Quality, Development Discourse, and Minority Subjectivity in Contemporary Xinjiang

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1Eastern Washington University, Cheney, WA, USA

Corresponding Author:Michael L. Zukosky, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Eastern Washington University, Cheney, WA 99004, USA Email: [email protected]

Quality, Development Discourse, and Minority Subjectivity in Contemporary Xinjiang

Michael L. Zukosky1

Abstract

The government discourse that describes poverty in a minority nationality county in northern Xinjiang follows specific patterns. The term “quality” (suzhi) is used to attribute the roots of poverty to residents themselves as well as to legitimate official poverty-alleviation and market-development strategies. This official use of suzhi discourse attempts to constitute a particular kind of subjec-tivity within China’s market economy but obscures local forms of exclusion and adaptation to market reform. Indeed, suzhi discourse often refers to adaptations that, rather than holding back local residents from development, are survival strategies. Thus, local agency can be seen in counter-discourses that attribute poverty not simply to their suzhi but to their lack of wage-paying employment.

Keywords

Xinjiang; subjectivity; ethnic minority; economic development; neoliberalism

In minority areas of Xinjiang, Chinese Communist Party officials use a spe-cific, patterned variety of discourse to explain the origins of poverty.1 Central to this discourse is the term “quality” (suzhi), which officials wield both to

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2 Modern China XX(X)

attribute causality to residents and to legitimate strategies of poverty allevia-tion and market development. This distinctive use of the term contrasts with and further complicates the existing divergent scholarly interpretations of the term in Han Chinese areas (Hsu, 2007; Yan, 2003).

Anthropologist Andrew Kipnis (2006) has argued that the popular and official notions of quality today emerged within the context of China’s deep-ening economic reform and engagement with what scholars have called neo-liberalism or “free market capitalism” (Harvey, 2006; Ong, 2006).2 Moving beyond the insights of Kipnis’s discussion of the emergent and changing meanings of the term suzhi, the use of the term to describe poverty among minority residents in Xinjiang shows us contemporary attempts to constitute a particular kind of political and economic subjectivity within China’s mar-ket economy. By subjectivity (see Foucault, 1983), I am referring to the notion that discursive language like suzhi is potentially involved in produc-ing new kinds of contemporary Chinese subjects, the agents who are the conditions of possibility for China’s new market economy.

This use of the discourse of quality also obscures local adaptation to reform—those changes that residents have instituted to better maintain con-trol over their lives—and thus local minority residents’ own distinctive agency itself. When officials and residents use the discourse of quality, they obscure the disjunction between minority nationalities’ quite recently devel-oped set of semi-subsistence skills that they utilize at the margins of China’s market economy and the specific kinds of subject roles they have been allo-cated by the state and capital. Although with different consequences from those envisioned by the Chinese state, the discourse of suzhi has acted upon minority subjectivities and this action can be heard within residents own pov-erty discourses as well as their discussions of needing “occupations” (in Kazakh, kasep), or non-animal-husbandry wage labor. Their need for occu-pations, an interesting counter-discourse to official reductions of poverty to suzhi, reflects the complexities of the new minority subjectivities that have emerged, as residents creatively transform the officially sanctioned discourse in unexpected ways.

Ethnographic Research in Northern Xinjiang’s Altai PrefectureThis research is based on several years of informal travel to the Xinjiang region as well as my formal dissertation research.3 The dissertation research was conducted between the years of 2003 and 2005 and included a range of qualitative research methods such as participant observation, formal and



Zukosky 3

informal interviews, and archival research. In a politically sensitive autono-mous region where many counties remain closed to foreign travelers and much foreign scholarship is still carried out without the knowledge or spon-sorship of the Chinese government (for a recent example, see Kaltman, 2007), my access to both state officials and rural communities in Xinjiang determined the dialogical character, in the sense of the conversation-like interaction between residents and government, of my argument.

My work also demonstrates the “new ethnography” in China (Harrell, Lunzy, and Ayi, 2007; Gransow, Nyiri, and Fong, 2005) and the ability of researchers to conduct field research, albeit with limitations, within local rural areas inhabited by minority nationalities as well as with the Chinese state itself.4 I was affiliated with the Xinjiang Academy of Animal Husbandry Sciences, an agricultural institute that formulates animal husbandry develop-ment policy for local governments. The academy assisted me in obtaining research permission for fieldwork from officials in northern Xinjiang’s Altai prefecture. Both scholars from the academy and officials from Altai saw me as a potential symbol of the region’s opening up.5 This allowed me visible public access to both local communities and the state, and I found myself dialoging with local communities about state development policy and with state officials about the views of local residents.

Ethnographic research involves a variety of methods including participant observation through which the researcher conducts direct, experiential par-ticipation and observation of a group of people and tries to better understand the “native” point of view, the meaning of things and actions for research subjects themselves. I was originally interested in learning about the meaning of development for minority residents, but through the process of research itself, I found many opportunities to learn about the meanings attributed to things by party members, technicians, and officials—people with a direct relationship to the state. While I have lived with party members, I was unable to live with any state official, and thus cannot claim to have conducted par-ticipant observation with government directly. But I did have extensive informal and formal interviews with a range of cadre and state employees. I derived many insights from discussions with these people during interviews and informal settings like banquets; ultimately, statements from these officials either articulated with or contradicted locally specific discourses of poverty and development.

The focal point of my research are the residents of a community that I call River-Fork Village, a “natural village” in the government’s sense of a “naturally” coexisting spatial cluster of households.6 The village was com-posed of primarily ethnic Kazakhs, but other individuals and households in




the village identified themselves as Mongol, Tatar, and Uighur. The county government identified River-Fork Village as an animal husbandry village because most of the village income was derived from livestock; residents raised mixed herds of meat sheep, cashmere goats, dairy cows, and beef cattle, as well as horses and camels. All these livestock are pasture raised in mobile herding strategies; residents’ rich, often forested summer pastures are north of the village up in the highlands of the Altai Mountains, and their spring and autumn pastures, lying within Altai’s foothills, are just to the east along the Chinese–Mongolian border. Residents had extensive lowland winter pastures in the Dzungar Basin, an area of sparsely vegetated steppe, semi-desert, and desert (the western Dzungarian Gobi) that ends in the grasslands and foothills of the Tian Shan Mountains and the regional capi-tal of Urumqi to the south.

In addition to River-Fork itself, I also include a larger and more abstract administrative unit—the administrative village of River-Fork—that con-tained four other natural villages and an adjacent administrative village that I call Poplar-Tree. These two villages were situated along the right and left banks of a river running through a valley that is used as the main thorough-fare by pastoralists moving between higher and lower altitude seasonal pas-tures. Even when located within River-Fork Village itself, I found opportunities to talk with residents from both administrative villages, and when visiting summer pastures used by River-Fork residents, I would again see these combinations of people from both villages. I estimate that I spoke with close to 300 households during fifteen months of research.

Originally, I talked with local residents about local change and develop-ment, and the question of poverty emerged in these discussions. In terms of standards of living, most village residents were able to meet their basic sub-sistence needs in food, clothing, and housing, and had access to water, land, and livestock. An average home in the village was built from white-washed mud brick and was made by residents themselves using widely available clay soils. Each home had packed earth floors and smaller, adjacent agricultural (wheat and potatoes) and hay fields, fenced off with mud and stone from the local river. The residents used transportable felt houses or yurts for living on seasonal pastures (Figure 1), although some pastures had older Russian-style log houses or World Bank–funded concrete one-room houses.7 These houses had no running water, but River-Fork and all the villages south of it have had electricity since 1997, as part of increased funding to the county government for infrastructure construction under the national poverty-alleviation program. Finally, the residents had incurred relatively little finan-cial debt.



Zukosky 5

Despite adequate subsistence resources, all residents talked about them-selves and their village as poor (K. kidei) and low quality (K. zawat timon, literally “low productivity”), the latter term used with some equivalence for the Chinese terms “low quality” (suzhi di) or “low cultural/educational qual-ity” (wenhua suzhi di), although they also used the Kazakh expression mad-enyet zhok or no culture/education (not to be confused with no customs or traditions [sal daster]). A common topic of discussion was money and the lack thereof for meeting their consumer desires in contemporary life. Even the wealthiest household, understood locally in terms of the quantity of pri-vately owned livestock, was said to be only temporarily “sitting rich” (K. bai ottar, using the verb tense meant to indicate the short duration of the action). Residents often talked about being economically vulnerable and lacking security in the event of unexpected accidents, illness, and disaster.

I conducted a partial census of 60 households (commonly five to seven individuals) out of the approximately 250 households that made up the two administrative villages. From the perspective of cash income, the village’s per capita income, defined as the average income per individual, was US$250,

Figure 1. A household sets up its yurt on its spring–autumn pasture with a chee, or grass wall, made from the yarn-wrapped reeds (foreground)




which is below the national average of US$342 for 2003–2005, as presented to the author by local government. The average cash income is misleading, however, because it does not capture the skewed income distribution within the village. In terms of income distribution, three quarters of village resi-dents—the majority of people—had per capita incomes between US$130 and US$215, far below the national average. Another fifth of village resi-dents had incomes above US$320, and individuals from two exceptional households had incomes over US$1,080. Thus, the incomes of these few households raised per capita income significantly, and therefore misrepre-sent local income standards. Of course, these numbers do not reflect a variety of forms of property and/or savings that might better capture local prosperity.

In general, residents, as well as the government, considered the area to be very poor. Despite per capita income being above the Chinese national pov-erty line of the period (approximately 700 yuan), the village was a target for government programs of poverty alleviation. The county as a whole was part of the national poverty-alleviation program because inclusion was based on relatively low county incomes as well as factors such as the ethnic composi-tion of the county, its proximity to the national border, and its proneness to natural disaster. Four households received direct government assistance (zui di shenghuo baozhang); these had disabled and/or ill household members.8

While a problematic indicator of absolute poverty, cash income is an excellent indicator of relative poverty. Indeed, the slow growth of income levels for the majority of residents has had a profound effect on emerging subjectivities that draw on the language of suzhi. To understand these subjec-tivities, one needs to understand how life in River-Fork is interconnected with large Chinese cities. Many residents had been to the regional capital at least once in their lives, primarily for medical conditions that required better care than could be received in the county. Cities like Urumqi, as they are represented in electronic media like television, provide a standard by which residents and government officials alike assess life in River-Fork. In the tele-vised life of large Chinese cities, there have been major changes in residents’ housing, material goods, travel and leisure, health care, and schooling. While standards have risen in River-Fork, residents do not perceive themselves as having shared in this broader development. And local governments, respon-sible to higher levels of state oversight and increasingly dependent on local tax resources, feel an urgent need to raise local incomes to meet local and national expectations. The tension of my argument has its origins in these often conflicting expectations.



Zukosky 7

A Theoretical Question about Discourses of Quality

Local subjectivity is affected by the way officials talk about the causes of poverty. Anthropologist Arturo Escobar (1995: 21–55) describes how the discourse of poverty and development in many developing countries has turned self-sufficient and needs-focused but low-income residents into objects of knowledge, planning, and transformation by national governmen-tal and international capitalist elites. By discourse, Escobar means how knowledge is organized through official speech, and how its recurrent, pat-terned, and normative language constitutes a particular kind of subjectivity and thus affects individual self-understandings. Escobar utilizes Foucault’s ideas of discursive power (1991) whereby governments, acting through indi-viduals and institutions, apply principles of market economics to their popu-lations and attempt to maximize state capacity by defining them for national and global projects. The important thing, for Foucault and Escobar, is that discourse is used as an exercise of power, the acting on the actions of others, the governing of populations.

Today, the discourse of Chinese government officials draws upon notions of socialist stage theory in defining and acting upon the population. Since the post-Mao market reform and adoption of socialist initial stage theory (shehuizhuyi chuqi jieduan lilun), the stage of capitalism, or the distinctive cultural and organizational qualities associated with economic growth, indi-vidual accumulation, and investment, is now seen as a natural law (ziran falü) that all societies must follow in a unilinear evolutionary path to a future com-munist and/or utopian society of wealth and prosperity (Chen, 2007; Xu, 2002). China, to overcome poverty, must first pass through the stage of capi-talism with its market competition and acquire its modern science and industrial technology with their high levels of productivity before making the tran-sition to pure socialism or communism. The implication here is that economic development requires individual competition to unleash society’s productive forces, a very liberal economic notion. This idea has produced theories about poverty and legitimated policies that enable the development of capitalist forms of political economy within the governance of the Chinese Communist Party and the “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics.”

The ways officials draw on the notion of quality in explaining poverty in River-Fork Village reflect the principles of socialist initial stage theory and China’s engagement with neoliberal forms of capitalist political economy and governance (Yan, 2003). Since China’s accession to the World Trade Organization dismantled many forms of market protectionism, the political




economy of China increasingly shares characteristics with what scholars have called “neoliberalism,” the use of governmental power to impose mar-ket imperatives and economic liberalization (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2001; Ferguson, 2006; Hediz, 2006; Saad-Filho and Johnston, 2005). In particular, as David Harvey (2006) argues, neoliberalism is characterized by the increas-ing scope of global capitalist accumulation, as capital has moved throughout the world (including China) in search of cheap resources, labor, and markets. The term “quality” is implicated in the neoliberal notion of using governmen-tal power to impose market liberalization, often through targeting the indi-vidual thought and action of the Chinese population. Indeed, local government officials, in pursuing the central government’s policy of economic liberaliza-tion, see their role as changing and improving the quality or suzhi of the local population.

Anthropologist Andrew Kipnis (2006), in a keywords-style social etymol-ogy first developed by the cultural materialist Raymond Williams (1985), describes the changing discursive dimensions of suzhi and argues that there has been a shift away from early reform thinking about an overarching and tangible inherent quality (zhiliang) of the Chinese people to thinking about the more plural and abstract acquired qualities (suzhi) that they embody and that change through time. In each understanding, these notions of quality were tied causally to economic development or the lack thereof. Kipnis argues that this conceptual shift to a new meaning of quality as something “acquirable” occurred as new development policies targeted the Chinese population and aimed to transform it within the context of market reform; within such a con-text, suzhi discourse emerged as a form of action upon the thought and behav-ior of the Chinese population.

The way that suzhi, as part of the broader discourse about Chinese devel-opment, plays out in minority nationality areas contrasts with Kipnis’s description. Today, the concept of minzu, or nationality, is used in conjunc-tion with quality to explain the increasing prevalence and concentration of poverty in minority nationality areas (Bhalla and Qiu, 2006; Ministry of Ethnic Affairs, personal communication). The term minzu differs from the social and historical definitions of nationality in English because of the close linguistic connection in Chinese between minzu and older semantic notions of zu, or a shared lineage group with its own unique social, economic, and cultural expressions (Dikötter, 1992: 97–125; 1994: 406–7; Feuchtwang, 1993: 14–15; Gillette, 2000: 5–11; Jenner, 2001). Thus, the term is incom-mensurable with the English term “nationality” in that it carries the notion of physical, biological descent, and inheritance at birth, clearly not only related but also semantically distinct from the English concept of race (i.e., without



Zukosky 9

its dependence on phenotypical variation). When quality is applied to nation-ality (as in minzu suzhi) to explain poverty in an ethnic minority community, it refers to an inherent physical quality of the population as well as an abstract acquired quality. A shift in meaning of suzhi to abstract acquired quality that changes through time has not occurred in China’s ethnic minority areas.

The association of quality with nationality naturalizes social inequalities between minority and majority Han nationality areas; that is, poverty has come to be understood as related not just to the changing historical conditions of market reform but to the “tangible physical quality” of minority nationali-ties. This view has also come to dominate official discussion about develop-ment in minority areas since the slowing down of economic growth during the 1990s and the subsequent Open the West policy (Xibu da kaifa). Discussions about suzhi in minority areas like Xinjiang provide explanations of this slowing down of economic growth and legitimate more aggressive policies to transform the thought and behavior of the local minority popula-tion as well as speed up economic liberalization.

Aihwa Ong (2006) argues that the Chinese government, through dis-courses like suzhi, induces citizens to self-manage their behavior according to capitalist principles of discipline, efficiency, and competitiveness. Does the discourse about the low quality of minority nationalities represent a similar form of governance of population, the application of the principles of market economics to the minority population, and the government’s attempt to maxi-mize their productive capacity for national development? In the next section, I will use examples to demonstrate how such discourse is indeed used as a disciplinary strategy to affect the self-discipline of minority citizens and their inclusion as a specific kind of neoliberal political-economic subject in China’s market economy.

Poverty Discourse in River-Fork VillageOfficial discourse made income levels, standards of living, and relative pov-erty in River-Fork Village natural and stigmatized phenomena, part of the tangible physical quality of minority residents. Officials accomplished this, first, by representing local residents as more linked to nature and thus less developed than other groups (see Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991). Secondly, they extended this naturalized discourse to minority subsistence practices in terms of the concept of “natural economy” (ziran jingji).

I often heard officials depict local poverty as a consequence of the arid, desert landscape of northern Xinjiang. Many officials, in describing local poverty, referred to the area’s extreme and harsh environment, its winter




snow disasters, and the hot and dry summers. Often, this was said to make its mark on the body of residents in the skin condition “red egg-shaped face” (hongliandan). Officials added that this environment was an important cause of or reason for the “softness” (ruan) of the minority nationality Kazakh pop-ulation. The term “softness” referred to the perceived vulnerability to disease and illness of the local population and was said to be related to a complex mix of genetics, diet, and natural environment. Officials observed that residents rarely ate vegetables, drank large quantities of alcohol, and were prone to several health conditions like rheumatism and high blood pressure. Thus, they claimed that the natural environment led to a low bodily quality (shenti suzhi di). As one official said, this environment produced a weak population that was not able to “keep up in development with the more advanced nation-alities like the Han Chinese.”

Furthermore, officials claimed that poverty was a product of residents’ struggle with this harsh environment. Because of the minority pastoralists’ dependence on local natural resources, officials argued, they existed in a “natural economy” that limited the development of their cultural practices. Officials thus described them as in a state of nature, low in thought and rea-soning skills (sixiang suzhi di) relative to broader Chinese society, which was perceived to be in a process of transcending nature and natural limitations (one of the hallmarks of capitalist and socialist modernity and development). This discourse has clear continuity with older social evolutionary thought in China and serves to rationalize new market inequalities.

Officials argued that local cultural practices impeded the development of the economy and residents’ incomes and that it was traditional culture, as an expression of the nationality group, that needed to be transformed to end poverty. Residents were said to be religious, conservative, and thus close-minded; they were unwilling to adapt to the new market economy. Moreover, officials said that minority residents had no sense of entrepreneurship or innovation, and thus do not recognize opportunities, take full advantage of their existing resources, or take market risks. Such statements conveyed the impression that residents thought nothing of individual accumulation, contin-ued to live in extended kin groups (biological descent groups), and concerned themselves only with subsistence. One can see how the discourse of quality is connected to an overarching essentialized explanation for poverty in communities like River-Fork Village and how it is closely tied to attempts to induce citizens to self-manage their behavior according to market principles.

The local government attributed the low income of residents to traditional animal husbandry, which depends on transhumant, mobile herding, seasonal



Zukosky 11

pastures, and the concomitant forms of social organization. Officials argued that in this natural or traditional economy, minorities clung to traditions that had a deleterious effect on the production, distribution, and consumption of commodities, as residents were said to produce only what they themselves needed and only insignificant amounts of surplus for trade (see Li, 1998, for a related discussion of “ethnic minority economy”). They produce animal husbandry products in ways, officials argued, that are inefficient, low in both quantity, and importantly, quality. This argument establishes a direct connec-tion between the use of a suzhi discourse to describe residents and the use of quality (zhiliang) in the local production of market commodities.

Emergent “Quality” in River-Fork VillageThe pragmatics of suzhi in contemporary Xinjiang represent a break with historical usages of the term and develop in relation to China’s deepening economic reform and engagement with global capitalism. State historical records and ethnographic life histories show that what officials now reify as a natural and underdeveloped nationality economy is itself a recent discur-sive phenomenon that emerged with the reforms of the post-Mao period rather than an archaic, inherent quality of the population.

Marxist social scientists in China writing at the time of Liberation repre-sented prerevolutionary Kazakh and Mongolian inhabitants of northwestern China as pastoral nomads, but at the same time, they did not argue that every-one engaged directly in animal husbandry (Zhonggong Xinjiang Weiwuer, 1988). Indeed, most observed that only poor households directly engaged in the herding of livestock (Nihawanti, [1952] 1988). These writers described numerous specialized occupations, such as tribal political and legal leaders, farmers and traders (some of whom were praised in Marxist literature for their contribution to the development of the region), healers, shamans, and religious practitioners, musicians and bards, and craftspeople like jewelry makers and woodworkers. Many of these diversified aspects of the local economy were eliminated during the Maoist period, said local residents, when policies focused on animal husbandry and agriculture and character-ized other trades and crafts as capitalistic or merely “aesthetic” (also see Ji, Wang, and Ma, [1972] 1988).

Even in the Maoist period, when everyone began to labor for the planned economy, many residents said that they were not engaged directly in animal husbandry. Kazakh extended kin groups were organized into collectives and often non-kin-based animal husbandry production brigades. Within these




brigades, households were organized into smaller, specialized work teams for different breeds of livestock, as well as non-herding and non-kin-based teams for agriculture, transport, construction, pasture improvement, and so on. Residents, remembering this period, confirmed these specialized work teams and held these non-herding jobs in high regard. Indeed, such jobs were among the highlights of local residents’ memory of the collective period. One man in Poplar-Tree Village recalled his work for one of these specialized work teams: “I worked in transport bringing supplies to people herding on the winter pastures. I liked that work.”

Therefore, while residents were made subject to Maoist planning, they were made subjects in diverse ways, in a local division of labor, and were never simply herders in a natural economy. If one looks at the ethnic surveys, government documents, and newspapers from the Maoist period concerning the northern Xinjiang region, one would be hard put to find any causal expla-nation that used low nationality quality to explain poverty.

Older, retired cadres who had traveled in the Altai prefecture of northern Xinjiang in the early revolutionary period described a diverse state-run planned economy, lively cross-border trade with the Soviet Union, and the presence of barges on the Irtysh River transporting timber, precious stones, and metals to the Soviet Union in exchange for matches, sugar, veterinary medicine, and so on (also see Benson and Svanberg, 1998; Wiemer, 2004). Moreover, as I learned from informal discussions with residents across Altai prefecture, the Soviet Union collaborated in a number of regional ventures in northern Xinjiang, such as petroleum exploration in Karamaiyi, beryl mining in Fuyun, and spinning mills in Tacheng. Forestry and mining were also widespread throughout the region. With the Sino-Soviet split in 1962 (see Moseley, 1966), many of these industries continued with Chinese state sup-port. The Maoist years were a period that produced a large number of urban, working-class minority citizens, and towns through northern Xinjiang today have older minority households and communities that originated from that period. Residents of River-Fork were highly conscious of this.

With reform (after 1984 in Altai), the state changed its methods of govern-ing the economy, and northern Xinjiang actually saw the collapse of several state-owned industries and the disappearance of work opportunities. The planned economy, with its organization of people into work brigades, was gradually disassembled and many industries lost state support. For example, as I learned from the manager of a wool spinning factory in Tacheng (on the Chinese–Kazakhstani border), many of the spinning mills in northern Xinjiang closed. Officials themselves argued that in Altai both forestry production and mining of precious stones had already begun to decrease by the time reform



Zukosky 13

began. At the same time, the export-processing Special Economic Zones in China as a whole emerged with their favorable production conditions, and eastern areas attracted vast amounts of domestic and foreign capital and underwent rapid industrialization, as well as the rapid absorption of a migrat-ing Han Chinese rural-to-urban labor force. This was the political–economic context in which both income disparity, relative poverty, and discourses about the quality of the local minority population emerged.

As would surface in the discussions about China’s eastern and western geographical disparity in the 1990s (see Wei, 2000), the consequence of focusing industrial development in the east was to marginalize western areas like Xinjiang. That, along with the decollectivization of land and livestock, created in Altai a local economy founded on both household and kin-based subsistence practices. Residents produced goods—such as construction materials, foodstuffs, and medicines—for their own consumption and which replaced the goods that had been (sometimes) provided directly by the state, particularly grain and meat. They also produced meat and cashmere for exchange on the market for cash. Cash was used for expenses like taxes, school tuition, agricultural inputs, fuel sources like coal, and other items that they could not produce themselves. The region saw the emergence of a semi-subsistence economy.

The practices that are stigmatized as low quality, as inherent aspects of their nationality, can be understood as adaptations to the current political economy and the disadvantageous effects it has had for local communities. In the next section, I will describe how these forms of local agency in economic reform have come to be described as “low quality” and how specific govern-mental strategies have come to target them for transformation.

Agency, Subsistence Strategies, and Human CapitalThe discourse of quality stigmatized the skills and knowledge that minority communities possess and use for subsistence. By ascribing inequality to nature and natural limitations, the official discourse about poverty conflates a lack of what the economist Gary Becker (1993) calls human capital—skills and assets advantageous in China’s emerging capitalist society (such as math and language skills, as well as specialized business skills)—with nature, natural evolution, and the evolutionary qualities of nationality groups. There is a reason for this: such discourse attempts to instill new kinds of values and enable citizens to self-discipline and align themselves with the new market economy, as Ong (2006) argues.




My own observations and interviews show that residents clearly have many skills and assets that make reference to their experience of the reform period, but that these differ from the skills and assets valued by the market. In his criti-cal theories of human capital, Pierre Bourdieu (1986) argues that certain sociocultural practices are not easily converted to financial capital and mone-tary value in capitalist economies, while others—what he called linguistic, social, and cultural capital—are more readily converted. Local subsistence practices may feed, clothe, and house residents, but they are not easily con-verted into cash income and economic growth; indeed, they are oriented toward residents’ needs in a context of uneven development. During one con-versation, several residents told me that the yurt represented to them power-lessness and poverty. The ability to work wood and wool into a yurt, as an example, are not skills and assets by which resources are distributed and labor divided in capitalist market societies. Therefore, one might argue that the low incomes of residents of River-Fork Village are not related to nature and natu-ral limitations, but to the disjunction between the skills and assets they use to subsist at the margins of China’s market economy on the one hand and the kinds of labor—that is, their role as raw materials producers in the commodity economy—that they have been allocated by the state and capital on the other.

The official discourse of quality thus obscures local values and resources. Residents adapted to market reform and uneven development in many differ-ent ways; they did not simply herd livestock and subsist. They had a variety of skills and assets, techniques and technologies, that enabled them to live meaningful lives, but that eluded economic-growth reasoning. For example, livestock were raised locally to meet household needs as well as for the pro-duction of commodities to be exchanged on the market. The fleece from the lambs was used for making felt (an activity for groups of women in summer) for embroidered felt mats (K. sirmaq) or mats made from whole sheep fleeces (K. qorpa) and for the walls and roofs of their yurts (K. tordeq, tundiq). While not commodities, these were used to make residents’ homes more comfortable and attractive and were crucial gifts of reciprocity that strengthened ties among families who cooperated on many daily subsistence activities.

Most families had goats that produced cashmere for the market. In addi-tion to a layer of fine cashmere that was sold on the market, they used the coarser outer hair to make rope (K. arqan), which was used for tying up live-stock for milking. The skin, hair, and wool of the camel were also used to make horse-riding staples such as whips, bridles, and saddle leather (all men’s activities), and the hair and wool were used to make thread, socks, long woolen underwear, and thick sweaters (all women’s activities). Many resi-dents resisted attempts to replace local sheep with improved varieties that



Zukosky 15

produce greater quantities of meat or wool because it would reduce these subsistence items. Indeed, many of these items (e.g., horse tack) were indus-trially produced and available in the county administrative seat, but residents preferred to make their own, reducing their costs. Importantly, they often commented on the low “quality” (K. sapaci) of the industrial goods produced by people they believed to be Han Chinese, an interesting counter-discourse to their own and their commodities’ denigration as low quality.

Goat’s milk played an important part in the local diet, particularly in the summer, and was processed into important but non-commodified foodstuffs like cream, butter, yogurt, and different kinds of cheese. Several sheep would be slaughtered every year, and the tail fat (K. kuyrik may) would be placed on the table alongside other kinds of products such as butter, all of which might be eaten with tea through the winter and spring. While hunting was prohib-ited and had vanished from local subsistence strategies, a number of food-stuffs were collected. In summer, foods like sorrel and wild onion contributed to the diet; meals of bread, butter, and wild onion with tea were also common then. Besides the winter and spring, when brick tea was purchased, the rest of the year residents drank a tea made from balasa (K.), a local herb. Fruits like strawberry, currant, gooseberry, and hawthorn were collected and eaten in summer; berry jams, consumed with bread or in tea, were not uncommon. None of these produced economic value for residents, but were enjoyed, enriched their diets, and reduced their expenses.

While households did buy medicine in pharmacies in town, many house-holds, in addition to using different kinds of meat (different cuts of different types of livestock were said to be good for different ailments), used locally collected and freely available plants to treat chronic diseases. Hyssop was used to treat infant pneumonia and skin disorders, and was mixed with mug-wort for stronger skin disorders in adults; a cut stem of scouring rush and its fluid were used like an eyedropper for irritations. Mint and dandelion, which could be seen hanging in the inside of yurts, were used to treat colds and gastrointestinal problem, red currant and dog rose for high blood pressure, and snow lotus for women’s reproductive health. Indeed, this access to locally available resources was what allowed residents to sell their meat and cashmere at the current low market prices, as they told me. In a way, access to and use of these resources allowed residents to subsist in, rather than in spite of, the market economy.

Official discourse about the inherent and archaic quality of residents and their supposed inability to develop cultural practices of individual accumulation (a notion that local stratification clearly challenged) misrepresented the local importance of extended kin groups in the collection or production of




many subsistence activities and goods. A shift to semi-subsistence and local resources was clearly based on a new set of social relations and moralities—often kin-based (but also neighbors and friends) cooperative groups and a morality of sharing and solidarity that replaced collective period arrangements (see Figure 2). These resources enabled the villagers to make ends meet by lessening the risks associated with the new market society (see also Banks, 1997). Yet, the discourse of quality stigmatized such practices in favor of capitalist principles such as private property and individual entrepreneurship.

Neoliberal Discourse in a Global Division of LaborIn this new form of life and living, Kazakh residents are like the “liminal subjects” that Pun Ngai (2005) describes; they subsist in a society shifting from an agricultural and socialist mode of production to an individualistic, industrial, and capitalist one. Officials conceptualized the way to alleviate poverty and improve the quality of the population as increasing productivity

Figure 2. An extended family (two brothers, their wives, and children) cuts goat hair and combs out the cashmere, and the children collect it and bag it up



Zukosky 17

through science and technology (what is defined as high quality), or more specifically in this context, the acquisition of new knowledge and skills related to industrial animal husbandry and qualities like individualism and competitiveness.

Development, as I heard in reference to some households regarded as “high quality” (suzhi gao), was defined as intensive, household-based indus-trial animal husbandry. This was reflected in the construction of permanent villages of brick homes and a sedentary animal husbandry based on irrigated plots, the cropping of improved varieties of feed such as alfalfa, and the enclosure raising of improved varieties of livestock. Officials said this would allow minority residents to break their link to nature and overcome the boundaries associated with natural livestock and pasture limitations through artificial selection and water engineering. Children’s schoolbooks had pic-tures of this ideal agrarian vision with neatly built modern settlements, a landscape thickly green with various kinds of crops and livestock, and trac-tors passing below raised super highways.

County poverty-alleviation and economic-development policy focused on animal improvement schemes, veterinary science, and the development of a feed industry. Officials linked the improvement of livestock and feed resources through scientific and technological initiatives—the quantity and quality of residents’ animal husbandry products—to the improvement of the quality of the local population. Again, here is a link between the improve-ment of the quality of a commodity and the improvement of the quality of the population. The idea was that such poverty-alleviation and economic-development programs will increase the discipline, efficiency, and competi-tiveness of residents in producing animal husbandry commodities for the market. Concrete village policies and programs that were instituted to change local practices included settlement programs, village committee meetings about using science in production, the provision of a variety of state veteri-nary services, and livestock breed improvement programs.

The county government, within the context of the global economy, had assigned residents the role of food and raw materials producers. In my discus-sions with officials at the Xinjiang Academy of Animal Husbandry Sciences, I learned how the local county government was under pressure from their bureaucratic superiors to increase foodstuff production for a growing urban population of wage laborers. Due to rises in income, residents in urban cen-ters like Altai City, Turfan, and Urumqi had greatly increased their consump-tion of meat products. To keep meat supplies plentiful and the market price low, regional economic planners promoted increasing animal husbandry pro-duction. Furthermore, they hoped to increase the quantity and quality of local




commodities and eventually develop an export economy. They had plans for a transnational export economy using refrigerated railcars that would ship meat produced by Muslims for Muslim markets across Central Asia to Europe and Turkey. Central Asia’s largest slaughterhouse, I was told, is planned for the regional capital of Urumqi and is to be owned by private capital.

The other significant commodity produced locally—cashmere—is extremely valuable as China is one of the main producers worldwide (along with Iran, Mongolia, and a few others). Mirroring the low quality of the local population, local breeds of wool sheep and cashmere goats were said to be of low quality, defined primarily in terms of breeding rates and fiber productiv-ity as well as of qualities like length, texture, and elasticity required for indus-trial spinning and weaving technology.

As cashmere prices rose dramatically in the reform period, the county government created a cashmere goat project that brought improved, genetically engineered goats from Liaoning province in northeastern China, a breed called the “Northeastern,” and through an artificial insemination pro-gram, crossed this goat with a local breed to improve the quality (zhiliang) of local cashmere. The low quality of local goats was attributed to low repro-ductive rates, high mortality rates, and substandard animal husbandry tech-niques. The policy decision to improve the quality of local goats was made in conjunction with regional economic planners who, studying global markets, hoped to exploit this particular niche.

The Xinjiang Academy of Animal Husbandry Sciences, which provided advice to the county government, made such decisions in consultation with universities and companies in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States. A large export-based textile industry has been built upon these local wool and cashmere resources: Chinese industry no longer exports low-value raw cashmere (which it had done until quite recently), but highly valued fin-ished cashmere textiles. As my conversation with the manager of one of the last remaining spinning factories in Tacheng indicates, many of the older cashmere spinning and weaving industries from the United States, Europe, and Hong Kong have relocated to eastern China (including those industries that were originally located in northern Xinjiang and used domestic cashmere supplies). Despite what might be understood as the de-industrialization of the region, local residents have contributed greatly to Chinese market develop-ment generally through the provision of low cost fiber.

Yet, according to local residents, this national development has not given any significant, or I might add sustained, local benefits to rural minority producers, particularly as the once rising cashmere prices have begun to fall with increasing domestic supplies. Furthermore, China’s expanding textile



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industry has undercut global prices of cashmere textiles and thus cashmere prices are not predicted to reach the high prices of the past (Unerkhan Bayan, personal communication).

While government policies favoring the concentration of value-added activities in eastern China have contributed to the overall development of China’s textile industry, they have also created inequality. Regional disparity has been widened by concentrating the production of low-value raw materi-als like cashmere in minority areas like River-Fork Village and the produc-tion of high-value finished textiles by industries in the east. The policy in general has been one of capital accumulation through the vertical integration, in Harvey’s sense of “neoliberal globalization,” of River-Fork residents at the bottom, with an ascending of hierarchy of semi-independent contracted trad-ers who purchase wool and cashmere, large consolidated companies like Tian Shan and Ordos (both of which market for large U.S. clothing companies), and an urban Chinese, East Asian, and U.S. and European distribution, mar-keting, and retailing system.

In this system, village residents have been designated as the lowest rung of value production. Thus, discourses of quality need to be contextualized in terms of their function in this neoliberal and global division of labor. Discourses of the quality of the local population were closely related to the restructuring of the Chinese economy in line with global capitalism; they referred not only to the quality of commodities but also to the whole, overarch-ing culture or way of life associated with the capitalist market economy.

Discourse, Counter-Discourse, and Subject-MakingAs I spoke with the county head about these issues, he said that township lead-ers had to proceed from both the “quality” (zhiliang) of the natural resources of the area (such as pasture area) as well as the resources of the people (ren ziyuan) to “open the area up” (kaifa). One of the “people resources” was their animal husbandry. “To have development,” he told me, “you need to look at and know the existing quality of the population (renkou suzhi), the local resources, and only then make a plan for its competitive advantage.” As we have seen, this has meant a focus on raising the quantity and quality of raw materials like meat and fiber produced by rural minority households.

River-Fork residents, though, had their own ideas, which together consti-tuted a counter-discourse to the dominant official one. Acutely conscious of their low status as herders, they said that improving their lives meant access-ing paid employment within urban areas. Some residents went so far as to




contradict the official line head-on and said that improving their lives was “not about improving animal husbandry.”9 Consider the following comments by a group of households:

We have been making our living by raising sheep, but we still have not become wealthy. . . . There is almost no hope for us in raising sheep. . . . I want to do other things. . . . None of the young people wants to herd sheep. . . . There is no longer any future in herding.10

Young people, when asked about imaginable futures, talked about want-ing to work in restaurants or as hairdressers, construction workers, or reli-gious teachers.11 The only residents who said they were interested in animal husbandry or “maintaining the herds” were the youngest male children, who, in the long-standing Turkic social practice of ultimogeniture and inheritance (see Zanca, 2011: 57), were expected to continue to reside with their parents, manage their family livestock, and take care of their parents in old age. As local residents are integrated into the market economy, and much of the new consumer lifestyle in which entertainment, health care, education, and trans-portation are obtained through access to cash income, they are lured by the pull of regional and national industrial development, despite the relative wealth of their local subsistence resources.

Yet, residents’ experience with China’s new political economy has been an exclusion from urban opportunity and an ever-growing rural population concentrated in the village. Only two individuals out of almost 250 in the two villages of River-Fork and Poplar-Tree were able to find urban employment, despite widespread interest. Many families were skeptical of sending their children to college or university in the regional capital because, as they were aware, they would simply return to their former rural way of life after gradu-ation because of urban discrimination against minorities. A college graduate from a different township who was visiting relatives on their summer pas-tures confirmed this fear; she told me that she had been unable to find work in Urumqi and had returned to her former life in Altai. When I asked people in River-Fork Village why there was so much poverty there, a common answer was that there “were too many people here. None of us can find any work or occupation.”

When I discussed this situation with an official in the township, he said that the low quality of the residents necessitated development strategies focusing exclusively on animal husbandry. As a poverty-alleviation county, its officials used central government subsidies to increase investment in education (new schools) and infrastructure (roads, electricity), but did not put much in work and employment promotion programs. I was told about a small



Zukosky 21

number of programs for the training of female tailors for local clothing work-shops. The county also recruited housekeepers to work in privately owned hotels in the regional capital as well as individuals to harvest cotton on state farms in southern Xinjiang (although working in agriculture in southern Xinjiang was unacceptable for most residents, in part because of the per-ception of poor relations between Kazakhs and that region’s Uighur nation-ality). But in general, there were few non-animal-husbandry employment programs.

On a visit to the township government, I also asked about programs to get residents jobs in the industrial sector. The official replied, “If you took one of the residents from this township and tried to put them into a developed area like Shanghai or Beijing, they’d be unable to do the higher-level work avail-able there. They have a very low quality” (tamen de suzhi hen di). Here the official referred to the overarching singular quality of the local population. Another official, who had been listening to our conversation, commented, “The first thing that needs to be done is to change the ‘quality of their thought’ (sixiang suzhi)” and then mentioned their conservative “psychological qual-ity (xinli suzhi).”

While this second official used the term suzhi to mean an acquired quality, which Kipnis described, he meant that because the local population embod-ied qualities such as conservativeness and a reluctance to leave their kin and biological descent group, they were only willing to do certain kinds of jobs, such as herding livestock. This contrasts sharply with the statements of resi-dents in River-Fork and Poplar-Tree villages. The relationship here between exclusion from urban working-class wage labor and discourses of quality is important, and subjects residents structurally to the animal husbandry econ-omy and the production of food and raw materials.

By using the notion of quality to define the limitations of residents, the official’s comments exemplify the dilemmas of exclusionary growth, dis-crimination, and a scarcity of good employment in China today (see Fischer, 2005, for a comparable example). The scarcity of employment and the float-ing population (liudong renkou) constitute a problem throughout all of China and one that makes central government officials very anxious. In northwest-ern China there are few industrial jobs and those few are unequally distrib-uted, particularly between minorities like the residents of River-Fork Village and the majority Han Chinese. Xinjiang’s economy is primarily agricultural (typical Han crops are sunflowers, sugar beets, and cotton), and regional industry is dominated by petroleum and food processing with some construction, chemicals, plastics, and electricity production (see Wang, 1999). Han Chinese, both local and floating, fill many of the jobs in industry. Local poverty-alleviation and economic-development strategies that focus on rural




animal husbandry production serve to maintain the social order by limiting competition between the two groups in urban areas. In other words, they have limited the minority floating population and thus reduced competition for urban employment for the Han nationality majority.

The Han population in the region has increased from low numbers during the early years of the new state to half the current population. According to Toops (2000, 2004), there were 0.19 million Han Chinese in Xinjiang in 1941, out of a total population of four million. Toops (personal communica-tion) also notes that according to the latest Xinjiang Statistical Yearbook, there were 8.36 million Han Chinese (versus 9.83 million Uighur) out of a total population of twenty million. Large numbers of these Han were relo-cated to Xinjiang for state-supported border-strengthening projects and the establishment of state farms during the Maoist period. Today, there has been a continuing in-migration of Han following public and private investment in industry in the regional capital of Urumqi and, more minimally, in county seats (see Fischer, 2005, for a comparable example of Han in-migration to the Tibetan Autonomous Region). The in-migration of Han creates an employ-ment market that is disadvantageous for minorities in that the Han Chinese often control important forms of human capital (in terms of social capital like extensive networks and cultural capital like spoken Mandarin Chinese). Han domination in the market is a topic of everyday conversation among many minorities in urban areas, as it is in River-Fork and elsewhere in rural Altai as well.

For the residents of River-Fork Village, this dynamic was all the more significant as there were few opportunities in the locality’s largest town and labor market, the county administrative seat, population 11,000. The town was established in the 1950s as party-government headquarters and devel-oped around the personnel of the main government organs and state-run work units: the county government, various bureaucratic departments like the Animal Husbandry Bureau and Forestry Bureau, police and public security bureaus, a television station, elementary and middle schools, hospitals and clinics, a post office, a gasoline station, a bus station, and a few dormitories/hotels. At the time of my field visit, Kazakh, the majority of the area’s rural residents, were only about a third of the town’s population and only a small minority elite had been able to complete high school, join the Chinese Communist Party, and find work in the governmental organs and work units, the most significant wage-paying employer of minorities locally. Since a large sector of the economy was state-subsidized wheat agriculture, there were several small mechanized flour and oil mills, but otherwise, industry was limited to a state-owned soda and ice cream factory. The town had an outdoor market for urban residents, small restaurants, general and more



Zukosky 23

specialized stores like pharmacies, typing and printing offices, beauty and barber shops, and Internet cafes, but most of these were owned and/or staffed not by minority residents but by new Han Chinese migrants. For example, some Fujian migrants had opened restaurants and general stores (chaoshi).

This was the context in which local residents struggled against their des-ignation as “low quality.” Despite official representations of residents as “herders” in a “natural economy,” the government was in fact an important source of employment for the township economy, and the wealthiest house-holds (those “high quality” households held to be the standard in animal hus-bandry by township officials) often worked for the government. Their relative wealth, or access to cash income, in the two villages was closely related to this wage-labor opportunity.

Of the 25 households in the natural village of River-Fork, six had some income from governmental work as village committee members, teachers, or herders of state livestock (used by state institutions such as the Forestry Bureau). Otherwise, a number of households earned non-animal-husbandry cash income through small-scale mining of local (flake) mica deposits (see Figure 3), handicrafts like wedding embroideries or musical instruments, and other sideline activities such as the management of a village/pasture store.

Figure 3. A resident, who considers himself a miner, maintains livestock, but every week sells flake mica to a Han Chinese purchasing manager in the county seat




Poorer households sold their labor to wealthier households as herders (or spe-cialized workers for such things as wool shearing or combing out cashmere), or sought other temporary or seasonal income-generating activities, like mud-brick making or vegetable selling. Thus, non-animal-husbandry employment was very important in local livelihoods (despite the government’s definition of the village as an “animal husbandry village”), but was inadequate to meet locally perceived needs and desires. Official discourse that labels residents low quality obscures these attempts by residents to utilize their skills and labor outside of animal husbandry to increase their income.

Residents who were not employed by the government, while often identi-fying themselves as “herders,” deplored this lack of “occupations” (K. kasep), which was widely seen by local residents as the most significant local prob-lem, second only to the growing population. Yet, the local township poverty-alleviation policy focused on animal husbandry development and even avoided alternative off-farm employment programs because of the low “quality” of the population. Thus, this particular minority area was not exploited through its provision of cheap labor for industry in distant urban areas. The residents of River-Fork Village are thus unlike rural Han Chinese migrant workers whom the discourse of quality relegates to positions as unskilled labor (see Yan, 2003: 501). In rural minority communities, neolib-eral development discourse is used explicitly to discipline local residents into raw materials producers, a position arguably below those of the urban work-ing class, if not in income, then in socially symbolic capital and position.

High Quality, Privileges, and Neoliberal GovernanceAs I have argued, development discourse reflects the ways that local forms of production have been integrated vertically by government into a global division of labor. Residents are made subject to food and raw materials industries, which give and deny value to them, marking them out either as “privileged subjects” of “high quality” (those who self-discipline according to the needs of industry and the market) or as “excludable subjects” of “low quality” (those who are undisciplined and inefficient) (Ong, 2006: 5–8). This label of “quality” is thus affixed to subjects in accordance with how each group of residents produces economic value and their ability to accumulate capital; their value and quality become that attributed to them by the market.

At the same time that officials are excluding the local population from cer-tain privileges, placing them—disciplining them—into the specific subject role of labor and source of raw material, they privilege high-quality entrepreneurs



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who are establishing new commercial and profitable enterprises, extending to them special rights and privileges. As I sat with a number of officials at a ban-quet, I was told by one party secretary that,

before our policy was about common prosperity, but the poor are close-minded. They just want to subsist. Within the subsistence economy, the rich don’t want to do anything either. So now we have a policy of sup-porting the rich, giving to the rich. You give to the wealthy and let them give to the poor by starting businesses. Then, the poor will have to compete to survive.

This Chinese Communist Party official espoused the liberal notion that competition and the market will drive development and social evolution in positive and beneficial ways. As Ann Anagnost (2000: 204) has observed, social evolution in the contemporary neoliberal age is in many ways a “survival of the fittest,” a process of “sink or swim,” in which market com-petition between existing classes and groups is believed to drive social change, evolution, and progress.

An official sitting next to the speaker quoted above provided an example of a township woman, a “high entrepreneur,” who had used Agricultural Bank of China loans signed off directly by the government to lease large tracts of natural land that were then “improved,” or irrigated. She was starting a feed industry to profit on the spring pastoral season when residents and their livestock return from their depleted winter pastures, but when snow still covers much of the spring pastures and forage grass is thus in demand. Because of this local demand, the price of hay increases dramatically. Many residents are unable to afford the high spring prices, and sometimes lose livestock as a result. The official said,

We need wealthy people like her who will lease out county land, buy high technology, and build a company hiring other township households in the process. As households are hired, they will be trained in the new technologies and this will improve their quality (suzhi). This kind of development liberates people [and] allows their thought to transform.

This discourse of development privileges and empowers capital in its trans-formation of residents into appropriate subjects. By becoming labor subjects in new local agricultural industries, the “quality” of residents is said to improve. Thus, the notion of quality was clearly related to this disciplining, defining, and identifying of rural residents as a special kind of labor in the new market politi-cal economy. In River-Fork Village, this is precisely what has happened.




Conclusion

Beyond a discourse that legitimates new market strategies that depend on the market and economic liberalization, this article has shown how the official use of a discourse of quality to explain poverty obscured the local adaptation to reform-era economic policies. Rather than reflecting local limitations, official discourses of poverty and quality obscure the semi-subsistence economy that residents have used to adapt to market liberalization and achieve their own goals. In this sense, they obscure local agency.

Discourses of quality in northwestern China obscure local agency in order to legitimate the social differences and inequality that reform has produced. One might argue that the low incomes of residents of River-Fork Village are not related to nature and their natural limitations, but index the disjunction between the skills and assets they use to subsist at the margins of China’s market economy and the particular kinds of labor they have been allocated by the state and capital in the new neoliberal political order. As described above, their position is as raw materials producers.

Rather than simply reflecting the actual abilities of residents, discourses about their quality, and the policies that those discourses legitimate, contrib-ute to processes of political subject construction. What is particularly inter-esting about the case presented above is how local residents used both notions of quality but also counter-discourses, as in their desires for what they called “occupations,” or non-animal-husbandry wage labor. In this sense, they attempt to discursively maneuver outside the subject position that they have been allocated in the new Chinese political economy.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Kathryn Bernhardt, Gardner Bovingdon, Judith Goode, Richard Gunde, and Sydney White as well as a number of anonymous reviewers for Modern China for important editorial comments that improved the style and argument of this article. All mistakes are my own.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship, and/or publication of this article:



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This research was supported by Fulbright-Hays and the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

Notes

1. Discourse is a widely used, but poorly understood term in the contemporary social sciences. In its nontechnical usage, it can simply mean any kind of writ-ten or spoken communication. In linguistics and discourse analysis, it refers to language above the sentence level and its form, interpretation, and effects (see Brown and Yule, 1983). Finally, in poststructuralist social science, discourse derives an additional layer of meaning from the work of Michel Foucault. Fou-cault (1982) argued that one of the effects of discourse is that it discursively forms the things of which it speaks and writes and that there are politics similar to grammar for its formal organization and interpretation. My use of the term refers to this latter meaning.

2. China’s deepening imposition of market imperatives during the government of Jiang Zemin was arguably neoliberal. Discussions in terms of neoliberalism are useful for understanding governmental initiatives to impose market imperatives. In this sense, neoliberalism is a general concept and different national econo-mies are specific instances that may or may not share all characteristics with the ideal type. In the particularities of China, one can still tease out remnants of the older socialist central planning model (guidance of the economy by government macroeconomic control), a modern post-colonial developmental state (state-led macroeconomic planning, particularly in Xinjiang, where state-run enterprises still dominate the economy), and reform-led state corporatism (in which the state determines which international nongovernmental and governmental orga-nizations will be allowed a presence and uses these to implement state policy). Moreover, this distinctive blend of political economy, while stressing economic liberalization, can draw upon a critique of neoliberalism (xin ziyouzhuiyi) and a reemphasis of socialistic values (hexie shehui) under the present government of Hu Jintao. In the recent discussions of the complexities of political–economic institutions emerging in the United States and the global financial crisis, one Chinese author describes the death of liberalism and emerging forms of both the U.S. and the Chinese political economy under the umbrella term of “pragma-tism” (shiyongzhuyi) (“Meiguo shiyongzhuyi zhangsheng ziyouzhuyi,” 2008).

3. My dissertation research was made possible by grants from Fulbright-Hays and the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and was written up with financial support from Temple University.

4. “New ethnography” refers to paradigmatic shifts in anthropological research methods and writing that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s in response to the changing social and cultural conditions of globalization (Marcus and Fischer,




1986). The impact of many innovations in the anthropology of ethnic minorities in China has only just recently emerged. For example, compare the recent col-laborative use of ethnographic methods by Stevan Harrell, Ma Lunzy, and Bamo Ayi (2007) with the classic work of Lousia Schein (2000) conducted under very different political–economic conditions of Dengist reform. Each methodologi-cal paradigm led to different understandings of Chinese society and culture. This article, with its observation of the changing conditions of China’s sensi-tive northwest Xinjiang region, was written before the July 2009 ethnic riots in Urumqi. Because the central and regional governments have attributed these riots to the outside interference of international organizations such as the World Uighur Congress and exiles in Europe and the United States, the liberalizing political and economic conditions in Xinjiang have since ended and conditions have become much more difficult for any social science research at all, whether Chinese or foreign.

5. In my field research, I was seen in many different ways by different people. I might have been considered a representative of global capitalism when the for-mal decision was made to allow my research, but I think my identity was much more complicated as research proceeded. I developed friends, colleagues, and acquaintances.

6. I am using pseudonyms for both people and places like the “natural village” to protect the identities of residents and officials. For transhumant populations in China, a natural village means a sedentary residence that can be distinguished from others by spatial density. It does not necessarily refer to the sedentarization of livestock. For both River-Fork and Poplar-Tree villages, these so-called natu-ral villages were established around 1986, after the beginning of the reform. For more on the topic of nomadic settlement in northern Xinjiang, see Zukosky, 2007.

7. The use of World Bank funds for the construction of homes and livestock enclo-sure on winter rangeland is a good example of State Council prescriptions for the use of nontraditional public sources of investment from governmental and non-governmental organizations in western China, as opposed to the use of private capital for such development in the east. In northern Xinjiang, this investment has been conducted through the Rome-based World Food Program, the Japanese government’s Ministry of Agriculture, the World Bank/Global Environmental Fund, and the Canadian International Development Agency.

8. One resident, who has since migrated to Kazakhstan, told me that he had heard about disability benefits from the media, but was unable to obtain them locally. Once, he went to the county government himself (rather than through the village committee or township governments). He waited in the foyer area for quite some time until someone approached him and asked if he needed help. After listening to his story, the man escorted him out of the building and told him that he needed to go to the township government office. At the township government, he was told



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that there were no disability benefits as such and was given a calendar (in my analysis, symbolic of the period of Jiang Zemin) and a township lottery ticket (the gamble of the market). Needless to say, he was one of the residents most critical of the Chinese state.

9. One resident told me that their problems were not related to technologies of ani-mal husbandry. When I asked about local poverty, I was told that it was related to post-reform changes at the local level. First, there were a number of individuals who were yet to be married at the time of the reform and were thus not allocated land or livestock. These households had less livestock than others. Second, when a Kazakh male marries, his family often splits their livestock and gives him a portion. If one married after reform, the resulting two houses would now have significantly less livestock. As one resident said, if you had several male chil-dren, then you had to split your livestock numerous times. This is similar to the observations of Luong and Unger (1998) on the importance of household size for relative wealth or poverty in the Maoist period. In addition, residents said that illness, which forced households to sell off their livestock to pay for medi-cal expenses, and the number of school-aged children, who required clothes and tuition, also contributed to the decline in a household’s financial circumstances. Sometimes, a household had all of these problems at the same time. Despite these explanations, local residents saw wealth and poverty as temporary, often referring to rich households as “sitting rich.”

10. These quotes are from a social assessment conducted in an adjacent county in northern Xinjiang during 2006; I assisted in the assessment, which was conducted by the U.S. Smithsonian Institute. They echo strongly the conversations I had in River-Fork and Poplar-Tree villages.

11. Due to the suppression of religious practice in the Maoist period, there has emerged a market and demand for religious practitioners that follow nationality lines. Local residents want a Kazakh mullah and the contemporary mullah was far overburdened with work at holidays and other ritual events. Thus, there is no competition with other groups in this field. Moreover, the educational institu-tions for the teaching of Islam were also easier to access for rural residents than the universities and colleges.

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Biography

Michael L. Zukosky received his PhD in anthropology from Temple University in 2006 and currently is an assistant professor of anthropology at Eastern Washington University. He has published in journals such as Nomadic Peoples, Studies in Language and Capitalism, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and the Journal of Political Ecology. He is preparing a manuscript about participation by pastoral peoples in resource management and wildlife monitoring based on two years of fieldwork in China and Mongolia funded by the National Science Foundation.



Quality, Development Discourse, and Minority Subjectivity in Contemporary Xinjiang

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