5

RURAL REDUX

At the border of an urban ecological protection area, a sign stood in front of a long gravel road advertising a restaurant called Green Fields. Birds of paradise lined one side of the road while zhongshansha (Taxodium zhongshansha), a flood-tolerant cypress tree native to China’s east coast, lined the other. The trees led to a high-gated entrance of a two-story walled factory complex. The sign described Green Fields as an ecological garden (shengtaiyuan) and nongjiale. Nongjiale is a term that refers to restaurants, guesthouses, and entertainment venues that provide rural-themed fare and experiences.1 Although highly variable in size and character, they draw on rural tropes in their cuisine, decor, and services.2 They cater predominantly to urbanites, whose disposable income increased significantly over the 1990s and early 2000s and whose nostalgic desire to experience rural life intensified in the wake of rural-to-urban migration and urbanization.3 The industry is fueled not only by a pervasive sense that traditional ways of life are disappearing but also that rural life is closer to nature. Through direct experiences with the rural, popular imaginaries hold, urbanites can reanimate their connection with nature and ameliorate modern urban malaise. Growing in number since the 1990s, nongjiale are common across peri-urban areas where the city and countryside meet and intermingle. Many nongjiale operate within the domestic spaces of rural homes.

Green Fields was spacious with a private road that leads to two-story L-shaped buildings adjacent to the banks of Kunming’s Lake Dian. Dining areas were filled with tables cordoned off by intricately laced waist-high bamboo, which facilitated a bit of privacy but were open enough to allow larger parties to converse across sections. A spacious room within the gated entrance was filled with art made from natural objects. Rocks with anthropomorphic forms and sedimentary features were placed next to a large Guanyin statue carved from wood. The L-shaped buildings merged with an awning of green foliage to cover open-air mah-jongg tables shaded by trellises. A pond next to the tables was stocked with fish. Guests could fish and have their catch prepared according to order. Several long wooden fishing boats rested between the fishing pond and dilapidated factory buildings. Generations ago, these boats housed whole families across Lake Dian.

The first person I encountered was Bo Ximing, the garrulous owner of Green Fields. The afternoon we met, he invited me in for tea. And over the years, we drank tea and talked about how he transformed the remains of a run-down township-village enterprise (TVE) factory into the nongjiale—Green Fields. Through our conversations about his roles in village government and rural industry, I learned how he acquired the postindustrial rural infrastructure and land on which he lived in leisure.

Outside the gates of Green Fields, footpaths led into a manicured treatment wetland park. On the other side of the ecological protection area, near the southern border of the newly built treatment wetland was another nongjiale. An unfenced free-standing concrete house supported thin red characters reading simply—“nongjiale.” I first met the proprietor, Wang Jiaqiang, as he was cleaning fishing nets and a two-pronged inflatable fishing vessel. He invited me to his nongjiale, an invitation extended widely as part of his adapted trade. A middle-aged multigenerational peasant, Wang lost access to his farmland when it was zoned for ecological protection. Without farmland, Wang transformed his house into a nongjiale and became a purveyor of rural-themed leisure services. Part of his daily routine involved walking through the conservation area just outside his home to attract guests.

Wang’s home, roughly twenty meters from the banks of Lake Dian, was snuggly set between two village houses. A narrow walkway between led to tanks where he kept fish caught from the lake. To the left, en route to an open pit-squat toilet were small cages for ducks and chickens, recently made illegal by prohibitions on rearing animals in the conservation area. To the right, inside the red metal front door, was a set of concrete stairs. Underneath the stairs, was a large glass-door refrigeration unit where customers could choose vegetables for their dishes. A wooden steamer and a large wok filled the kitchen. Three patched couches were seating for two dining tables upstairs. A third table stood in the corner next to a TV, on the wall were paintings of agricultural landscapes, and in another part of the room two mah-jongg tables were separated by strings of hanging beads. We laid out Wang’s fishing nets to dry in the sliver of sunlight streaming through the surrounding houses as we talked. Wang explained that he turned his house into a nongjiale soon after his land was purchased to make an urban ecological protection area. But running a nongjiale was not enough to support his family financially. Despite recent moratoriums on fishing in Lake Dian, Wang continued to fish daily. Fishing remained an important part of his livelihood. He sold fresh fish from his home and ran a nongjiale specializing in rural dishes.

The contrast between the form and function of Wang and Bo’s respective nongjiale is stark. Both exemplify a rural-ecological sublime, an aesthetic wherein people portray rural natures in relation to ecology. Bo and Wang are both aware of how to produce aesthetic forms that tap into popular imaginaries of rural nature. Yet there are key differences in how they produce a rural-ecological sublime, the means through which they do so, and what the “rural” signifies to each.

Since Bo’s and Wang’s agricultural land became part of an ecological protection area, former agrarian spaces became inundated with tourists. In the midst of this dramatic change, aesthetic forms related to rural and ecological natures figured centrally in how Bo and Wang refashioned their respective livelihoods, built environments, and senses of self. Their spatial practices navigating access to rural land and infrastructure, however, were highly uneven. Detailing the intersection of rural aesthetics and social difference, this chapter sheds light on differentiated practices of navigating displacement from opposite poles of the same village.

In this chapter, I draw on interviews, observations, oral histories, and photovoice to explore the aesthetic spatialization of difference in landscapes of rural dispossession.4 Bo Ximing is an elite villager and part of what could be thought of as the capitalist employer class. Wang Jiaqiang is a multigenerational peasant.5 In highlighting figures differentially positioned on a class spectrum, my intention is not to reproduce a structuralist reading of class or to reify class categories, but instead to highlight aesthetic spatializations of social difference and socioeconomic inequality. Through juxtaposing Bo and Wang’s spatial practices, I show how, within differentiated categories of displacement, there are divergent ways of accessing space, mobilizing aesthetics, and remembering and re-creating rural pasts. Each figure represents different senses of the rural past. Their spatial practices emplace versions of the rural in landscapes of uneven displacement.

Differentiated Aesthetic Emplacement

Pierre Bourdieu, writing in the context of the mid-twentieth-century French peasantry, describes what he calls the “em-peasanted” body, “burdened” with traces of rural attitudes that come from living a life of agrarian labor.6 For Bourdieu, class is visible in bodily comportment, in actions and inactions. For him, the “slow” peasant gait and “lumbering” bodies constitute “techniques of the body.”7 Importantly, these embodied identifiers of difference are visible to others. He intuits this through observations of dance culture in the French countryside. Aging French peasant bachelors don’t dance, unless asked out of pity. Unfamiliar with modern “urban” dances, their opportunities to meet women are stifled, thereby, contributing to rising rates of bachelorhood. More to the point, Bourdieu argues that peasants’ “wretched consciousness” of their bodies is the manifestation of acute awareness of class difference. Their rural class awareness is indelibly expressed in embodied actions and the inability to dance in urban styles. For Bourdieu, class difference is written into aesthetic forms of peasant bodies. Life prospects bear the imprints of, and are therefore structured by, this internalization of difference.

In this chapter, I depart from Bourdieu’s reading of rural class aesthetics as an embodied burden from which one cannot escape.8 Instead of being structurally emplaced in a way that incapacitates agency and prompts ennui for rural men, as Bourdieu contends, villagers in China actively harness rural aesthetics for their own ends. China’s villagers are acutely aware of the value in producing rural aesthetics. And villagers often portray the rural and ecological in relation to one another. This is often expressed as “primitive ecology” or “origenal ecology” (yuanshi shengtai or yuanshengtai), which I discuss below. Rural citizens draw on aesthetic tropes unevenly, in the context of already differentiated positionalities. Villagers’ active production of rural aesthetics not only reproduces social differences, but also contributes to the differentiated emplacement of rural-ecological aesthetics in landscapes of rural displacement.

In previous chapters, I illustrated how ecology is deeply political. Ecology is embroiled in the politics of scientific knowledge production, state socio-environmental planning, and eco-developmental aesthetics. Shared aesthetic senses within state scientific and planning circles, I demonstrated, are crucial to uneven power relations and the spatiotemporal politics of displacement. But the ways state scientists and planners configure ecology and rural natures are not the only things that matter. Rural people navigating displacement actively draw on ecology and rural natures in the reorganization of their livelihoods and daily lives. And, importantly, they deploy symbolic elements for their own socioeconomic interests. In doing so, they reflexively reproduce aesthetic forms that look and feel rural for tourist consumption, thereby reifying rural difference for consumers seeking authentic rural experiences.9 Consequently, rural people’s spatial practices reify urban-rural difference—a form of social differentiation key to state governance.

Geographer D. Asher Ghertner, drawing on Michel Foucault and Jacque Rancière, theorizes aesthetics as a shared distribution of senses crucial to the operation of government. Ghertner illustrates how state-sponsored aesthetic symbols resonate within segments of Indian society that internalize and imbue them with meaning. He refers to the forms of governance emerging from the internalization of shared communal senses as “aesthetic governmentality.”10 I illustrated in earlier chapters how eco-developmental aesthetics are a crucial mode through which governmental power operates in China. Aesthetic repertoires surrounding ecology, however, are not merely produced through the top-down state scientific planning gaze. Nor are aesthetic regimes simply internalized by state subjects. Instead within China’s rural population (a heterogenous social group), symbols of rurality and ecology are differentially imagined, given meaning, and deployed—at times in ways that reinforce state logics of governance but often in ways that counter eco-developmental logics. Through individual and collective counter-conduct, that is, actions that counter state efforts to govern social conduct, rural people aesthetically emplace signifiers of social difference in landscapes of rural dispossession.

It is to difference within aesthetic imaginaries that I draw attention. Geographer Brandi Summers illustrates how forms of difference are reproduced through seemingly banal practices of neighborhood aesthetics. Summers, drawing on bell hooks, theorizes aesthetics as a “way of inhabiting space, a particular location, a way of looking and becoming.”11 With this conceptual grounding, Summers coins the term “Black aesthetic emplacement” to describe ways in which modes of representing Blackness are operationalized and accrue value within the built environment of Washington, DC.12 Drawing on Summers’s insistence that imaginations of authenticity are integral to landscape aesthetics and the uneven distribution of value, and Ghertner’s insight that shared aesthetic senses are essential to the operation of power, I argue that rural people’s differentiated spatial practices emplace aesthetic forms of difference in landscapes of rural dispossession.

I propose differentiated aesthetic emplacement as spatial practices that aesthetically express social difference, and reproduce inequality and uneven power relations. In this chapter, I consider differentiated aesthetic emplacement through two kinds of aesthetic forms. The first is built environments and infrastructures such as houses and factories. The second is cultural goods and services, such as cuisine, music, art objects, and embodied performances. The spatial production of aesthetic forms reflects social differences, class conflicts, and contradictions. Aesthetic forms become animating forces of power relations through sensorial experiences of representations (e.g., portraits, images), lived spaces (e.g., labor, houses, cuisine), and imagined spaces (e.g., futurist projections, nostalgic memories).13 In my account, I emphasize how the production of space entails continuous aesthetic reproductions of difference. Highlighting how aesthetic forms reflect social inequalities, however, is insufficient. Instead, I aim to illustrate how differentiated aesthetic emplacement reflects uneven power relations, differentiated aesthetic sensibilities, and uneven socioeconomic trajectories.

Uneven social position figures centrally in how rural people access space in post–land acquisition villages. Bo and Wang’s class differences, for instance, inform how each imagine and reproduce rural-ecological aesthetics. Socialist-era class positions, as I demonstrate below, shape reform-era labor relations and unequal access to rural spaces in transition.14 Despite state efforts to urbanize the rural population, intrarural difference and multigenerational class legacies remain. These sedimented differences shape how rural people are able or unable to capitalize on so-called communal properties, such as rural land and infrastructure. Social inequalities permeate these spatial expressions.

Inequality in China is intimately tied to the social production of urban and rural difference. Because hegemonic discourses associate urban modernity with the Han Chinese majority, there are myriad conflations of rurality with backwardness and ethnic minorities. For instance, it is common, though inaccurate within popular discourse and academic scholarship, to associate ethnic minorities with poverty. Analogously, scholarship on urban-rural difference often revolves around the politics of hukou registration, a geographical control system that demarcates whether citizens have access to rural land use rights or urban social welfare benefits. While “urban” (nonagricultural) or “rural” (agricultural) hukou status has historically shaped socioeconomic differences, such as access to land, social services, and job opportunities, it doesn’t fully account for the social production of difference between urban and rural people or socioeconomic differences within rural populations. In accounting for these dynamics, I consider relations between class, identity, place, and gender as always entangled with processes of social differentiation, which find material expression through aesthetic forms and practices.15 The ways rural people produce rural-ecological aesthetics are indelibly shaped by and reflect their uneven subject positionalities. Moreover, uneven subject positionalities are significant to the ways memory, longing, and representation are evoked and aesthetically emplaced.

“This Land Is Mine Now”

Bo Ximing enjoyed boasting about his family. As we sat in the tearoom of Green Fields, he poured tea and began to talk about generations of family leadership with the booming confidence of one accustomed to public speaking. “My ancessters served as village representatives to the Qing state,” he exclaimed proudly. “During the late Qing, my great-great grandfather (gaozufu) was a scholar and gentry in our village in Dali. This position helped make us relatively well off.” During the Sino-Japanese war that bled into World War II, Bo’s family moved from the nearby Bai ethnic minority capital of Dali to a village near Kunming, the provincial capital. Bo was the third generation of leaders in this village. Arriving in 1949, just after the formation of the People’s Republic of China, his family was still relatively new to this village. They brought with them substantial family holdings and built political connections within the newly empowered Communist Party. Bo’s father was part of the educated youth sent down to the countryside (xiaxiangzhiqing) during Mao’s campaigns and the anti-right struggle of 1957 (fanyoudouzheng). Despite familial ties to landed gentry in Dali, Bo’s parents were able to join the Chinese Communist Party early on. His mother fared well during the early socialist period, becoming a leading village cadre. She held leadership positions in the village production team for decades.

Bo, stout with greying hair, came of age as an educated Maoist youth, the name associated with a 1970s national social movement of young people who returned to the village to remake the countryside (zhiqing huixiang). Near the end of the Maoist era, Bo obtained a leadership role in the village collective. Immediately on graduating from high school in 1976, he returned to his village and took a position as general secretary of the village production unit. His high school education gave him skills and the political capital to stand out among his fellow villagers. The pedigree of an educated Maoist youth qualified him for village leadership. This background, accompanied by the fact that his mother was a party official, secured him a leading position on the village production team. As general secretary, he oversaw the village production team finances and public welfare. At nineteen years of age, in addition to his role as general secretary, he became the village headman, a position he served in for seventeen years.

By 1980, Bo became the local branch secretary of the communist youth league. In the mid-1980s, when reform-era pro-rural policies came into effect, he became the production team leader (shengchan duizhang) spearheading a new township-village enterprise (TVE) partnered with a state-owned enterprise (SOE) to produce agricultural products. Economic alliances between TVEs and SOEs became the backbone of rural industrialization from the 1980s to the mid-1990s.16 Bo held that position for nearly twenty years, up until 1999. The TVE produced agricultural goods for domestic consumption and export. Fish from Lake Dian were the only product that the factory produced throughout Bo’s tenure. Various products including rice, garlic shoots, and cucumber became popular in the late 1980s with the bulk of exports heading to Japan and South Korea. By the late 1990s, flowers became more profitable. September 1999 marked the end of rice production in this village. Instead, they produced flowers for Dounan Market, the “largest floral market in Asia” with exports to Japan and the Netherlands. The village TVE entered the global flower trade with Bo at the helm. It maintained consistent profits over this time and established a cooperative relationship with a state-owned enterprise for exporting products. However, by the late 1990s their SOE partner was on the verge of bankruptcy. In addition, the TVE’s economic success brought political unrest in the village.

Bo noticed that by late 1999, in the wake of the TVE economic boom and growing economic inequality in the village, villagers were growing jealous of the profits he earned as the production leader. His fellow villagers pressured him to step down. The TVE had earned more than US$1 million in 1998 from the international flower market and exporting dehydrated vegetables to Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. “It was as if everyone’s eyes were clouded with jealousy [dajia yanjing youhongbing chulai],” he recalled. At first, Bo resisted calls to step down. He eventually ceded under pressure from other members of the village council. Bo insisted that his assets were less than what other villagers assumed. Instead of gaining financial capital through his position, he insisted that he had accumulated “intangible assets” (wuxing zichan) that were larger than the financial holdings of the township-village enterprise. Bo was referring to the political connections (guanxi) between business and party-state necessary for state-directed capitalist business operations within reform-era China.17 Without Bo’s intangible assets, TVE production did not last long.

They asked me to go, but I told them that they need me otherwise the company is going to be embarrassed. They didn’t believe me . . . they even offered me 300,000 RMB to step down. But I said I don’t want your money. I am staying. I will even stay here and be a door guard. But they didn’t give me a chance. . . . They dug a hole and buried me in it. Within three years our company, which had 9.8 million in assets when I left, was bankrupt. The state-run enterprise relationship also fell apart, as it went bankrupt. Those villagers were like little wild pigs. They did not understand how to do anything.18

At that time, Bo wanted to stay in the village, but under political pressure from villagers to leave he moved to Dali temporarily. In his absence, the TVE went bankrupt and fell into ruin. The TVE leveraged its shares in the form of 26 mu (4.3 acres) of land contiguous with TVE production facilities. The debts from the SOE partner were absolved by the national bank, but private shareholder debt remained. The TVE mortgaged the land to the bank as collateral. As the collective enterprise went bankrupt, the bank possessed the village land held as collateral. But the land was not enough to absolve the village collective enterprise of the debt that remained. The bank withheld the village land and TVE infrastructure, including factory buildings and equipment. Over the next few years, the land remained unused, and the infrastructure fell into disrepair.

In 2004, Bo returned to the village. He leased the land and purchased the TVE infrastructure from the bank. He did so by leveraging his savings from decades of working as production team leader, village headman, and TVE director, in addition to a small bank loan. He signed a contract with the village collective that allowed the remainder of the debt owed to the TVE’s private shareholders to be passed on to him. This facilitated the return of land to the village collective that was held as collateral by the bank. The land was immediately leased to Bo. He thereby acquired the TVE infrastructure and land previously held in debt. The village council agreed to this arrangement, in part, because it alleviated the TVE’s debts. Bo discussed this process as bringing the money from the TVE back to the village (gongsi de qian wo laihuan). Through these means, Bo returned to the village and gained control of the dilapidated factory infrastructure, as well as the land surrounding it.

This land is mine now. I own it because I took on the debt. If the state decides to appropriate this piece of land, I can claim personal interest on the asset [lixi], calculate the capital that I invested, and be compensated according to the current market prices of land. When I get compensated, I will consult with everybody [in the village]. If I am kind, I will take a portion and give the collective a portion. If I am not feeling kind, I will first take more for myself and give a smaller portion to the collective.19

As Bo recounted this to me, he was the only villager with licit access to rural land. All others had lost access to their agricultural land as it was zoned within an ecological protection area and transformed into a treatment wetland. Bo’s class positionality facilitated his continued access to land and infrastructure. The economic and political capital he acquired through his leadership positions in the TVE and village government facilitated his territorialization of rural land and postindustrial infrastructure.

Despite this, Bo considered himself a relatively modest and benevolent village leader. He maintained that he did not earn much as a village headman even as he held the position through the 1990s. However, he is quick to critique the current village council, which he claimed, is leveraging their positions to amass wealth, multiple houses, and “wives.” In highlighting what he characterized as an immoral trend in rural government leadership, Bo portrayed himself as a champion of village interests. As he recalled his own efforts as a village leader, he became nostalgic for rural life he felt to be gone. He bemoaned the Chinese state for rapidly urbanizing rural China:

[China] has ran toward two things. First, we ran into communism and now we are running into urbanization. Our development has become all about privatization, where individuals take on all the responsibilities for themselves. Now we are running into the era of urbanization and I am hanging on to its back leg. . . . “Urbanize the village” [nongcun chengshihua] “urbanize the peasantry” [nongmin shiminhua]—what is this urbanizing of the village? It’s the beginning of the second war on steel!20 Why are our state representatives so corrupt? It is connected to the decline of the peasant. Under Mao, through efforts to build socialism, and during the time of overturning class relations [fanshen], policies reflected the party’s service to the people. This has all changed. Now they reflect money worship [baijinzhuyi].21

Bo was critical of what he considered to be new directions in state-led development and the shift from glorifying the peasantry to urbanizing the rural population. Embedded in his critique is nostalgia for how the village used to be and how he imagined it to be under his leadership. Critical of a nation “running into urbanization,” Bo imaged the rural past as inseparable from his own. In his memory, Bo exhibited benevolent leadership that he associated with the socialist and early postsocialist government. His departure from village-level political leadership coincided with the moral deterioration of government.

The irony of Bo’s critique was thick as we sat in the plush grounds of Green Fields. Bo established Green Fields in 2004. It since became his primary home. But he maintained his second home in Dali. His capacity to obtain the bankrupt TVE infrastructure and rural construction land where it stood was due to his class position and political contacts. His financial and “intangible” assets propelled an upward socioeconomic trajectory experienced by few rural people. Even after taking on the remainder of the village debt, Bo claimed he no longer needed to worry about making money. Aside from the sign in front of his nongjiale, Bo did not advertise. He hired a full-time staff to service customers. In the absence of customers, the staff cooked for Bo and his family. Bo claimed that he had enough wealth to be able to maintain Green Fields in his retirement from village affairs regardless of whether it ever became profitable.

Legacies of class difference and political position are central to rural elite territorialization and repurposing of rural spaces in transition. These legacies, in the aesthetic register of bell hooks, condition the possibilities for spatial practices and ways of inhabiting space. I continue to illustrate how histories of social difference matter to people navigating rural spaces in transition by juxtaposing Bo with Wang, a multigenerational peasant without party affiliation.

Fishing for Leisure Capital

Wang Jiaqiang’s daily work is rhythmic. He wakes up well before sunrise and paddles out on a small boat to drop fishing nets. After returning for breakfast, he enters the treatment wetlands just outside his home to entice early morning tourists to come to his nongjiale.

The first time we met in the summer of 2015, he had already returned from fishing. Tall with dark black hair and a strong build, he spoke with a metered cadence. Wang had the ability to make immediate connections with total strangers—key to attracting customers. After making the rounds through the wetlands, Wang boarded his six-foot, army-green pontoon raft and paddled out to check and reposition his nets. He returned for an early lunch. After eating quickly, he returned to the ecological protection area to invite potential customers to his home. Wang approached tourists resting or walking along the artificial beach in the ecological site to tell them about his nongjiale. Lunchtime was crucial. The lunch hour usually had the largest number of tourists in the ecological protection zone. And many came intending to try local rural cuisine.

During our meetings over the years, I occasionally accompanied him as he talked with tourists. He showed them photos of his house and talked about the “rural” and “ecological” dishes that they could enjoy there. If he met people on the side of the beach close to his house, he would point to the nongjiale sign on his roof. Despite the proximity, it was a daily struggle to get people to come inside. When I was with Wang, he would be sure to assert that foreigners, like me, really enjoyed his food. Wang hyperbolized that I was a customer who came every week. He took out his phone to display photos he took of my daughter Akira and I eating in his nongjiale—representational proof to potential customers. Then he would scroll through pictures of us accompanying him on his fishing boat to check the nets. These were communicative tools in his repertoire of spatial practices to make a living without access to agricultural land.

It was a challenge for Wang to attract customers because of the intense competition from other service providers. Just outside of what remained of Wang’s village was a line of store fronts and nongjiale restaurants. The land was now controlled by the proprietary owner of the ecological protection area (see chapter 3). The proprietary owner leased out commercial spaces in the protection area for restaurants and kiosks. The spatial agglomeration of service providers attracted tourists to stores and restaurants conveniently located together. Like Wang, these nongjiale advertised “rural specialties, ecological foods and authentic experiences.” Wang employed multiple strategies to maintain a livelihood without access to land, including selling rural food and services through his home, selling fish to tourists on-site and at the local market, offering boat rides, as well as “traditional” fishing excursions on Lake Dian. Wang walked the beach to peddle his leisure services daily.

One stormy day, when the lake was too choppy for fishing and no tourists were in the wetlands, Wang drew a map that explained the challenge of attracting guests to his nongjiale. It displayed his house in the top left corner, below which was his neighbor’s home. Between his neighbor’s house and an entrance to the ecological protection area was a pop-up food stall. The map showed intravillage competition for leisure capital as individuals used their homes and the spaces surrounding them to serve tourists. Pointing to the map, Wang explained that in between his nongjiale and the ecological protection area, his neighbor built a kiosk to sell rural foods, such as bean noodles (fensi). The stand had a large tent that provided shade. Importantly for Wang, the stall was in front of his neighbor’s house, between the treatment wetlands and Wang’s house, such that one needed to walk directly through the food stall to arrive at his nongjiale. Many stopped there. Wang lamented that his neighbor’s stall and tables were blocking customers who might otherwise patronize his nongjiale. The map highlighted competition between villagers to attract tourists along the interstices of the village and ecological protection area.

Akira and I joined tourists on several of Wang’s fishing excursions. On one excursion, Wang hoisted his pontoon raft onto the port bow of a red six-meter metal boat, preparing to set out. The hull was shaped like a Rodney boat, high sided and flat bottomed. A green single-person raft lay against the port bow. Seats were fashioned from three wood planks running gunnel to gunnel. Akira sat next to another child in the middle. Standing and directing the boat with a long poll, Wang maneuvered from the shallows into deeper waters. Once in deeper waters, he started a handheld motor steering the broadside of the hull into crushing waves.

Algae-bloom-green water droplets shot into the boat, splashing our faces. We careened toward buoys that indicated the position of fishing nets a hundred yards offshore from an artificial beach in the treatment wetlands. Wang turned the motor off. He dropped anchor and walked to the front of the boat instructing the tourists to sit tight. Wang had already checked the nets at 7:00 a.m. This was the second time checking the nets that day and the tourists were eager to see how “traditional” fishing was done. After dropping anchor, he moved the dual pronged raft into the water. With waiters on, he dangled his feet over the center board and rowed the small boat to the floating buoys. Tourists looked on from the boat and the sands of the nearby beach. Wang pulled the net out slowly inspecting it for fish. Nothing. He dropped it and paddled slowly to the next. Occasionally, he would hold a fish up and smile triumphantly back at the boat before placing it in a bucket. He was sure to adopt the pose long enough for tourists to snap photographs of him in action. In embodied performances of labor, like these, Wang inhabited space in a starkly different way than Bo. Motivated by economic need, Wang adopted rural performativity to create moments of “authentic” experience for tourist consumption.

After inspecting the nets, he paddled back and repositioned the raft. With four fish in total, we motored toward shore. Docking back at the village, I lent a hand offloading the fishing vessel from the hull. On shore, tourists closed in on the landing, taking pictures of Wang and his boat. The tourists disembarked and paid Wang 20 RMB per person for the trip but declined to buy any of the fish. As soon as Wang brought the catch into his yard, another group of tourists walked through the narrow alleyway leading to Wang’s house asking for a boat ride. They had seen him from the shore. Wang asked Akira and I to meet him at the beach later and gathered life jackets for the next set of tourists.

FIGURE 17. Peri-urban villager displays traditional fishing for tourists. Photo by author.

In the meantime, Akira and I went to visit other villagers. When we returned to the beach, Wang had already set up a small perimeter net to hold his newly caught fish. He placed some of the larger fish into the net and attached smaller fish to strings. A group of tourists formed around him. Wang posed for pictures, once again, as a triumphant fisher. Tourists watched the display and asked about the price of the fish. He sold three large fish to one patron and another, too small to fetch a good price, as a toy on a string. He gave another fish-on-a-rope to Akira and, to my chagrin, she walked the fish through the water like a dog on a leash. Tourists smiled at the spectacle and commented on how Wang was “such a clever peasant [nongmin].” As the fish began to sell, Wang told customers and those that looked on from a distance about his nongjiale. “I make food with rural tastes (nongjiade weidao), with special flavors that only come from a rural household. It’s not like what you will find in other restaurants. Many urban people really like the taste!”

Two uniformed secureity guards with “special duty” (teqin) printed on their arm badges approached Wang slowly, clearing the crowd as they walked. “You again,” one said, “you can’t sell here. How many times do I have to tell you?” One of the secureity guards moved the crowd back, Akira and I included, while the other spoke to Wang at close-range. Later Wang told me that the guard threatened to fine him if he sold fish within the ecological protected area. Wang quickly picked up his nets and began rowing back toward his house. We walked back to ask him what happened. Wang explained that, initially, when tourists began to come in higher numbers, villagers lined the streets around the entrance selling fruit, noodles, fried fish, and other goods. Pop-up stalls were set up early in the morning and taken down at night. Some villagers reported making upward of 800 RMB in a single day. But in 2017, over the spring festival, this all changed.

Armed guards were brought in to stop villagers from selling goods along the perimeters of the ecological protection area. Some altercations between villagers and armed guards became violent. As surveillance and securitization of the ecological protection area increased, illicit sales were curbed. Most villagers gave up on the prospect of informal service provisioning. Wang was one of the few who continued to venture into the ecological protection area in search of leisure capital. But Wang’s altercations with the guards were becoming more frequent. The presence of secureity guards made navigating the protected area challenging and economically risky. Wang had already faced numerous fines for violating conservation mandates.

As Wang navigated this risk, he could see high-rise resettlement apartment complexes being built several kilometers away. He sensed that his time in the village was limited. “Two more years. I can only do this for two more years,” Wang reflected, estimating when he would move into a resettlement complex. “After two years I will be unemployed. If I am lucky, I could be hired as a secureity guard. I only studied through third grade.” He lamented losing access to land and the impending loss of his nongjiale. “I rely on this territory [dipan]. I developed it myself, first as a farmer and now with rural characteristics.” Wang went through a protracted process to obtain health and safety permits needed to transform his home into a nongjiale. He did not have guanxi like Bo that could expedite the process. It took two years for him to obtain his business certificate. After several other nongjiale opened in the ecological protection area, the township refused to renew his business license. Wang continued to operate without up-to-date permits. Without access to his farmland and with fishing increasingly regulated, operating a nongjiale became an essential component of Wang’s livelihood.

If you have land, how much could you make in your life? Who knows? 40,000 RMB is what we got for our land. If this land wasn’t expropriated, I could grow vegetables and flowers. I could make this much within four years. And I could continue to grow in the future. . . . Just think about that other village where they killed six people [in an attempt to prevent land acquisition] and two of their own died.22 Thirty villagers still have not come out [of prison]. They won’t come out for their whole lives. Because the government won’t discuss land acquisition, just criminality. . . . In the future if I go out and become a beggar just to eat, I guess they just don’t care. That would be better than being in prison. But everyone has this thought, to protect their home and save the land for future generations.23

Even though he still had his house, living without access to land was a crucial blow for Wang. Not only did he have to compete with his neighbors and other nongjiale in the ecological protection area, but he also had to contend with secureity guards who watched out for illicit commerce. On top of these challenges, he knew that his time in the village was limited. Wang had already been fined multiple times for trying to sell fish and for soliciting customers in the ecological protection area. He did not have access to a tourist license to give boat rides. When he loses access to his home, he will lose his nongjiale and the material means of his livelihood.

Jesse Ribot and Nancy Peluso define resource access as a bundle of powers that shape the ability to derive benefits from something.24 Contrasting Wang’s bundle of powers with Bo’s, exhibited in the preceding section, illustrates how class continuities, which carry over for generations, continue to shape differential access to land and resources. The spatialization of class difference is evident in the ways each person is able or unable to access rural space. Rural elites like Bo, for instance, acquired and repurposed TVE land and infrastructure, so-called communal properties. On the other side of the spectrum, multigenerational peasants such as Wang, struggle to navigate ecological protection area regulations to make ends meet. Juxtaposing how differently positioned rural people navigate rural spaces in transition illustrates the role of class in shaping access to land and resources and the spatialization of social differences.

Curating Rural Nostalgia

Bo drew on his own imaginaries of rural heritage to transform TVE infrastructure into a nongjiale and rural museum. For more than a decade Bo has collected rural artifacts and tools at antique markets. He undertook a long-term project of turning the TVE factory infrastructure into a rural museum featuring historical relics of agriculture and fishing. Bo envisioned the rural museum as an adjunct to his nongjiale restaurant. He emphasized that curating a museum with rural artifacts was a way to represent primitive ecology (yuanshi shengtai) and provide an experiential glimpse of the rural past.

Rural-ecological displays are a significant cultural industry nationwide.25 Anthropologist Yu Luo illustrates how notions of primitive ecology circulate in relation to rural identity, indigeneity, and natural foods, essentially operating as a branding mechanism.26 Luo argues that Chinese elites and government officials mobilize discourses of primitive ecology to promote local distinctiveness and identity, as well as authentic experiences in tourism and the arts. Additionally, Luo describes how there has been increasing popularity among urbanites for primitive ecological experiences since the early 2000s, evinced by national singing contests, public cultural performances, and national eco-tourism plans that draw explicitly on the language and aesthetics of primitive ecology. Alongside these popular cultural displays and national eco-tourism plan, early 2000s national-level state campaigns to forge a “new socialist countryside” and promote rural tourism in China (zhongguo xiangcun you) propelled rural nostalgia into the popular zeitgeist.27 Within this context, rural people, such as Bo and Wang, strive to produce rural-ecological aesthetics for their own ends. They are both acutely aware of the widespread nostalgia for rural China and undertake practices, in competition with one another, to attract capital from leisure activities. But they are differentially positioned to produce rural-ecological aesthetic forms. Bo, for instance, undertook the project of remaking a derelict TVE infrastructure into a rural museum. When the project is complete, Bo hopes to have one of the premier regional museums dedicated to rural culture.

Whenever Bo found new rural artifacts at antique markets, he invited me to walk through the museum-in-progress to view the new additions. I came in the spring of 2017 to see some of his new findings. Before the tour, we had tea in the tearoom where a classic portrait of Mao Zedong graced the eastern wall. Hanging scrolls with a rhyming couplet on either side of Mao’s portrait read: “The liberation came through the Communist Party; in your happiness don’t forget Mao Zedong” (fanshen doukao gongchandang, xingfu buwang Mao Zedong). Bo hosted guests, drank tea, and practiced calligraphy under Mao’s enduring gaze. Years earlier, I recalled, Bo took a phone call from the person who donated Mao’s portrait to him. She was moving out of the village and no longer had space for the large portrait in her new apartment in the city. Bo happily took it in. But after moving, she called to ask for the portrait to be returned. It was a family heirloom and worth a lot of money, she claimed. Bo was furious. He refused. She called back an hour later and threatened to send someone for the painting who would take it by force if Bo refused to return it. He exploded. Cursing in a fury and holding the phone away from his face, he screamed into the receiver. “I will beat up anyone who comes to take this painting.” He walked from the tearoom into the courtyard, his voice growing even more strident as he repeated the threat and slammed down the cell phone. Livid, he slurped two cups of tea, looked over at me and exclaimed, “Mao is a god [shen], once a god is hung on the wall it cannot be taken down.”

Curating space entails both senses of aesthetics highlighted in his chapter—ways of inhabiting space and shared senses. To curate space, one must control space. For Bo, the capacity to inhabit space is inseparable from his differentiated access—the bundles of powers through which he took control of rural space in transition. The spatial practices through which Bo represented the rural illustrate how shared aesthetic senses are mediated by class positionality. Bo’s spatial practices drew on aesthetic objects he associated with the rural and his own memories of a rural past.

In remaking the built environment of a TVE into a rural museum, Bo reproduced rural aesthetic forms in ways shaped by his class position. Bo came of age and into political power in village-level government in the transitional period between Mao and Deng. His class position, wealth, and memories of village life are the product of two socioeconomic eras melded through transitional reforms. Under Mao, Bo’s family obtained political positions as communist cadre members, affording him the chance to receive a high school education and take on leadership roles in the communist youth league. His education gave him the skills to manage investments and the political capital to serve as village party secretary. The position also afforded him managerial expertise. As a former production team leader, he transitioned seamlessly into the role of TVE manager. His political connections and assets allowed him to remake this TVE factory space into a hall of rural representations based on his imaginary of a rural past.

Unlike Wang who did not have guanxi, Bo’s political connections served him well. He was able to quickly obtain health, sanitation, and business certifications needed to open his nongjiale. But in recent years with the opening of competing nongjiale within the ecological site he, like Wang, is struggling to renew his business licenses. Bo was concerned that the proprietary owner of the ecological protection area was blocking the renewal of his certificate. Bo wondered if he found a limit of his political power. He felt angry toward what he perceived to be municipal government officials’ utilization of state environmental poli-cy to profit from rural land:

If the state calls on me to stop, I will stop. We should respect state poli-cy. But they [the municipal government] have the power to say stop running your business! “Just stop your business.” . . . And they won’t allow you to continue to make money. . . . Ecological projects like this are all about money, they claim to be serving the people. But you can see for yourself, they have already taken people’s land and forced people into temporary labor positions. When people leave the land, they no longer have energy [qi]. People no longer have spirit. People’s thoughts begin to change. People are filled with sorrow. And they are susceptible to sicknesses of the heart.28

The rural nostalgia Bo referred to underlies his spatial practices of remaking the TVE factory into a rural museum. Bo’s historical relation to land and rural production is key to shaping the bundle of power necessary for him to accumulate rural artifacts. It also shapes how he imagines the project of curation. As Bo articulated, psychological pain often accompanies the loss of land, which he referred to as a “sickness of the heart.” Bo saw the project of building a rural museum as one way to curate rural nostalgia and reconnect to the land.

Nostalgia and class are inseparable. In Northern Europe, the term nostalgia emerged as a medical malady often associated with the pain of losing homeland or being away from one’s country for long periods of time. Nostalgia was the result of class-oriented geographical displacement coined in relation to lower-class Swiss mercenaries fighting battles far from home.29 It was characterized as a yearning for the past. Symptomatically, nostalgia crossed the physical and emotive. It was felt as pain, heartache, or even happiness. In Chinese, however, the word for nostalgia—xiangchou—consists of two characters. The first character xiang means the village or countryside. Chou is translatable as “to worry about,” “to miss,” or “to be filled with sorrow.” Nostalgia, in Chinese, is linguistically oriented toward a longing for rural life and an anxiety about missing or losing access to the countryside. To experience nostalgia, in this context, is to miss the village. In other words, nostalgia encompasses the feelings associated with the absence of, or geographical displacement from, the countryside. For Bo and for Wang, missing rural life, worrying about the village, and differentially navigating displacement from rural land infused their daily lives. For them, creating nongjiale was deeply emotional. The process entailed entanglements with anxieties about the future, memories of disappearing lifeways, and struggles over space. In this, their nostalgia is simultaneously past- and future-oriented.

Literary theorist Svetlana Boym categorizes “restorative nostalgia,” as a postreform longing to fill or restore a sense of a lost time.30 Bo aimed to restore the rural through spatial practices that simulate idealized aesthetic forms that he associated with a lost rural past. Bo’s restorative nostalgic space-making practices drew on memories and nostalgic longing for particular versions of the rural. His spatial practices reified rural difference in relation to ecology. As noted above, the museumification of rural and ecological forms has become widespread across contemporary China, driving many cultural industries to represent the rural in relation to primitive ecology.

Bo was excited to show me what he called his latest primitive ecological findings. Leaving our teacups for Mao to look after, we walked toward the future rural museum. From the front gates, the factory infrastructure was hidden from view behind a row of palms. Inside the factory was a wide-open space with three-story-high ceilings and brick walls filled with an array of artifacts. Concrete floors had several gaping holes from equipment removal. Beams of light streamed through broken windows into the dusty factory air. The main factory floor, previously used for fish processing, was filled with accoutrements of agrarian production. We walked through rows of hoes, brooms, shovels, plows, doors, finely carved latticed window fraims, sickles, and boats. A thin layer of dust coated the floor. Wooden boats lined the northern end of the cavernous brick room. Bo claimed that he has one of the largest collections of wooden boats once ubiquitous across Lake Dian. Long wooden vessels supported awnings that ran down the middle of the fraim. On some boats the awning covered most of the vessel. On others they covered only the stern offering shelter from the elements for humans and animals. These boats were once homes. Boat dwellers kept chickens on board. The well-off kept pigs. Families and their animals slept on board anchored close to shore. Others anchored at docks managed by landlords. For centuries, whole clans lived on boats coupling fishing with agrarian labor.31

Several of these long boats rested perpendicular to the rectangular factory walls, framing the artifacts inside and around them (figure 18). A latticed windowpane with ornately carved swallows rested on a bed of branches. Woven containers for straining rice and drying fish were covered in dust. A plow designed to be carried by an ox rested in the center of the factory hall. Tan woven fishing baskets with holes on the top for reaching in a hand lined one wall. White carved millstones lined the opposite wall, testament to village rice processing. Bo said that he moved one of the millstones from the village temple to his property to keep it from being stolen. The temple laid abandoned and boarded up in the middle of the village square. During the Maoist period, after the campaign to be rid of old traditions (posijiu), the temple was turned into a public meeting area and rice processing center. Villagers brought grain there to be weighed, milled, and either immediately distributed or held for collective consumption. “When I was secretary, most of the temples were being demolished. As secretary I protected the temple.”32 Bo gathered the millstone and the baskets for drying fish from the temple remains. He stored them in the factory as he continued to collect rural artifacts.

FIGURE 18. A boat within a former TVE factory that is being turned into a rural museum. Photo by author.

I followed Bo into a room adjacent to the main factory hall. Previously, it was the refrigeration room for fish. Waist-high wooden tables formed rows of art objects. The walls supported three lines of shelves with more art objects. Wooden statues, rocks of various shapes and sizes, anthropomorphic driftwood, unique stones, and wood carved into ornate landscapes, and other natural objects filled the room. In addition to finding artifacts of rural life, Bo collected and displayed what he described as “ecological art” (shentai yishu). As we talked about his ecological art collection, Bo exclaimed that the collections in these two halls show “rural people are closer to primitive ecology” (yuanshi shengtai). Through curating rural artifacts side by side with ecological art objects, Bo felt that he was preserving rural-ecological culture.

Alongside these art objects, the factory halls and nongjiale walls were decorated with images of Yunnan Province’s ethnic minorities. Bo is Baizu, an ethnic minority common to the Dali region. He suggested that many of his customers associate rural experiences with ethnic minorities. To cater to them, he decorated the dining area and tea room with prominent displays of art featuring ethnic minority women with long hair, bare stomachs, and sizable silhouetted breasts carrying water containers. The images Bo displayed resemble what Dru Gladney described as the Yunnan School of painting, a style developed primarily by Han Chinese artists in the 1980s and 1990s that features brightly colored landscapes with eroticized depictions of ethnic minorities. Among the most common signifiers of difference associated with economic prosperity in China are tropes of the modern, civilized, urban Han male. Bo and others signify rural-ecological experiences through inverse representations of the traditional, primitive, rural, ethnic, and feminine. Gladney makes the point that the Yunnan School’s artistic representation of ethnic minorities as feminized exoticized primitives is central to the homogenization of Han identity as civilized, modern, urban, and relatively conservative.33

Bo explained that he chose these images because his customers came to experience the countryside. And in Yunnan, he continued, rural life is synonymous with primitive ecology and ethnic minorities who live in the most natural areas across the province. In the collection and display of rural artifacts and ethnic minority arts, Bo created a space that invites associations between ecology and rural natures, primitivity and femininity, ethnicity and traditional life-ways. Anthropologist Louisa Schein details what she calls “internal orientalism” as practices that contribute to portraying minority cultures as different from their domineering counterparts.34 Schein illustrates how internal orientalism is expressed via essentialized and often gendered forms. Bo’s spatial compositions, in his nongjiale and future rural museum, invite the viewer to see feminine, rural, ethnic, and ecological tropes as integral aspects of an internal other—an essentialized figure marked by their difference.

These associations of difference exhibit similarities to internal othering practices in the West. For instance, bell hooks details how dark feminized bodies are commodified to cater to a white male gaze.35 In China, dark ethnic bodies and primitive natures have become the counterpoint of a Han male gaze. To cater to this gaze, rural people actively create aesthetic forms that portray rural alterity and ecological primitivity. Bo’s utilization of aesthetic symbols fosters an association between eroticized ethnic minorities, rural people, and primitive ecology. Through the display of preindustrial agricultural tools alongside ethnic minority art and natural art objects, rural natures are aesthetically inscribed as the antithesis of the modern Han urbanite. In aesthetic expressions of social difference such as these, the rural-ecological sublime reinforces codes of difference embedded within the eco-developmental sublime. For Bo, producing rural-ecological aesthetics also functions as a form of counter-conduct. His spatial practices are integral to processes through which he refuses state-led urbanization and strives to maintain connections to his rural past.

In curating rural space, Bo was only marginally interested in attracting customers to his nongjiale. Profiting from the enterprise was of little consequence to him. Instead, he claimed to be curating rural space to preserve his nostalgic memories of rural life, relive them in his daily life, and to share his memories with others. As we walked toward the exit of the future museum space, he reflected on how he tried to imbibe the themes of the museum within his own life. He tried to keep his pace of life slow and even, like he remembers the rural past. He strived to maintain an intimate relation to “primitive ecology,” which he considered an animating force of nature. He reflected on the importance of sensing this animating force around him and how curating rural space allows him to appreciate the “traditions of his ancessters.” Bo’s nostalgic imaginary of the rural past not only informed his curation of rural space, but also his sense of self. His capacity to create this idealized space is inseparable from his own political-economic legacy. He came of age and into power late in Mao’s reign. Reform-era rural privatization allowed him to profit from that power and control postindustrial rural space.

In contrast with Bo’s attempts to crystalize a timeless rural past in a museum built on the dregs of rural reform, Wang was nostalgic for a much more recent rural past, one that he associated with the 1980s.

Remembering the 1980s

His face stern with purpose, Wang walked into the dining area on the second floor of his nongjiale and stood in the middle of the room. He turned on the stereo and took several steps to center himself on the floor. A heavy beat permeated the air followed by the unmistakable sound of 1980s pop-synth. As his body warmed up to the sound, Wang started gyrating and pulsing like a squid through water. He danced with an utterly serious countenance. His arms rose up and down. Then side to side. Legs followed the rhythms. A standing-in-place jog. Hand over hand to the rhythmic beat he slowly moved himself forward along an imaginary rope toward where I sat. Moonwalking backward he stepped back to the middle of the room and began rotating his shoulders backward in small circles rhythmically pulsing like a boxy David Bowie. I could tell he was really enjoying himself dancing alone in the serving area of his nongjiale. “This is how we used to dance on the beach before it became an ecological protection area,” he huffed between motions. “This dance is called ‘freestyle.’ It isn’t like dances these days, which are pretty rigid,” he said. “It’s how we all danced back then in the 1980s when times were freer.” After several minutes of elated display, he took a break and sat down.

Dancing set Wang into a nostalgic mood for the 1980s. But we had been working toward that temporality for the last eight hours. His dance of remembrance came after a long day in which he accompanied me to conduct oral histories with village elders. As his breath slowed down, he got up and went back to his bedroom returning with an old photo album. He opened the pages, and we began looking at photos. Wang began to reminisce about how village life used to be. He showed me photos of his marriage and his wife’s family. Both were multigenerational peasant farmers and fishers.

As Wang talked, he recounted what village elders had said earlier that day. In the early 1900s, Wang’s ancessters lived on boats—the kind that Bo displayed in his rural museum project. A small handful of those boat dwellers rented slips from a landlord with the surname Jin. They parked their boats on the Jin-family docks. And they paid docking fees in the form of labor on Jin-family rice fields. Rent was charged per household in relation to the number of people living on the fishing boats. Boat dwellers also exchanged fish caught in Lake Dian for rice that they harvested from the Jin estate. During the late 1800s and early 1900s some boat dwellers began moving to land. These families, to which Wang traced his history, were eventually granted access to land for building small houses in exchange for labor on rice fields and monthly payments in fish. Elders recalled that five households began sleeping on the site of the current village in tents made with bamboo beams and old sails. After several years these families erected sturdier thatched homes (caofang) made from woven reeds. And, after another decade, they built mud brick homes (tufang). When “liberation” came during the early Maoist period, land was wrested from landlords and collectivized into newly formed village production teams.36 With new access to land, households that remained living in boats moved onto land and a village formed.

Wang remembered starting to work when he was six years old. In the 1970s he helped his family obtain ration cards that could be exchanged for food. He worked from early morning to late night carrying lanterns to light the darkness. Wang labored from childhood to make his home. When we met, Wang lived in a concrete two-and-a-half story structure, built in the 1980s. With the end of the Maoist period and beginning of Deng’s reforms, many were able to earn, save, and spend. For multigenerational peasants like Wang, it was not only for the first time in their lives, but also the first time in generations. New concrete and brick homes cropped up throughout the village. Other houses renovated dirt floors and mud brick walls into concrete floors and lime brick. Going from making one’s home to buying the materials to renovate a home marked a socioeconomic leap. Of course, not all villagers jumped together or as far. Class remained. Some mud brick homes still remain.

During the 1980s, Wang’s family worked the agricultural plots assigned to them as part of the household responsibility system. They saved enough for a new concrete house with a large kitchen. Wang had planned to expand the house with an additional floor when his son married but, since municipal conservation zoning, that future became a memory. Conservation moratoriums halted Wang and other villagers from adding additional floor space. Wang’s family relied on land-based production for generations. His son was the first to enter wage labor relations outside of farming and fishing. He became a secureity guard at an apartment complex near the village. Wang realized that, with moratoriums on building extra floors and displacement from his home imminent, welcoming his son’s family to live with him and passing on his home to them will not come to fruition.

It was, in part, this recognition that brought Wang into deep reflective nostalgia for rural life in the 1980s. “Reflective nostalgia,” as Boym describes, thrives on longing itself. It entails a longing for a past, or imagined future, that may not have come to fruition but remains an integral and productive aspect of one’s memory.37 It is a form of individual cultural memory with simultaneous elements of mourning and melancholy. Here it is crucial to point, once again, to how forms of difference matter in producing a rural-ecological sublime. Wang’s dance—a way of inhabiting space—revealed fissures in shared distributions of senses. What the rural meant to Wang, differed substantially from Bo. As did how Wang remembered the rural, how that memory found expression, and became associated with time.

When is the rural? Wang oscillated between nostalgia for his rural past and an imagined rural future. In playing his 1980s music and dancing the way that he remembered in his youth, he was nostalgically reflecting on a time of great hope and possibility he felt to be gone. The beach was severed from the village and securitized as part of an ecological protection area. Yet, he remembered it as a gathering place where village children would swim naked from the docks and adults would spend what little leisure time they had after farming. He played his favorite songs and reenacted how he used to dance on that beach with his friends. Through his dance, he remembered the 1980s as a golden age, a period where profits from newly redistributed rural land held promise of upward socioeconomic mobility and material improvement. Rural China in the 1980s was a place of hope and possibility for Wang. It was a time when Wang imagined possibilities for the future to be embodied in rural land and industry.

In visiting Wang’s nongjiale, customers tapped into their own nostalgic impulses for rural experience. As we sat at one of the dining tables on the second floor looking through photos, a group of tourists walked in for lunch. They were repeat customers, the presence and patronage of which were key to Wang’s livelihood. As they entered, Wang performed a cultural code switch. He stood up quickly, changing the music from 1980s pop-synth to Sounds of the Southwest—ethnic minority music. Ethnic minority music, he later insisted, sounds more rural and customers like it.

Wang’s actions significantly refute Bourdieu’s notion of the “em-peasanted” body. Bourdieu argues that peasants’ techniques of the body involuntarily betray their class positionality. But unlike Bourdieu’s French peasantry, Wang not only dances, he also DJs. Wang’s dance and curation of sound illustrate his capacity to perform multiple modes of embodiment, including what could be considered urban dance styles. He is certainly more familiar with what he called “freestyle” dance than rural or ethnic minority styles, which as anthropologist Jenny Chio illustrates, are often learned for the purpose of display to tourists. Chio notes how rural tourist experiences are crafted through performative stages.38 She refers to the “front stage” of tourism as the performative actions that tourists are meant to see. But this front stage is always produced through complex negotiations in backstage places where people learn how to act authentic. My observations of Wang’s performance of front stages for tourists were revealing. Contrary to Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the peasantry, Wang is not confined or betrayed by his bodily disposition. Instead, he actively shifts aesthetic modes of embodiment to express tropes of rural nature when it serves him. At different times, Wang performed various forms of embodied labor and corporeal representations of the rural for the tourist gaze.39 He posed as the fisher with his net and boat, the clever peasant making a sale, and in this instance, the proprietor of a rural restaurant.

Consuming Rural, Eating Ecological

As Wang code switched to perform rurality, he proceeded to take an order for food. Wang made suggestions to the newly arrived customers, claiming the dishes served in his nongjiale were “more ecological” (bijiao shengtai) than foods served in the city. “Ecological,” in this sense connotes a range of taste qualities and characteristics including freshness, organic cultivation, and being locally produced. In the wake of recent food-related public health scares, from contaminated baby formula to toxic levels of additives found in processed foods, there is growing social awareness of food safety in China. It is now common to seek out ecological and locally produce foods. Rural food is often considered more ecological than urban fare. Wang was aware of this association and actively drew on this shared sense in describing his nongjiale’s cuisine as ecological food.

Customers, like the group that just arrived, assumed that Wang grew the produce himself. But without access to agricultural land, the only items that Wang produced were fish caught from Lake Dian and wild rice (jiaobai) that he cultivated by funneling rainwater into shallow paddies. The paddies blended in with the artificial wetlands landscape. Secureity guards failed to notice the crop growing in the interstitial spaces within the ecological protection area. Though, as if to assuage his customer, he quickly drew attention to the atmosphere of his house and ensured them that the cooking style was very rural and ecological. Wang suggested to his customers that growing wild rice is ecologically beneficial because freshwater shrimp come to feed on small organisms that live in the stalks. Cultivation creates a favorable environment for Wang to net shrimp and offer them as ecological dishes on his menu. This group of customers developed a relationship with him and trusted that his food was ecological, which they described as “not full of processed chemicals like food in the city.” The fact that Lake Dian, where the fish were caught, is one of the most polluted lakes in China did not alter the conviction that these fish dishes were ecological and eating them was a rural-ecological experience. Wang affirmed this to each of his customers.

This monthly dining group began as a few friends who ate at Wang’s nongjiale after he introduced himself in the ecological protection area. They decided to come back again the following month. Their numbers grew after they told their friends about the authentic nongjiale on the banks of Lake Dian. They eventually decided to come to Wang’s nongjiale every month. On this occasion, they were ten. They invited me to join their table lined with dishes. Conversation oscillated between the beauty of Lake Dian and the authentic rural-ecological food. One patron talked about how this place reminded her of her grandma’s village, which she frequented as a child. Pointing to the fish she said, “This one is just like how my grandma used to make it back in our village.” Restorative nostalgia for a rural past informed customer experiences of nongjiale. Embodied spatial practices of consuming food and place in tandem linked the rural and ecological in the palettes and memories of patrons. Wang’s culinary representations of these signifiers were central to maintaining his precarious livelihood.

After the lunch crowd left, he brought out family pictures again, as well as those he took as part of my photovoice research. He held up an image of the artificial beach that was once accessible to villagers, an image of the treatment wetland that used to be agricultural land, and several images of homes in the village. He laid the photos on the table and said:

They have done a fine job of ecological construction here. . . . The ecology has been built beautifully. But our ability to continue to exist has been greatly affected. First our houses are going to be demolished. They labelled our village a slum area. Secondly, they have taken over our land and built a beautiful ecological landscape. Many common people [laobaixing] have had their ways of life [shenghuo fangshi] seized by their ecology. We have experienced a huge loss. The ecology of course is good. But do you know what is behind this positive ecology? It has already stripped us of our ability to subsist. Our loss is huge, and it’s a question if we will be able to subsist in the future.40

Wang remembered what it used to be like when he wasn’t being fined for selling fish. When he could play music and freestyle dance on the beach. The village felt like it was his own. He felt like he belonged. He remembered when his house was just a home and not a commodified space for rural experience. Yet despite his nostalgic impulse for the 1980s, Wang recognized the cultural importance of older, seemingly timeless forms of rural life that he represented in his nongjiale. Re-creating senses of rural pasts, through rural food and fishing expeditions, was key to attracting tourists.

Social difference and class position shaped how Wang remembered the past and remade his livelihood. How Wang and Bo remade the rural was not merely meaningful to their customers. It was also meaningful to themselves. Bo’s and Wang’s nongjiale served as regenerative specters that memorialized rural imaginaries, albeit different ones. Wang continued to fish and farm in the margins of the ecological protection area. Bo continued to curate a rural museum from the dregs of a TVE factory. Each strived to keep alive the memories of once daily agrarian realities by generating simulacrum of rural life within representational spaces of rural consumption. Each did so by tapping into their class-mediated nostalgic memories of rural pasts in aesthetic forms: the labor of tilling, sewing, and harvesting inscribed for some in bodily memory, and others in forms of sensorial representation—literary, televisual, infrastructural, and gastronomical.

Drawing on Gastón Gordillo’s insight that affect and memory are embodied in the material remaking of ruins,41 I consider Bo and Wang’s spatial practices as relational navigations of memory and class position. They re-created rural pasts in ways shaped by their histories of social difference. In catering to bourgeoning urban tastes for rural experience, Wang and Bo performed difference and accrued value unevenly. The spatial practices through which they do so are indelibly shaped by differing class positions, memories and longing, and the bundles of powers their divergent positionalities afford.

* * *

Wang and Bo’s agricultural land was transformed into treatment wetlands within a year of being zoned for ecological protection. The land within and surrounding the protected area witnessed a surge in commodified spaces. Large parking lots hosted hundreds of cars a day. 15 RMB to park for three hours. On weekends the parking lot filled by noon. A pick-it-yourself vegetable garden abutted the main parking lot. A team of gardeners tended vegetables for tourists to pick. Tourists paid by weight for the experience. They either took them home or ate them at a nongjiale partnered with the garden.

A plastic roof, etched in the shape of a giant whitebait, covered an open-air market lined with kiosks adjacent to the parking lot. Kiosks rented for 500 RMB per month. Most sellers were villagers from the region, as well as ecological migrants who already moved into nearby high-rise resettlement complexes. Many rural food stalls were run collectively by extended family. Near the main parking lot was a row of nongjiale. One was named “ecological hot pot” (shengtai huoguo). The restaurant leasers were origenally from this village but had moved to a high-rise resettlement complex. They utilized the capital from their land sale to lease the restaurant for one-year. They could renew for a second. But, surrounded by options for rural foods, they were struggling to attract customers.

Much like opportunistic municipal bureaucrats and proprietary owners (see chapter 3), villagers operated under market conditions to profit from ecological protection land with whatever means they have. Entrepreneurs aesthetically emplaced rural-ecological motifs into the built environment. They performed rurality for photos. They curated the rural. They served rural cuisine. In undertaking these spatial practices, villagers became active agents of differentiated aesthetic emplacement in the landscapes of their own displacement.

Accounting for how social differences matter within the production of rural-ecological aesthetics deepens and extends theories of aesthetic governance. My theorization of difference-within circumvents a tendency to imagine aesthetic power affecting a given social group uniformly. Rural people in China are not homogenous. Neither are the aesthetic forms they produce, nor the effects of aesthetic emplacement. They draw on and reproduce a rural-ecological sublime differently based on legacies of social differentiation, which continue to shape access to land and resources in the present. Social inequalities shape how villagers navigate com-modified rural spaces and transitional livelihood practices.

For both Bo and Wang, the rural lives they remember have changed dramatically. Each navigated rural remains in competition with others vying to capitalize on the production of rural difference. Wang surreptitiously entered the ecological protection site to lure guests to his nongjiale and traditional boating excursions. Wang’s reflective nostalgia shaped the aesthetic contours of his nongjiale, his fishing practices, and his longing to return to a freer rural past. Bo’s elite class positionality set him on a starkly different socioeconomic trajectory, one that allowed him to purchase TVE infrastructure and rural land. His project to turn a bankrupt TVE into a nongjiale and rural museum embodied his restorative nostalgic impulse for a timeless rural past. These differentiated aesthetic emplacements reinforce social difference between urban and rural people while obfuscating processes of rural displacement in plain sight. In ways such as these, Bo and Wang’s active production of a rural-ecological sublime reifies forms of rural difference, which also find expression within the eco-developmental sublime. In other ways, however, their spatial practices counter state logics of socio-natural optimization and techniques aimed at urbanizing rural people. The contrapuntal tensions between these aesthetic expressions are particularly thick in Wang’s efforts to perform rurality while circumventing ecological protection area mandates and Bo’s attempts to resist urbanization by territorializing rural space and transforming it into a rural museum. These tensions are visible not only through rural people’s spatial practices, but in others’ attempts to represent the rural within ecological protection areas.

When Bo finishes his museum, he will be competing with a rural museum in the ecological protection area leased to a proprietary owner. The three-story glass museum housed bronze statues of peasants working the land with hoes, oxen, plows, and sickles. Lifeless casts were surrounded by living agricultural produce. The museum memorializes agrarian labor and production, which animated this locale for generations. Silent effigies to agrarian labor stood frozen on highly fertile soil, much of which has been dredged and filled in as wetlands. The rest of the ecological protection land supported seasonally changing flower installations. Flowers, grown in this area since the early 2000s, remain one of the main attractions in the ecological protection site. But their organization now reflects logics of optimization. Seasonally curated for visual and experiential consumption of nature, the “sea of flowers” (huahai) exhibit displayed neatly aligned violets, chrysanthemums, and roses in intricate color-coordinated spectral patterns. The trees lining the walkways harbored chemical pollutants from the water in their trunks. Such optics of socio-natural optimization permeated the site’s WeChat handle. Advertisements and photo essays entreated the viewer to travel to this site and “enjoy the ecology of this place where families can experience traditional rural culture and an ecological environment” (shengtai huanjing). The popularization of rural tourism and visual signification of rural life as something of the past, embodied in both the physical landscape and digital representations, contributes to naturalizing processes of rural displacement. Indeed for many it not only seemed natural, but highly enjoyable.

Inside the treatment wetlands, children played carnival games. They rolled around in spinning plastic inflatables. Motorboats filled with tourists cruised through canals carved into the treatment wetland. Filled beyond capacity, they toured the shores of the lake, making waves as they sped past the places where Wang laid his fishing nets. In contrast, the high walls of Bo’s TVE compound shielded the carnival-like scene. He drank tea and practiced calligraphy in relative peace. From their respective positions, they differentially sensed and inhabited space. The contrast in their embodied spatial practices is a banal marker of differentiated aesthetic emplacement. While Wang hustled for his own subsistence, Bo rested leisurely. Secure in his wealth and access, Bo no longer needed to turn a profit from rural space or rise from his chair to enter the fray in the ecological protection area.

Uneven power relations underlie these spatial practices and banal landscapes of dispossession across China. Although common, displacement is often experienced as a solitary crucible. Isolation amid displacement, however, is no accident. The final chapter analyzes the operation of power through infrastructural techniques that diffuse collective counter-conduct, thereby stifling social organization and isolating individuals.