Trading on Tradition

Competing for Cultural Development in Shanxi

The Chinese turn toward the production of culture as an economic activity was largely precipitated by the dysfunctional tax system the central government inherited from the planned economy in the 1980s, which led the party to promote fiscal decentralization and to devolve fiscal responsibilities onto local governments in the 1990s (Oakes, 2006: 14). In the competitive climate of regionalism, local identities have been scaled up to the provincial level to forge competitive dynamics between specialized regions so that place-based identities can be bought and sold within the market economy through entrepreneurial activities (Oakes, 2000). Furthermore, Chinese competitive regionalism seeks to attract investment not only from outsiders but also from people within a region, and particularly from regional elites (Oakes, 2000).

Specifically in relation to Shanxi province, David Goodman (1999, 2002) links provincial identity to the fact that its development strategies in the 1980s and 1990s lagged behind those of many other provinces. Despite Shanxi’s flourishing as China’s merchant and banking hub in the late imperial era (from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century), the province declined financially as the warlord Yan Xishan redistributed the province’s wealth during the Republican era (1911–1949) (Gillin, 1967). Furthermore, Shanxi’s pivotal role as a stronghold of Red Army forces in the Anti-Japanese War (1937–1945) positioned the province in the vanguard of the Chinese Communist Party (Feng and Goodman, 2000; Goodman, 1999). With its heavy industries and communist credentials, the province became an exemplary hotbed of peasant radicalism with close ties to Beijing for three decades following the Revolution of 1949 (Goodman, 2002; Kong, 2010).

Because of its Maoist legacy and infrastructural isolation Shanxi was slow to enter the competitive market climate of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” under Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the 1980s. The China-wide fiscal devolution in the 1990s put increasing pressure on provincial and local governments to meet economic and developmental responsibilities. Therefore, the Shanxi government sought to attract investment through promoting a positive regional identity for economic sectors beyond industry, such as tourism (Goodman, 2002). Shanxi’s strategic development plan from 2003 therefore evocatively advocated “mining culture in the same way that we mine coal” (Kong, 2010: 84).

The village of Sweeping Cliff is nestled in the arid mountains of central Shanxi where the golden mountains rise into the sky embraced by ordered terraces with hardy green vegetation. Sharp drops of loessial soil into deep ravines below break the agricultural terraces that have been carved horizontally into the hillside over millennia. The village accommodated about 1,200 inhabitants, all of whom are officially classified as agricultural citizens (nongmin). Within living memory most rural residents in Shanxi drew their livelihood from collective and household-based agricultural work and mining-based heavy industries. By the 1990s huge portions of Shanxi’s productive capacities had been released from agriculture and industry and channeled into new service sectors of the economy. This rapid economic transformation has accelerated in the last two decades through an entrepreneurial model of development that links local governance to the corporate drivers of the diversifying economy. In May 2009, a subsidiary of a coal mining corporation began tourist operations in the village. Sweeping Cliff villagers today find themselves precariously poised between cultural traditionalism and state-fostered corporate capitalism as the area is carved up between large companies and government agencies for economic development.

In Sweeping Cliff, the melding of coal mining and cultural excavation has forged the economic driver pushing forward tourism development. Although the allocation of Sweeping Cliff’s temple spaces remained in the hands of the village committee during the post-Mao era, the village government contracted the temples and underground tunnel system to a succession of two business corporations in order to earn revenues on their operations. In a narrative that closely parallels the local government’s strategy for cultural development, the latest tour company in Sweeping Cliff is in fact a subsidiary of a coal corporation. As a result of the tour company’s activities, the temple complexes no longer served as public spaces in the interests of a collectivist ideology, but were privatized as areas for patriotic consumption of Chinese heritage.

Contrasting stereotypes of Shanxi “as either a poverty-stricken rural backwater or, in its urban centers, as a rusty and polluted bastion of outmoded and bankrupt Communist industrial policy” have precipitated a massive propaganda effort to establish a new version of the province’s “glorious entrepreneurial past” (Kong, 2010: 82). By hailing a local history of an entrepreneurial spirit as a morally valid and historically grounded driver of business development, local governments and economic elites justify their development strategies in marketizing Shanxi culture.

The president of the coal corporation developing the tourist industry in Sweeping Cliff, for instance, seemed genuinely committed to fostering economic development and cultural heritage preservation at the local level in the service of the Chinese nation. In a number of ways, President Fan mixed ideals of corporate social responsibility with an ethics of refined self-cultivation reminiscent of imperial elites. President Fan was a keen supporter of academic research and cultural education. In a global trend, many mining corporations attempt to give back to local communities where they operate through corporate responsibility programs, but in China this phenomenon is also linked to a legacy of community-based welfare provision (see Carrillo, 2008, for a Shanxi-wide analysis of this phenomenon). President Fan explicitly considered the conservation and development of Sweeping Cliff as an act of entrepreneurial goodwill.

President Fan fashioned himself as a popular man of the people, who always spoke to villagers in the local dialect. He avoided extravagant displays of wealth in the village, instead focusing on a more humble and gracious interaction with people of lesser economic and political capital. For instance, in anticipation of the Mid-Autumn Festival (Zhongqiujie), President Fan visited my host family and me with his wife, his daughter, and her caretaker. In a gesture of down-to-earth generosity, President Fan’s wife presented us with a batch of homemade moon cakes (yuebing). As my host family showed President Fan around the courtyard, he complemented their beautifully maintained buildings and chatted about their backgrounds.

President Fan could also be very grave about socioeconomic inequality and was earnest in his commitment to alleviating poverty through economic development. At a banquet he hosted in an upmarket urban restaurant, I sat next to a businessman working in the Hong Kong automobile industry. While discussing the import of luxury cars to Shanxi, I retold a joke I had heard in Sweeping Cliff about the feeling of unassailable privilege and entitlement that came with buying a BMW. Although BMWs are marketed under the name of Baoma in China, the joke is that the acronym BMW actually reads as Bie Mo Wo, a homonym for “Don’t touch me!” This play on words reiterates how ostentatious displays of wealth create an unbridgeable socioeconomic gulf between the superrich and the rest of the Chinese people. The Hong Kong car merchant laughed and retold the joke for President Fan, who seemed taken aback by this humorous engagement with wealth and power disparity. To President Fan, poverty was no laughing matter and he launched into a discussion about improvements in transport as the basis for further economic development in the area.

In reading Kong Shuyu’s (2010: 96) description of the new type of national Shanxi hero represented in the television drama the Qiao Family Compound in the late imperial era, parallels with President Fan’s self-presentation emerge through an “interesting, if incongruous, combination of capitalist aspirations, traditional Chinese values, socialist ideals and commercial nationalism” in “a man who chooses business not for personal advancement but in the interests of the nation.” Kong argues that the drama’s main protagonist thereby “creates a traditional lineage and collective identity for China’s new social group, the “Red Capitalists” (Kong, 2010: 97). Furthermore, many of the tourists who visited Sweeping Cliff shared this eclectic blend of ideals that underpinned their personal commitment to state-fostered capitalism in the service of the Chinese nation.

The tourists who flocked to Sweeping Cliff were mostly well-to-do people from both Shanxi and other parts of China in search of a deeper understanding of the country’s cultural history through the lens of its mercantile, financial, and military foundations. Many tourists considered tourism (lüyou) a hobby (aihao) or a pleasure (yuele), but for others travel was part of a commitment to cultural self-fulfillment or professional advancement. For instance, not only specialists from various industrial sectors, including military and civil engineering, but also government officials, bankers, businessmen, and academics came to the village to take tours. Such honored guests were often shown around the village by the local historian, Teacher Dian, who had been instrumental in putting Sweeping Cliff on the Shanxi map of cultural sites through the publication of a book he wrote on the cultural history of the village.

In addition to domestic tourists, foreign visitors also came to the village on day trips from longer stays in Pingyao, a UNESCO world heritage site located about a 40-kilometer drive away. The city walls of Pingyao enclose a great number of Shanxi merchant homes and draft banks. Shanxi’s touristic areas can be grouped into its vast temple complexes (e.g., the sacred Buddhist mountain of Wutaishan and the Jinci temple complex near Taiyuan), the Yungang Grottoes, merchant residence complexes, and the banking and merchant city of Pingyao. Among the grand merchant complexes, the most famous, the Qiao Family Courtyard, was used as the set for Zhang Yimou’s film Raising the Red Lantern (Da hong denglong gaogao gua). In order to differentiate itself from the UNESCO site and other merchant courtyard sites in the area, Sweeping Cliff was promoted as a mountain fortress, although most of the monumental domestic and temple architecture in the village was built by local merchants and sponsored by their lineages and business networks.

Across Shanxi, the legacy of an entrepreneurial past was being sold as a cultural product to the new rich through tours of luxurious family courtyard dwellings and draft bank complexes dotting the province. Within Shanxi’s emergent field of cultural tourism, Sweeping Cliff was therefore only one of many villages with sumptuous yet decaying courtyard complexes left from the province’s heyday as a banking and merchant hub. In the 1950s, these extended household complexes had been parceled up and redistributed on the basis of residential need, with particular priority given to veterans of the revolution. Sweeping Cliff was also home to various temple complexes and an underground passage system that had been carved into the loess soil. In order to gain a competitive edge over other merchant tourist sites in the province, the tour company developing Sweeping Cliff tourism had to produce a unique cultural product that nonetheless fit into the overarching narrative of the Chinese nation.

The tour company created this unique cultural product though an image of the village as a showcase of both astronomical knowledge and as a military arsenal of great antiquity by projecting an astronomical map of star correlations onto the village and the underground tunnel system below. However, in the process the tour company produced a cultural object that was out of touch with villagers’ everyday experiences of the village and alienated them from the shared resources of cultural production. The tour company thereby legitimized privatizing formerly collective spaces, such as village temples, while simultaneously invalidating villagers’ rights to their own homes, which became a part of Chinese national heritage. Although these processes of cultural commodification had been foreshadowed by the business activities of an earlier company called Bright Forest, the transformation gained full force in the late 2000s when a tour company called the Triumph Culture and Tourism Company contracted the village temples and underground tunnels from the village committee.

From Natural Village to Ancient Fortress

In the early 2000s, the first company, Bright Forest, was a small outfit that restored the temple buildings and charged ticket entry to tourists who came to view Sweeping Cliff’s scenic spots. The cooperation between Bright Forest and the local government led to the renovation, restoration, and refurnishing of Sweeping Cliff’s temple complexes and also the excavation of the tunnel complexes below the village. The company replaced statues and restored architecture that had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.

The Bright Forest tourism brochure from the early 2000s praised the village’s religious culture, underground tunnel system, and domestic dwellings in erudite and flowery language. However, historical specificities were hidden behind vague descriptions and large photographs of the village as a repository of an abundant wealth of Sweeping Cliff “culture” (wenhua). Although the Bright Forest tourism literature makes a case for visiting the village, Triumph’s marketing strategy shows a much keener awareness of how to mark and substantiate Sweeping Cliff as both an exceptional and representative site of greater Chinese culture.

In contrast to Bright Forest’s emphasis on religious artifacts, a mysterious web of tunnels, and the impenetrable domestic dwellings, Triumph’s approach to tourism development represented the entire village as an ancient fortress that drew together the temple complexes, the underground tunnel system, and the domestic residences in the village. By making a historically grounded argument that the village once formed a military installation and arsenal, Triumph transformed the representation of Sweeping Cliff from a simple “natural village” (zirancun) of living inhabitants into an “ancient fortress” (gubao) of immense historical value.

In May 2009, the Triumph Culture and Tourism Company took over the Sweeping Cliff tourism development from Bright Forest, which had ostensibly “gone bust” (pochan). Triumph contracted (chongbao) the tunnels and temples of the village for the next 50 years, which gave the company both economic development rights and the obligation to preserve Sweeping Cliff’s heritage. Triumph Culture and Tourism Company was a newly established branch of the Triumph Energy Company, which was a major player in the province’s coal industry, with a total income of 2.16 billion RMB in 2011. By contrast to the vast transactions resulting from their coal operations, the Triumph tour company contracted the rights to Sweeping Cliff village’s temples and tunnels for an annual payment of only 100,000 RMB paid to the township government and between 50,000 and 70,000 RMB to the village committee.

Although the tour company justified its operations in terms of heritage preservation, the resulting contrast between village income levels and the corporate investment in the village was a sore point with many villagers. Furthermore, villagers claimed that due to Triumph’s political influence and wealth, their village committee had lost the authority to direct the development strategies of the village and instead followed the plans set out by Triumph.

The person charged with developing this new cultural product was Mr. Yan, the strategic development officer for the newly formed Triumph Culture and Tourism Company. Mr. Yan was in his mid-forties and came from the coal mining city of Datong in the north of the province, where he had worked as an engineer in the coal mining industry for several decades. Mr. Yan had transferred to cultural tourism operations as a way of pursuing his dream of forging a bridge between engineering and astronomy through the medium of fengshui. Mr. Yan fashioned himself as a defender of the art of geomancy and claimed to be restoring the status of this ancient knowledge system to its rightful place as a “natural science” (ziran kexue) in the face of various aberrations that had descended into “superstition” (mixin). Mr. Yan claimed, for instance, that none of the local fengshui masters could be trusted as their knowledge was built on limited experience and textual learning. Mr. Yan’s distrust of local, experiential, and verbal knowledge underwrote his efforts to establish a coherent fortress culture on the basis of steles, manuscripts, and books.

Under the direction of President Fan, Mr. Yan and a number of other employees participating in a tourist planning committee took part in meetings where the future of the economic and cultural development of Sweeping Cliff was decided. In a planning meeting in January 2010, Mr. Yan referred to Sweeping Cliff as a village, only to be jokingly chastised by President Fan who exclaimed “What was that?! Village (Cunzi)?! Sweeping Cliff is an ancient fortress (gubao), is it not?!” All present assented to the rebranding. Over time, this discursive transformation from village to fortress gained its own consequential force, especially under municipal government directives to create cultural displays and promote tourism in the area.

To initiate this transformation, Mr. Yan ambitiously began to develop a theory of how the village architecture and underground tunnel system formed an intricate complex of astronomical correspondences that safeguarded the site as a fortress. By the spring of 2010, Mr. Yan’s vision of Sweeping Cliff as a fortress of military, religious, and scientific significance had been enshrined in a display in the one of the temples where colorful information boards mapped many of Sweeping Cliff’s architectural features onto a complex assortment of astronomical constellations (see billboard display in Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Mapping the star correlations onto Sweeping Cliff.

A cornerstone of Mr. Yan’s argument was that the shape of the village walls closely resembles the outlines of the Kui constellation, one of the 28 zodiacal constellations in traditional Chinese astronomy. Mr. Yan argued that Sweeping Cliff was therefore constructed as an earthly mirror of the “Heavenly Armory” (Tianzhi wuku) represented by the cluster of stars that make up the Kui constellation. Furthermore, Mr. Yan attributed the origins of Sweeping Cliff’s name to two of the 28 Chinese astronomical correlations, with one correlation being “Sweeping” and the other “Cliff.” ³ According to Mr. Yan, both the constellations for “Sweeping” and “Cliff” were marked by the locations of the now defunct and covered village water wells. Mr. Yan was also confident that several Chinese pagoda trees had stood in the center of the village for over a thousand years and that their positions had replicated the six stars of Sagittarius, or the Southern Dipper. Furthermore, Mr. Yan had grand ambitions to extend his vision of astronomical correspondences from Sweeping Cliff’s surface phenomena to the underground tunnel system beneath the village. Mr. Yan claimed that military installations in the underground passage system could be mapped onto the astronomical correlations, but this aspect of his research was still in development and needed further excavation work. As Triumph’s promotional leaflet proclaimed, “Such a deep understanding of astronomy as the builders of Sweeping Cliff Ancient Castle possessed is rarely seen” (Triumph Corporation tourist information leaflet, 2010).

Through its promotion of astronomical correlations, Triumph branded Sweeping Cliff as an important site of imperial history. In its information leaflet the tour company positioned Sweeping Cliff as replicating knowledge and practices emanating from China’s imperial center. In particular, it is worth noting the reference to the Emperor Huangdi, who is often heralded as the first cosmic ruler over the centralized Chinese state and a patron of the ancient study of astronomy. Furthermore, the text in the tour company leaflet traces astronomy as a “rare science” through subsequent dynasties, claiming that Sweeping Cliff was one of the exceptional repositories of this extraordinary knowledge that “was completely planned and constructed according to astronomical rules, and material traces of these astronomical principles can be found in as many as thirty locations.”

According to their future economic development plans, Triumph hoped to expand Sweeping Cliff tourism in the following five years to include services such as hotels, restaurants, and inns. On one occasion, Mr. Yan showed me a very ambitious document that included plans and pictures for the construction of bridges and new buildings, including the potential wholesale resettlement of the village inhabitants. Mr. Yan concluded his explanation by saying: “If you come back in five years, Sweeping Cliff will be a very different fortress.” Although tour company strategists were drafting these preliminary plans with the knowledge of the village committee, villagers were largely unaware of the particulars. Nonetheless, villagers complained about the tour company’s distribution of profits and were wary of its possible expansion of operations into domestic areas of the village.

The tour company’s activities revealed a discursive transformation in the spatial and historical orientation of the village that diverged from the experiential knowledge put forth by the villagers themselves. Triumph sought to turn the site from one of local interest to one of national significance, thereby sacrificing the village’s place in a living present for the integration of Sweeping Cliff into historical antiquity. However, this new cultural product of an ancient fortress characterized villagers as out of place within their own village, both in terms of cultural production and the preservation of cultural heritage. Nonetheless, this conflict cannot be reduced to a simple case of “invented tradition” (see Hobsbawm, 1983) as villagers and the drivers of the local economy alike grounded their arguments in aspects of Sweeping Cliff’s cultural and historical landscape. As such, the emerging discourses in Sweeping Cliff resemble Siu’s (1989, 1990) findings on the complexities of recycling of cultural fragments of tradition that furthers the interests of various power holders.

Rather than framing the transformations in Sweeping Cliff in terms of invention versus reinvention, the following argument unfolds in accordance with the spirit of Siu’s (1989) work on the recycling of rituals and how these are locally understood and contested. As with Siu’s respondents, there was a mixture of compliance, even enthusiasm, as well as resistance among different actors participating in the production of the fortress culture in Sweeping Cliff. A particularly telling example of this emerged when Triumph attempted to stage a celebration that laid claim to a historical legacy of great antiquity through a Star Worshipping Festival, but actually produced a powerful representation of the new fortress culture outside of the realm of villagers’ experience. During this performance, the tour company forged an effective display of its role in fostering development and preserving heritage in the village, despite disenfranchising villagers from the processes of cultural production.

The Star Worshipping Festival

Qingming Festival on April 5, 2010, vividly brought the differing interests of villagers, the local government, and the tour company into a performative contrast. Qingming is normally associated with the widespread practice of grave sweeping, an aspect of the festival that has firm roots in Sweeping Cliff’s ritual calendar. Until the 1950s, a festival called Jixi was also celebrated as an inter-village ritual exchange throughout the first month of the lunar New Year in the surrounding mountains. Although tomb sweeping and Jixi would conventionally not take place on the same day, the tour company combined a number of celebratory practices with Qingming Festival. The tour company’s planning committee had been discussing the potential of staging a cultural performance for several months, and finally a government directive created the impetus for the cultural display.

The municipal government directive aimed to increase tourism in the area through cultural displays on this date due to the links between the origins of the Qingming Festival and the nearby site of Mount Mian. The historical figure Jie Zitui was accidentally burned to death on Mount Mian with his mother around 636 bce. This tragic event initiated the Cold Food Festival (Hanshijie), the precursor to the Qingming Festival. Although the Cold Food Festival was no longer observed in the area, the municipal government deemed this historical contribution to the nationally observed Qingming Festival an opportune date to promote and market local culture.

On Qingming, provincial television channels broadcast live footage of the celebrations on Mount Mian throughout the day. Footage of cable cars running through the green and brown mountain range was juxtaposed with singing and dance routines in traditional costume that highlighted the beauty of folk customs. Speeches by prefectural and municipal leaders expounded on how Qingming contributes to the diverse cultural history and economic development of China. One moderator explicitly commented on how the appreciation of local customs (minsu) adds to the greater harmony (hexie) of China. The live audience to this spectacle included local politicians, company bosses, and celebrities attending by invitation.

Meanwhile, Sweeping Cliff was abuzz with activities in preparation for the afternoon visit by President Fan and an entourage of local leaders (lingdao) who were to descend upon the village to enjoy the village festivities after the conclusion of performances on Mount Mian. In addition to the elaborate staging of the Star Worshipping festivities, which required moving to each village temple in turn, a number of old men performed a local opera form, called “dry tone singing” (gandiao yangge) at the fengshui screen in the center of the village. Furthermore, a troupe of folk music performers sang and danced through the village (niu yangge), and a group of women came to chant scriptures in the shrine to the Empty King (Kongwangsi).

As an ardent fengshui aficionado, the tour company’s strategic development officer, Mr. Yan, took the research and organization of the Star Worshipping celebration under his wing and orchestrated an extremely elaborate event. Although the festival of Jixi had not been held since the 1950s, Mr. Yan managed to gather an overview of the ritual sequence, which he then creatively adapted for its modern-day incarnation. In addition to Mr. Yan’s creative revision of the ritual liturgy and its meaning, his personal project of establishing Sweeping Cliff as a fortress with expansive astronomical correlations resounded in the adaptation of the event. In an interview with Mr. Yan, we discussed how he reconstructed the ritual liturgy and meaning of the Star Worshipping Festival. Mr. Yan began by telling me that China’s history of star worship spans three thousand years and was normally a ritual prerogative of the emperor. In the absence of written records, Mr. Yan could not assess how old Sweeping Cliff’s Star Worshipping Festival was. However, the way he fashioned the festival echoed the information in the tour company’s information leaflet that Sweeping Cliff’s cultural history is embedded in the ancient use of astronomy and its function as a military installation and weapons arsenal.

On Qingming, the parade through the village began with the ritual opening of the ceremonies in the Kahn Temple. Mr. Yan and other tour company employees had set up a yellow worshipping table with various flags denoting the four cardinal directions and steamed bread bun offerings to different cosmological constellations. In an interview after the ceremony, Mr. Yan enumerated the steamed bread offerings to various celestial bodies and constellations in detail: the sun and the moon; the five elements (metal, wood, water, fire, and earth); the four cardinal directions; and good fortune, official salary, longevity, happiness, and wealth (fu lu shou xi cai). In addition, four flags were embroidered with symbols and characters to represent the nine brightnesses (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn, and two stars); the 28 constellations; the sixth star of the Southern Dipper; and the seventh star of the Northern Dipper.

In keeping with the political dimension of the festival, discussed below, Mr. Yan had enlisted various members of the village government to perform roles in the ceremony and hired a number of young men from the area as altar bearers. Despite acting as the village host, Sweeping Cliff’s mayor declined to wear a costume, but nonetheless took part by accompanying the altar table through the village and lighting incense. Instead, another village official directed the affair dressed in sumptuous blue and acted as the master of ceremonies (zhuchiren). This role would traditionally have been filled by a fengshui specialist, but the local diviner, who will appear later in the article, refused to take part in the tour company’s activities. Another member of the village committee wore a sheep skin vest and a towel tied around his head, the costume of a mountain shepherd. The shepherd also carried a staff (zhougelan) that ceremonially opened the worshipping path (kaidao) for the ritual procession. Young men dressed in dramatic gold acted as the bearers of the sacrificial table. In addition, about 40 or 50 villagers had brought festive steamed buns (huamomo) to the event. Although this widespread participation might be mistaken for popular enthusiasm, the main reason villagers brought the steamed buns was that the tour company had announced that they would remunerate villagers for their homemade bread with 10 RMB each.

Within the Kahn Temple, crowds gathered from about 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Not just tourists, but many local people from Sweeping Cliff and the surrounding villages had come to watch the spectacle. Mr. Yan assembled the villagers with steamed buns in front of the altar. On the second tier of the Kahn temple, people set off firecrackers to open the festivities. Then the village mayor lit some incense and bowed to the altar three times before sticking the incense into a pot on the altar (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Villagers gather for the Star Worshipping Celebration in the Kahn Temple.

The master of ceremonies called out the first line of a script Mr. Yan had prepared for the occasion: “Worship the Kahn King!” (Bai Kehan wang!). With some hesitation and uncoordinated confusion, the villagers clinging on to their steamed buns bowed to the altar three times. “Worship the Supreme Kui Constellation!” (Bai Kui xiu xingjun!) resounded the blue leader’s voice as the villagers bowed down again to the altar. Finally, “Pray to the Supreme Xin and Bi Constellations!” was his last call to bow. As the villagers straightened up, the man dressed in the sheep skin announced the route for the procession: “Walk down Red Stone Street, worshipping the complete universe of supreme stars!” (Zou hongshijie, bai zhoutian xingjun!).

Lifting the ritual staff, the man dressed as a shepherd turned to his right and led the procession out of the Kahn Temple gates and into the village. At the shepherd’s heels, the golden boys carried the altar as the master of ceremonies made sure nothing toppled off. The villagers with their steamed buns brought up the tail of the procession with expressions ranging from amusement to confusion. A drummer beat in a low steady rhythm of solemn advance. Crowds of spectators were chatting, eating, and laughing as they followed the procession. In addition, folk music performers danced, turned, and played flutes as they accompanied the crowds.

After turning from the village’s main street and weaving through a small alleyway, the procession came to a halt at the large Central Earth Platform (Zhongyangtu) in the middle of Sweeping Cliff, where a similar worship liturgy was performed. The procession’s final stop was at the Erlang Temple at the northern tip of the village, where firecrackers once again preceded the villagers’ bows led by the calls of the master of ceremonies.

Then a village woman brought trays of sculpted millet lights, similar to those used in a domestic festival to propitiate little spirits of the home to fill up the family’s grain storehouse. She set the trays next to the altar table and gradually lit them with burning incense. In the past, these lights would have been lit at the wells throughout the village alleyways, but were now restricted to the final stage of the festival in the northern temple. Although villagers usually called these lights “wick lights” (niandeng), during the Star Worship Festival the ritual specialists under Mr. Yan’s direction referred to them as “star lights” (xingdeng).

As the lighting of the grain lights took some time, hired dancers in colorful costumes decided to create their own entertainment in the background, singing and dancing wildly behind those assembled. Their loud additions interrupted the continuity and completion of the ceremony as nobody could hear when the master of ceremonies began to read out the steamed bread carriers’ names. Calling up individual villagers with their steamed buns by reading out their names off a list, the master of ceremonies recognized each contributing villager before the audience and checked their names off the list. Each villager in turn placed his or her bread in front of the altar and kowtowed to the altar.

The villagers participating grew increasingly restless during this time-consuming process and made no effort to hide their irritation and boredom over the ordeal. Most of the observers began drifting home for their afternoon meal. However, those with steamed buns on offer had to wait to be documented so they could pick up their payment later that evening at the tour company office. The elaborate Star Worshipping Festival therefore petered out in a rather anticlimactic process of tidying up the ritual paraphernalia.

Even some members of the tour company felt the astronomical correlations were a fanciful invention. Despite their confident recitation of the correlations to their tour groups, tour guides occasionally raised their doubts with me about the tour company narrative. One local tour guide expressed his misgivings in the following way: “The correlations are so approximate and selective. The ancients really knew their astronomy and if they had wanted to make these correlations, they would have been precise.” With a mischievous grin he added, “The whole thing is pretty fantastic (huanxiang)!”

The way the Star Worshipping Festival was staged may have had some textual legitimacy. Comparing the liturgical script of the Sweeping Cliff celebration with Johnson’s (2009) exploration of village ritual manuscripts across southeast Shanxi brings out certain similarities, but also many fundamental differences. Johnson divides his analysis into annual New Year’s community exorcisms, on the one hand, and sai temple festivals for deities’ birthdays, on the other. In relation to the New Year’s exorcisms, in particular, appeals are made to various celestial bodies and constellations. It is worth noting that the division into the two types of festivities does not actually hold for Sweeping Cliff’s annual Jixi Festival, where both Triumph’s version and villagers’ memories of the festivities combined elements of New Year’s exorcisms with sai performances. From Johnson’s comprehensive overview we can surmise that references to celestial bodies were probably common in these types of festivities, but within a much broader appeal to a vast array of divine forces.

Another important point Johnson makes relates to the centrality of spectacle and sacrifice within these village rituals. While Jixi in Sweeping Cliff included some sacrificial activities of giving offerings in the village temples, villagers actually remembered this aspect of the festival as being far more comprehensive and including a wide range of locations and divine forces throughout the village. Again, Triumph’s exclusive focus on celestial bodies seems to have been part of proving its hypothesis of the village as a national treasure of astronomical culture rather than recognizing the diversity of important cosmological locations and forces throughout the village.

The Star Worshipping Festival achieved Mr. Yan’s implicit aim of manifesting and solidifying the astronomical correlations between Sweeping Cliff and the sky above through an elaborate cultural display. In contrast to the textual historical arguments that Triumph made available to tourists through billboards, leaflets, and tour guide scripts, this festival was a cultural display of a different order because it was primarily performative.

The performative nature of this cultural display raises questions about the intended audience and outcome of the festival. Triumph’s insistence that this celebration was for local people was borne out by the audience that attended and the participants Triumph hired to take part. However, the staging of the festival monopolized knowledge production about the village outside of most villagers’ experiences and memories, so that they did not recognize the ritual complex in its present form. Nonetheless, this overreaching in terms of historical legitimacy also contained its own potential for subversion by local villagers. Through contesting the legitimacy of the performance, villagers questioned the synthetic coherence of Triumph’s cultural display of history and voiced their own memories and narrative of Jixi as a locally embedded festival. Villagers thereby challenged the inequality in power and wealth that followed Triumph’s rising dominance over the village’s political and economic future.

Challenging Fortress Culture

The reinvention of Jixi as a Star Worshipping festival reveals the capacity of the ritual to legitimate power holders, both in people’s memories of the prerevolutionary past and in the current climate of collaboration between the tour company and the local government. Nonetheless, villagers had serious reservations about the Star Worshipping Festival and the newly created fortress culture with which it was associated. These reservations show that forms of ideological domination are never complete, but open up spaces for criticism and negotiation.

In contrast to the top-down mapping of astronomical correlations by the tour company, villagers upheld alternative bottom-up notions of local experiences of place that relied on personal and experiential knowledge. Villagers’ elaborations of local culture drew on collective memories of both communal and domestic spaces as part of an alternative vision of power, wealth, and architectural features of the village. Discrepancies between villagers’ everyday and ritual activities and the tour company’s vision of culture show village resistance to the temporal and spatial map the tour company attempted to project onto the village. The temporal and spatial dynamics of the celebration of the festival were problematic to villagers on several counts, including the timing of the event, the political implications of the celebration, and the spatial orientation of the ritual toward the sky.

The main problem with the timing was that the tour company staged the festival on the same day as Qingming, the China-wide Tomb Sweeping Festival. On this day, male villagers had climbed up the hillside to visit their ancestral graves, giving offerings to honor their lineage predecessors and pray for descendants for as long as anybody could remember. The awkward juxtaposition between the solemn trip to the graves and the boisterous village activities was a point of reflection for the men in the hills.

In the morning sunlight, men and boys clambered on motorcycles or journeyed by foot into the surrounding countryside, carrying offerings of paper and steamed dough buns (huamo) in bags, trays, and steamer baskets. As they stepped up to the ancestral gravesites scattered across agricultural terraces, men gave offerings to the Earth God (Tudishen) with white joss paper and steamed buns. Kowtowing, lighting incense, and giving offerings of more steamed buns to the ancestors, men prayed for descendants for their lineages. Last, they heaped fresh earth onto the ancestors’ graves with agricultural shovels, thereby cleaning the sites with a local homophone for “money” (qie, Putonghua: qiao and qian). As many villagers pointed out, the Star Worshipping Festival hijacked a date reserved for a lineage-based celebration in the hills for a ritual spectacle orchestrated by outsiders. In particular, villagers’ concern with giving offerings to the earth, praying for descendants, and eliciting wealth at the ancestral graves was problematically collapsed into the tour company’s focus on astronomy in generating capital through tourism.

Another problem with the timing of the festival was that it obscured what villagers felt was its most important aspect, its sequential celebration in different villages over the first lunar month of the New Year. Historically, each village on the mountainside had a fixed date on which to celebrate the festival, with Sweeping Cliff’s date being the 28th day of the first month following New Year. The leaders of the hosting village would perform the ritual ceremony, thereby legitimizing their political roles to an audience of fellow villagers and mountain leaders from other villagers.

Older villagers emphasized that the festival was really a sequence of celebrations, which legitimized the political leadership of the mountain villages in opposition to the valley below, by stringing the mountainside together through reciprocal hosting of the celebration. Ole Bruun (1996: 46) has pointed out that fengshui was historically associated with “rebellious sentiments” rather than supporting state and formal power, although the Sweeping Cliff reinvention under the direction of the tour company came to epitomize its control over local governance. The tour company’s transformation of the festival into a performance of outside power over the village was particularly objectionable to villagers, as the company invited elected village officials to partake in the performance, thereby turning their political leaders into puppets for the display of outside power. The reinvention of Jixi as a Star Worshipping Festival by the tour company on a single day thereby established the company’s authority in the village through a melding of commercial and political interests to legitimize capitalist development.

The intrinsically political nature of the festival was probably the main reason that government forces shut down the celebration in the 1950s, while domestic rituals continued behind heavy courtyard gates and under the shelter of the region’s reputation for peasant radicalism. The continuity of domestic rituals occurred under what people called “the big red umbrella” (da hong san) of their socialist credentials. The continuity between the domestic and the public spheres was also at stake in the staging of the festival. The traditional day of the festival, on the 28th day of the first month of the New Year, came shortly after a domestic celebration on the 20th day of the New Year, locally referred to as the Little Filling Up of the Grain Storehouse (Xiaotiancang).

For the Little Filling Up of the Grain Storehouse, women made wick lights to propitiate the “little spirits” (xiaoshen) of the home. These ritual lamps were handcrafted figurines made by mixing millet and vegetable oil into a dough, which was sculpted into lamps with a small rolled paper wick to light at night. In my host family’s house these sculptures included a swimming water doll, chopstick candles, a lamp for the chicken spirit, and ingot lights. These lights were placed throughout the home to entice the little spirits to fill up the household stores of food, clothes, water, and wealth. At the end of the domestic celebration, villagers would eat some of these handmade millet lights in the home and save some for the festival the coming week. In contrast to Jixi, this domestic ritual continued throughout the Maoist era, despite the official denunciation of the practice as a wasteful superstition involving women’s heterodox activities in the home.

Villagers claimed that in the past celebration of the Jixi, worshippers entered all the alleyways with wick lights. Placing the lights next to every well in their alleyways, villagers kowtowed to the sources of water they drew up from the earth below. Although the wick lights made an appearance at the Star Worshipping Festival, they only appeared at the final temple stop of the procession. Despite the tour company’s insistence on the festival as a celebration of the stars above, the most memorable aspect of the celebration for elderly villagers was going around into all the alleyways of the village and lighting the lights at the various wells. Drawing water from the wells had been a daily task until the 1990s when an underground pump system was installed throughout the village that drew on the underground reservoir and pumped water into taps in each courtyard. By contrast, Triumph’s strategic development manager, Mr. Yan, asserted that the wells themselves were dug in places corresponding to cosmological and astronomical principles that tied them to the celestial bodies above.

The contrast between the village as an agricultural and mercantile place of residence, on the one hand, and its representation as a military arsenal and fortress, on the other, further underwrites divergent ways of viewing the village’s ideological and material position in the mountains in relation to the valley below. Sweeping Cliff’s mountain view over the urban valley can be gleaned from the local expression that “[When] Sweeping Cliff lights a lamp, the Valley City sees its brightness” (“Sweeping Cliff” diandeng, “Valley City” kanming). The tour company argues that the saying is the result of Sweeping Cliff’s strategic importance for a kind of relay of lights from the countryside to the city that acted as a military warning system. However, the festival of Filling up the Grain Storehouse suggests that the source of the saying is not necessarily from the military domain, but could also come from the nexus between the domestic and agricultural realms when women propitiate the little spirits of the home.

Even the name of the festival, the Star Worshipping Festival, is contested in the local dialect, where worshipping the west (jixi), offering sacrifices (jixi, Putonghua: jisi), and worshipping the stars (jixi, Putonghua: jixing) converge as homophonic. For instance, the village historian, Teacher Dian, insisted that the festival originated in celebrating ancient Buddhism’s location of “paradise in the west” (xitian) rather than in astronomical correlations and star worshipping in the village. He argued that the celebration had gradually been transformed among the people into a performance to soothe the spirits (anshen) and create peace of mind (ping’an de xinli). Although Teacher Dian mentioned that the ritual worshipped the God of Heaven and Earth (Tiandishen) in the temples of the village, he also discussed how the ritual procession historically stopped to give offerings at other sites, such as the alleyway talisman “the stones of Taishan dare to resist evil” (Taishanshi gandang), the well spirits (jingshen), and the alley gate spirits (xiangmen shen). Teacher Dian also claimed that Jixi was the day marking the beginning of a new year of agricultural work for farmers, and the day on which merchants set off on their trading travels.

Teacher Dian was not the only cultural specialist from the locality who had apprehensions about star worshipping in Sweeping Cliff. As already mentioned, the village diviner, Mr. Gua, refused to participate in the Star Worshipping Festival entirely and maintained a narrative of Jixi that implicitly critiqued the tour company operations. Specifically, Mr. Gua mobilized the close association between water and wealth within local cosmology and used this nexus to criticize the economic development strategies of the village tour company, whose profits flowed to a larger corporation in the valley below the village. Mr. Gua worked as a farmer and viewed the tour company operations with deep suspicion and open disdain. The diviner was the son of the deceased fengshui master and medical doctor of the village. He acted as the keeper of his surname group’s lineage scrolls as well as books, manuscripts, and calendars used for divining the proper timing of significant ritual events in the village.

Mr. Gua insisted that the festival was not a temple festival (miaohui), but a sai, which involved competing for boisterousness (sai re’nao) and worshipping spirits (jibai shen) in every home and every alley (gejia gexiang), with particular focus on the wells (shuijing). Village leaders (lingdao), particularly the mayor (cunzhang), would carry offerings to all the wells and temples throughout the village. Musicians played instruments and opera troupes performed as villagers and gods observed the display (kan re’nao). Mr. Gua even claimed that the festival had nothing to do with star worshipping (jixing) at all, but was simply part of offering sacrifices (jisi), which are homophones in local dialect.

Another point that Mr. Gua emphasized was the link between water and wealth in the village, to the extent that “water is the source of wealth” (shui shi caiyuan) and when “the water goes, it ruins wealth” (shui zoule you pocai). On one occasion we were discussing the two pools in the center of the village that historically collected the rainwater flowing down the alleys and particularly down its central alley, Dragon Street (Longjie). The tour company had recently renamed the street Red Stone Street (Hongshijie) as they said that the dragon represents the Chinese nation so that the company feared offending visitors by implying that one trampled on China when one walked down Dragon Street. The tour company also asserted that these pools were the two dots on the taiji of the yin-yang symbol, with Red Stone Street forming the curved line between. Mr. Gua dismissed these knowledge claims as a superficial misreading of the landscape and instead pointed out that in recent years, the water levels had become extremely low, sometimes even revealing the stones at the bottom of the pools. He argued that the access point for the water (shui liujin) to the pools (shuichi) had been blocked (du) and the water now flowed out of the North Gate of the village into the valley below. As far as the village’s fortunes went, “the water has run dry, the wealth has come to an end” (shui ganle, cai wanle) and “nowadays, water flows out of the village like wealth” (shui liuxia, gen caifu yiyang).

From these various accounts, the festival appears as a celebration of the ecology in terms of the architectural and spatial features of the village, with a particular focus on its water sources. However, the sequential celebration throughout the mountainside with local leaders in attendance suggests that the festival was not only an ecological, but very much a political event that drew the villages of the mountainside together and legitimized their power structures. As such, the festival may have been an important part of ordering relations between agricultural producers and merchant households within the area in relation to the imperial state in the valley below.

The divergent images of the festival as a celebration of astronomical constellations in the sky above or worshipping the source of water in the wells below illustrates the contrast between a top-down and bottom-up approach to emplacing the village in history. Furthermore, this aspect of the ritual shows how continuities between domestic and public spaces were disrupted during the Maoist era. Most importantly, the tour company reinvented the ritual in the public domain by ignoring the ritual significance of homes as cultural resources in sustaining life through agricultural production and material wealth. The festival’s significance in ordering relations between agricultural producers and merchant households within the area in relation to the imperial state in the valley below was simply glossed over by the tour company in its restaging of the event. Instead, the tour company staged the festival to highlight the village’s distinctiveness as a cosmological site that correlates with ancient astronomical principles from Chinese history.

Regardless of aspects of historical accuracy, the Star Worshipping Festival conveyed powerful messages, both to those with experiential memory of the Jixi from their childhood and those who were experiencing the performance on its own terms. The overarching and yet implicit message that people took issue with when discussing the Star Worshipping Festival was Triumph’s stake over claims of historical legitimacy. This manifested itself in two ways: first, the financial and informational superiority Triumph claimed over the village; second, the tour company’s control over the collective fate and future of the village. However, both of these messages were tied up with villagers’ understandings of Jixi as well as the subsequent realization of the economic and political power that Triumph was wielding over their locality.

Triumph’s capacity to induce political cadres and ordinary villagers to participate in the festival was astonishing and must be dealt with in turn. At the most basic level, the village political cadres were subject to the bureaucratic hierarchy under the municipal government, which made many decisions in the village regarding resource allocation and development permits. Financially, the village committee was also dependent on Triumph’s revenue from the tour company operations for its fiscal budget. The Star Worshipping Festival was an event where both the political forces of the municipal government and the economic interests of the tour company aligned under the watchful gaze of Triumph and its associates. Therefore, the village committee’s compliance was guaranteed from a coercive perspective. However, its participation in the performance also made sense from a more local village perspective, as it demonstrated its political legitimacy over village governance, even if guaranteed by outside forces.

Many of the ordinary villagers who brought steamed buns were motivated by the promise of remuneration, and considered their participation as an unproblematic part of the kind of “activities” (huodong) that local employers engage in. However, during the actual performance, villagers complained of the “time wasted” (langfei shijian) while waiting to be listed. Most of the villagers who came to “watch the boisterousness” (kan re’nao) saw the festival as akin to temple festivals. It was only on further reflection after the event that local villagers took issue with how the Star Worshipping Festival had unfolded.

The reason for the subsequent resistance was not so much the financial and informational superiority that Triumph had over the village, but the way these activities staked claims over the shared future of the village. In order to understand who was competing for power in this context and what types of power were at play in these performances, the following section delves into an examination of key fault lines and actors in the development of Sweeping Cliff. What emerges from this discussion is that economic factors and actors were driving the political process in the village under the imperative of development. This meant that the cosmological and historical arguments voiced above were not translated into outright resistance, as villagers’ experiences were always denied by the official tour company’s narrative of history. Instead, villagers contested Triumph’s financial and informational dominance through economic arguments about the distribution of wealth in terms of collective and domestic resources, themselves built on the basis of Maoist political and economic history.

The Distribution of Wealth and Compensation

Local apprehensions about star worshipping and fortress culture were not purely cosmological, but very much intertwined with the distribution of profits from the development of the tourist economy. Therefore, these interventions and contestations in the realm of culture had material consequences for villagers, who feared they would be displaced from the village. The preceding section has argued that fortress culture must be understood within its local context of fengshui cosmology and domestic rituals. However, the transformation of discourse surrounding Sweeping Cliff as either a village or a fortress has deeper implications for the material value of the place.

Villagers framed the temple complexes in the village through a narrative of collective ownership from the late imperial, Maoist, and post-Maoist eras. During the Maoist period the two lineage halls were transformed into domestic spaces and the various temple complexes were converted into government offices, a school, and brigade storehouses. Nonetheless, only in the post-Maoist era was the public nature of these spaces slowly eroded by the incursion of the two successive tour companies, which privatized these spaces for the use of outsiders.

By contrast, villagers considered their homes to be sites of family and ritual continuity, havens from the politico-economic turmoil outside their courtyard walls. Although villagers viewed domestic spaces as economic and cultural resources, they were unsettled by the tour company’s activities and worried about the potential expropriation of their homes, ostensibly under the banner of collective heritage in the service of the Chinese nation. Despite their disgruntlement with the company’s privatization of village spaces for use by outsiders, their methods of resistance focused on a more equitable distribution of profits and compensation for usage.

Although all village land belonged to the government, the use rights to houses and domestic land were bought and sold within the village between residents. In addition, rights to land for construction could be bought from the urban Department of Land Administration (tudiju) in the municipal city center in the valley for about 3,000 to 4,000 RMB per mu. If one had an old house on a plot of housing land, this could usually be torn down and replaced without fees or payment. However, Sweeping Cliff had an unusual situation in that prerevolutionary houses had legally been placed under architectural preservation in 1995, so that tearing down an old house could incur a fine from the Historical Relics Bureau (wenwuju). Although some courtyards included sumptuous merchant houses flanked by modern white-tiled additions, the architectural preservation laws also led to many locked, abandoned, and desolate courtyards scattered throughout the village.

Administratively, the village has long been classified as a “natural village” (zirancun) under the direction of a village committee (cunmin weiyuanhui). People living in Sweeping Cliff identified collectively through forming boundaries between villagers (cunren) as insiders and all others as outsiders (waidiren). Villagers also contrasted their identity as part of a wider community of civilians or commoners (laobaixing) in opposition to political forces and economic developers. Crucially, the convergence between the village committee and the local development forces became increasingly palpable from 2009 onward.

For instance, when asking village government representatives about their concrete plans for the future development of the village, I was told that the committee no longer had plans for the village, as this was now in the hands of the tour company, which were opening up and developing (kaifa) the village. In a complete capitulation of the committee’s leadership role, one village committee member stated: “The village plan is now just the tour company’s plan.” A consensus in the village had it that the tour company rather than the village committee was “constructing the new village” (jian xin cun) through its close contacts with the municipal government and its vast financial resources, which induced the committee to approve whatever decision the tour company made about the village’s future.

While villagers did not overtly blame their own village committee for the loss of control over village governance, they implied that the municipal government was in the pocket of the tour company, which could therefore direct decisions about the future trajectory of the village by forcing the hand of the village committee. Instead, people focused on seeking compensation (baochang) for the tour company’s exploitation of the village. Particularly in relation to the valuation of their houses and their possible appropriation by the tour company, villagers were aware that their position was precarious.

While some villagers were glad that they had built new houses, which the tour company would not be interested in buying, others pointed out that an old house would be much more valuable if they were removed from their homes. The value of having a well-preserved old home was thereby offset by the dangerous ownership this entailed in the event of the expansion of tour company operations into the domestic terrain. In the 1980s and 1990s families had often invested significant amounts of capital into building new homes, but by the late 2000s they became concerned that they would not receive enough compensation for their homes if they were moved out of the village as the tour company only valued old houses.

An example of the blurred boundaries between public and private interests in preserving the value of houses in Sweeping Cliff emerged in a village shop on Dragon Street, a domestic residence that had been converted into a shop that catered to both villagers and tourists. The shop was housed in an old building and in the autumn of 2009 a torrential rainstorm caused the central beam supporting the roof to crack in half, leaving it jutting down from the ceiling into the service area of the store. The shopkeeper complained he could not afford to replace the beam in accordance with the government’s preservation directives and his landlord refused to replace it. Therefore, he insisted that the tour company should finance a new beam as this was also in their interest, because so many tourists dropped in on their way down Dragon Street. However, Mr. Yan pointed out that the tour company could not get involved in such preservation work in private homes or businesses. In the end, the shopkeeper received a secondhand beam from his brother-in-law, who sourced it from a building that had been torn down elsewhere. The shop as a place of commerce housed in a domestic dwelling of historic value exemplified the competing interests between the village and the tour company.

Villagers had different perspectives on the future of their village as well as the value of their houses. At the most obvious level, the village and the houses within it were home to them, a place of origin and return, where they lived large parts of their lives. While some villagers observed the profit-making of the tour company with suspicion and indignation, others contemplated opportunities for earning a living from the tourist industry. Several villagers had set up restaurants that catered to truck drivers passing by the village and tourists who came to visit. One family had opened their home to visitors as a guesthouse. A woman, who had carefully renovated her ancestral home for a film shoot a number of years earlier, hoped to open a grander hotel and restaurant in her courtyard complex with her sister, but she was very anxious whether the municipal government would grant her the necessary permits for her enterprise.

In exploring the differing conceptualizations of Sweeping Cliff as either an ancient fortress or a living village, the stakes for those involved were high. On the one hand, the municipal government and the tour company struggled to make the location into a resource for commercial profit and thereby develop the local economy. On the other, villagers attempted to protect their position in the village as a home from which to sustain a living by amassing material comforts and security. Although the temptation arises to cast this conflict as a simple narrative of state-sanctioned corporate exploitation and autochthonous resistance, people’s differing positions cannot be reduced to the rigid lines of a battleground. In particular, villagers, local officials, and tour company employees shared the commitment to using domestic and collective spaces for a prosperous future.

Reminiscent of what Guo Xiaolin (2001) has called the “bifurcated state,” the image most Sweeping Cliff residents upheld was of a benign national government in a relationship that was largely political and symbolic, while criticizing the predatory local state in terms of social and economic actualities and inequalities. In contrast to national political figures, who were treated with both venerating deference and even a kind of familiar intimacy when they came up in conversations or appeared on television, local politicians and developers were heavily criticized from below as the executioners of experienced injustices. Policy directives from Beijing were generally approved of at face value, while the actual local officials associated with their implementation were not above criticism.

In Sweeping Cliff, however, the division into a local and national state would be too simplistic, as the “local” state actually contained two levels in villagers’ experiences and imaginary. One could even go so far as to say that Sweeping Cliff villagers did not encounter a bifurcated state as much as a trisected state divided into the village, municipality/province, and nation. At the most social and experiential level they dealt with village insiders in the form of the village committee and cadres. On the mid-level they experienced the regulatory frameworks of the municipal and provincial governments that implemented policy directives and made many decisions about their livelihoods through the granting of permits for activities ranging from childbearing to business. However, these permits were not always granted and could be denied to villagers, unlike to powerful outsiders such as Triumph. Therefore, mid-levels of government were often experienced as predatory. However, this allowed the national government to appear as a symbolic and benevolent entity with centrifugal harmonious forces. Despite some excellent studies engaging with these mid-levels of government (see Duara, 2009), more ethnographic studies of this level of governance could provide points of comparison (see Feuchtwang, 2004).

In short, Sweeping Cliff villagers encountered a trisected state through the village, the mid-level, and the national scales of governance that could be divided into experiences of engagement that resulted in the village committee enjoying insider status, the municipal and provincial government appearing as economically predatory, and the national state being credited with a benevolent symbolic status. Through performances such as the Star Worshipping Festival, Triumph attempted to lift the positive associations of village-level governance to the mid-level, but this was so clearly completed under the direction of the municipal government and the tour company that the attempt ran sour with villagers. Nonetheless, villagers largely contested the tour company operations in practical terms through the economic realm by retaining control over domestic spaces and contesting the appropriation of formerly collective and public spaces, such as village temples. However, as they were largely excluded from the new cultural product of fortress culture, they were simultaneously losing their access to the means of cultural production through village domestic and public spaces. They thereby stood in danger of losing access to culture in both its objectified form and as a creative process.

Culture as a Resource: History or Efficacy for Future Development?

Triumph’s discursive shift in representing Sweeping Cliff was intimately intertwined with its relationship to the regional political economy. Most prominently, there was the imperative to differentiate the site from other merchant courtyard sites in the province, while retaining the objective of national unity under regional diversity. Triumph’s corporate policy of diversification from the coal industry was linked with the idiosyncrasies of particular key players, such as President Fan and Mr. Yan. However, these aspirations may not have been as idiosyncratic as they first appear, as elites throughout China increasingly seek to distinguish themselves through refined self-cultivation (see Osburg, 2013). In the context of corporate social responsibility this salvaging of cultural heritage was used to throw a positive light not only on the Triumph Company, but also those personally involved in the development of cultural tourism. Most importantly, the way the site was being represented allowed entrepreneurialism to be legitimized within both Chinese history and the current market nation.

An investigation of “mining culture” (wajue wenhua) could easily slip into a language of cultural resource extraction and circulation that relies on a shared sense of culture as an object. However, this article has approached the analytic notion of culture not as an object but as a process. This means that rather than viewing culture as a product that is frozen, finished, and awaiting circulation, the article has attempted to excavate the hidden relations underlying the production of culture. What emerges from this culture-as-process analysis is that what was being circulated as culture by different actors in Sweeping Cliff was actually fundamentally different.

For the tour company, culture emerged as a particular narrative of history, while villagers emphasized personal experiences and material efficacy. ⁴ More specifically, Triumph’s historical narrative positioned Sweeping Cliff as an exemplary site of astronomical and military knowledge, while also displaying its value in the late imperial market nation with entrepreneurship at its helm. Conveniently, this version of history also legitimized personal, corporate, and governmental shifts toward a state-led marketization of cultural resources in the region. By contrast, villagers largely derived their cultural knowledge from experiences and emphasized the effects, or even efficacy, of cultural practices. Although villagers were attuned to the effects that changes in village representation could have on their place in Sweeping Cliff, their cultural contestations remained fragmented and partial, as emerged in relation to the Jixi Festival. Their more direct criticism focused on the value of their village and the distribution of profits resulting from the marketization of Sweeping Cliff. Villagers made claims about the rightful distribution of resources in the village grounded in Maoist discourse of collective ownership or by mobilizing the cosmological efficacy of Sweeping Cliff in creating capital.

Despite the regional and local specificities of Sweeping Cliff, calls for “mining culture” are not unique to the village or even Shanxi province. Moreover, Sweeping Cliff villagers themselves laid claim to their culture as an economic resource for value production to stave off the potential risk of expropriation. This may lead us to ask what notions of authenticity and legitimacy are at work with regard to cultural resources and cultural creativity. An important form of relational thought consists of building analogies between different orders of things (see Descola, 2013). Within Sweeping Cliff, it appears that villagers, developers, and government officials shared an underlying “analogical” mode of thought in relation to cultural resources. ⁵ While Triumph and villagers had this analogical basis for the mobilization of cultural resources in common, the sources of legitimate knowledge claims on which they made these analogies differed. On the one hand, Triumph based its legitimacy on written history in relation to the Chinese nation. On the other, villagers based their legitimacy on experiential efficacy in relation to the locality.

Two parallel discourses, one of the market nation, and the other of the agricultural-domestic village, emerged in Sweeping Cliff, particularly in the different explanatory frameworks for the existence of Jixi. The tension between an agricultural and market-based way of life clearly existed in the village before the Reform era, as the late imperial sacred architecture and ritual worship in the domain of private homes showed. In the Maoist era, collectivist state ideology and institutions replaced the ritual celebrations in the public sphere that were associated with political and economic competition. In turn, the retreat from the Maoist state in the Reform era may have left these formerly religious spaces particularly open to penetration by the market. As the strategy of cultural entrepreneurship under the patronage of state-fostered capitalism arose in Shanxi, the tour company was able to capitalize on these public spaces with the compliance of the local government.

Taking up Siu’s (1989, 1990) suggestion that cultural fragments may be recycled to legitimize the interests of power holders under different historical conditions, Sweeping Cliff’s case reveals that different actors experienced unequal access and legitimacy claims in selecting particular cultural aspects from the diversity of cultural processes for the representation of culture as an object. In Sweeping Cliff, two versions of culture that appeared superficially commensurate, culture as history and culture as efficacy, were subject to a hierarchy of truth-claims in which the former more readily created a cultural object that was ideological, thereby obscuring relations of production and exploitation. Moreover, victors wrote the resulting history, so that China appeared to have always already been a capitalist economy, with the Maoist period and its redistributive logics emerging as an aberration. Therefore, villagers’ attempts to reclaim shared resources or redistribute the wealth resulting from their commodification fell on deaf ears.

Although many studies have focused on how privatization and marketization affect sites of economic production and manufacture (e.g., Potter and Potter, 1990; Hinton, 1990; Oakes, 2006), this article has offered insights into how these transformations affected the cultural commodification of a whole village, including people’s homes. Although cultural continuity in the domestic space appeared to have been important throughout people’s living memories, as they sealed off their homes to Red Guards and closed their gates to nosy tourists, their future ability to retain these spaces is less secure. Local and national discourses of the village’s past clashed in relation to the future of the village, as villagers asserted their belonging through a discourse of local inheritance while the tour company framed its claims in terms of national heritage. The article thereby contributes to anthropological investigations into how people orient themselves in relation to the future development of their historic past and cultural traditions (see Herzfeld, 1991; Appadurai, 2004).

Despite the conflicts of interests between villagers, developers, and the local government, most people in Sweeping Cliff shared in the hegemonic vision of culture as a resource to be harnessed in the interest of the larger project of economic development. This corresponds with some of the macro-analysis of China’s cultural development (as discussed by Wang, 2001), but the article simultaneously has traced competition and discontent between villagers, developers, and local government and proposed that an ideology of harmonious coexistence was operating at various social and political levels. Within the village, a community under pressure glossed over internal divisions in order to resist outside forces and provide a cohesive front to an outside researcher. This occurred in the domestic domain when family conflicts were downplayed, at a residential level between neighbors who sought to hide their differences, and as a village-wide phenomenon with regard to the village committee, whose compliance with the tour company was framed as a necessary compromise with outside forces.

This desire to project an image of cohesion may be traceable to the collective era or possibly even earlier, when people of the mountainside resisted political pressures from the valley below. However, the recent constellation of harmonious coexistence resonated with the national governmental discourse of Hu Jintao’s vision of a “harmonious society” (hexie shehui). Although villagers hesitated to compare their notion of “peace and quiet” (ping’an) as a local ideal with the larger political sphere of “harmony” (hexie) at the national level, the domestic ideology of harmony allowed a split image of the state to appear. Building on what Guo (2001) has called a “bifurcated state,” Sweeping Cliff villagers appear to have held a trisected view of the state, with the national government emerging as beyond criticism, while mid-level governments were often criticized as corrupt and unreliable enforcers of their directives, and the village committee was deemed powerless in the face of these outside forces.

Sweeping Cliff offers a situated account of how national and localized ideologies can resonate with each other in contrast to the antagonism fostered by the actual practices of governance at the middle levels of the state. Yan Yunxiang (2011) has described a shift from a strongly localized existence centered on familiar faces during the Maoist period to an increasing engagement with outsiders during the Reform era. Yan thereby reveals both the opportunities and apprehensions brought about by the necessity for social trust to complement personal trust. In Sweeping Cliff, these processes of increasingly direct engagement with village outsiders also meant that distrust in the complicity of different levels of government with economic developers emerged as a central concern.

Although the tour company was indeed fostering both local development and heritage preservation, it achieved these goals at the cost of casting villagers out of the village. Furthermore, by creating a new cultural product through appropriating cultural resources, the tour company was denying villagers the capacity to stake their historical agency and cultural identity on their own terms to outsiders. By hosting a celebration as elaborate as the Star Worshipping Festival, the tour company staged an elaborate display of its power over the village that encompassed both shared and domestic spaces. Although villagers defended Sweeping Cliff from marketization for outside cultural display and the resulting expropriation of value by powerful political and economic actors, their future capacity to do so seems increasingly uncertain.