughter” has a sorrowful melody to convey a mother’s sadness at having to send her daughter away. Coming from this culture, folk singer He Jinhua, with her mellow, silky singing and her sentimental performance on stage, effectively intensified this emotion. For an outsider audience, who had no knowledge of the Naxi language or marital custom, the melody of the song and He’s emotionally contagious performance helped to bridge the distance created by the unfamiliar lyrics. For the professional singers, the competence they gained as part of their disciplinary training, which was the ability to perform folk singing for an outsider audience through melody adaptation, singing technique, and stage style, was skillfully applied to their performances on the National Mall. Pumi singer Rongba Xinna’s dragon-worship song, one of her prize-winning pieces at professional contests in China, was specifically adapted from Pumi folksongs and recomposed to give full scope to her voice. The intrepid spirit of the song was effectively embodied through her sonorous voice and her zealous performing style. Similarly, the Shangri-La vocal quartet also presented their professional re-creation of a Tibetan folksong by adding multipart harmonies to the original melody—harmonies that do not exist in Tibetan traditional folk singing. During the interview, the singers pointed out that their innovative arrangement of multipart harmonies rendered the artistic realm of the original love song more poetic (July 2, 2007). The silver award this song claimed at the Twelfth Chinese Youth Singing Contest and its popularity in China’s mainstream society show that the adaptation has successfully struck a responsive chord in the hearts of the outsider audience.

When it came to the professionally choreographed dances like “Achi Mugua,” not only did the dynamic changes of formation, rhythm, and movement keep the audience’s attention, but these elements were put together in a way that the messages of intimacy and affection and the permeable boundary between humans and nature were effectively brought to the front. During the climax, even without knowing any of the cultural meanings or significance that the dance might have originally possessed, the audience could discern the message of harmony and feel the atmosphere of joy delivered with the gift of the symbolic ring. In my conversations and informal interviews with festival goers about Yunnan’s performances, many of them emphasized their emotional connection to the performances by using words like “spirited,” “passionate,” and “expressive.” ⁸ The combination of indigenous melodies and dance steps, modern choreography, and exquisite singing and dancing skills worked well in othering ethnic Yunnan while simultaneously producing an aesthetic resonance of Yunnan’s ethnic performing arts with the modern world. ⁹

The well-tuned aesthetic resonance indicates that the Yunnan officials had no intention of constructing Yunnan’s cultural otherness as an incompatible opposite of the modern world—they chose not to emphasize “primitiveness” or “backwardness” (luohou), which has been salient in the official representations of ethnic cultures since China’s state project of “nationality recognition” (minzu shibie, launched in 1956 and continued until the 1980s) (Fei, 1980; Gladney, 1991; Bulag, 2002; Yang, 2009). This codified state interpretation of ethnic cultures and minorities, as scholars have pointed out, implemented a unilinear evolutionary concept of history, derived from Friedrich Engels’ adaptation of Lewis Henry Morgan’s late nineteenth-century scheme (White, 1998). While the Han Chinese were distinguished as the most advanced, ethnic customs, rituals, religions, and arts were documented and presented as visible signifiers indicating the backwardness of minorities (Gladney, 1994; Harrell, 1995; Schein, 1997, 2000; Blum, 2001). Based on a content analysis of minority-centered articles appearing in the People’s Daily newspaper from 1950 to 2001, Hoddie and Lou (2009) find that minority cultures have been most frequently depicted as “representatives of primitive cultures,” “representatives of China’s past,” or “pathologies (e.g., religious beliefs and practices)” contributing to the impoverishment of minority regions.

But Hoddie and Lou also point out that, in the post-Mao era, despite the prevalence of the ongoing view of the primitiveness of minorities, the innate performance talents of minorities have become a dominant theme in both arts and sports for the first time. Newspaper articles have “lauded [this] as a virtue that members of the majority should both experience and celebrate” (Hoddie and Lou, 2009: 65). In this sense, the construction of ethnic Yunnan as the aesthetically appealing other on the National Mall seemed to convey a tone similar to the recent refinement of state discourse in People’s Daily. I would argue that the Yunnan provincial government appears to have gone even further in avoiding any connotation of primitiveness or backwardness by prioritizing the artistic excellence of the professionally mediated performances over “dance as ethnography” on the Mall. As the Yunnan officials put it at the special preparatory meeting called by the Yunnan government right before the delegation’s departure for the United States, these performances were brought to Washington, D.C., to present the richness and diversity, splendor, and distinctiveness (fengfuduoyuan, xuanliduocai, gejutese) of Yunnan’s ethnic performing arts, which would win glory (zhengguang) for China and Yunnan, something both the Han Chinese majority and the international audience could “experience and celebrate.” ¹⁰ At the opening ceremony of the SFF and a news conference held by the Yunnan delegation on the first day of the festival, Mr. Zhou Wenzhong, the Chinese ambassador, and Ms. Yan Youqing, the Vice Minister of the Standing Committee of the Yunnan People’s Congress, respectively talked about ethnic cultures in the context of economic success in modern Yunnan. They described Yunnan’s cultural richness and economic achievement as two complementary ends. Thus, as shown in Yunnan’s official representations, Yunnan’s aesthetic appeal and cultural otherness were constructed to publicize Yunnan as a place that possessed cultural and historical continuity between tradition and development. This, however, is at odds with the great concern expressed by Proschan and Koanantakool about the threat of development to the Mekong cultures in their introductory article written for the official 2007 SFF Mekong program (Proschan and Koanantakool, 2007: 34–35).

In addition, Yunnan’s performances and image crafting on the National Mall also represented an official endeavor to create a place-based pan-Yunnan identity within the framework of China’s nation-state, or locality in unity. Yunnan presented music, folksongs, and dances from eight ethnic minorities and the Han Chinese at this festival. When time permitted, one representative piece from each ethnic group was performed on the main “Nine Dragons” stage. On the small stage called “New Moon,” the final piece was always a song performed together by the nine ethnic singers. Their arms were linked together or they danced the same steps, and they sang passionately like a happy family. This performing format is familiar to the Chinese and it has become a standard opening or ending ceremony whenever politically orchestrated large-scale entertainment spectacles take place, such as at the CCTV annual national Chinese New Year Gala (chunjie lianhuan wanhui) launched in 1983. It is programmed as a metaphorical yet visual illustration of China’s state image of being a multiethnic and multicultural big family. It has been exercised in such a way that it has become the fixed, recognizable iconic moment signifying nation building in China’s mainstream culture (Sun, 2007; Ren, 2003; Xu, 2007).

However, this big-happy-family song would have been performed in Mandarin at the CCTV New Year Gala. At the SFF the chorus of this song was sung in one of the native languages of these singers or in the Kunming (the provincial capital of Yunnan) dialect. The same occurred when Pumi, Tibetan, Yi, and Nu singers performed a toast song at the opening ceremony of the SFF on behalf of the Yunnan delegation. Thus, when Yunnan as a provincial government of China presented the province’s ethnic cultures, it apparently adopted the same strategy to imagine a happy, unified, multiethnic family. While this imagined community was undoubtedly an epitome of the state, it could also be simultaneously understood as a construction of Yunnan as an imagined community of its own, thereby promoting its regional identity.

This was further evidenced in Yunnan Today (Jinri Yunnan), a bilingual illustrated brochure that was especially designed for Yunnan’s participation in the SFF (Yunnan Government, 2007) and was distributed at the festival. For this document, the word “nationality” (minzu) was chosen instead of “minority” (shaoshu minzu) for the title of the section “nationality cultures” (minzu wenhua). The brochure displayed the historical and cultural achievements of the Han Chinese and ethnic minorities side by side without emphasizing the former as the majority. Achievements of all groups were presented as equally brilliant chapters in the glorious cultural history of Yunnan. The evolutionary hierarchy between the Han Chinese as the most advanced and the ethnic minorities as underdeveloped was subtly rewritten as cultural pluralism if not fraternal diversity. And the brochure located the significance of these achievements on a larger map of humankind rather than within the boundaries of China. ¹¹ Here, Yunnan was not a peripheral, minority frontier region within China; instead Yunnan was portrayed as a fertile cradle of civilization and a pan-local “home” where ethnic and cultural diversity was rooted and thrived. Yunnan was culturally re-centered and validated as a distinctive place of its own. In addition, in the context of the SFF, where Yunnan presented its programs as a region among other Mekong cultures, the name “Yunnan” not “China” was shown on festival banners, in program books, and in the presenters’ program introductions. This served to accentuate Yunnan’s regional identity and to project it as a world culture.

This re-centered Yunnan-ness should not be misunderstood, however, as an intention to deny Yunnan’s political membership in the Chinese state. This provincial identity was constructed through Yunnan’s local integration into national political culture. It indicated the cautious and multifaceted endeavor of a provincial government of the Chinese state when it had an opportunity to represent itself to the world. And this endeavor should also be viewed in the context of its historical trajectory rather than as something unique to Yunnan or socialist China. As numerous studies of regionalism in late imperial China, the Republican era, and southwest China in the 1950s and in the present have shown, localism, regional autonomy, or native-place particularism is not necessarily inconsistent with nationalist ideology or national integration (Faure and Siu, 2006; Fitzgerald, 1994; Cole, 1996; Duara, 1993; Goodman, 1995; Solinger, 1977; McCarthy, 2009). Yunnan’s practice at the festival showed that, when China and Yunnan were both constructed as “home,” the Yunnan government continued the long-standing politics of embedding its local distinctiveness into the unity of the nation-state.

The crafting and publicizing of place-based Yunnan-ness at the festival can be viewed as a practice of “territorial place making.” It represents “a desired if never fully accomplished mastery over a territorially defined place and of a self-identity pinned to that place” (Feuchtwang, 2004: 17). In this sense, Yunnan officials engaged in a process of re-imagining their administrative region and the geographical home of diverse nationalities as “a focused, identified place” (Feuchtwang, 2004: 5) on a provincial scale. As a process of negotiation and reappropriation, ¹² Yunnan’s promotion of place-based Yunnan-ness at the festival aligns with the state’s discourse of nation building and development on the one hand, and, on the other hand, centers on its regional perspective, achieving a delicately managed balance between its cultural otherness, aesthetic appeal, and modernity as well as between its Chinese-ness and Yunnan-ness. And the Yunnan provincial government portrayed these seemingly competing features as compatible rather than contradictory.

Scripting Yunnan’s Performances: Cultural Exchange and Economic Regionalism

In studying the Maasai dances (Kenya) and Chinese ethnic music ensembles that were performed for foreign tourists, Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1994) and Lau (1998) point out that these performances are more than an immediate interaction with the audience. Their productions and presentations are informed by a “script” or “narrative” that has been in place long before the events occur and are framed by local history and political economy. This perspective can be applied as well to Yunnan. At a global level, Yunnan’s practice at the SFF is one among many others that are customarily scripted by the politics of international artistic exchange, in which ethnic folk performing arts—always “more than art” (Trimillos, 1995)—have long served as cultural “transmitters” (Giurchescu, 2001) of images and political messages.

It is not a coincidence that the “golden era” of the state folk dance troupes studied by Shay occurred during the Cold War when art was employed to “form positive images of their respective nation-states” (Shay, 2002: 2). For its part, in the 1950s the United States exported dance to show its artistic achievements to uncommitted countries in a program of cultural exchange (Prevots, 1998). In modern China, international art exchange has long been married to advancing a nationalist agenda, as is evident in, for example, the foreign tours of Peking Opera by Mei Lanfang’s troupe in the 1930s (Goldstein, 1999) and by both socialist China and Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s (Guy, 2005). In the contemporary era, Rees’s research on the Naxi musicians’ first international tour in London in 1995 shows that this tradition was also actively exercised by China’s local governments and non-governmental art groups to tactically glorify their ethnic religious music (Rees, 2002).

In the same vein, Yunnan’s participation at the 2007 SFF was primarily formulated as a political task and documented as a significant moment in the history of Yunnan’s “foreign cultural exchange” (duiwai wenhua jiaoliu) (Gu, 2008). It was understandable that, when afforded the opportunity to take the central stage in the capital of a world power like the United States, the Yunnan provincial government felt the need to fulfill the weighty responsibility for crafting positive images of both China and Yunnan. The integration of embodied indigenousness and artistic excellence was designed to enchant America’s “mainstream society” (zhuliu shehui) rather than projecting an image of backwardness, which other participating delegations (including the former Soviet Union and the Philippines) in the past had been similarly concerned with when asked by the SFF to alter their presentations to offer something more “ethnographic” (Camp and Lloyd, 1982; Cantwell, 1993; Price and Price, 1994). And Mr. Fan also believed that the performances were a powerful illustration to the world—especially to those critical of China’s ethnic minority policy—of how well China preserved and developed its ethnic cultures.

Yet, this is not the only “script” that molded Yunnan’s image crafting on a global stage. Yunnan officials’ practice cannot be fully understood without situating it in the increasingly popular scenario of promoting regional cultures and identities among China’s contemporary provincial governments back home. Scholars of provincial studies view this phenomenon as an inherent dimension of China’s provincial economic development in the reform era, or what Goodman calls “economic regionalism” (Goodman, 1994: 5). Scholars point out that China’s post-1980s economic and fiscal decentralization has changed the traditional confinement of provinces to an administrative role (Fitzgerald, 2002: 11–40; Hendrischke, 1999: 6). As the central state relinquishes its economic role to macro-control rather than direct intervention, provinces assume economic functions—involving growing economic autonomy (e.g., policy making, budgetary power, large-scale investment projects) and financial self-reliance (Goodman and Segal, 1994, Hendrischke and Feng, 1999; Donaldson, 2010). Provincial governments need to formulate their own specific economic and business strategies, develop their regions’ comparative advantages, and engage in regional, national, and international trade systems. As Hendrischke (1999) and Feng (1999) state, the economic empowerment of provinces and their increasing interactions are driving China toward a situation where provinces have to compete against each other for a salient role in the country.

In this process, the defining, developing, and even inventing of a so-called “provincial cultural identity” (Oakes, 2000) becomes a standard practice of provincial governments, especially among the inland provinces with less access to technology, capital, and markets. Studies of Shanxi’s, Jiangxi’s, and Guizhou’s provincial identities show that the governments of these provinces rework divergent local traditions into a pan-local cultural heritage on a provincial scale and construct their regions as coherent cultural units of distinctiveness (Goodman, 2002; Feng, 1999; Oakes, 2000). While provinces strive to become centers of identification to promote local subjectivity, ¹³ the provincial cultures they construct are more tightly linked to regional political-economic agendas. A popular slogan—“trade (or economy) performing on a stage built by culture” (wenhua datai, jingmao changxi)—indicates that the rise of provincial cultural identity is part of a comparative-advantage package developed to attract capital investment and economic opportunities. As Oakes (2000) and Broudehoux (2004) argue with regard to global capitalism and place identity, capitalism acts as a stimulant for local cultures and identities in such a way that the local is remolded to be more attractive to capital and consumption. In China’s western minority regions, scholars have also observed that local minority cultures and folk performing arts predominantly occupy the central “stage” built for regional and provincial economic agendas, mainly culture-trade festivals and the development of ethnic tourism (Oakes, 2000; Swain, 2002; Hillman, 2003; Tuohy, 2003).

Participating in this trend, Yunnan has become one of the most salient provinces to have successfully promoted “provincial cultural identity” in the past two decades. ¹⁴ Yunnan’s fame as an ethnic tourism destination since the 1980s and the role of tourism in its economic growth ¹⁵ powerfully illustrate the profitable potential of ethnic cultures. It also contributed to Yunnan’s early awareness of ethnic cultures as a resource for regional development (Yang, 1998). As Mr. Fan pointed out, “the card we play is the card of ethnic cultures. This is our comparative advantage. We’re of a different type (leixing) than Shanghai, Nanjing, and Beijing. They have their strong points (techang). We can’t follow their paths.”

As early as in 1996, the Yunnan provincial government had formally put forward its development scheme of “constructing a great province of ethnic cultures” (jianshe minzu wenhua dasheng). The development scheme was carefully programmed at a research conference organized by the Yunnan provincial government in 1998, with a focus on crafting Yunnan’s provincial image as well as defining ethnic cultures as the “driving force” (qudongli) of Yunnan’s economy. ¹⁶ At this conference, political officials and intellectual elites envisioned the image of Yunnan to be anchored in ethnic cultures and to be themed as “the mythical and wondrous” (shenqi) and “of the time” (shidaixing) (Yang, 1998). As shown here, this elite version of Yunnan’s provincial image has been vividly represented through Yunnan’s performances on the National Mall. This conference also stated that “culture” and “economy” should be viewed as an integrated entity rather than two estranged ends. “Culture” was a distinctive kind of productive force. Mr. Dan Zeng, the then Vice-Secretary of the Yunnan Provincial Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, theorized this function as “the economic attribute” (shuxing) of “culture” (Gao, 2010). By officially extending the attribute of “culture” beyond its conventional category of “ideology” (yishixingtai), the Yunnan provincial government paved the way for strategically constructing ethnic cultures as a comparative advantage and resource through various venues, including the market (e.g., tourism and the crafts industry), ¹⁷ exhibitions (e.g., expos), and art performances and exchange.

During the implementation and popularization of the development scheme, ethnic performing arts, especially song and dance, were received enthusiastically as the essential elements for forging Yunnan’s provincial image (Yan, 2007). A dance ensemble titled Dynamic Yunnan (Yunnan yingxiang) became a cornerstone in this process. Produced by the famous Bai ethnic dancer Yang Liping in 2003, the ensemble included folk dances Yang collected from dozens of minorities in Yunnan, and the performers were mainly villager-artists without any formal training in mainstream art schools. However, in ways similar to what we have seen in Yunnan’s performances at the SFF, it was juicily twisted with modern, professional choreography and elaborately packaged with advanced stage technology (e.g., lighting, music, sound effects). With its indigenous appeal and artistic presentation that spoke to a modern audience, Dynamic Yunnan stormed China, not only enjoying huge market success but also wining in 2004 the Lotus Award (Hehua jiang), the highest honor in professional dance recognized by the Chinese state.

Dynamic Yunnan’s successful integration of ethnic performing arts, governmental support, and the market formed a model for the Yunnan government to promote potential ethnic artists, to produce and to export “premium” (jingpin) artistic products, and to carve out an image of Yunnan within and beyond China. From 2003 to 2006, numerous award-winning ethnic star singers (including the ones who performed at the 2007 SFF), large-scale minority song and dance spectacles, ¹⁸ and Yunnan’s overall high profile in China’s international artistic exchanges continuously drove the prosperity of the so-called “Yunnan phenomenon” (Yunnan xianxiang) ¹⁹ initiated by Dynamic Yunnan. Unlike ethnic tourism that attracted inner China to the frontier region of Yunnan, the “Yunnan phenomenon” brought Yunnan to China’s most prestigious stages. It touched off a wave of awareness of Yunnan’s ethnic performing arts in mainstream society. One year before the SFF, the Yunnan provincial government produced another large-scale minority song and dance ensemble titled Nature’s Sounds from Yunnan (Yunling tianlai), in which all the ethnic singers and musicians who performed at the SFF participated. During Nature’s Sounds Beijing performance tour, the Yunnan provincial government promoted the ensemble as branded product like Dynamic Yunnan. ²⁰

The scenario of promoting Yunnan’s provincial cultural identity in China leads us to see Yunnan’s choice of professionalized folk-ness at the SFF in a different light. It constitutes another episode in Yunnan’s development scheme, aesthetically crafting “ethnic Yunnan” as an economic and cultural brand globally. With this script, Yunnan officials skillfully brokered their own political-economic agenda at the SFF. As a cultural official of the Yunnan delegation incisively pointed out during a conversation at the SFF, “The [Yunnan provincial] government spent money for a purpose. You must have heard of ‘the politicization of art’ (yishu zhengzhihua), and this is called the ‘artifying of politics’ (zhengzhi yishuhua)” (July 7, 2007).

“The politicization of art,” as this official emphasized by his choice of the words “you must have heard of . . .,” is familiar to Chinese and to scholars of Chinese performing arts. Art as propaganda, already sophisticatedly articulated in the 1929 Gutian conference and well established in Mao’s 1942 Yan’an Talks, has been massively and effectively implemented by communist architects in China’s modern history. Numerous studies have noted the transformation of folk performing traditions into nationally exercised political vehicles (Wong, 1984; Yung, 1984; Holm, 1991; Sullivan, 1999). Minority folksongs and dances, in spite of the increasingly “intelligent” and “less heavy-handed” control by the state after the 1980s, have always been regulated by the criterion of “ideological suitability,” as Mackerras observes. He concludes that minorities have not been “the real master in their own house in culture” as is claimed in the policy of the party-state (Mackerras, 1984: 218).

The contrast that the Yunnan official underlined here between “the politicization of art” and “the artifying of politics,” however, did not necessarily point to a change in the instrumentality of “art” in Yunnan’s practice on the National Mall (or back in China). But, in contrast to “heavy-handed” propaganda and political campaigns, the vigorous official promotion of minority performing arts for Yunnan’s provincial identity brings “art” to the foreground on stage and endows “art” with a seemingly apolitical position that officials hope will ease the crossing of boundaries and be identified with by all. Especially at the SFF, the belief in cultural sharing held by the majority of festival goers, the symbolic weight of the National Mall, and the aura of authenticity of the presented programs only enhanced the representational power of the presented minority folksong and dance performances, effectively making statements for the backstage architects. In this sense, “the artifying of politics” can be understood as a measure of how intelligently and artistically a provincial government of the Chinese state (re-)applied “the politicization of art” to its nationalistic task and its provincial development agenda on a global stage.

In addition, what makes Yunnan’s practice of “artifying politics” successful is the aestheticization of place and politics through ethnic performing arts. Through ready-to-be-embraced otherness and artistic excellence, these “premium” artistic products were designed to take on their audience’s emotional experience and aesthetic imagination. For the festival audience (as well as domestic audiences in China) who encountered Yunnan through these performances, their evoked aesthetic experiences rendered these performances something more than a mere means for image crafting—they constitute what “Yunnan” meant. And it is from this that “aesthetic Yunnan” has become a cultural brand. To borrow Ban Wang’s insightful view on China’s politicized literature and revolutionary cinema, “the political masquerades as aesthetic experience and discourse and blends them into a realm of sensation, perception, feeling, image, representation, and myth” (Wang, 1997: 7). And, “in this regard, politics does not borrow the garb of aesthetics to dress itself up but is itself fleshed out as a form of art and symbolic activity” (15). ²¹ In this process of artifying politics, the Yunnan provincial government showed its capacity for maneuvering both the politicization of art and the aestheticization of politics—carrying out its economic agenda by way of aesthetic experience in an era of economic regionalism in China.

Conclusion

In her study of Zhuang ethnic identity, Katherine Kaup (2002) argues that, while numerous scholars (especially in anthropology) have noted the local nature of ethnic identity and the local state apparatus as a factor in identity politics, state structures have been under-examined, generalized, or imprecisely differentiated. And an important aspect of state structures, Kaup points out, is territorial administrative structures, including county, prefectural, and provincial boundaries. In her case study, she examined how the Nationality Recognition Project was carried out by the two adjacent provinces of Yunnan and Guangxi quite differently in the 1950s, with or without flexibility. Their implementation and propaganda campaigns shaped the deeply differentiated self-identification and expressions among the Zhuang who lived on either side of the provincial boundary as well as the official and scholarly discourses in the two provinces. Thus, Kaup reminds us, economic, social, and political sources are distributed largely through territorial administrative structures, and these structures also profoundly shape ethnicity politics.

The case of Yunnan’s provincial identity construction through ethnic performing arts on the National Mall, once again, says that territorial administrative structures do matter. The rise of economic regionalism among provincial governments, especially the western provinces, gives provincial officials the motivation and opportunity to culturally and spatially imagine and define their governed territorial administrative regions through performing ethnic cultures. In this context, Yunnan’s vision and practice crafted a regionalized version of ethnic Yunnan, whose aesthetic appeal was programmed to enchant China and the world alike.

Furthermore, Yunnan’s successful practice on the National Mall also leads us to reflect on Yunnan’s capacity for artifying politics as a regional government in an era of economic regionalism in China. By pursuing “the art of dance” rather than “dance as ethnography,” Yunnan’s theatrical minority folksong and dance performances beautifully enmeshed aesthetic experience and politics and effectively acted out Yunnan’s provincial identity project and development scheme.