From China Rights Forum, via Song & Silence:

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.

At first I concluded, as many visitors to the region had before me, that these plastic performances – swaying girls in tight dresses, peacocks in overcrowded zoos, and deforested green hills – were all that was left of local culture. However, while many ethnic minorities in Sipsongpanna participated and profited from the state-approved marketing of their ethnic identity, behind the scenes was simultaneously a roiling debate among some ethnic minorities about who they were, and what their “real” culture was and should be. In hundreds of temples springing up across the region, senior monks were initiating new monks and reviving nearly obliterated Buddhist traditions. Young men were writing and performing rock songs about social issues in the minority language for crowds of thousands. Women oral poets were performing epic oral narrations in minority languages for crowds of thousands.

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. [Full Text]