Brief aus China

I travelled to Kaili, the capital of the Miao-Dong Autonomous Prefecture of Qiandongnan, in Guizhou Province in the south west of China, to see a Lusheng Festival. My greatest concern was that it would turn out to be a tourist trap. For months I dreaded the thought of smiling girls and boys in perfect ethnic costumes performing in a well rehearsed display of folklore clichés.

Kaili, like most Chinese towns, is quite ugly, but the countryside – if you ignore the air-polluting industries – is very picturesque. And densely populated; in every valley Hmong villages climb up the hillsides, surrounded by rice paddies. My fears were not abated by the visits to some of these villages that were included in the trip. In every village we were met with the traditional Hmong welcome of rice wine, song and dance (and the nagging question of whether the villagers were paid to do this or if they just relied on our inevitable shopping e文章来源中国酒业新闻网xpenditure).

But all my worries and misgivings were alleviated when we finally arrived at the “festival,” which turned out not to be a traditional Lusheng Festival at all. This “Lusheng Festival” was a kind of fair held in connection with a meeting of local officials. We visited on the second day, which meant that the official part of the program was over, but the big cars and men in suits betrayed the continued presence of functionaries, which is not usually the case at a proper Lusheng Festival.

The dancing was not that of the usual Lusheng Festival competitions, with groups of (mostly young) females, dancing under the watchful eyes of their mothers, the judges and Chinese tour-ists. These were ordinary peasant women in traditional Hmong costumes mixed with modern items, like trainers, dancing to brisk Lusheng tunes. It was a simple, artless kind of dance based on a not too complex structure and performed in a ring surrounded by an audience. In short, it was dancing by peasants for peasants, very far from any scholarly Folk Dance Federation.

The reason for this “preservation of peasant culture” is the massive underdevelopment of the mountainous countryside where people still live pretty much as they always have. No foreigner was allowed to visit this part of China up until the eighties as it was considered to be too poor. Today cash is coming in, presumably thanks to labour migration to other parts of China. As a consequence you might find satellite dishes on the roofs of even the most dilapidated shacks and there is a profusion of commercial channels to watch ...
China might be a dreamscape for neo-liberals but political liberalism has no place (yet) and even though Beijing is willing to let the Hmong people live accord-ing to their traditions they are in no way willing to give up their control. This became obvious when we happened to pass through the village of Lei Gong during a rehearsal for the New Year celebrations. Apparently, Lei Gong was going to be the place for the 2007/08 New Year festival; the place where everyone that was anyone in local politics was going to be, alongside representatives from the central government – and the Party – all the way from Beijing. As in Beijing, foreigners are not allowed to attend the celebrations. It was OK for us to see the rehearsal as long as we did not step on to the honorary platform. The Miao (the Chinese name of the Hmong) New Year celebration rehearsal turned out to be a kind of surreal, huge, Soviet-inspired pageant with hundreds of school kids attired in ethnic costumes accompanied by loud and boisterous popular singers.

This part of China has been a source of unrest throughout history and from early times the central government has deployed soldiers here. A legacy of this is the Dixi or Ground Opera – an early form of the traditional Chinese Opera, the most spectacular form of which is the so-called “Peking Opera.” The ethnic group preserving the Dixi tradition is called Old Han and is said to be descended from soldiers sent to the area during the Ming dynasty. Today all-male, all-female or mixed groups are performing the Dixi with masks on their foreheads that are covered by black veils. I saw an all-female group of performers in the village of Cai Guan.

Considering there are about 4 to 5 million Hmong and that they are just one of several ethnic groups in China – with a strong identity – it is easy to understand the Chinese government’s wish to keep all in happy “harmony,” partying, dancing and playing their Lusheng flutes when not working hard on their well kept fields. But the question is, how long is this relatively new “harmonious dance of China” going to last?