Suzhi (Quality)

In tracing the recalibration of people of high and low quality, I follow Ann Anagnost, who asserts that the multitude of migrant labourers in China, who are represented as people of low quality, in fact provide the surplus value that fuels China's economic growth. As she writes, ‘The laboring migrant body is the hidden source of wealth production in China's economic ‘takeoff’, even as its lack of value is blamed for holding back China's development’ (Anagnost Reference Anagnost2004: 192). She contrasts this ‘low quality’ with the ‘high quality’ of urban Chinese children, in whom parents invest considerable funds for education, culture and special training.

Concerns about the quality of China's population had first emerged in the early twentieth century, framed at that time by public intellectuals as the need to ‘improve the race’. Prominent elites complained that Western imperialism had led to the ‘degeneracy’ of Chinese people and blamed Western nations for China's failure to achieve the wealth and power it deserved. Indeed, in the 1920s Chinese elites published articles about eugenics, an idea recently arrived from Europe, although policies to improve China's population were not implemented (Anagnost Reference Anagnost1997: 125). Following the 1949 Revolution, Mao Zedong rejected eugenics, calling it an imperialist tool. On the contrary, Mao called for people to have many children, believing that more labour (more hands) would produce more rapid economic growth (Anagnost Reference Anagnost1997: 126).

In the post-Mao era, policy makers in Beijing, influenced by ideas circulating in international development in the late 1970s, began to blame China's ‘excessive population’ (Anagnost Reference Anagnost1997: 117), rather than Western imperialism, for the country's underdevelopment. Discursively, a huge population was linked to problems of ‘chaos’ (luan) and threats to social control. Political elites adopted Taylor's notion of ‘scientific management’, believing that ‘science’ included both technological and moral components. Scientific management would promote ‘human quality (ren de suzhi)’, combat ‘moral degeneration’ and prevent modernisation processes from leading to chaos (Bakken Reference Bakken2000: 38).Footnote ³ A focus on population quality, then, became the basis for political authority during the transition from Maoism to the era under Deng Xiaoping (Anagnost Reference Anagnost1997; Bakken Reference Bakken2000). Policy makers in Beijing saw China's ‘excess of population’ and low population quality as the paramount problems facing China as it entered the period of economic reforms from 1978 onward (Anagnost Reference Anagnost1997; Greenhalgh and Winckler Reference Chan2005).

The particular emphasis on high and low quality people derives from the 1979 one-child policy to limit population growth. In contrast to the Mao Zedong era, when political ideology largely drove state campaigns, the new era of economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping emphasised the four modernisations in agriculture, technology, science and education, operationalised through a discourse of rational planning (Greenhalgh and Winckler Reference Greenhalgh and Winckler2005). In the 1970s, the government birth control slogan was ‘later-longer-fewer’, encouraging later marriage, longer spaces between births and fewer children. In 1980, the notion of ‘quality’ was added to the slogan, highlighting the importance of both the health and education of children (Greenhalgh and Winckler Reference O'Brien and Li2005: 42–43). Couples were to have fewer children of higher quality. High quality children would be educated, especially in science, and as the era of economic reforms progressed into the 1980s, they would also be entrepreneurial (Anagnost Reference Anagnost2004; Greenhalgh and Winkler Reference Greenhalgh and Winckler2005: 43, 94). The policy goal was to achieve a high quality population in a modern China—the scale of concern featured both the individual body and the social body. In a speech in 1991 to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Premier Jiang Zemin stated that China's highest priority was raising population quality (Anagnost Reference Anagnost1997: 203). People of high quality would be educated, scientific, rational and entrepreneurial—all markers of modernity that took on increasing discursive power as China approached WTO entry in the late 1990s. As China tentatively reached its goals to limit population growth by the early 2000s, the emphasis on the quality of that population intensified, together with the need for ‘“superior” children equipped to compete in the modern world (Greenhalgh and Winckler Reference Greenhalgh and Winckler2005: 44).

With respect to the population as a whole, the notion of quality (suzhi) ‘works ideologically as a regime of representation through which subjects recognise their positions within the larger social order’ (Anagnost Reference Anagnost2004: 192). In Chinese society, the suzhi discourse ‘derives part of its ideological potency through its reinforcement of related systems of valuation already embedded within Chinese development discourse, such as town versus country, developed versus backward, prosperous versus poor’ (Murphy Reference Murphy2004: 3). The social order also includes the valuation of Han versus minority nationality, in this case upland Akha shifting cultivators on China's periphery. The link between high quality people and social stability also signifies that those designated as ‘backward’, ‘rural’ and ‘poor’ are potential sources of chaos. In the 1980s, economic development projects targeted minority farmers to help them ‘catch up’ with their Han neighbours.Footnote ⁴ In the late 1990s, however, the location of minority shifting cultivators in the national body dropped in status, reflected in the newly-entrenched ‘low quality’ of Akha and other hill peoples in relation to the emerging national project of environmental conservation.

Although official portraits of ethnic minority peoples in China's southwest had for centuries depicted them as different from and inferior to the Han majority (see, for example, Gladney Reference Gladney1991; Harrell Reference Harrell1995; Hostetler Reference Hostetler2001; Sturgeon Reference Sturgeon2005b), and although minority nationalities in Yunnan had officially been described as ‘backward’ since the 1980s when ‘developed’ became the goal, the use of ‘low quality’ in the late 1990s marked a new articulation of the suzhi discourse with environmental concerns.Footnote ⁵ This shift allowed for an amazingly rapid adjustment of upland minority people's standing in society, as well as the quick central reclamation of forest lands.

Rachel Murphy argues that the suzhi discourse in rural areas also enables the transfer of responsibility for modernisation from the government to the individual as the state retreats from providing social services such as health care and education (Murphy Reference Murphy2004). The suzhi discourse deflects the political challenge of state retreat, as rural people, including those in Mengsong, are now responsible for their own development. As a result, farmers see the need to improve themselves and ‘to regulate their everyday conduct in ways that conform to the common political drift of society’ (Murphy Reference Murphy2004: 19).

I explore here the production of villagers' subjectivities through the suzhi discourse to discover not only how Mengsong farmers ‘conformed to the common political drift’ but also accepted the loss of large areas of land and other local resources within a period of five years, adding a geographic, or spatial dimension to the workings of suzhi. Common assertions about upland people who did not understand the value (or quality) of forests in the face of a national environmental crisis reinforced social hierarchies by explaining why certain kinds of people ‘did not belong’ in certain kinds of spaces (Cresswell Reference Cresswell1996). By contrast, state foresters, those of ‘high quality’, were deemed ‘in place’ in forests, which they now reclaimed as state territory and were believed to manage rationally based on scientific knowledge. Over a short five years, Akha farmers had become ‘out of place’ in the forests and fields surrounding them.

Local Village Elections

Based on the Organic Law of Villagers' Committees of 1987, local village elections were to establish local self-government in selected places and were promoted by high level central government leaders as a step towards democracy (Chan Reference Chan1998: 509; O'Brien and Li Reference O'Brien and Li2000). The push for local village elections was part of the general devolution of decision-making and fiscal responsibility ushered in with the dissolution of communes in 1982 (Goodman Reference Sturgeon2002). As part of this devolution, the Organic Law made village committees responsible for the management of village lands, a task that had previously belonged to the natural village or hamlet level (Oi Reference Oi1989; Oi and Rozelle Reference Oi and Rozelle2000: 515, 532). The law was designed to increase village cadre accountability (O'Brien Reference O'Brien1994: 36) and move towards transparency in village governance and the rule of law, both required by the WTO (Horsley Reference Horsley2001: 52). According to Western scholars, the elections policy reflected central state concern with corruption at county and township levels of government, especially in western China; disaffection of villagers in western China as they become poorer in relation to people in the east; and WTO requirements that China move towards a fair process of governance (O'Brien Reference O'Brien1994; O'Brien and Li Reference O'Brien and Li1999; Unger Reference Unger2000; Horsley Reference Horsley2001). Following direct election of village committees, these committees were supposed to ‘manage their own affairs’, including village lands, in compliance with the laws.

The literature on local village elections in China helps situate them in the 1987 context, when Chinese policy makers were devolving responsibility on a number of fronts, including land management. These election studies do not fully explain the outcomes presented here. Most of these studies come from political scientists and legal scholars who are explicitly or implicitly comparing elections in China with some notion of elections in the West and are looking for what China scholars might call ‘sprouts of democracy’.Footnote ⁶ This focus on democracy obscures the dynamics in Mengsong, and probably elsewhere.Footnote ⁷

In this paper, instead of comparing the elections in Mengsong with some notion of democracy from the West, I am comparing diachronically in the same village—that is, dynamics in 2002, when I made two follow-up visits, with dynamics five years earlier in 1996–97. Prior to 1998, Mengsong farmers managed their own land and trees, and local mining was either locally organised or handled in ways that generally benefited Mengsong farmers. By 2002, management of all these resources was dictated from outside Mengsong, and benefit from resources accrued to outside actors and institutions. My concern is to explain how these changes happened, in such a short period of time, without much fuss.

Narratives About Akha

In 1997, there was more than one narrative circulating about minority nationalities in Xishuangbanna prefecture where Mengsong is located. At times administrators in township and county offices, the levels of state administration just above the village, would make broad-brush claims about the ‘backwardness’ of all minority nationalities, especially the upland groups who were all thought to ‘eat the mountains’, a disparaging comment about shifting cultivation, a source of ‘chaos’ in Xishuangbanna. At other times, however, officials in the same forestry, agriculture and planning offices, in focusing on Akha, would say the Akha were the ‘most developed’ among the hill peoples. When asked, these officials would say this meant that Akha sent their children to school, participated in markets and were willing to try new crop varieties. These statements were always in the same words, as if this was the current ‘take’ on Akha. In other words, Akha sought to be educated, entrepreneurial and scientific—all characteristics of ‘people of high quality’ in the national evaluation. The suzhi discourse had already been in circulation for more than 15 years at that point, but the general tenor of conversations with township and county officials was that Akha and other upland groups needed to be ‘improved’ and that some groups, such as Akha, participated willingly in this project, contributing to social harmony.

In relation to forests, township and county foresters were somewhat ambivalent about Akha forest management. But the policy directives from the early 1980s had all been implemented, meaning that in 1984, as part of decollectivisation from communes, areas of forest were devolved to hamlets and households. In the time since 1984, foresters had attempted to control farmers' forest use through requiring new fees and permits to cut trees, imposing a timber cut limit in each area, and allowing villagers to hold ‘wasteland auctions’ to enable entrepreneurs to buy long-term contracts to land to be kept in forest.Footnote ⁹ None of these measures worked as intended, although they produced numerous conflicts at the local level (cf. Grinspoon 2001). If somewhat reluctantly, as of 1996, state foresters concurred with administrators in planning and agriculture departments that Akha were ‘willing to improve’ under state tutelage.

GovernanceFootnote ¹⁰

In 1993, the township government appointed Akheu as the head of Mengsong in an emergency measure when the old village head suddenly died. Appointing a head was unusual. Beginning in 1982, as part of the process of devolution and economic reform, villagers had elected the village head from a slate of candidates drawn up by the township. Following his appointment in 1993, Akheu enjoyed township support from 1993 to 1998, even as he proved to be remarkably corrupt (Sturgeon Reference Sturgeon2005b, Reference Sturgeon and Solinger2005c). As natural resources such as tin and ‘wastelands’ in Mengsong became commodities in growing markets, he found ways to control access to these resources and to funnel the profits to himself.

Also beginning in 1982, hamlets had elected hamlet heads from candidates not pre-selected by the township, reportedly using ballots in elections that took place every three years. During my 1996–97 research, hamlet heads were busily visiting state administrators in township, county and even prefecture offices to protest what they saw as the village head's corruption (Sturgeon Reference Sturgeon2004, Reference Sturgeon2005b). In 1998, their relentless protests finally helped to bring Akheu down. In 2002, Mengsong villagers and township officials shied away from any explicit description of what took place, saying only that Akheu and three other village officials, including the party secretary, were removed from office for ‘financial impropriety’. In my experience in the 1990s, hamlet heads were smart and active in promoting hamlet projects, traveling to numerous line agencies in Xishuangbanna to find funding for them.

In Mengsong as a whole there were then two levels of governance: the village of Mengsong, of which Akheu was the appointed head, and eleven elected hamlet heads. Both levels participated actively in Mengsong affairs and most conflicts at that time resulted from arguments over resource access between Akheu and the hamlet heads. The impetus for my research on local village elections was to find out if villagers had voted Akheu out of office and to see who might have replaced him.

Access to Forests and Agricultural LandsFootnote ¹¹

In 1984, as part of the devolution of responsibility to local levels, a committee comprised of a township forester and several Mengsong villagers had distributed commune forests in the following way: forests in best condition became state forests; each hamlet received a collective forest for house construction; and each household was allocated plots for fuel wood. The collective forest and fuel wood forests were contracted to villagers for periods of 50 years under strict state regulations. At the same time, the committee designated sites for forest protection where Akha had customarily protected a cemetery forest, a watershed protection forest and a ring of woods right around the village (Sturgeon Reference Sturgeon2005b). Although monitoring these sites transferred to the township forestry station, the very act of marking out customary protection sites meant that state foresters acknowledged that Akha farmers knew something about managing trees. According to my 1997 measurements, the forests in Mengsong, including sites of regenerating shifting cultivation fields, were high in biodiversity and the protected forests held a predominance of rare, old-growth species. These were forests in reasonably good condition and likely to improve (see Sturgeon Reference Sturgeon2005b for complete forest data).

When agricultural land was distributed from communes, each household acquired wet rice fields and shifting cultivation lands under 30 year contracts. The understanding was that these lands were theirs to manage under state regulations. Following allocation, farmers raised increasing numbers of livestock for burgeoning local markets, turning high elevation shifting cultivation fields into collectively managed pastures. By 1996, livestock numbers were three times what they had been in 1982 when the lands were divided to individual households (Sturgeon Reference Sturgeon2005b). In 1997, sale of livestock was a major source of household income, second only to local mining.

Access to Mining

In 1997, a state-run manganese mining operation hired Mengsong men to load and unload the ore from trucks. Villagers who worked in manganese were paid daily wages that contributed substantially to household incomes. The second form of mining in Mengsong was for tin located on village lands. The village head, Akheu, organised the mining so that anyone in Mengsong could mine the tin, but they had to sell it to him. He routinely pocketed some of the profits from resale that were meant to go to village administration (Sturgeon Reference Sturgeon2004, Reference Sturgeon2005b). The tin mining made Akheu a wealthy man. It is important to note, however, that for villagers as well, income from mining was the highest source of household income at that time (see Sturgeon Reference Sturgeon2005b for complete data). Whether for Akheu or other villagers, tin was important, and the income from selling it accrued to people in Mengsong.

Overall, as of 1997, Vanguard, the Mengsong hamlet that I analysed in depth, was doing quite well economically, with household incomes slowly rising. The equitable distribution of land and forests meant that household incomes were not markedly stratified. Men and women, in diverse ways, were producing for markets and engaging in wage labour, mostly in local mining. The number one source of household income was from mining, closely followed by livestock sales (Sturgeon Reference Sturgeon2005b).

The Local Village Election in MengsongFootnote ¹³

Whereas my earlier research concentrated on Vanguard hamlet, in 2002 I expanded the scale to include six of the eleven hamlets in Mengsong. Hamlet heads and a sampling of villagers differing by gender and age in each hamlet were forthcoming about election details. Key informants in Vanguard, who knew me well, shared not only election events but also their opinions and misgivings about recent changes.

In preparation for the local village election held in November 2000, a working group from the township government visited each hamlet in Mengsong several times to explain and help organise the election. Villagers said that township officials strongly encouraged them to elect people who were of ‘higher quality’ than those in the past. Those with more education, it was said, could bring about faster economic development in Mengsong. The undertones of ‘science’ and ‘rationality’ are very close to the surface in these directives, as they are in many discussions of education and elections in China (see O'Brien Reference O'Brien2001: 413–414, 418). The suzhi discourse was wending its way more completely into Mengsong daily lives, as candidates considered whether they were ‘high quality’ enough to serve in office. Additionally, township officials pointed to a man called Lao Er whom they had appointed as interim village head when the previous man died, an instance similar to 1993 when Akheu was appointed. Lao Er, the township officials said, had completed middle school, whereas the previous village and hamlet heads had only finished elementary school.

The election took place in three stages. In the first stage, citizens 18 years of age and older in each hamlet wrote down five names for each of the five positions to be elected. The five positions were village head, accountant, women's representative, young people's representative and a person to settle disputes. Two additional committee members would include a new party secretary, elected by Mengsong CCP members, and a head of security, appointed by the township. In the second round, villagers could choose among the top three vote winners from the first round for each of the five positions. In the final round, held at the Mengsong school, two remaining candidates for village head gave speeches spelling out what they would do to improve agricultural productivity and the local economy. According to people from his own hamlet, Akheu actually put in his hat for village head and lasted through the first round. In the second round, the township-working group told Akheu to withdraw his name, which he did. In the end, Lao Er—the candidate pointed out by the township-working group—won the election to be head of the Mengsong village committee.

The emphasis on education and ‘people of high quality’ had been around for several years. Narratives that linked science, education and development had been circulating in China since the adoption of ‘scientific management’ and the 1979 one-child policy to produce a ‘high quality’ population. The difference was that up to 2000, village heads with elementary school education and organisational ability had seemed to themselves, and to other Mengsong farmers, to be capable of managing local affairs. In my 1996–97 stint in Mengsong, no one mentioned anyone's lack of ‘quality’ to hold local office. On the contrary, numerous villagers gave examples of previous and current local leaders who showed concern about village affairs and the ability to get things done. During 1996–97, local hamlet heads and the village head had confidently staked their claims to resources and made their arguments to officials in various scales of state administration.

By 2002, when I returned, however, former Vanguard hamlet leaders, key informants from my earlier research, each told me privately that at the time of the hamlet election, which took place just after the village election, they had voluntarily stepped aside, believing that younger, more highly educated people might indeed do a better job. These men had been persuaded by the importance of suzhi in managing daily affairs and promoting economic growth. As the daughter of Agu, one of these men, explained, ‘my father lacked the scientific understanding of how to bring economic development’. In other words, Agu and others in the ‘old guard’ from 1997 were responsible for the current poverty, and his removal from office in 2000 was understandable. By 2000, potential candidates had to consider the whole Chinese population, which needed to be of ‘higher quality’ to develop economically and engage in global competition. In this context, former leaders saw themselves as ‘lacking’. This conforms to Anagnost's analysis that those of ‘low quality’ are blamed for holding China back.

Governance

Central government supporters of the Organic Law as well as the township working group promoted the elections as devolving power to local villagers. Farmers should take advantage of this opportunity to vote for local committee members and participate in local self-governance. From the point of view of Mengsong villagers, however, the process looked different. The elections, as introduced by a township working group, moved major decision-making from the hamlet up to the village committee level, including management of local lands, which in principle still belonged to the collective (hamlet) level. Both Lao Er and Agu, the former Vanguard leader, explained that the structural reform surrounding the election moved ‘power’ from the hamlet to the village level. Hamlet heads could no longer apply directly for government funds, but instead had to approach the village committee. The township working group explained these changes as responding to the need to ‘unify administration’ (tongyi yidian) to make Mensgong ‘easier to manage’ (guanlixing). The context and phrasing sounded to me as if Mengsong would be ‘easier to manage’ for the township.

The younger, newer village officials, whom I interviewed many times, were all fresh-faced and pleasant. Lao Er and the new party secretary asked me what I liked about Mengsong. I said I liked the people. When they asked what problems I saw, I pointed to all these new companies and business people from the outside, enterprises that had no responsibility for or commitment to this place. The two leaders agreed and said that they also worried, but that it might be OK. In contrast to Akheu and his cohort from five years earlier, these new officials were waiting for higher-ups in government administration to tell them how to increase agricultural productivity and grow the local economy.

Over a year after the election, the new village leaders' knowledge about emerging possibilities in Mengsong was not extensive and they had not yet learned how to negotiate, how policies were implemented or how new opportunities might be exploited. For example, in two weeks of interviewing hamlet heads and former informants, I discovered that a company from Taiwan had offered to pave the road from the main hamlet to a local reservoir, and that a Hong Kong company had assessed the possibility of turning the reservoir into a tourist facility with rental boats. Lao Er and the party secretary had not heard of these possibilities. In a setting like Mengsong, either of these proposals would have been a major event. In another example, when I asked Lao Er how he would handle Vanguard's loss of 700 mu (46.6 hectares) of shifting cultivation land to state reforestation, he said the government should reimburse Vanguard, but he did not know how much. He would wait and see. While we might read this as a single instance of electing (and appointing) somewhat passive and incompetent people, it is curious that moving decision-making from the hamlet to the village level also removed considerable clout from hamlet heads who had previously gone around to township and county administrators to protest Akheu's corruption and ask for development funds. By 2002, hamlet heads were not part of the ‘village committee’ and could not directly contact government agencies.

By 2002, though, the previous leaders, whether Akheu or the former hamlet heads, were seriously dissatisfied. Akheu claimed that the newly elected leaders ‘did not know how to operate’. The new village leaders would not insist that policies such as the logging ban and ecological construction be reworked to suit local conditions. Akheu stressed that the village leaders should be more active—they should be looking for new business opportunities instead of responding to outsiders. He also said they should be applying for funds from the Go West project.Footnote ¹⁴ The former Vanguard hamlet heads claimed that the newly-elected leaders did not have the ability (nengli) that they themselves had. It is notable that the old guard used the word ‘ability’, rather than ‘quality’, in describing capable people. The use of ‘nengli’ to describe people, common across China, gives high marks to those with a ‘can-do’ attitude and the savvy to get things done. In its use, nengli does not imply level of education, as reference to ‘people of high quality’ always does. The former leaders subverted the suzhi discourse in a modest way by adjusting the language to suit their own meaning.

Resource Access—The Timber Ban and Ecological Construction

The effects of the timber ban and ecological construction on Mengsong were multiple. The state reclaimed the forest. Villagers were no longer allowed to cut any trees in the state forest.Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, a township forester told me that a large area of primary forest in Mengsong known as Sanpabawa, which I knew Akha farmers had protected for over 250 years, would come under stringent state control. As the last remaining extensive primary forest in the uplands, this forester intoned, ‘the Sanpabawa needs to be protected by state foresters before Akha destroy it’. This man noted that the policy goal was ‘to take back as much forest as possible’ following the 1998 floods. As he pointed out, Mengsong land is in the watershed of the township wet rice fields, meaning that in his view, tree cutting in Mengsong negatively affected lowland livelihoods.

As for Mengsong farmers, they now had to get a permit and pay a fee to cut trees in the hamlet collective forest. They could still cut fuel wood in household forests, but the forestry station agent told me farmers could no longer cut trees over six inches in diameter, even on household land. At the same time, the township forestry station paid villagers to manage the collective forest and household forests, which now belonged to the state (guojia).Footnote ¹⁶ For many farmers, this shift in emphasis was not the critical issue, although they found it annoying to get permits and pay fees for trees that they had kept in good condition. Agu put it more bluntly: ‘In 1982 the government gave us forest contracts for 50 years. Now that is all changed. They cheated us’. For the longer term, the separation of forest-dependent people from the forest, both symbolically and materially, had been accomplished through the suzhi discourse that, by 2000, had produced Akha as people without the knowledge and quality to manage forests on their own. The transformation involved a reconfiguration of both society and space, as people were reclassified and lands were taken out from under them.

For most farmers, the critical issues for forests were two. First, the way the timber ban and ecological construction were implemented meant that villagers could no longer practice shifting cultivation. On household shifting cultivation lands, farmers were allowed to cut small trees but they had to leave in place trees over six inches in diameter. This rule alone effectively ended shifting cultivation. Farmers could not cut enough trees over a large enough area to make a good burn needed to provide ash as fertiliser for new crops. Also, as shifting cultivation fields regenerated into forests, they came under the purview of the township forestry station and were lost to farmers. With the loss of shifting cultivation lands, farmers were unable to produce enough grain. On the grain issue, the township forestry station pointed to the ‘grain for green’ plan to reward farmers for allowing cultivated land to regenerate into trees.Footnote ¹⁷ A few Vanguard farmers had heard of this plan, but they had received no grain or money. The plan was for farmers to receive grain subsidies from the state rather than produce grain for themselves—a passive position in compensation for passively allowing trees to take over their land. In the past couple of years, township foresters had repeatedly explained to farmers that shifting cultivation destroyed forests and the watersheds that provided water for lowland farmers in Xishuangbanna. Township foresters called this ‘chaotic cutting’ (luan kan) that threatened the environment and impeded development. As with any action called ‘chaotic’, this tree felling also threatened social stability. As one farmer noted, ‘We never knew that our cutting trees affected people elsewhere’. As a result of the pervasive ‘environmental narrative’ about the destruction of watersheds (see Blaikie and Muldavin Reference Blaikie and Muldavin2004), the purported damage caused by Akha farmers now extended outside of Mengsong. Akha villagers' ‘lack of knowledge’ and ‘low quality’ were causing problems for the greater Chinese society, and hindering economic growth.

The second major issue for farmers was the loss of land for pasture. The forestry department required villagers to plant either pine trees or tea on what was pastureland. Agu told me that many Vanguard farmers, once they understood the implications, started planting tea to keep the government from reclaiming their lands. Since they had already lost substantial pasturelands, most villagers had sold all their water buffalo and cattle. Five years earlier, sale of livestock had been the second highest source of household income. Removing pastures from villagers' control eliminated yet another resource from farmers' management and income streams.

Access to Mining

By 2002, the state prohibited farmers from mining on their own lands. In their place, a Kunming company contracted the tin mining in Mengsong and hired outside workers. This company paid hamlets an annual fee, a sum that did not contribute to household incomes. By that time, the manganese mining operation also contracted workers from elsewhere to load and unload trucks in Mengsong. In similar fashion, a Fujian company had begun mining gaolingtu, a white clay used to make fine porcelain, hiring their own labourers to dig in Mengsong. The income from all these activities and resources was going to enterprises and workers from outside Mengsong. As Agu noted, all these outsiders had made conditions ‘very chaotic’ (hen luan). He used the same language as state agents, luan, but pointed to new forms of ‘development’ rather than farmers' land uses as the source of chaos.

Akheu, the Entrepreneur

By 2002, Akheu was the boss of the tin mining crew. Earlier ousted from his role as village head, Akheu had been hired by the Kunming company and was now portraying himself as an entrepreneur, one of those business people represented by the Communist Party of China. He was also trying to turn himself into a person of higher quality who intended to follow the track of business, rather than state administration, as the means to become a person who counted in China (Sturgeon Reference Sturgeon and Solinger2005c).