For scholars working, travelling or just passing through ethnic minority regions of rural China today, the rise and socioeconomic impact of tourism are immediately noticeable. Tourism and its effects are, of course, of great concern to village residents seeking income-earning opportunities, local government cadres wanting to build social and symbolic capital, and provincial and national bureaus aiming to fulfil the central state's policies and projections for the future of the nation. Xianghong Feng's detailed ethnography of ethnic tourism and its consequences in and around Fenghuang county, Hunan province, offers a careful analysis of the strategies and rationalities behind village-level participation in tourism development, the often strained relationships between local residents, migrant entrepreneurs, and government officials, and the networks of power and resistance that cross-cut tourism labour and opportunities.

Feng's study is based on more than a decade of engagement with tourism and ethnic Miao communities around Fenghuang, although she emphasizes that the bulk of the research conducted for the book took place between 2010 and 2014. This period is important because it traces the workings of rural ethnic tourism in China after the “New Socialist Countryside” national rural development policies, when countryside tourism in the form of nong jia le (“peasant family happiness”) businesses, including locally owned, village-based guesthouses and restaurants, was widely promoted as a key means for rural economic growth and stability. In her ethnography, Feng closely analyses the rise and fall of village restaurants, the negotiations and struggles between village entrepreneurs and tour group leaders (and in particular, the rather vicious cycle of kickbacks and commissions that perpetuate village competition and the highly unequal distribution of tourism profits), alongside a readable account of the quotidian tasks and responsibilities of villagers who are central to making an “ethnic encounter” possible for tourists.

Focusing on the nexus of tourism, power and inequality, the book provides a timely study of the sociocultural transformations and economic aspirations of rural, ethnic minority Chinese. The communities Feng studies are Miao, and like other minority regions they are increasingly enmeshed in, and attempting to profit from, middle-class urban China's desire for leisure experiences. Her interlocutors, who are drivers, restaurant owners, photographers and local cadres, participate deliberately and reflexively in the processes of self-commodification and neoliberal entrepreneurialism that characterize ethnic tourism in the world today. However, as Feng shows, these Miao villagers also stake their claim alongside and sometimes against the influx of developers, investors and government officials who, across the country, have been integral in carving out “scenic areas” and siphoning profits through concessions and management contracts that are often agreed upon without (much) consultation with the village residents directly affected.

Fenghuang has been part of county, and later provincial and national tourism development projects since the 1990s. The focus of tourism development in the region has expanded from Fenghuang's famous “old city” (gucheng) to surrounding Miao villages. The ethnography is divided into three parts, each of which explores a different scale and aspect. As Feng describes in the first two chapters, the history of tourism in Fenghuang illustrates the “McDonaldization thesis,” in which the scaling up of village-based tourism results in generic forms of commodification and the unequal distribution of profits and power in the tourism industry. Part two (chapters three to five) details how tourism penetrated into rural Miao village communities around Fenghuang, and also how Miao villagers themselves attempted to move into the gucheng to find work and wages as photographers, souvenir sellers and restaurant owners. These chapters provide important analyses of gender, power and profits in China's tourism industry. In particular, Feng's discussion in chapter four of women's roles in tourism and their relatively enhanced status offers useful insights on the ways in which tourism both amplifies and transforms gendered roles and subjectivities. The discussion of “prosperity” as an idea and as an ideal norm for Miao villagers in chapter five provides a nuanced understanding of what might entail “poverty alleviation” through tourism.

Part three focuses on one village, Longcun, describing the tactics of everyday resistance against tourism developers and investors, and the tribulations of village restaurants. In chapter six, she illuminates the complexity of internal village politics “induced,” as she writes, by tourism. While everyday resistance by villagers was small-scale and temporary, the cumulative effect reveals both the possibilities and limits of agency for rural Chinese. In chapter seven, Feng details how villagers attempted to operate their restaurants early on as a cooperative and to set minimum prices for tour groups (the primary source of business), to the dissolution of this model in favour of individually run businesses.

In her conclusion, Feng discusses Langde, a Miao village in neighbouring Guizhou province that has been well-studied as a case of small-scale, community-based tourism development, and ends with the provocation that even this highly celebrated model may also fall to the forces of “McDonaldization” if left unchallenged.

As a case study of tourism and power in rural ethnic China, this book is a helpful contribution to the growing literature in the anthropology of tourism and contemporary China studies through its ethnographic attention to social relations, gender, and rural economies. The level of detail is at times overwhelming, and readers may find it difficult to follow all of the names and stories presented, because they tend to be woven in and out of chapters without clear structure. A more robust introduction and/or conclusion would have been beneficial for providing a stronger sense of the analytical arc of the chapters and the implications of the arguments. Nevertheless, the book will be of use to scholars already working on these issues, and individual chapters could be effectively integrated into relevant university courses and seminars on minority China, tourism anthropology and rural development.