Two models for ecotourism in Danzhai
For the past three years I have been fortunate to consult with the Guizhou government on questions of local development and the proper stewardship of biocultural diversity. This has usually taken place through flying visits to see rural tourism development projects. Each year I get to see a little more of the astonishing places and communities that seem to be stuffed into every corner of Guizhou. One of the most beautiful valleys I have had a chance to visit was in Danzhai County, with my colleagues ZHANG Jianfei from Wuhan University and ZHANG Xiaosong from Guizhou Normal University.
This year I had the opportunity to return to Danzhai county, now as part of a team from the International Mountain Tourism Association. This group of people, who had met in seminars and discussions, had already debated at some length and rather inconclusively what we thought ‘good’ ecotourism might be, and what values we thought the IMTA should be promoting. As an organisation the IMTA is acutely aware of the fragility of mountain landscapes and the tension between drawing in revenue from tourists and harming the eco-cultural landscape that both residents and visitors want to enjoy.
When our busload of IMTA folk came to Danzhai, then, I had already participated in long and enthusiastic conversations with town, county and prefecture officials about fundamental wants such as education; about fragile landscapes and how best to utilise them; and how cultural diversity transforms and adapts to development. During our one day in Danzhai we were taken to visit two development projects that were a challenging pair: a shopping mall built in the middle of nowhere by the Wanda Corporation, and a village supported by high-end artisanal paper-making. The problem posed by this pair is deep enough to merit more substantial treatment than I can give here. One question is, how were these two sites selected for IMTA folks to see? I was lucky enough to already know Danzhai county a bit, but for some of my colleagues this incongruous pair was the only glimpse of Danzhai county they had. However, the question that stays with me is this: are they opposites, or are they complementary?
(Before I continue: It’s worth looking at the Anthropology Today issue on tourism, and especially at Michael A Di Giovine’s survey on how anthropologists perceive tourism there. My collaborations in Guizhou are with Chinese anthropologists and historians who have a distinct view on what the applied anthropology of ecotourism might be. There is a generational change in views of ‘nature’ among Chinese intellectuals. The practical and political motivations for studying ecotourism development in Guizhou, an historically backwards region of China, include a complex sense of stewardship of its cultural and biological diversity.)
Danzhai Wanda Village 丹寨万达小镇
The first of these two sites has its own Facebook page: the Danzhai Wanda Village. Indeed, the Wikipedia page for Danzhai county talks about almost nothing else, although I can assure you there are many other fine places in Danzhai, including some staggeringly beautiful karst valleys in Danzhai that remind me strongly of the European Alps. The mythology of the Wanda corporation and its founder Wang Jianlin is an origin myth for benevolent giant capitalism in China, along with the stories of Jack Ma and Alibaba and Lei Jun and Xiaomi. As we drove along one of Guizhou’s shiny new expressways towards the Wanda village, our tour guide explained that Wang Jianlin had wanted to invest in rural Guizhou but that existing transport links were so poor that it was impossible to shift goods to the rest of China in a cost-effective way. Frustrated by these constraints and concerned for the welfare of the people living in this very poor rural backwater, he decided instead to build a tourist village that would celebrate local culture while also generating income through tourism. All the income, we were told, would be returned to local people. We arrived only a month after it had opened, and already a million guests had visited.
Danzhai Wanda Village is basically a pleasant large open-air shopping mall in the middle of rural Guizhou, with lots of local colour. The shops range from T-shirts to local food to paper-making. It’s arranged as a long meandering street, with a bus park and reception area at one end and a bus park and performance area at the other end. Visitors enter, wander down the mall, and arrive at the other end after buying things, eating things, and imbibing Danzhai Miao culture. It was said the Wang Jianlin had originally intended to produce and market local Danzhai pork—–actually, many different preparations, ranging from smoked salamis to pork bellies—and that certainly featured on the menu. A very popular craft shop encouraged people to get involved and make their own paper using natural materials.
Perhaps because we were arriving as part of a delegation that included officials, we were confronted on our arrival by many women in Miao clothing who blocked our way until we had drunk 白酒báijiǔ from their hands. They were accompanied by young men playing the Miao bamboo internal reed pipes. I don’t think most visitors were confronted by this famous-in-Guizhou ritual on arrival at the mall, but it did seem to be part of door staff duties at many of the more expensive restaurants. One man, part of a small team receiving folks at the door of one restaurant, was patient enough to let me try to get a noise from the shawm-like pipes. They come in a range of sizes from the middling to the enormous.
Self-presentation as a Miao girl or boy is a skill: at the IMTA itself, held in Xingyi, the ushers dressed as Bouyi or Miao were actually professional performers, who had a hilarious time interacting with our group after the official ceremony had finished. In Danzhai Wanda Village the staff who man the doors of the restaurants don’t seem to be performers as such, just folks glad to have a job. However, for someone growing up in Danzhai, part of an autonomous ethnic prefecture, both classification as ‘Miao’ and the performance of Miao-ness are routine social-political processes. Family histories may record intermarriages and ambiguities, but managing categories without awkward ambiguity is key for someone entering the world of mobility, identification and employment.
One art gallery was a remarkable oasis among the small shops and restaurants, though it wasn’t attracting so many customers. It held prime position, right in the middle of the mall. The goods on sale were expensive handmade craft items. It had a central gallery courtyard complete with lotus pools, where there was a display of photographs by a UK photographer of authentically ethnic people from all over China.
At the end of the mall, after one has passed any number of ethnically themed shops selling local goods (a few) or utterly generic tourist stuff (many), one arrives at a large courtyard where performances are held to entertain you until your bus retrieves you. There’s an information hall, and there, above the information desk, is the most astonishing thing about Wanda Danzhai town.
The screen is so large that it’s difficult to get it all into one photograph, and as you can see it’s constantly updating. This is an image of the mall as a business: each yellow dot is a shop, each green trace is a moving consumer. The screen shows a shifting breakdown of consumers by origin, consumer spend, consumers by gender and so forth. Every single person is tracked from entry to exit, and for Chinese visitors, their ID is tied to their record allowing the Wanda software to organise each dot as, for example, a 43-year-old woman from Chongqing. As you can see, by 15:30 on the 18th of August there had been 1,091,832 entrants to Danzhai Wanda Village, including us.
Stone Bridge 石桥
My colleague ZHANG Xiaosong has been working with the village of Shíqiáo for many years. I haven’t had time to work out how old the papermaking industry actually is at this particular site, but I would not be surprised to discover that it was more than a thousand years old. Much of Guizhou is karst relief, very rugged even if the actual height isn’t so great, with caves and underground rivers and deep gorges. The name Shíqiáo refers to a great arch at the mouth of a cave where alkaline water pours out and flows a short distance down to a river. This cave entrance forms a natural shelter and the water provides both mechanical energy and raw materials for making paper from Broussonetia papyrifera (构树 or 構樹) which grows in the area.
The water is channeled into a series of vats used for paper slurry, and workers use screens to sieve the slurry into flat sheets of paper that are dried in great stacks. Nowadays the power comes from electricity but there are still pivots, canals and mounts that show how recently the mashing, milling and lifting were done with hydromechanical power.
The paper mill here produces a grade of paper which is of extraordinary quality. In the village nearby, shops sell paper to tourists: notebooks and the like. But the real economic punch of the paper business comes from the international importance of the paper produced here. It is used for archival work in Beijing and elsewhere; the shop is filled with stacks of paper waiting to be shipped out, and a few shelves of items for tourists. The finest grade of paper is gossamer-thin, and used to reconstruct damaged material in the national museum. Heavier grades, which are still remarkably light, are used for copying out Buddhist sūtras. The owner of the paper shop didn’t bat an eye when I asked about international export.
The view from inside the cave out past the paper-making sheds into the river valley features the graceful concrete span of the new motorway that now connects Danzhai to the rest of Guizhou and China, the same motorway along which Danzhai Wanda Village may be found.
This small village was, if not rich, then certainly well enough off. The rooms above the shops were available for home stay, and although the road down to the village was precipitous and not really suited for big busses, there were clear signs directing tourists down towards a reception area where cultural performances could be held and a parking area. The village itself was laying a new main drain pipe — improvements to sanitation! — and there was evidence of a steady traffic of tourists coming through. At the other end of town chilies were drying in the sun by a bend in the river where children were swimming. A placard announced that one of the older structures in the village dated from the early Qing dynasty. I didn’t have time to work out where the old road was, but this village clearly had been well connected for many centuries through the export of fine quality paper. To a lesser extent that road must also have brought in the supplies of Broussonetia papyrifera 构树 for the mill.
The paper industry, although it is artisanal and relatively low-volume, generates both income and connectedness for this village. People did not come to this village first because of tourism, and tourists do not represent its only link to people, wealth and influence well beyond Danzhai and indeed Guizhou as a whole. The paper industry does attract tourists, though, and clearly tourism has become an important income generator as well as a way to fold into the general programme in Guizhou of developing sustainable tourism.
opposites or complementary?
In the late afternoon of the 18th August, as we sat in our bus headed for the hotel, there was a general consensus among the foreign IMTA members that Danzhai Wanda Village was the wrong model for mountain tourism and Shiqiao was the right one. In workshops and discussions we had agreed that IMTA (and we) should promote light infrastructure, locally-led projects that foregrounded ecological fragility and refused instrumental approaches to cultural and biological diversity. In my notes I see scribbled links between the refusal to commodify people or places and cumulative benefits of healthy ecosystems, healthy populations and healthy individuals. We spoke about ‘slow tourism’, ‘light tourism’, tourism that balanced the evolving well-being of a local community in its ecological context with the desires and needs of visitors attracted to these rare places. At several moments we drew an explict contrast between ‘mass tourism’ and ‘ecotourism’.
The opening film for the IMTA conference, produced in Guiyang, celebrated Guizhou’s geography as a resource for tourism and broke it down into key categories: mountains, water, roads. 山水, mountains and water, is a pair that conveys the whole notion of aesthetic landscape…but roads? Those roads, in the film, begin with mule tracks and progress through monumental concrete motorway bridges to high speed rail and the expansion of the airport. How do we move through landscapes, as tourists or scholars or merchants? The roads are there in the film because the motorway bridge viewed from the papermaking cave is a contrast but not an enemy.
Danzhai Wanda Village was imposed from outside by an immensely powerful individual and his company. It was intended entirely as a means of selling ethnicity and it is a classical example of heavy infrastructure that requires lots of energy to build and run. It produces vast quantities of waste and both direct and indirect (transport) pollution. It depends on an enormous motorway to even be possible. There was no sense at all of the ecology or the environmental footprint of the project: it is a heroic taming-of-the-landscape exercise that sets aside economic growth through raw industrial production capacity for the more sophisticated, but equally objectifying, process of profit through the commodification of local culture. The Orwellian monitoring of every customer is featured as a kind of excellence.
Symbolically, it’s even more problematic. The pernicious influence of wealthy developers in Guizhou is a recurring theme: it’s impossible to achieve anything like co-ordinated planning among civic authorities, as one or another contending group in the county or prefecture can always recruit a developer to buy out rights for development in some part of a region. Indeed, developers appear to be a constantly circling menace, waiting for the next scenic spot to be identified. Although there are World Heritage sites, there are no protected areas at a regional scale and nothing like mixed-use protected landscapes. Guizhou province appears to have very little in the way of tools to support ecologically sensitive development of tourist areas. In that sense, Danzhai Wanda Village is the story of a heroic developer taken to its logical extreme, drenched in awestruck positive rhetoric. This place is a shrine to the unconstrained developer as a benevolent local god.
By contrast Shiqiao had emerged organically: it is a bottom-up development that has grown as much as needed to handle a certain flow of tourists but is not catering for, or seeking, ‘mass tourism’. Rather than a luxury hotel, it has home-stays. It does not depend entirely on tourism but has diverse economic and material processes through which it creates durable connections to distant people. Shiqiao’s own people speak for themselves, make their own connections to the people that came there, and don’t have to represent themselves in terms determined by urban or elite constructions of ethnicity and gender.
So: Danzhai Wanda Village bad, Shiqiao good? Now I am not so sure. Listening to how some (though certainly not all) Chinese colleagues spoke about the two places, it was clear that Danzhai Wanda Village was a satisfying, even amazing, project, with positive moral and aesthetic qualities. At present in China there is no option of rejecting mass tourism, only directing it. As Guizhou is a tourist destination, so it is a mass tourist destination, and Danzhai Wanda Village serves that market. The landscape around Shiqiao is fragile: it is a deep river valley with caves, and it can continue to develop slowly precisely because the great concrete arc of the expressway passes overhead on its way to Danzhai Wanda Village. Practically, the two kinds of place are not opposites, they are complementary.
In terms of ecologically and socially responsible tourism, Danzhai Wanda Village is not good, but as a mass tourism destination it is necessary. It could have been a far better project! It should have a zero-impact infrastructure marketed as aggressively as the ‘big data’ in the visitor information room: solar panels, mandatory use of recycled materials for all packaging, waste processing for visitors on entrance and exit, onsite sewage management, aggressive and highly visible water recycling. Every shop should be named for an endangered local species, and visitors should be shown how the environmental impact from driving down the motorway balances against air pollution reduction schemes on the site, including reforestation. There should be a railway, and visitors arriving by rail should get a discount. But the mass tourism market that Danzhai Wanda Village serves is a necessary part of Guizhou’s future so long as we humans continue to crowd the earth.
So, too, one could hope for a far more sophisticated and participatory approach towards cultural commodification…but perhaps that is reaching beyond what is politically possible in the modern People’s Republic of China. People in Danzhai, as elsewhere in Guizhou, have a flexible and ironic attitude towards ethnic identity. Miao, especially, in Guizhou know that they are not one linguistic or cultural community in spite of official categories. If an imposed ethnic identity constitutes their politics, it can also be used to make money. There are politically sensitive examples of the state’s management of ethnicity elsewhere in China that make any discussion difficult, but I do think that moving away from an instrumental approach to culture towards a genuine appreciation for diversity is, again, part of what Guizhou can and should strive for.
By its size, Shiqiao cannot expect to be a participatory experience on such a grand scale, and it is worth asking how we could develop the symbolic power of a small, slow, and sensitive rural development project like Shiqiao to act as a counterweight against the (Wikipedia-worthy) hype of the Wanda project. Certainly we can feature places like Shiqiao in case studies and best practice guidelines; and we can ask the people there who have worked hard for decades to share their knowledge. Yet part of why Shiqiao succeeds, when analysed under the criteria for mountain tourism, is that it did not need the tourists. Danzhai Wanda Village is a self-consuming nothing, a fictitious village constructed for tourists to consume; Shiqiao is an old place, part of one of the oldest economies in the world———the materials for literacy. The lesson of economic diversity is well understood. Across Guizhou there are good rural development projects in villages involving, for example, organic strawberry and blueberry farming combined with cultural and agricultural tourism. The tourists come to see and take part in a local economy that is not just about tourists. There is a material basis for their experience of authenticity.
What else is needed? The lack of proper regulation on development in Guizhou is a critical challenge. I am convinced by the anger and arguments of many Chinese colleagues that for Guizhou to develop ecotourism (a cryptic symbol if ever there was one!) a strong and co-ordinated system of environmental protection, planning, protected areas and protected area management is necessary. Were such a regulatory scheme in place, then the Wanda project could have been directed towards an ecological economics and meaning. It could have been a symbol not of unconstrained property baron benevolence towards the weak, but of China’s ambition to build advanced environmentally appropriate structures that integrate and strengthen its diverse and fragile landscape.