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This chapter examines the changing political framework of the region from the late nineteenth century through to World War I as fluid political boundaries that were transformed into bordered territories. It describes how local elites in the Yunnan boundary region managed the transition zone of the mountains between Burma and China, and the role that they played in the local political system after the Panthay revolt and just prior to the fall of the Konbaung Dynasty in Burma. The chapter then describes how old and new elites were created in this process of geo-political transformation. It focuses in particular on the eastern borderworld, where great ethnographic complexity became rationalised in line with new and emerging political needs. It describes in detail how a local system of cross-group relations expressed as a ritual system became a model for later Kachin ethno-nationalist ideological expansion influenced by these administrative changes.

One of the first things the Chinese Communists did with the Yi, as they did with all ethnic groups, was to define them. In the linguistic realm, this also meant classifying them into dialects, subdialects, and local vernaculars. This was done not purely for scholarly reasons but also in order to facilitate the standardization and teaching of Yi languages. This chapter provides a comprehensive view of this classifying process and of the three different projects of standardization that have resulted in very different modern scripts in Sichuan, Guizhou, and Yunnan. Although there are probably about a million members of the Yi minzu who do not speak Yi languages, this leaves nearly six million who do, and to varying degrees, Yi languages have entered the modern world, especially in Liangshan by means of school textbooks, daily newspapers, radio stations, and other modern media.

Chapter 3 joins Fifth Generation Chinese director Chen Kaige on his pilgrimages to the Chinese heartland in Shaanxi and Yunnan Provinces while shooting on-location for Yellow Earth (1984) and King of the Children (1987), where he wrestled reflexively with his awareness of the neocolonial politics of “experiencing life.” Through archival research and close textual analysis, this chapter reconstructs two parallel journeys to the rural associated with these productions — one diegetic and the other extra-diegetic. Just as the films’ protagonists were “sent-down” to the countryside, Chen Kaige toured Shaanxi and Yunnan with his production crew during the films' pre-production. When read together, these journeys map rural China as a haunted psycho-geography, where both Chen and the films' characters learned to acknowledge their ultimately tenuous connection with the collective unconscious supposedly enshrined in the PRC’s most sacred historical landmarks. More broadly, by reading the films’ journey narratives as allegories of Chen’s own pilgrimages, I show that Chen’s place making not only interrogates the coherence of official frameworks of nation building under Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, but also ushers in a new discursive construct of the auteur as an individualistic and semi-autonomous creative subject.

This chapter recounts the experiences of Zhang Dage as a migrant in Burma. More specifically, it examines the localities, peoples, livelihoods, and times of Zhang Dage's early youth in Burma based on his letters and essays. Zhang Dage, born in a mountain village in Shan State, Burma, in 1962, shares many stories that reflect different stages of his life, including his childhood and education. His narrative also provides valuable data regarding the migrant Yunnanese lifestyle, especially in the Shan State. Like many Yunnanese migrants, Zhang Dage's life has been marked by a series of migrations. Since 1980 he has settled in Taiwan, but every Chinese New Year he takes his family back to his parents' home in Reshuitang Xincun (often called Xincun), a primarily Yunnanese Han village in the Chiang Mai Province of northern Thailand. This chapter also considers Zhang Dage's concerns about his aged parents in Thailand, his eldest sister in Yunnan, his native places in Shan State, and his own family in Taiwan.

In this chapter, the author tells the story of Ae Maew as a migrant in Burma. Ae Maew, the Shan nickname of a Yunnanese graduate student whom the author met in Taiwan in 2004, was a second-generation migrant in Burma who had grown up in Laikha in Shan State. Ae Maew reflects on her Chinese education, drug addiction in her family, family history and conflicts, migration to Taiwan, and her sentiments toward Burma. Her memories of mules and horses reveal an intimate female role behind the long-distance caravan trade. The author also talks about her visit to Taunggyi University, where Ae Maew had studied for about three years, along with Ae Maew's unhappy Chinese New Year in 2005. She says the frictions Ae Maew experienced have stimulated her to seek new possibilities and directions abroad rather than remain in Burma.

This book explores the migration history and transnational trading experiences of contemporary Yunnanese Chinese migrants (composed of both Yunnanese Han and Muslims) who are residing in Burma (or Myanmar) as well as those who have moved from Burma to another country such as Thailand. It recounts the stories of Yunnanese migrants to shed light into their lived experiences as well as their thinking, feeling, intimacies, courage, ambition, and despair. The book focuses on migrant Yunnanese mobility and (transnational) economic ventures, and especially their long-distance trade involvement with a range of armed ethnic groups and official agencies. Taking a transborder and transnational perspective, it examines the migratory and mercantile agency of the diasporic Yunnanese, with particular emphasis on why and how they have undertaken ongoing movement and a range of underground and cross-border trades.

This book examines how environmental winds gained force and shaped Yunnan Province’s social landscapes. It looks at the lives of those individuals who not only encountered environmentalism but brought it into being in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). By focusing on the PRC’s environmental politics, it offers a different way of thinking about globalization, and in particular globalized formations. Drawing on the author’s extensive and ongoing engagements with many people in Yunnan Province, the book highlights the role played by ordinary people in what it calls “making the global.” It first provides an overview of wildlands and wildlife in the PRC before the environmental winds (1950s–1980s) and goes on to discuss some of the dominant theories for understanding globalization and globalized formations. It also considers how the Chinese metaphor of winds can be adopted as a concept for understanding how globalized social formations—in this case environmentalism—work.

This chapter argues that by 1937, a medical infrastructure of Western hospitals and clinics already existed in Yunnan—many of which promoted Jennerian vaccination against smallpox, if not immunization against other diseases. This organization had hybrid origins in the efforts of French, British, and Chinese empires during the early twentieth century, although the province remained on the fringes of the emergent Nationalist medical administration until the late 1930s. Wartime biomedical experts in Kunming relied upon this limited but significant infrastructure to build a new vaccination scheme that sought universal coverage of urban and rural populations for the first time. Ultimately, the politics of medicine—and especially vaccination against smallpox—in prewar Yunnan reflected power struggles between empires for influence in the region. Like the Russian, Japanese, and local forces that battled for controlling interests in Manchuria, French and British imperial powers in Yunnan competed with each other as they engaged with local warlords; sought to build economic and transportation networks in the region; and used medicine, especially epidemic control, as a means of establishing influence.

This chapter describes the research methodology used in the present study and introduces the two provinces under consideration. It compares the impact of economic, social, political, cultural, demographic, natural, and geographical factors in Guizhou and Yunnan. For each factor, available data from five qualitative and quantitative sources were collected in order to cross-check the results derived from each source. Each factor was analyzed to determine whether it could explain the juxtaposition of economic growth without poverty reduction in Yunnan and/or the combination of poverty reduction without economic growth in Guizhou. The analysis of demographic, economic, and political factors revealed several similarities and differences between the two provinces and some factors that moved in the opposite direction than expected. Thus, the puzzling pattern of economic growth and poverty reduction seen in the two provinces remains a mystery.

This chapter addresses the question of why the leaders of Guizhou and Yunnan provinces chose different policy approaches to effect economic development. This question is significant, given that these leaders faced similar challenges, operated in similar contexts, and answered to the same bosses in the central government. Were the contrasting strategies adopted due to initiatives from provincial leaders, some centrally initiated experiment, a historical or geographical factor, or a combination of these factors? Evidence suggests that, although the central government constrained and encouraged certain actions and approaches in the provinces, the experiences and backgrounds of the individual provincial leaders affected the choices of strategies. Moreover, once a particular course was set and had received central support, a form of path dependency caused the strategy to continue even after the original leaders had departed.

This chapter examines the impact of road construction on economic growth and poverty reduction in Yunnan and Guizhou. Yunnan leaders' road construction policy focused resources on building highways, which stimulated the exports of the province and supported the development of the tourism industry. The Guizhou government, on the other hand, concentrated on rural roadways, becoming in the process a leading province in the density of such roadways. The policies of both provinces fall into the category of market facilitation because the intention of each roadway was to expand market opportunities and access. Although the two provinces adopted a similar role for the state, they nevertheless did so while following different strategies. Yunnan leaders adopted a strategy that most clearly emulates the developmental state, promoting large-scale construction intended to maximize economic growth largely through industry. Guizhou leaders, in contrast, focused on small-scale activities and poverty reduction, which is more consistent with a micro-oriented state.

This chapter examines the impact of migration on economic growth and poverty reduction in Guizhou and Yunnan. For Guizhou, migration helped reduce poverty, even though the modest remittances contributed little to economic growth. The mobile Guizhou labor force contributed primarily to GDP growth in other provinces. For Yunnan, migration was a missed opportunity. Few rural residents migrated, thus limiting potential remittance income. Had the Yunnan government adopted policies promoting vocational training and other forms of job support, and promoting the construction of rural roadways, the inability or unwillingness of potential migrants to accept the risks inherent in migration might have been overcome. By encouraging migration, the Yunnan government might also have reduced poverty within the province.

This chapter first discusses the causal connection between tourism, economic growth, and poverty reduction, and briefly introduces the development of tourism in China. It then explores the volume, distribution, and structure of tourism in Yunnan and Guizhou. In Yunnan, the main focus of the tourism industry is on the rich cultural diversity of the province and it is centered in rural, predominantly minority regions. The distribution and structure of the tourism industry primarily promotes economic growth, with a more limited effect on rural poverty reduction. Although Yunnan has many potential tourist attractions in poor counties, the government focused its resources on developing tourist destinations in the non-poor counties. In Guizhou, many tourist activities and sites are distributed in modest villages in poor counties, and they are structured to be small in scale. As a result, poor rural residents benefit directly by hosting tourists, both foreign and domestic. Although the amount of money involved—and thus the profits—are usually quite modest, they can make a big difference in the income of poor people.

This chapter examines the impact of coal mining on economic growth and poverty reduction in Yunnan and Guizhou. In Yunnan, coal contributed to economic growth but did not significantly reduce poverty, largely due to the volume, distribution, and structure of the coal industry. In Guizhou coal production probably impeded economic development, although it did reduce poverty, primarily through smaller-scale town and village enterprise (TVE) mines based in the Guizhou poor counties. Although the geographical distribution of coal resources contributed to this pattern, policy decisions made by the provinces and the central government were also crucial. But the effects of coal mining on poverty reduction must be weighed against its substantial risks. The dangers inherent in the industry make it difficult to advocate a policy in which TVE coal mining is promoted to reduce poverty.

The patterns of economic growth and poverty reduction in Guizhou and Yunnan can be partially explained by their distinct policies on the similar features of their rural economies: road building, migration, tourism, and coal mining. Although these four factors proved to be important in both provinces, it is the variations of each of them that explain the different patterns of economic growth and poverty reduction. Thus, the policy choices of these provincial governments, not just cultural, geographical, and economic factors, created these puzzling patterns. This chapter analyzes these areas synthetically to derive and explore the overall models that the leaders of the two provinces adopted to change and improve their economies. It discusses the developmental state model adopted by the Yunnan provincial government and the micro-oriented state model followed by Guizhou leaders. The models of poverty reduction vary in the nature of the relationship between the state and market, primary goals (e.g., growth or poverty reduction), tactical approaches, scale of the activity, and mechanism through which the poor are expected to benefit.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to examine the relationship between economic growth and poverty reduction by analyzing two regional economies: the poor provinces of Guizhou and Yunnan in China. Both provinces are remote and mountainous, with many rural families subsisting on what they can produce from these harsh agricultural conditions. However, in the 1990s, the economy of Guizhou grew sluggishly while poverty declined, whereas the economy of Yunnan grew rapidly with few people emerging from poverty. The remainder of the chapter discusses the research methodology used in the present study along with a brief overview of the subsequent chapters.