Nongjiale Tourism and Contested Space in Rural China

Spaciality and Symbolism

Nongjiale is not the only form of rural tourism that has emerged in China’s countryside. Its two decades of development have been complexly intertwined with other forms of leisure-tourism activities, leading to a surge of all different kinds of accommodation facilities in rural China (Park, 2008b; Yang and Wang, 2005; Zhongguo lüyou tongji nianjian, 2010; Zou, 2004). Because of this, it is difficult to draw a clear dividing line between the nongjiale farm guesthouse and other forms of leisure-tourism accommodation in the countryside. Nonetheless, the nongjiale farm guesthouse can be roughly defined as a relatively small-scale dining-lodging facility usually owned and run by a local peasant household with a limited capital investment. As I will discuss later, nongjiale farm guesthouses face tough competition from middle- and large-scale facilities mostly called dujiacun 度假村 (vacation village) or binguan 宾馆 (hotel) for both material and symbolic resources.

The term nongjiayuan 农家院 literally means “farmer’s courtyard” or “farmer’s compound.” The architecture of the nongjiayuan reflects to a substantial degree the essential features of farmhouses, given the thematic formation of nongjiale as a Chinese version of rural tourism. The generic configuration of the typical nongjiale farm guesthouse in Fule Valley largely preserves the quadrangle compound layout of the typical farmhouse in the region. Facing southward to a walled or fenced courtyard, a rectangular flat with two bedrooms and a kitchen/hall (or a living room in relatively recently rebuilt ones) between them constitutes the north wing of the compound. Rural farmhouses observed in many other provinces and regions show the same generic configuration with some minor variations (see Bray, 2005: 33; Liu, 2000; Yunxiang Yan, 2003; Zhang, 2001).

Based on this layout, a variety of farming and/or supplementary residential facilities such as a pigsty, poultry pen, barn, and toilet may be built along the east, west, and south wing of the courtyard, in accordance with the practical needs of the household. The specific configuration and constellation of an individual farmhouse may look considerably different, reflecting the physical terrain on which it is built, the economic circumstances and size of the household, and, of course, the needs and tastes of the family. For example, if the family is relatively big, a few extra bedrooms can be added to the east and the west wings of the courtyard, which may lead to an L-shape or a U-shape structure. Nonetheless, the basic configuration of most farmhouses in Fule Valley revolves around the enclosed compound structure and most villagers take it as the ideal structure for a farmhouse. Those who do not live in a complete compound structure are mostly poor households. Most villagers want to renovate or rebuild their farmhouses into a relatively enclosed compound house with an impressive gate when they have enough money to do so. In terms of this generic configuration, there is a significant commonality between farmhouses and farm guesthouses in Fule Valley.

When a peasant household decides to open a farm guesthouse, what it does first is to renovate or rebuild its old farmhouse into a dining-lodging facility. Depending on the amount of capital the household can afford to invest, the results may vary significantly. Those with the least capital cannot do more than largely preserve the existing structure and facilities of the farmhouse with a minimum degree of renovation, while those with enough capital tend to completely rebuild the north wing into a modern-style flat or multistory building and replace the farming facilities such as the pigsty and barn with a brand-new structure furnished with numerous guest rooms and modern showers/toilets. Most nongjiale entrepreneurs fall somewhere between these two poles in their construction projects. Because of limited capital at the start, the majority of the building projects are tilted toward the former pole. Those closer to the latter pole from the outset are very rare, and most of them are the result of a second or third renovation. Thus, the architectural style and spatial configuration of new and old farm guesthouses may look considerably different in detail. Yet again, most of them largely preserve at least the generic layout of rural farmhouses.

The floor plan of a farm guesthouse called Kelejia (see Figure 1) epitomizes the continuity between farmhouses and nongjiale farm guesthouses. ³ It shows that the specific configuration of rooms and facilities is significantly different from the average farmhouse, but its generic style, that is, a quadrangle compound house with a courtyard, remains almost intact. What this continuity implies is self-evident. The architecture of nongjiale farm guesthouses encodes to a certain extent the cultural meanings and values projected onto farmhouses by largely maintaining the essential layout of the latter. Nonetheless, this self-evident point does not explain much about the complex place-making in which nongjiale farm guesthouses become a culturally meaningful and politically and economically charged destination of rural tourism in post-Reform China.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The floor plan of Kelejia Farm Guesthouse.

As Xu’s statement above suggests, there are frequent nostalgic references to family relations and familial values in nongjiale tourism. The discourse of family and familial values is thus integral to the nongjiale experience and host-guest interaction. Most urbanite guests describe their experience in farm guesthouses through the spatial metaphors of family and home, such as “a feeling of arriving home” and “like returning to my old home.” What specific spatial aspects of farm guesthouses elicit the sentiment of familial intimacy and homey comfort among urbanite guests? To answer this question, it is necessary to delve into the spatial symbolism of the nongjiayuan and its links to the broader architectural tradition of Chinese society.

The nostalgia for familial intimacy and homey comfort provoked by the space of the nongjiayuan is first of all a consequence of the fact that the majority of urbanite guests have a substantial rural background. For these people, the spatial scheme of farm guesthouses should be reminiscent of their experience with rural life. Especially those who were born and grew up in villages or small towns and migrated to the city for higher education and job opportunities may experience a feeling of “returning home” in a farm guesthouse. As Maurice Halbwachs suggests, “spatial images play [an] important . . . role in the collective memory” (1980: 130), and the spatial scheme of the nongjiayuan can evoke nostalgic memories of what immigrant urbanites have left behind in their rural hometowns. ⁴

But urbanites who do not have any substantial experience or background of rural life exhibit a similar kind of nostalgic sentiment toward the spatial scheme of the farm guesthouse. For analytic purposes, I call this category of people “the native urbanite.” ⁵ If one has experienced rural life, especially in one’s childhood, it would be more than natural to nostalgically respond to the rusticity and rurality that the architecture of farm guesthouses materializes. However, native urbanites’ nostalgia for the rural life needs further explanation.

Of course, as most Euro-American advanced capitalist societies have experienced for more than a century now, people tend to become nostalgic for what they themselves have destroyed (see Berman, 1982; Lowenthal, 1985). In this vein, the rapid post-Reform industrialization, urbanization, and modernization that the Chinese people have experienced for the past three decades have engendered nostalgic sentiments among them. Researchers have observed that nostalgia has permeated all dimensions of Chinese society today (O’Brien and Li, 1999; Park, 2011; Wang, 2002; Yang, 2003). However, this tide of nostalgia does not explain why a certain group of people shows a certain form of nostalgia in a particular way and why particular things, incidents, symbols, and figures become the object of nostalgic yearning. The native urbanite’s nostalgia for rural life, triggered particularly by the architecture of nongjiale farm guesthouses, should therefore be approached from the broader social-historical context of China’s built (i.e., human-made) environment.

In an interesting work on the correlation between the socio-spatial production of the danwei 单位 and power relations in post-revolutionary China, David Bray (2005) argues that the siheyuan 四合院, or “the courtyard house” in his translation, epitomizes China’s architectural prototype that dates all the way back to ancient times and still persists in myriad back-alley residential communities in major Chinese cities like Shanghai and Beijing (see also Dutton, 1998: 208–10; Wang, 2003: 55–58). ⁶ The key architectural features of the siheyuan articulate the four general principles of Chinese architecture: a walled enclosure, axiality, north-south orientation, and a courtyard (Boyd, 1962: 49). The basic spatial scheme, cosmology, and symbolism of the courtyard house have informed all different kinds of built environments, including farmhouses, temples, imperial palaces, and even cities, for thousands of years (Bray, 1997: 52–53; see also Boyd, 1962; Bray, 2005; Zito, 1997). Siheyuan, a generic term for the quadrangle compound house built around one or multiple courtyards, embodies the prototype or archetype of China’s domestic and residential space. ⁷

In her work on gender and technology in late imperial China, Francesca Bray (1997) points out: “Building a house is not a simple matter of providing shelter using the most appropriate materials and design. A house is a cultural template; living in it inculcates fundamental knowledge and skills specific to that culture. It is learning device, a mechanism that converts ritual, political and cosmological relationships into spatial terms experienced daily and assimilated as natural” (51–52). Bray’s conceptualization of the domestic space as a “cultural template” for family relations and socio-symbolic orders in traditional China seems very much to hold true in contemporary China as well. According to Yunxiang Yan’s work on the transformation of family relations in a northeastern Chinese village, the changing spatial scheme of farmhouse remodeling during the 1980s and 1990s has been intimately connected with the rising importance of conjugal relations and the notion of privacy within and beyond the family (2003: 112–39).

The prototype of domestic space embodied in the siheyuan underlies the architecture of the nongjiayuan as well. The basic configuration and floor plan of the nongjiayuan are almost identical to those of the siheyuan; such continuity has probably something to do with the nostalgic sentiments of familial intimacy and homey comfort that native urbanite guests experience in farm guesthouses. However, the siheyuan has not been the dominant form of housing in post-revolutionary China. Although many siheyuan-style traditional housings still exist in the city, the new form of collective work-residential units (danwei) dominated residential space for the majority of the urban population from the 1949 socialist revolution to the 1990s (Bray, 2005; Walder, 1986).

David Bray specifies the characteristics of the danwei by arguing that “the danwei is the foundation of urban China. It is the source of employment and material support for the majority of urban residents; it organizes, regulates, polices, trains, educates, and protects them; it provides them with identity and face; and within distinct spatial units, it forms integrated communities through which urban residents derive their sense of place and social belonging” (2005: 5). In terms of its spatial scheme, danwei housing consists of an enclosed compound containing, as a rule, multistory apartment buildings as well as all the facilities necessary for everyday life, such as grocery stores, small shops, clinics, and schools. The residential apartment complex in the danwei compound usually housed hundreds, or even thousands, of households in its clearly delimited space.

At first glance, the spatial scheme of danwei housing looks fundamentally different from that of the siheyuan. According to David Bray, however, although the danwei provided a radically new form of residential space born out of the particular process of China’s socialist revolution, there still were underlying links between its space and that of the siheyuan at least in two respects. First, the general spatial scheme of danwei housing significantly articulated China’s long-standing architectural prototype epitomized by the siheyuan. Like the generic configuration of the siheyuan, the space of danwei housing invariably took the form of an enclosed compound surrounded by a high wall. Bray argues: “This enclosed form brings to mind the walled family compounds that constituted the dominant spatial form of traditional China” (124). Second, just as the space of the siheyuan provides the residents with a sense of belonging, familial intimacy, and identity, so too the enclosed nature of the danwei compound and the lack of social mobility during the Maoist era formed a kind of integrated community-like social space in which the residents developed a sense of communal life, intimacy, and identity through intensive and long-term relationships with their neighbors (5).

If a residential space encodes social relations and morality and shapes the everyday world of the people who live in it, it will engender a certain “structure of feeling” (Williams, 1977) that has a long-lasting impact on their value orientation and emotional disposition in the later stages of their life. This structure of feeling will prompt actions and emotional responses when they are involved with the same or a similar spatial constellation. That being the case, the siheyuan-like space of the nongjiayuan will trigger certain nostalgic sentiments among the nongjiale guests born and raised in the space of danwei complexes as well. In other words, city people may perceive and experience the space of the nongjiayuan as a locus of familial intimacy, communal life, and homey comfort through its structural and functional connections with the danwei housing that they once lived in. This implies that the prototype of Chinese residential architecture engenders a certain kind of common collective memory among different groups of people.

Recently, both siheyuan residential communities in urban back alleys and danwei compounds have been rapidly disappearing with the radical transformation of urban space since the 1978 reforms (see, e.g., Zhang, 2006; Dutton, 1998). Li Zhang’s article (2006) on the spatial transformation of the cityscape of Kunming in Yunnan province provides a good example of how the rapid disappearance of old residential areas and commercial alleys is perceived and evaluated in terms of the humanitarian criterion ren de qi. Zhang observes people in Kunming lamenting the vanishing of ren de qi along with the disappearance of old and familiar cityscapes. Similarly, in the process of disappearance, the space of the siheyuan must have been an important locus of nostalgia and memories of the recent past when people still could feel ren de qi in their work-residential spaces. Through the structural and symbolic continuity with the siheyuan and the danwei complex, the spatial scheme of the nongjiayuan evokes among urbanite guests the memory of familial-communal intimacy, homey comfort, authenticity, tradition, and warmth of humanity.

Beside the embodiment of nostalgia, familial intimacy, rusticity, and tradition, the space of farm guesthouses encodes another bundle of cultural values that cannot be explained simply by the architectural idiom and symbolism of the farmhouse and the siheyuan. As Xu Liang’s mention of “green environment” and her linking of it to the issue of personal health, the green discourse and its connection to self-health care constitute a key discursive layer of rurality in Chinese society today. I found that China’s widespread green discourse was connected with the surge of environmental consciousness and the elevated concern about health among the Chinese in conjunction with the dramatic degradation and destruction of the environment and the rapid privatization of the socialist health-care system since the 1978 reforms (see Farquhar, 2001, 2002; Farquhar and Zhang, 2005: 320; Ho, 2001; Weller, 2006: 56, 70; Yang, 2005). The architecture of farm guesthouses encodes the cultural value of green and healthy lifestyles into its spatial scheme, representative of which are the vegetable gardens in their courtyards and the kang 炕 in their guest rooms. ⁸

Noteworthy is that the discourse of green environment and healthy lifestyles connects the space of the nongjiayuan with a new form of urban residential space, that is, the luxurious high-rise apartment building, examples of which have explosively popped up over the past several decades, radically transforming the cityscape of China. In an analysis of advertisements for Shanghai’s luxury housing, David Fraser (2000) illuminates the permeation of green discourse in particular and rurality in general into the urban space. Based on his content analysis of advertising leaflets, he suggests that the thematic elements of the advertisements, such as proximity to nature and a peaceful lifestyle, are markers of “a romanticized ruralism” that bring about “a sense of placidness among the urban tumult” (46).

The image of a green and tranquil environment in the housing advertisements and its materialization in high-rise apartment complexes are not the only signs of the permeation of rurality into the urban space. Romanticized forms of rurality saturate public restaurants in the city as well. In my field trips to numerous cities, I often came across restaurants specializing in nongjiafan 农家饭 cuisine, mostly its luxury version embellished with rustic motifs.

Finally, just as the space of the traditional house embodied the power relations within and beyond the patriarchal family in premodern Chinese society (Bray, 1997), so too the space of farm guesthouses forges and encodes a particular form of power relations between the host and the guest. As pointed out at the beginning of this article, there has been a persistent structure of inequality between the rural and the urban in contemporary China, and the rural populace has come to be regarded as subordinate and inferior to city dwellers. This rural-urban relationship is certainly reproduced between the peasant host and the urbanite guest. City people wield power in their relationships with the peasant hosts not only in terms of their relative wealth but also in terms of their cultural capital accumulated through the codification of suzhi 素质 (human or cultural quality) in rural-urban identity politics (Anagnost, 2004; Hairong Yan, 2003). In addition, they wield power as the consumer of service against the peasant host as the provider of service. City people thus exert symbolic power through the cultural capital that Chinese society ascribes to them as the agents of modernity, culture, civilization, and suzhi.

Within this rural-urban cultural hierarchy, most people whom I interviewed thought that city people transfer their cultural capital to the peasant host through their simple presence in the countryside. They presume that the symbolic value of the urban body trickles down to the peasant body through the host-guest interaction taking place in the space of farm guesthouses. Interestingly, not only urbanite guests but peasant hosts as well express an analogous notion through astonishingly similar tropes exemplified by the following remarks:

Well, nongjiale is good for both the peasant and the urbanite. City people mostly have a higher wenhua 文化 [culture, education]. . . . City people can educate peasants and they can learn from the former. (A middle-aged guest from downtown Beijing)

On all accounts, city people are higher and peasants are lower in culture. Nongjiale provides the peasantry with opportunities to interact with city people. Through the relationship, the peasantry may learn something from city people. (A farm guesthouse owner in rural Chengdu)

However, the space of the farm guesthouse is also a locus in which the cultural hierarchy mostly tilted toward the urbanite guest is reversed, at least symbolically, to a certain extent. The room in the north wing of the compound house is usually reserved for the host family. In the case of Kelejia, the old host couple lives in a room at the east end of the north wing (see Figure 1). According to the spatial embodiment of family relations and hierarchies in the siheyuan, the north wing, called zhengfang 正房, is the residential area of the patriarch, that is, the power center of the household (Bray, 1997: 52–53; Bray, 2005: 30–32; Dutton, 1998: 209). Especially, “the room at the east end [of the north wing] was regarded as superior and thus was reserved for the ancestral shrine and the residence of the older parents” (Yunxiang Yan, 2003: 132). Under the same principle, the north wing of farm guesthouses assumes the symbolic force of the zhengfang in the siheyuan. Given the universality of the symbolism of China’s domestic space in the minds of the Chinese, both the host and the guest must be aware of the spatial hierarchy in farm guesthouses. The symbolic power that the spatial scheme of farm guesthouses provides to the peasant hosts allows them to have a sense of being “the host” in the literal sense of the term, that is, a host who wields power and accumulates prestige over the guest by providing the latter with material and symbolic hospitality.

Although nongjiale host-guest relationships are basically market relations, market economic rationality is not the only principle involved. Rather, reciprocity operates as an organizing principle in the material and symbolic exchanges between host and guest. During my fieldwork, I often observed that the host-guest relation draws not only on economic rationality but also on the moral scheme of guanxi 关系 in which the host and the guest exchange gifts, hospitality, or renqing 人情 in their words, based on the principle of reciprocity. And both the guest and the host try to emphasize the noneconomic nature of their interaction by cloaking naked material calculation as much as possible. Host-guest interactions in typical, small-scale farm guesthouses like Kelejia are generally intimate and personal, or as they are frequently expressed, “like a family” 一家人一样 and “like arriving at my own home,” especially when the guests are long-term huitouke 回头客 (returning or old customers). ⁹

Quite a few huitouke give small gifts to their hosts upon their arrival and the hosts reciprocate by providing their return customers with some discounts or free agricultural products upon their departure. What is interesting here is that when the host-guest relationships are long-term and intimate, guests’ right to order meals sometimes slips out of their hands. Some old customers simply let their peasant hosts determine, either partly or entirely, the contents of the nongjiafan meal. In addition, the guest sometimes has to order much more food and drink than she or he actually wants because of the feeling of obligation to the host. The peasant host may even join the table of the guest and partake of the food and drink together “like a family.”

This reciprocal nature of host-guest interactions thus sometimes inverts the guest-host power relationship. In other words, the moral economy activated by the reciprocal interaction between the host and the guest neutralizes to a certain extent the economic and symbolic power wielded by the guest. When this is articulated with the symbolism of the spatial scheme of the farm guesthouse, peasant hosts enjoy a certain kind of superiority, at least in a symbolic sense, over urbanite guests beyond their role as the service provider. The spatial idiom of the nongjiayuan encodes this reversed-power relationship and sustains peasant hosts’ sense of dignity in their interactions with urbanite guests. Peasant hosts’ sense of dignity is sometimes expressed through their expectation of respect and proper manners from the guests and their complaints about some city people’s treatment of them as a simple service providers. A nongjiale farm guesthouse owner said with anger, “we’re not a fuwuyuan 服务员 [server or waiter/waitress]. We’re the zhuren 主人 [master, owner, and host] of this place. It [treating us simply as a server] is completely bad manners!” ¹⁰ Meanwhile, the space of the nongjiayuan does not simply inform host-guest power relations, but also provides an arena of identity politics and competing discursive forces. In the following section, I explore the contested space of nongjiale farm guesthouses as a locus of two competing discursive systems and social forces—rurality and modernity (or urbanity)—in present-day China.

Modernity and Hybrid Space

One day I came across on the bustling streets of downtown Fule township, hundreds of passersby strolling into the gigantic square in front of the recently built International Conference Center. Around the square, tens of fair booths were attracting hundreds of curious spectators. It turned out that the booths were temporarily set up by the district government for propaganda purposes. They were displaying hundreds of photos and diagrams propagating the current development and modernization of the district. One of the booths that especially caught my attention had over its entrance a provocative red-banner slogan, “Strongly promote building a socialist new countryside.” ¹¹ Interestingly, it was exhibiting photos of the impressive urbanization and modernization of Xingfu village, a nongjiale tourism model village in Fule Valley. Among the six photo collages on the three walls of the booth, five formed two columns juxtaposing the old and the new look of the village to highlight its “splendid” development, and the last was a brief introduction of the trajectory of the village’s development. Many photos that represented the new look of the village were of nongjiale farm guesthouses built in the style of a multistory mansion. The booth was proudly presenting the urbanized built environment and farm guesthouses in the village as the model feature of rural development, urbanization, and modernization.

In the preceding section, we found that the cultural values projected onto, and reproduced by, the architecture of farm guesthouses constitute a key layer of the social construction of rurality in China today. However, the romanticized layer of China’s rurality is not the only discursive force that informs the spatial scheme of the nongjiayuan. As the booth’s presentation of Xingfu village’s farm guesthouses indicates, another crucial discursive force—modernity—wields tremendous power over the space of the nongjiayuan. In what follows, I discuss how the two competing discursive systems are manifested through the space of the nongjiayuan, engendering a contested space of hybridity in which seemingly incompatible forces and gazes are complexly comingled.

Most farm guesthouses keep the generic configuration of the farmhouse in the process of construction, while, at the same time, they also discard many significant markers of rurality and rusticity. On the one hand, the mud-brick and/or red-brick wall is replaced by a concrete wall; the traditional black tile roof is mostly replaced by a concrete slab roof; the traditional squatting-down-style toilet is replaced by a modern flush toilet; the interior of guest rooms is filled with a variety of modern consumer products; the kang is replaced by a bed; and so on. On the other hand, however, not all rustic artifacts are replaced. Rather, quite a few material icons of rusticity are preserved in sanitized and fragmented forms. Among them are bundles of dried corn ears or red peppers hung here and there on the walls, a small vegetable garden in the courtyard, some old agricultural implements or household artifacts displayed at eye-catching spots, and a few rooms furnished with a kang. Just as the generic configuration of the nongjiayuan links to rurality, rusticity, and tradition, these material fragments of rural lifestyles embody the same line of cultural values.

Nonetheless, many nongjiale farm guesthouses in Fule Valley and beyond tend to look more like an urban house or mansion than an average farmhouse. Apart from their urbanized exterior, they are furnished with a whole array of modern facilities, including private showers, 24-hour hot running water, flush toilets, air conditioning, luxurious beds, and fancy electric consumer products, most of which are absent from China’s average farmhouse. Accordingly, hybridity comes to be one of the most salient characteristics of the nongjiayuan. Generally speaking, the architecture of most farm guesthouses falls between two poles, the most rustic style and the most modern style. ¹²

Important here is that the spectrum is obviously tilted toward the latter pole. Nongjiale guesthouses, at least in their details, seldom preserve the crucial characteristics of peasant farmhouses. That is, except for very rare cases in which a peasant couple runs a nongjiale guesthouse without significantly renovating their farmhouse, usually because of a lack of capital, most nongjiayuan largely lose their traditional, rustic character at the moment of renovation or construction. It seems ironic that, far from being rustic, the architectural style—again, except for the underlying architectural prototype—of farm guesthouses is greatly shaped by the popular image of urbanity and modernity. Moreover, a highly successful nongjiayuan tends to evolve into an urban-style multistory building which, like those exemplified by Xingfu village farm guesthouses, is often represented as the model of rural development, urbanization, and modernization by the party-state and the state-affiliated media in China. In this respect, the term “nongjiayuan” comes to be a largely vacant word because their actual architectural styles seldom register the popularly imagined characteristics of “the farmer’s courtyard.”

Architectural hybridity of this kind is not exclusive to China’s nongjiale tourism but also characterizes rural tourism throughout the world (Cloke, 1993; Roberts and Hall, 2001, 2004; Taylor, 1997). This presumably reflects a universal belief that, even if rural tourists are looking for something “authentically” rural in farm guesthouses, they will not tolerate a complete absence of modern comforts and hygiene. This holds true in the case of nongjiale tourism, where peasant hosts seek to attract more customers by offering space that caters to the urbanite guests’ ambivalent desires for romanticized rural lifestyles on the one hand and comfortably modernized and sanitized accommodations on the other.

What makes the Chinese nongjiale guesthouse special are the power relations between rurality and urbanity embodied in its space. While the architectural style of farm guesthouses in Euro-American contexts mostly revolves around rurality (Park, 2008a), the space of nongjiale farm guesthouse in China is largely dominated by the markers of urbanity and modernity, leaving only a few prototypical traces of rurality and tradition in its deep structure. The dominance of modernity in the architecture of the nongjiayuan is an obvious paradox within the broader thematic formation of nongjiale tourism. ¹³ So it is not surprising that many urbanite guests complain about the “over-modernization” (or over-urbanization) of farm guesthouses. A customer from downtown Beijing grumbled to me,

I’m completely disappointed with the style of the house. It doesn’t look like a nongjiayuan at all. If I wanted to stay in this kind of modernized guest room 现代化的客房, I’d go to one of the vacation villages or hotels in this valley. . . . When we come out here, we want to experience a relatively authentic rural lifestyle 比较地道的农村生活.

Despite the high frequency of complaints about over-urbanization, however, most peasant entrepreneurs whom I interviewed within and beyond Fule Valley showed a strong desire to renovate or completely reconstruct their guesthouses in yet more urbanized styles. The future business plan of one farm guesthouse owner succinctly reveals this desire:

When I earn some more money with this farm guesthouse, I’ll construct a loufang 楼房 [multi-story building] with tens of guest rooms. And I’ll fill all the rooms with a lot of stuff such as air conditioners, private toilets and showers, big TV sets, and karaoke machines. Then I think I can earn daqian 大钱 [big money]. With this present pingfang 平房 [single-story house], I can’t make much money.

Most nongjiale peasant entrepreneurs shared this belief that more modernized accommodations will attract more customers and thereby bring in more money.

Whether this belief is justified depends on the extent to which the quantity and quality of physical facilities determine the business of farm guesthouses. I found in my field research that they were only some of the many factors that influence the business turnover of a specific farm guesthouse. Quite a few farm guesthouses with relatively poor facilities were very successful, while many of those with a full array of modern comforts did very slow business or were on the verge of bankruptcy. This implies that peasant entrepreneurs’ desire to instill modernity and urbanity in their farm guesthouses might be far from what city people actually expect or want. Indeed, some urbanite guests commented on this “peasant way of thinking” 农民的想法 in patronizing terms:

If they had preserved some more rustic qualities in their nongjiayuan instead of getting rid of them completely, they could have attracted many more customers. They just don’t know what we city people want. . . . The peasant way of thinking is just a sign of their low quality 低素质.

Interestingly, however, this “urbanite way of thinking” does not seem to be well grounded either. Although many guests complain about the over-modernization of farm guesthouses in one way or another, their actual practices reveal something different. Regardless of how much they look for authentic rural lifestyles, most guests strongly emphasize a certain degree of modern comfort and hygiene in their practices, and react negatively to the lack of facilities and hygiene in nongjiale guesthouses. The same person who strongly lamented the over-modernization of the nongjiayuan openly criticized the unsanitary food and uncomfortable facilities of farm guesthouses that he had previously experienced, right after complaining about the over-modernization. Most urbanites seem comfortable with this contradiction. Here, in the space of the nongjiayuan, modernity seems to work as a discursive gatekeeper that determines which cultural codes are brought to the fore in nongjiale tourism. It is so central that all positive cultural codes can be eclipsed in certain situations. Consequently, failures in inscribing sufficient markers of modernity into the space of the nongjiayuan invoke all the negative cultural codes of rurality: dirty 脏, absence of hygienic notions 没有卫生观念, low in quality 素质低, lack of civilization 没有文明, lack of culture 没有文化, and so on.

However, as long as the urbanite guest’s nostalgic yearning for rurality is the major force of nongjiale tourism, traces of rusticity and rurality will never completely disappear but will survive in sanitized, romanticized, and fragmented forms. It is not completely impossible that the power relations between rurality and modernity in the space of the nongjiayuan might become reversed at a certain point in the future development of nongjiale tourism. This is because of the irony of modernity that the more the forces of modernity become dominant in people’s daily lives, the stronger their nostalgic yearnings for authenticity (Berman, 1970, 1982). Someday in the future rusticity and rurality may resurge in a cultural renaissance of what has been destroyed by the juggernaut of modernity, a process that seems to have already begun in China today. In this vein, the space of nongjiale farm guesthouses becomes an arena in which rurality and modernity are negotiated, challenged, and reproduced along the socioeconomic and cultural fault-lines between the country and the city in post-Reform China. ¹⁴

Nonetheless, the dominance of modernity in the space of the nongjiayuan will certainly remain intact for a while given the high-modernist gaze of the developmental state and the triumph of the neoliberal market principle. At the time of my fieldwork, most new and renovated farm guesthouses within and beyond Fule Valley had begun to rid themselves of the already fading traces of rurality. Most obvious was that they began to remove the small vegetable garden from their courtyard and completely cover it with concrete. In the case of Xingfu village, all households of the village remodeled or rebuilt their farmhouses into modernized loufang for nongjiale tourism, drawing on both the rent revenue from the village’s collective land and financial subsidies from the government. All the individual guesthouses and the village’s built environment as a whole have been transformed into urban styles covered with asphalt and concrete. Now the village is extolled as a nationwide model village of “rural urbanization” 农村城市化 just like Dazhai 大寨 village in Shanxi province used to be hailed as a model of socialist modernization during the Maoist era.

“The Hygiene Room”

The flush toilet is certainly a key icon of modernity in nongjiale farm guesthouses. When peasant entrepreneurs remodel their farmhouses for nongjiale tourism, usually the first item on the agenda is to replace the traditional pit-hole-style Chinese toilet with a modern one—mostly, the squatting-type flush toilet. Even if a farm guesthouse is launched with a minimum degree of remodeling, the toilet is almost always transformed into a flush toilet, if not a fancy one. All but a few farm guesthouses that I observed in Fule Valley and beyond had at least one modern-style public toilet, usually accompanied by a shower in the same compartment. Because of the limited initial capital investment, not many farm guesthouses can afford to furnish their guest room with a private en-suite bathroom 私人卫生间. Most guest rooms with such are in relatively large-scale facilities that can hardly be categorized as a typical nongjiale farm guesthouse. By my rough count, about 85 percent of average nongjiale farm guesthouses in the greater Beijing area did not have a private toilet and shower facility in the guest room(s).

What draws special attention to the permeation of modernity into farm guesthouses is that the toilet in most nongjiayuan is called weishengjian 卫生间, literally “hygiene room.” It is probably one of the most idiosyncratic toilet nomenclatures in the world, which straightforwardly registers the crucial implications of hygiene in particular and modernity in general within the cultural hierarchy of Chinese society. The questions of exactly how and by whom the term was coined and when it entered the daily lexicon are yet to be answered. But at least it is certain that the widespread use of the term throughout China is fairly recent. There are a variety of terms for the toilet in China, including cesuo 厕所 (corner spot), biansuo 便所 (comfort room), maokeng 毛坑 (bending pit), maochi 茅池 (ribbon pond), xiaojian 小间 (small room), xishoujian 洗手间 (hand-washing room), and, for public toilets, gonggong cesuo 公共厕所 (public corner spot), or, in short, gongce 公厕 (Xiandai Hanyu cidian, 2002). When I first visited Beijing in summer 2002 to conduct a pilot study for my dissertation fieldwork, most toilets in both the city and its rural hinterland were generally called “cesuo” and occasionally “xishoujian,” and it was very common to see a restroom without a door and even without any partition. I did see toilets referred to as a “hygiene room” at that time, but that was very rare. Just a few, but not all, luxury shopping malls, grand hotels, and public buildings such as hospitals and libraries seemed to use the term for their restrooms. I did not come across the term at all in the many rural areas I visited then—the toilet in farmhouses did not have a written sign anyway and public toilets were labeled “gongce.”

When I returned to Beijing in summer 2005 to conduct a year of dissertation fieldwork, I found a noticeable change in the nomenclature. “Hygiene room” had become the generic name for the toilet in the city, and in rural areas as well, although to a lesser degree. People did not seem much aware of the increasing use of the term, probably because they did not pay much attention to this banal aspect of daily life. Nonetheless, as soon as I questioned people about it, many of them agreed with, and became interested in, my observation and provided some useful clues for when and how the term had suddenly become prevalent. They conjectured that the spread of the term had much to do with the outbreak of the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic that horrified the whole world during the first half of the year 2003. They guessed that the outbreak of SARS was so traumatic that the notion of hygiene permeated people’s consciousness more deeply than ever before. A similar point was made by nongjiale guests and hosts whom I interviewed as well.

Certainly, hygiene consciousness per se is not a new phenomenon in the history of China. The notion of hygiene in the modern sense of the term had already been imported in the late Qing period. Since then, the discourse of hygiene has been at the forefront of China’s modernist discourse. In this process, hygiene has been one of the key criteria of identity formation that has divided not only rural from urban China as signified by the popular clichés “the peasantry does not have the notion of hygiene” 农民没有卫生观念 and “peasants are too dirty” 农民太脏, but also China from the West in terms of the dichotomy between unsanitary China and the sanitary West (Rogaski, 2004; see also Tang, 1996). Yet the SARS outbreak seems to have been a critical moment that prompted the cultural value of hygiene to permeate the thinking of the Chinese populace more thoroughly than before. The high tide of toilet renovation and the spread of the new name might be a manifestation of that process. It should be noted that the increased income and rising living standards since the 1978 market-oriented reforms must have contributed to the process as well. For whatever reasons, by the time I started my fieldwork all but a few farm guesthouses in Fule Valley called their toilet “weishengjian.”

In Fule Valley farm guesthouses, one of the most important factors that influence new customers’ decision to check in is the hygienic condition of the weishengjian, in addition to the general cleanliness of the facility as a whole. For some customers, the cleanliness of the toilet is far more important than that of the guest room. One informant said that “I can endure a little lack of weisheng 卫生 [hygiene] in the guest room but I can never tolerate a dirty weishengjian.” For many customers, the cleanliness of the toilet is even much more important than its quality and luxuriousness. Thus, even if the toilet is gaudy and fancy, so long as it is not clean enough, customers immediately complain that “peasants’ hygienic consciousness is very low.” And not many customers complain about the cheapness of a facility so long as it is kept neat and clean.

Because of the centrality of toilet hygiene to the spatial modernization of the nongjiayuan, the first target of farmhouse remodeling projects, as mentioned earlier, is typically the toilet. The rural development policy of the local government clearly signals the centrality of the toilet in the modernization of rural space. The local government had promoted the modernization of rural housing for a number of years. Interestingly, the first step it took on this score was a toilet renovation campaign. Since 2003, the district government has ambitiously promoted toilet modernity by awarding a RMB 500 cash subsidy to those who renovated following “the first degree”一级 criteria set up by the government. Kelejia is one of the farm guesthouses awarded RMB 500 by remodeling its toilet into a first-degree facility. Referring to the award, the owners of Kelejia, Mr. and Mrs. Jiao, from time to time proudly emphasize the first-degree quality of their toilet to customers. Internalizing the value of hygiene, the old couple keeps the public toilet almost immaculate all the time whether there are customers or not. They also change the bed sheets every time they are used by customers. Most other peasant entrepreneurs also try hard to make their farm guesthouses as hygienic as they know how.

Here again hygiene is generally regarded as a cultural value that flows from the city to the countryside and from the urbanite body to the peasant body. As I briefly mentioned earlier, it is generally thought that the intimate interaction between peasants and urbanites in the venue of nongjiale tourism is beneficial to the former in the sense that the latter’s culture, suzhi, and hygienic consciousness are transferred to them. This is clearly enunciated by both city people and peasants alike. However, modern values do not always flow from the city to the countryside. Rather, when the peasant proactively internalizes and practices the value, the direction of flow, or gaze, can be reversed. The reversal is enacted when the peasantry redirects the value of hygiene to city people. The toilet is often the very vehicle of this reversal.

The space of the toilet—especially when it is a public one—is a spot that is most easily dirtied. In the peak season, peasant hosts have to clean it many times a day to maintain its cleanliness. In 2006, I observed the Kelejia old host couple clean the toilet about eight times a day during the May First Golden Week holidays. Generally, the host couple takes it for granted that the toilet will easily get dirty and needs to be cleaned. However, when the toilet is soiled because of city people’s allegedly “uncivilized” way of using it, they blame them. Sometimes, urbanite guests dump toilet paper, cigarette butts, and other trash carelessly on the floor, spit everywhere, forget to flush, and so on. In these kinds of incidents, peasant hosts redirect the value of hygiene, which has been directed to their body and place, to city people by denigrating them through the same tropes that city people use against them: “Some city people’s suzhi is lower than peasants’” 有的城里人比农民素质低; “[They have] no civilization at all!”一点文明都没有; “How come even city people don’t have culture to this extent?” 连城里人也怎么这么没有文化呢; and so on.

This is another moment of nuanced inversion of power relations between the peasantry and city people at least at the level of discourse. But this discursive process works the other way around as well. Carefully interpreting peasants’ rhetoric condemning city people’s lack of civilization, one may easily recognize that most of their value-charged denigration draws on the tacit assumption that the peasantry is inferior to urbanites. The rhetorical question “How come even the city people don’t have culture to this extent?” obviously assumes that, on all counts, city people have more culture than the peasantry. Here they actually reiterate and thereby reproduce existing negative stereotypes of the peasantry. Interpreting the discursive process in this way, the inversion of power relations in terms of the hygiene code paradoxically contributes to the reproduction and reconsolidation of the existing cultural hierarchy and power relations disadvantageous to the peasantry. Yet, this fact cannot completely neutralize the challenge, resistance, and contestation that the peasant poses to city people’s hold on symbolic power. Important is that peasant hosts challenge and re-appropriate the forces of modernity by proactively subscribing to those forces.

In addition to materializing the value of hygiene, the toilet involves an interesting moral twist. Occasionally, new customers of a farm guesthouse decide not to check in because it does not have a private toilet in the guest room. Peasant hosts respond to this in basically two different ways. First, by interpreting city people’s reluctance to check in to be due to the substandard facilities in their guesthouses, they decide to furnish private toilet facilities as soon as they accumulate enough capital, as indicated by a guesthouse owner’s future business plan quoted above. Although relatively rare, city people’s expectation of a private toilet is influential enough for nongjiale peasant entrepreneurs to take it seriously. Second, interpreting city people’s “fastidious” 讲究 concern about toilet privacy in a completely different way, they associate the private toilet with another strand of identity politics beyond the issue of toilet hygiene. Needless to say, hygiene is central to the space of the private toilet as much as the public one. Yet, the cultural value of “privacy” embodied in the private toilet has significant moral implications for identity politics.

Mr. Cui, the owner of a nongjiale guesthouse in the valley, provided by chance an interesting comment about the moral implications of the private toilet. When I was chatting with him over the correlation between the physical amenities of a farm guesthouse and its business turnover, he said,

You know what? Most of them [those who look for a private toilet in a nongjiayuan] are in abnormal relationships 不正常的关系. . . . Most customers come here and have a good time with their family, friends, or colleagues. Just as a person never comes alone, so too it’s very rare that only one man and one woman come to stay overnight in a nongjiayuan. Perhaps you haven’t realized that most of them are not husband and wife. . . . If the woman isn’t a prostitute, she must be a concubine who plays with the man for money. . . . City people today are too corrupt. They don’t have any morality these days. . . . These people have a different purpose. So they want that kind of room [i.e., a guest room with a private toilet].

This comment raises a significant issue: the prevalence of extramarital affairs or, in other words, the dismantling of conjugal relationships in Chinese society today. Although there must be some exaggeration, Cui’s statement suggests there has been an important shift in conjugal relationships. At a banquet that I had with a few informants in a downtown district, the township government official Mr. Zhao made a similar statement:

Today, if you’re relatively successful in your career, you have to have a girlfriend outside. The more, the better. It says that you can afford many women. In traditional China, all men with power and money had several women in their house. This custom is returning today. . . . That’s the way it is. If you have ability, it’s natural to have many women. . . .You know what? Most of the women with whom those rich men stay overnight in vacation villages are not their wives. Who plays with their wives today?! . . . Even the horse-riding peasants come down here and play with karaoke xiaojie 小姐 [girls], while their wives are feeding the horses back in the village. Then don’t even think about the situation in the city. . . . This is authentic China. ¹⁵

These two informants’ comments reveal significant points about the social-cultural landscape of China today, especially the dramatic shift in family and gender relations in the cities. I cannot delve deeply into this topic here, but at least it can be argued that, aside from various statistics and the high divorce rate, the comments signal the prevalence of extramarital relationships, the dismantling of conjugal relations, and the commoditization of sex in China today. The boom of rural hotels and vacation villages seems to have something to do, if only indirectly, with this social process. The informants said that these rural accommodations served as a leyuan 乐园 (paradise) for people in secret affairs and young couples seeking romance in a space of privacy. Accordingly, many consider rural hotels and vacation villages to be hotbeds of moral corruption and promiscuity. This was especially so when villagers gossiped about an ex-village cadre who had been in jail for three years because he had secretly employed karaoke girls as prostitutes in his vacation village in Fule Valley. Many villagers associated this incident with what they had to say about moral corruption in general in present-day China.

What is interesting here is that it was not nongjiale farm guesthouses but large vacation villages that most of the gossipers linked to a decline in morality. This does seem to correspond to reality. Although I did come across a few couples who stayed in farm guesthouses who were obviously having an affair, they were exceptionally rare. The nongjiayuan was generally perceived as a space of “relatively normal” 比较正常的 people and “relatively healthy” 比较健康的 activities for family, friends, and colleagues. Moreover, an informant said that it was not easy for a nongjiale guest to bring an illicit partner to a farm guesthouse because of the fairly personal and intimate host-guest relationship. This moral dividing line between the nongjiayuan and the vacation village seems at least symbolically to give the edge to nongjiale peasant entrepreneurs in their competition with vacation villages. When they need to devalue the vacation village as a way of competing, they often highlight the corruption and immoral activities that take place there.

As Cui’s statement above suggests, the private toilet that most vacation villages provide is taken as an icon of city people’s moral corruption. Thus, peasant hosts who do not have the facility in their guesthouses sometimes revile urbanites who decide not to stay because of the toilet as “immoral” and “promiscuous.” One day, a young couple seemingly in their late twenties or early thirties strayed into Kelejia to see if the farm guesthouse would be suitable for them to stay overnight. But they decided not to stay and impolitely complained “How come you don’t even have a toilet in the guest room?” As soon as they got out of the main gate, Mr. Jiao castigated them behind their back:

Damn it! What the hell do they want to do with the private toilet? [Here he believes they need a room with a private toilet for their secret assignation]. If that’s the purpose, why do they come to my place? They should have gone to a vacation village. My nongjiayuan is not for that. . . . If they were husband and wife, they wouldn’t need that kind of room. . . . Because they’re having an affair, they need to find a secret place and hide, afraid that somebody will find out.

Mr. Jiao’s anger is exceptional given that he is a thoughtful and even-tempered man who neither easily expresses his emotions nor gossips about others. He is respected by most villagers because of his probity and entrepreneurship. It was the young couple’s extraordinary impoliteness that triggered Jiao’s outburst. Nevertheless, this does not mean that he is opposed in principle to the private toilet and the modernity that it represents; indeed, he very much wants to upgrade his guesthouse by furnishing it with private toilets and other modern amenities to improve his business. To this extent, a private toilet is like “sour grapes” that Mr. Jiao yearns for but cannot afford because of his limited capital.

Shanlirenjia, one of the most successful nongjiale farm guesthouses in the valley, recently added two more wings with twelve more guest rooms in addition to renovating the main north wing into a two-story building, investing a couple of hundred thousand RMB. The owner of this guesthouse had made a great deal of money through his successful management of a small farm guesthouse with seven rooms and now wanted to expand the business by building more guest rooms to make “daqian.” He furnished all guest rooms with a private toilet and shower, a TV, and an air conditioner, making them far more like a hotel room. With this renovation and expansion of the facility, its business boomed.

One day, I mentioned the expansion of the guesthouse and its successful business in a conversation with a farm guesthouse owner on the other side of the village. I told him that Shanlirenjia’s owner had a very good sense of management and his business had grown very quickly. As soon as I finished the statement, he resolutely declared, “I’m sure he’s been hosting corrupt people [couples in problematic relationships]. Otherwise, no need to furnish every guest rooms with a private toilet.”

This sour-grapes mentality among nongjiale peasant entrepreneurs becomes more obvious when it comes to their relations with vacation villages. They frequently express a keen sense of competition with vacation villages in two ways. First, they try to devalue vacation villages by claiming they serve inauthentic, unhealthy, unnatural, and MSG (monosodium glutamate)-laden food. Second, they denigrate them for the immoral and promiscuous activities allegedly taking place in them. This is natural because they are in stiff competition with vacation villages over the same pool of urbanite customers. Private toilet/shower facilities are often the vehicle for their belittling of vacation villages.

Despite the condemnation of vacation villages, however, most nongjiale entrepreneurs very much want to furnish their farm guesthouse with private toilets, assuming that it would enable them to earn daqian, which is not always the case as I have pointed out. The private toilet is not simply a locus of identity politics between the host and the guest but also an arena of competition between nongjiale farm guesthouses and vacation villages as well as among the nongjiale peasant entrepreneurs themselves. What we observe here is that the spatial contestation of the nongjiale farm guesthouse is significantly informed by many different, and sometimes conflicting and self-contradictory, material and symbolic forces with which diverse dimensions, layers, and strands of Chinese society are complexly intertwined and comingled.

Conclusion

The space of the nongjiayuan, especially that of the weishengjian, registers two dichotomies. One is between the idyllically moral countryside and the corrupt city and the other between the backward countryside and the modern city. These dichotomies significantly shape the place-making and identity politics in nongjiale tourism. The dichotomies are first of all a primary vehicle for identity politics and social-boundary making between the host and the guest. Peasant hosts manipulate the first dichotomy to belittle city people in their struggle with and assimilation of the forces of modernity, while urbanite guests draw on the second to stigmatize peasants and thereby assert their privileged position and sense of superiority within China’s political economy and rural-urban cultural hierarchy. At the same time, peasants adopt the second in a form of self-negation, while city people mobilize the first for their romantic consumption of the countryside.

The ethnographic data in this article suggest that this situational mobilization of the two dichotomies for identity politics articulates with various material and symbolic forces that constitute the fabric of Chinese society today. In this process lies a mirror of modernity whose surface is complexly distorted by the rapidly changing field of meaning and rural-urban power relations in post-Reform China. This mirror of modernity reflects nongjiale hosts and guests in significantly different ways. It urges peasant hosts to transform themselves into modern subjects by negating their rusticity and backwardness, while inducing urbanite guests to escape from the locus of pollution, urban drudgery, and alienation by romanticizing their rural counterparts.

Consequently, what we see from the place-making processes in the venue of nongjiale tourism is an obvious paradox, a paradox that leads to a clash between urbanite guests’ expectations about the nongjiale experience and the peasant hosts’ interpretation of city people’s expectations. In a case of “dreaming different dreams in the same bed” 同床异梦, they are dreaming different dreams in the bed provided by the new leviathan that has been created by the historically unprecedented merger of the socialist party-state and the neoliberal market system in post-Reform China.