This is a tale of two different places in Northwest Yunnan: Yongning, now a township in Ninglang County and known mostly as home to the Mosuo people and their system of social relations without the bonds of marriage, and Jinguan, in Yongsheng County, separated from Yongning by a couple of minor mountain ranges and populated mainly by farmers of the Han majority. The idea of this “bifocal view” offered by Xiaolin Guo is to closely examine local variation in the context of the state administration of the region as a whole.
While the two places are similar in some ways—they are of similar size and density of population and similarly remote from regional economic and administrative centers—the differences are stark. Jinguan lies in a relatively low-lying basin with fertile soil and a climate that allows for two rice harvests a year; it is perhaps the richest part of northwest Yunnan. Most of its inhabitants trace their descent to Ming garrisons, established at the end of the fourteenth century to defend the empire's southwest frontier, and they enjoy a proud and long-standing political allegiance to the Chinese state. By contrast, Yongning is higher in altitude and poorer, with a climate less suited to agriculture. The Yuan made the Yongning rulers native hereditary chiefs (tusi); the Ming confirmed this status. As native hereditary chiefs, the Ah family governed Yongning with little effective interference from without until it was peacefully liberated in 1950. In 1956, after many Mosuo joined other ethnic groups in a regional armed rebellion against the Communist Party, the chieftainship was abolished, and Yongning was forcefully incorporated into the party's system of governance.
After sketching out the history of the region as a whole from the Yuan through the socialist period, Guo refines her focus to the ethnographic level, relying on household surveys, participant observation, and interviews with local village, township, and county officials to describe contemporary livelihood and social structure in each township. Her account of Mosuo sexual relations is detailed and interesting, yet it remains at the level of generalized description. She does not look into variations of the “visiting” relationship within the Mosuo community. Nor does she examine kinship relations among the other ethnicities in the Yongning basin and surrounding mountains—mainly Han, Pumi, and Nuosu. When it comes to quoting actual Mosuo voices, she relies on the Chinese ethnography of the 1960s. In her investigation of Mosuo history and society, Guo makes a number of missteps. She echoes the view, prevalent in the Chinese-language literature, that Mosuo society is “woman centered,” without really explaining what that might mean. In the interest of comparing Mosuo communities with the Han villages of Jinguan, she makes the proposition, absurd at any level, that patrilineal descent is the “mirror opposite” of matrilineal descent. She repeats Anthony Jackson's judgment, long since debunked, that Yongning's Naxi neighbors practiced matrilineal inheritance until the Qing reforms of Lijiang's tusi system in the eighteenth century. And she vaguely links the Mosuo with the Tang dynasty polity of Sum-pa, known as the “Land of Women” (Nüguo), which is mythology at best.
Guo's account of Jinguan township, on the other hand, is fascinating. She contrasts social organization in Jinguan with the classic models of lineage and family organization derived from work in South China. Jinguan has few ancestral halls and almost no lineage organization, the result, according to Guo, of low population pressure and little outward emigration. Here, Guo makes expert and nuanced use of her ethnography to describe social organization. Her accounts of adoption, cross-sibling relationships, uxorilocal marriage, and “stay-at-home daughters” are particularly interesting. She claims that the last-named institution, called zhaipo, is unique to this basin. Parents, often wealthier ones, sometimes chose to have an elder daughter stay single, remain home, study Buddhist scripture, and help raise her younger brothers' children. Zhaipo had the authority of elder brothers over their younger siblings and of parents over their brothers' children. They were supported in old age by their brothers' children and grandchildren and had a place on the ancestral altar after their deaths. In a detailed account of economic livelihood in the basin, Guo describes an abundant resource base gradually becoming restricted by population growth.
Guo's most original contribution is her account of the evolution of local administration in the counties of Ninglang and Yongsheng. Ninglang County joined Mosuo-dominated Yongning township with Nuosu (Yi)-dominated Langqu township. Between 1950 and 1956, the Communist Party set up government organizations side by side with the native chieftains' governments. After the ethnic rebellions in 1956, the party demoted the chieftains, made Ninglang an “Yi autonomous county,” created a party-dominated county government, and carried out land reform in both townships. Eventually, the Nuosu elite came to control the county government. Guo judges this to be a form of autonomous rule analogous to the tusi system—though she admits that the degree of ethnic autonomy is restricted. She gives a fascinating account of kinship and marriage among Nuosu government officials, through which high-caste Nuosu create alliances among local administrations across the Yunnan–Sichuan border. Here, Nuosu elites employ a resource to which Mosuo officials, who still rarely marry, do not have access. Guo gives a detailed description of state–society relations during the reform era, as poverty relief programs and the abolishment of agricultural land tax enhanced the redistributive role of the state, and tourists, drawn to Yongning by the Mosuo, began to dominate the local economy.
Similarly, Guo's investigation of the township government and village administration of Yongsheng County during the reform period is excellent. She argues that the abolishment of the agricultural tax in 2006 altered the relationship between the state and rural society. It shifted responsibility for rural public welfare to the central government, on the one hand, and it moved the focus of local governance from the township government to village administration, on the other. She gives a lively account of rural development in this relatively well-to-do enclave of the periphery, emphasizing the give and take between local interests and various levels of state administration. She shows how Yongsheng county officials managed to take advantage of both the central state's emphasis on poverty alleviation and its plan to develop the country's western region, getting the county classified as poverty stricken because of its regional position, despite its relative wealth.
State and Ethnicity in China's Southwest is a competent, sophisticated investigation of local administration in an extraordinarily complex frontier region. Guo successfully argues that political integration in this region was uneven, multifaceted, and dialectical. It was never organized merely around a Han/non-Han binary; it was subject instead to many variations, depending on differing histories of local governance and different local styles of organizing social relationships. In some ways, the book attempts to capitalize on the sex appeal of Mosuo society, and its weakest points are those where it gives in to the hype on the Mosuo. But, overall, it is a sober, scholarly, complex, and resolutely unsensational work that consistently pulls in the opposite direction, relentlessly and skillfully placing local social organization in the context of the complex, fluid history of frontier administration.
