Ralph A. Litzinger

Questions of gender: Ethnic minority representation in post-Mao China

Abstract The burgeoning scholarship on ethnic minorities in the Peoples Republic of China has shown how minorities are often represented as feminized subjects in popular culture, film, museums, and tourist encounters. This scholarship has advanced a new critical understanding of the relationship between post-Mao nationalism and the display of minorities as objects of difference. This article builds on this scholarship by exploring how minority scholars have produced their own accounts of their peoples cultures, histories, genders, and ethnicities throughout the post-Mao period. Specifically, it examines an essay written by the Yao scholar Liu Yulian in the early 1990s on the indigenous reproductive practices of the Chashan Yao subgroup, who live in the Jinxiu Yao Autonomous County in Guangxi. Her essay utilizes the theories of Marx and Engels on social reproduction to redress the ways in which the Chashan Yao had been classified, struggled against, and marginalized in Jinxiu County and it aims to promote a new interpretation of the Chashan contribution to Chinas socialist modernization agenda. Yet her work also raises a series of questions about how minority scholars were speaking for local communities and local realities. Rather than see Lius writings as yet another example of Chinas practices of internal or “Oriental Orientalism,” this essay situates Lius research in the context of local debates among minority scholars and other elite over who possessed the right to speak for and represent socialist modernity. And it suggests that new ethnographic and theoretical attention should be placed on how different actors perceive and understand the stakes of different styles and forms of ethnic and gender representation.

Introduction: “Specters of Marx, Shades of Mao, and the Ghosts of Global Capital”

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels famously use a spectral metaphor to describe the challenge that Eu rope’s midnineteenthcentury subterranean communist forces posed for the cap i tal ist establishment. Faced with an economic order that was increasingly predicated on the extraction of surplus value from the labor of the proletariat, Marx and Engels called upon their communist brethren to “meet this nursery tale of the specter of communism with a manifesto of the party itself ” (Marx and Engels 1998). Here, the “specter of communism” carries a retrospective as well as an anticipatory valence, connoting the past and current suppression of communism and the emancipatory promise that communism holds for the future. Postsocialist China, meanwhile, may be seen as a mirror image of this vision of midnineteenthcentury Eu ro pean communism. While The Communist Manifesto describes how communism arose in response to the exploitative tendencies of industrial capitalism, in con temporary China it is instead capitalism that is being offered as an antidote to the socioeconomic weaknesses resulting from a quarter century of communist rule. After a Maoist politi cal economic system predicated on egalitarianism yielded widespread poverty punctuated by periods of extreme famine, Mao Zedong’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, instead took aggressive mea sures to encourage rapid economic growth and privatization. Capitalism, in Deng’s view, offered con temporary I N T R O D U C T I O N

Ghost Protocol: Development and Displacement in Global China

Even as China is central to the contemporary global economy, its socialist past continues to shape its capitalist present. This volumes contributors see contemporary China as haunted by the promises of capitalism, the institutional legacy of the Maoist regime, and the spirit of Marxist resistance. Chinas development does not result from historical imperatives or deliberate economic strategies, but from the effects of discrete practices the contributors call protocols, which stem from an overlapping mix of socialist and capitalist institutional strategies, political procedures, legal regulations, religious rituals, and everyday practices. Analyzing the process of urbanization and the ways marginalized communities and migrant workers are positioned in relation to the transforming social landscape, the contributors show how these protocols constitute the Chinese national imaginary while opening spaces for new emancipatory possibilities. Offering a nuanced theory of contemporary Chinas hybrid political economy, Ghost Protocol situates Chinas development at the juncture between the world as experienced and the world as imagined. Contributors. Yomi Braester, Alexander Des Forges, Kabzung, Rachel Leng, Ralph A. Litzinger, Lisa Rofel, Carlos Rojas, Bryan Tilt, Robin Visser, Biao Xiang, Emily T. Yeh