JOHN THE OBSCURE ™

By John Ruch

© 2006

They Have Buried Talu: Ethnic Theme Parks and Chinese Utopia

Ethnic minority theme parks are the hot ticket in Chinese tourism today.

No, this isn’t a Disney satire—at least, not intentionally. These are theme parks in which all officially recognized minority cultures are dumped together in a kind of entertainment landfill, amid quasi-authentic architecture and actual native youths shipped in from the boondocks, who perform song and dance smartly rewritten for maximum outsider pleasure. Alternatively, tourists can go to the boondocks themselves and visit walled-off actual towns that charge an admission fee and stage festivals upon the government’s cue.

Naturally, my kneejerk reaction is to be horrified; and after being hit with a hammer that big and ugly, why wouldn’t my knee jerk? But I’m wise enough to know the situation is complex, and furthermore that I’m engaging in my own brand of intellectual tourism, fascinated at what I perceive as a bizarre, exotic eccentricity of a place I’ve never been. (I’m also satisfied to learn this brand of tourism is controversial in China.)

There’s a sense of utopian vision to this ethnic tourism—or more precisely, of the embrace between various utopian visions. To be conveniently reductionist for a moment: the government sees the parks as nationalist propaganda and a modernizing force to perpetuate its own socialist utopia; the tourists see them as an escape from disorienting, dislocating, market-economy modernism; and the local people who are selling their culture see them as a way to enter the modern, sexy, commercial, rich utopia the tourists are viewed as living in—and are fleeing madly.

Theme parks as utopias may be an obvious point, but China is so obviously obvious about it that it becomes almost subtle again.¹ The most dazzling example is Shangri-La, a fictional Tibetan utopia invented by a British novelist, but now the official name of an actual Tibetan-Chinese territory so designated for tourism. There’s something beyond grotesque in a government that invaded Tibet and did its damnedest to destroy local culture now restoring and pimping the same. But the magnetic, nostalgic, spiritual appeal of Shangri-La—the place and the idea—to the Chinese people is well-attested by the hordes of domestic tourists who descend upon it annually.

It’s tempting to make some grand statement about globalism and the like, but I don’t want to ignore the peculiarly Chinese cultural forces at work here. But I think a general point can be distilled. A society’s dominant culture is always, by virtue of being real and thus flawed, a failed utopia or even a dystopia. To energize itself, it must continually invent—or invade—new utopias. In extreme cases, it will itself be replaced with one.

These utopias will always be located “outside”—someplace physically or culturally remote, atmospheric, beautiful. And woe betide the people who happen to live there, at least if they don’t read the fine print. Ditto for those who make their money by running current utopias, unwary of being replaced by tomorrow’s bigger, brighter dream.

I draw these conclusions from Chinese tourism, where there are such phenomenon as remote villages vying for the distinction of becoming an officially “authentic” tourist destination.² But I think they apply broadly because China, of course, doesn’t have a monopoly on ethnic tourism.

The history of making money by gawking at minority people is beyond my scope; it’s at least as old as European exploration and as recent as “ethnic tourism” being a buzzword of the rebuilding of New Orleans. But the precursors of China’s ethnic theme parks as peculiar institutions (to borrow a phrase) can be traced directly back to America.

A notable example is the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii, a catch-all for Pacific Island culture run by the Mormons as a money-maker and a place to give Brigham Young University kids a job (as baldly put in its mission statement, surely one of the most honest bits of the missionary culture of which the place is a remnant). It’s been around since 1963, the era when tiki-bar culture spread throughout America, spurred by memories of veterans of World War II Pacific action, as a utopian symbol of endless post-war leisure.

Margaret Lawrence, director of programming at Dartmouth College’s Hopkins Center for the Arts, had some American comparisons as well in describing her fears about the possible dark side of ethnic tourism. I talked to her because last fall she organized performances, films screenings and discussions by and about ethnic minority performers from Yunnan, one of China’s most coveted ethnic tourist spots and location of one of the biggest ethnic theme parks.

Lawrence cited similarities to our country’s “reservation culture” for Native Americans, in which disparate tribes were concentration-camped together and saw much of their culture reworked into tourist trinkets and shows. And as a visitor to China’s Yunnan Nationalities Village, which includes a miniature train ride through the two-dozen ethnic minority attractions, she compared it to the “It’s a Small World” ride available at both Disneyland and Disney World. That famous ride is a boat trip through robot figures stereotyping various cultures, all singing the titular song about a bland, nonexistent kind of universal brotherhood.

“It’s a Small World” is a particularly apt comparison, because it was clearly the direct inspiration for Beautiful Indonesia in Miniature Park—itself an inspiration for China’s ethnic theme parks. This crazed ethnic theme park in Jakarta was created by the dictator Suharto to show Indonesian diversity even as he ravaged the country and sparked ongoing ethnic conflict. Inspired by his wife’s 1971 visit to Disneyland, it includes quasi-authentic models of houses and temples from various major ethnic groups, and a lake containing islands shaped so as to depict significant parts of the archipelago.³

China has certainly embraced these models physically. Its popular tourist parks also include Splendid China Miniature Scenic Spots—miniature models of well-known buildings and landscapes—and Window of the World, featuring miniatures of international famous buildings. The ethnic theme parks are simply a living, internal-culture model of these domestications. (Both of the aforementioned theme parks are in Shenzhen, as is probably the best-known ethnic theme park, China Folk Culture Villages.)

But more subtly, China has embraced these models ideologically. Disney’s utopian vision was a liberal one pushing against the tide of the ongoing racial conflict in its home country and Cold War tensions abroad. China’s ethnic theme parks have a similar aura of (perhaps calculated) tolerance and unity. Suharto had a more dystopian vision; Beautiful Indonesia is divided up by government provinces, in turn reflecting favored groups and ignoring others, and overall emphasizing his centralized control of everyone and everything. That, too, is a message of China’s parks.

China was already playing this game, literally, as early as the 1950s with the Ethnic Minorities Mini-Games, which continued at least into the 1990s (with some pauses). A kind of rural Olympics with a cultural festival appended, they were meant to show Chinese socialist unity by tossing all ethnic groups under the same umbrella (or circus tent).⁴

It’s important to note that the Chinese government decides what the ethnic groups are. Under Mao, ethnic groups were surveyed and ranked according to a system ultimately based in perceived “socio-cultural distance” from the dominant Han culture. More than 400 ethnicities were originally self-reported, but the government has officially recognized only 55.⁵ This pseudoscientific ethnocentrism is codified by the ethnic theme parks. For example, one of the most popular cultures in the parks is that of the Dai in Yunnan. Dai is a very broad term for an ethnicity that includes a multiplicity of cultures (so varied, in fact, it’s just a variant spelling of “Thai,” as it’s the same ethnic group that’s a majority in Thailand, Laos, etc.).

So the Chinese government’s utopian vision in these parks becomes the easiest to trace. (And also the one I find least sympathetic, if you hadn’t noticed.) The visions of the tourists and the performers are matters of emotions and hopes; the visions of the government are largely matters of stated policy.

That policy is essentially to modernize, assimilate and eventually socialize the more remote outposts of the country, and in the short term to promote national unity as paramount while recognizing ethnic differences.

The government handles this in a very direct way, one not intuitive to people in most other countries. Even in modern, market-economy China, all tourism is ultimately run by the government, down to where people are allowed to go. This isn’t just government persuasion; it’s government control.

The government’s policy of modernization through tourism began shortly after the late 1970s market-economy reforms of Deng Xiaoping. The history and impact of this development on the Miao ethnic group in Guizhou has been charted by Xiaoping Wu, who describes government officials of that era viewing the Miao as too hick to realize how to exploit the wildly beautiful natural resources of their mountainous region. As the Miao suffered through poverty, government officials referred to them as having a “poverty of plenty” and “begging food with a golden bowl.”⁶ The obvious “solution”: the government would beneficently introduce tourism.

(China’s ethnic tourism is rich with dark irony. That includes the history of the Miao, who ended up in their current remote home because they fled there to avoid assimilation with the Han centuries ago. Their rebelliousness is part of their “exotic” allure. The ethnic name Miao is actually a derogatory Han term roughly meaning, “Weeds.”⁷)

The links between modern tourism and previous utopian development efforts are sometimes startlingly obvious. For example, one of the theme parks in Yunnan is built on the site of an earlier, failed attempt to turn a lake into farmland.⁸ Now Yunnan farmland often becomes parking lots for tour buses. And tourism development is generally viewed officially as a wedge for future development of other sorts.

A kind of renewed campaign was the 1999 declaration of the “Open Up the West” policy, an ambiguous directive to modernize rural (and often ethnic-minority) parts of China (including southern as well as western areas) with everything from tourism to giant infrastructure projects. This is where government utopianism gets the most emotional and romantic. Like the US, China has a Western mythos fraught with frontier symbolism—an analogy the Chinese government itself readily made. While there are specifically Chinese cultural elements involved, the American practice of combining natural preservation with exploitation, and assimilation of indigenous ethnic minority cultures, was an appealing model.⁹

Obviously, that Western romance belongs not merely to the Chinese government, but to the Chinese people. It’s just one facet of the appeal of ethnic tourism, but it’s a good reminder that however calculated the government may be, ethnic theme parks would not succeed without speaking to something in the Chinese soul—or at least, in some Chinese souls.

And we are talking about the Chinese here. The vast majority of the visitors are domestic tourists, and there are millions of them per year. China Folk Culture Villages in Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong, opened in 1991 with the presumption that foreign tourists would be the main consumers, but turned out to be a domestic hit, according to Tim Oakes, a professor of geography at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies ethnic tourism.¹⁰

The appeal level of these ethnic theme parks is pretty hard for a Westerner to understand. They aren’t very fancy. They don’t have rides. They have quasi-authentic native buildings—always appearing exactly the same among various parks, even if the originals vary widely at home—built by native craftspeople shipped in for the occasion, but with concrete floors. (Some buildings are even moved intact from their original locations.) Young people, 18-25, from actual ethnic minority villages are shipped in for two-year tours to live in the villages, doing their best to ape domestic skills and cooking, but mostly to sing and dance. Most Western visitors find the performances obviously phony and the costumes plastic. A common performance is a staged wedding ceremony in which male tourists can kiss a bride for a sum of money. Tourists can often dress up in the costumes and “go ethnic for a while,” as Oakes puts it. An American tourist I spoke to who visited Yunnan Nationalities Village recalled the “strong hint of cheesiness” to the whole place.¹¹

“In China, you can have what is almost an oxymoron of authentic replication,” Oakes explained. For one thing, there is the attempt at some authenticity in having the buildings constructed by the ethnic people in question and so forth—albeit according to a tourist plan. But the Chinese also have less of a cultural obsession with the original artifact; something passably close, with the same aura, will do. Something similar can be seen in their treatment of natural wonders, which are sometimes modified with inscriptions and the like, alterations that are considered to be enhancements, not ruinations.¹² The “guiding principle” of China Folk Culture Villages, according to its souvenir book, is “originating from real life but rising above it, and discarding the dross and selecting the essential.”¹³

Lawrence noted the non-irony of this view among tourists. “They’re genuinely interested,” she said.

The theme parks always lump together a large number of ethnicities—usually at least 10. China Folk Culture Villages’ program includes a “Grand Parade” featuring all the two dozen or so ethnic groups cavorting together, from northern nomads to southern farmers. Yunnan Nationalities Village stages shows on its “Plaza of Ethnic Unity.” In part, this is a programmatic holdover from the original idea of appealing to foreigners by offering them a one-stop shop for Chinese exotica. But it also serves the government agenda of showcasing ethnic, and thus national, unity—more imaginary than real, of course.

But isn’t the amalgam a turn-off for tourists, who presumably seek authenticity? It doesn’t seem to have much impact on the utopian vision sketched out by such tourism.

An escape from soulless modern life is the general appeal most researchers find; in particular, a nostalgia-ridden one. Oakes has noted the significance of these parks springing up in Shenzhen, a new city on the border of China’s most Westernized, free-market area. On the basest level of just being a theme park, where behavior can be less restricted, more musical and so on, an amalgam of ethnicities doesn’t matter.

But there’s also a more serious issue, one involving rootedness. Oakes has also noted other trends converging on this, such as the appeal of preserving “old towns” in cities. He has identified a general trend “to invent a landscape of nostalgia upon which to build a sense of national identity.”

In this vein, it appears the general idea of ethnicity, rather than any particular ethnicity, is the key appeal. (Some tourists are drawn by their own ethnic roots, but they are not the majority.) The idea of more “authentic,” “primitive,” soulful cultures in beautiful or dramatic places is what tourists pay to experience. The potential power of this experience in an incredibly homogenous country—less than 10 percent of the populace is ethnic minority—is hard to overstate.¹⁴ In this vein, it’s interesting to note that Yunnan Nationalities Village also includes Dinosaur Island, a park-within-a-park that seems to echo, albeit insultingly and crassly, the aura of a lost world, something old and nostalgically on the verge of extinction.

A generic interest in the religious, still a kind of open taboo in China, also appears to be involved. China Folk Culture Villages includes an Uyghur mosque, a Tibetan lamasery and other religious structures. Again, their general existence, rather than specific religious affiliations, seems to be an appeal posed against both socialist and capitalist materialism. Yunnan Nationalities Villages actually contains a working, sacred Buddhist temple.

All of these trends are all the more pronounced in tourism to actual ethnic villages, which often become or operate as theme parks themselves. The government arranges these tours, notifying villagers to stage performances and festivals at the proper time. The program is largely similar to that of theme parks, but obviously in a more natural setting. This makes more clear what is often missing from the theme parks—the natural “paradises” that the ethnic minorities often live in, which adds to the sense of utopia. Travel brochures describe the areas with such language as the “last virgin land,” “mysterious land,” and so on, as Wu has recorded. The Dai live amid subtropical beauty; the Miao among dramatic crags; the Tibetans in one of the most sublime landscapes in the world. “It really symbolizes this kind of lost paradise,” Lawrence says of Yunnan, with its year-round flowers and other accoutrements.

This interplay between humans and nature is reportedly viewed by the Chinese with distinctive meanings I don’t understand well enough to articulate.

But the general idea of getting back to nature, of finding a meaningful—and colorful—culture, of experiencing a sense of the numinous, are surely things Westerners share with these tourists. It’s easy to see what they get out of it. Their utopia is a pretty simple one. What’s interesting is how it is pitted against the government’s vision of modernization. Paradoxically for the government, this type of tourism relies on the modern tourists themselves not wanting to be so modern. And paradoxically for the tourists, it means participating in that process of modernization.

But the really complicated position is that of the performers, or villagers. Just about every expert on this subject agrees it’s too simplistic to view tourism as a wave that crashes over them, destroying their culture. But frankly, it’s hard to see the complex reality of the interplay as much better.

There’s no doubt that the tourism is demeaning. The kissing of “brides” is just one example. The Dai’s Water Festival, like so many real rituals, is turned into a cheap amalgam of various ceremonies, and ultimately nothing but a water fight described glibly in tourist materials as a “crazy, wild and wet holiday.”¹⁵ Performers at Yunnan Nationalities Village exist alongside animal exotica such as white elephants.

“You can see pop stars having video shoots in Yunnan with lovely girls dressed in minority culture costumes with flowers…and it’s not even authentic,” Lawrence said.

What do the performers/villagers get in exchange? Theoretical fulfillment of their utopia of money and the proffered modernism. But, as Wu has documented in the Miao villages, they don’t get much. Certainly, income improves, along with women’s social status and an overall sense of positive ethnic identity, she found.

But she also found it’s all built on a foundation of sand. It all disappears when the next, more “authentic” village is found. Locals generally have very little involvement in or control of the tourism. Most of the money flows outside. The government seizes land for related development like restaurants for little or no money.

Native dress starts to be worn less frequently. Chinese language becomes more prevalent. Customs start to disappear, or are performed only for money. Performers tend to display psychological disassociation, saying the commercialized rituals aren’t the real thing and hence aren’t profaned; yet the real thing is hardly ever performed, since the government fills up the social calendar with staged shows.

The process is well-known in other cultures, like Bali, Lawrence noted. While cultures are always rich in rituals, “Suddenly, people start choosing the five that are most attractive to tourists.” The rest are forgotten, and even those that remain become rote, hollow set pieces.

Overall, Wu notes, the positive benefits are economic; the negative ones are cultural. And since the culture is what the economy is based on, that can be devastating. It’s a utopia that can quickly become a dystopia. And I use the word utopia advisedly, based on the strength of hope described. Wu says the locals are often overly optimistic about the potential benefits of tourism, and inaccurately idolize the lifestyle of the tourists, who are viewed as wealthy and idle, their own modern reality of work and urban life going unseen.

I don’t want to oversimplify anybody’s viewpoint. Ethnic tourism is popular in China, but it’s also controversial in China. “There’s increasing interest [among] urban intellectuals and tourists themselves in preservation,” Oakes said, adding it’s considered a Western idea. That, of course, is my instinct, too—and may be as selfish as my reasons. After all, if you don’t preserve culture, how can you keep using it as a utopia?

Academic study of ethnic tourism is burgeoning. Of course, it can be a form of exploitation itself. I asked Lawrence about how she staged her touring show of Yunnan performers, who were located and brought to the US through a long chain of contacts.

“To present anything on a stage, you change it,” she acknowledged, emphasizing the importance of that awareness. “The minute you open up that circle and present it, you’re changing it.”

In that show, she was careful to employ heavily contextualization: who would actually perform which song in the culture, why, what the backstory is, and so on. Not the sort of thing that happens in an ethnic theme park.

And the performers themselves? “They’re very aware of it,” she said. “And I think they would say it’s complicated. But their individual mission is to keep [the culture] as alive as possible. They’re in a race.”

Mixed feelings seem to characterize every description of the performers/villagers’ role in this tourism. It’s tempting to just leave it at that, to acknowledge the complexity, to realize that the urge to preserve can be its own brand of condescension. But it’s also pretty obvious that, while the government-tourist-performer axes create a three-dimensional picture of ethnic tourism, it’s the locals who are on the low end of the power scale. It becomes hard for me to even talk about the choice of people who don’t really have one anyway. But I’m distant from the nuances.

“As an American, I’m kind of horrified by, quote, cultural theme parks,” Lawrence said. But, she added, “If people think it’s better to be in polyester versions of their costumes selling tchotskes…[rather than] working in a field, who am I to say it’s bad?”

Oakes also maintains a more objective view. He’s particularly interested in the issue of what happens to the youths who do their tour in the theme parks and then go back home.

“Theme parks have played this really important role in bringing urban [ideas] back home,” he said, adding that the youths “tend to develop a tourist-activity kind of routine that tends to mirror what they do in theme parks. The theme park is referring to villages…At the same time, villages become like theme parks.”

This can’t be all bad. It certainly isn’t all good.

But whatever it is, it all seems to be coming together in Shangri-La, the bizarre nexus of government, Chinese, local and even Western utopianism.

Tibet, the remote, mountain-ringed plateau in southwest China, and its capital Lhasa have figured in Western utopian and fantasy literature for centuries (right up to an obvious reference in the latest Batman movie). The particular utopian vision altered with cultural needs over the years, as charted in Peter Bishop’s 1989 book “The Myth of Shangri-La: Tibet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation of Sacred Landscape.” But it settled down into what it basically is today: an idea of a refuge of mystic religious wisdom, ancient folkways and dramatic natural beauty.

But around 1920-40, Bishop notes, a problem developed. Lhasa modernized. It got the telegraph and radio. You could buy Bing Crosby records. The Dalai Lama had a sports car with the license plate, “Tibet 1.” In short, a utopian buzzkill.

Into the breach stepped “Lost Horizon,” James Hilton’s outstanding utopian novel that was set in Tibet—not in the classic, but now overexposed, Lhasa, but rather in a fictional refuge called Shangri-La. “The myth of Tibet could no longer be entrusted to Tibet,” but rather to a symbolic fictional version of it, Bishop notes.

In Hilton’s 1933 novel, Westerners arrive in Shangri-La after a hijacked plane crashes there.¹⁶ They find a mystic Tibetan lamasery with its own occult religion, methods for extending life by centuries and a society kept happy by wise moderation. Its mission statement is to outlive an impending outer “Dark Ages.” (Within 20 years, China invaded Tibet and destroyed many lamaseries and temples.)

The cultural power of Hilton’s vision is impressive; “Shangri-La” has become a byword for “utopia.” The idea of China establishing an official Shangri-La, as it did with the former Diqing County in northwestern Yunnan in 2001, seems ridiculous—a bit too much bowing and scraping to Western ideals even for newly market-friendly China. But that appearance, Oakes warned me, is itself a product of ethnocentrism. It turns out China has its own long history of Shangri-La romance, a special derivation of Hilton’s vision.

Hilton’s novel was turned into Frank Capra’s hit 1937 movie of the same title. The movie was dubbed into Chinese and shown widely in that country at the time. It was popular for its resonance with China’s own utopian literature, especially an ancient poem called “Peach Blossom Spring.” Indeed, the dubbed version of “Lost Horizon” was called “Romance of the Peach Blossom Spring” in China, according to Oakes.

A hit Chinese pop song called “My Beautiful Shangri-La” spun out of the craze, and the term entered Chinese. Now there’s a luxury hotel chain in Asia called Shangri-La—which probably is the Western-fawning hypocriticism I was looking for. (I should note “Lost Horizon” was a curious syncretic view of East and West, a Tibetan utopia overseen by an ex-Christian Frenchman, so it’s not a pure Western borrowing.) Anyhow, while the word is common in China, most people actually believe it’s some kind of authentic Tibetan word.

The craze was renewed around 1992, when the book “Lost Horizon” was translated into Chinese for the first time.

“A number of localities in western China started to scramble to identify themselves as the actual place where the book took place,” Oakes said. Never mind that Hilton never visited Tibet or China, and his story was total fiction. “It was done more at the behest of travel agencies and very entrepreneurial guides,” he said.

There remain several claimants to the throne, but the official winner was the aforementioned Diqing on the Tibet-China border. To bolster its claim, it “recruited a phalanx of local scholars,” as Oakes put it, who held a conference marshalling all sorts of pseudoscientific “evidence” for how the fictional book was actually set in the area. It’s another interesting example of the Chinese conception of “authenticity.” Describing some bizarre scenes in a documentary movie about Shangri-La—such as a hotel named Paradise with a fake mountain within like one in the novel—Oakes comments on the “sense that fakery is a necessary part of utopia, that the facade is crucial to authenticity.”

This official Shangri-La isn’t a theme park per se, but an area that includes wilderness, a town and a Tibetan monastery. It’s ethnic Tibetan, though it’s a Chinese town.

“The area was already kind of slated for tourism anyway,” Oakes said. “It’s a really incredible place. It’s a place you’d want to go anyway even though it’s so crassly cashing in on these ideas.”

Oakes said that when he first visited in the 1980s, the town operated in Chinese. But now there’s been a “Tibetanization” of the architecture and more bilingual signs. And when you come into town, you see the words “Shangri-La” in big white characters, both English and Chinese, on a hillside; Oakes likens it to the famous Hollywood sign.

Shangri-La, as a sort of grab-bag, Lost-and-Found Horizon, has been a tourist hit. It seems to stand as all the aforementioned utopias all at once.

It is certainly part of the government’s modernization regimen. “Shangri-La was really promoted to the rest of Tibet as the way to be…In that respect, it serves political concerns,” Oakes said. That’s not to say it’s just something China has invented, Oakes added, noting that residents of Lhasa generally view Shangri-La as a backward, hick area.

It also allows the government to look tolerant of the Tibetan Buddhism it once attempted to destroy and still mistrusts. (Similarly, the Chinese government undertook a controversial restoration of the residence of the exiled Dalai Lama.) “Politically, it shows the government respects Tibetan culture, religion and all of that, as long as it’s a sellable commodity,” Oakes said.

For tourists, it’s like the ethnic theme parks to the max. It’s a real town with real temples and real dramatic scenery, plus all the mythical overtones of the novel’s romance and the actual history of Tibet being forbidden territory to Chinese. Shangri-La operates like a theme park, Oakes has written, in the sense that “it locates a non-place and enables one to visit and enjoy this place at will.” It may operate on that purest form of nostalgia—a longing for something that never even existed. It’s a sort of stand-in for the lost, suppressed Tibet; Bishop’s comment can be reformulated to say that Shangri-La can no longer be entrusted to Shangri-La, but rather to a quasi-real, specific Tibetan-Chinese place.

And then there are the locals and tour guides—those with the most complex utopia. Surely the money is good, and there is even some local ownership of tour companies. Sometimes there’s even poetic justice. “A lot of the big entrepreneurs are Tibetans who were previously exiled,” Oakes said. “That’s a really wonderful kind of irony.”

But there are also the old mixed feelings. In Shangri-La, there is “a lot of negotiation about, what does this all mean?” Oakes said, adding that one of the biggest eco-tourism companies there “is very vocal about how they think the whole Shangri-La [idea] is just this Western romanticization.”

Shangri-La is also still an attractive name to Westerners—a whole other factor in the ethnic tourism game, and beyond my scope, but clearly waiting in the wings.

They’re not just waiting there, either. Tourism is up on the newly open Mekong River, which flows from Tibet down the southern Chinese border, straight through Dai country. Indeed, it was in a New York Times travel article about the Mekong that I first heard mention of the “zoolike” ethnic theme parks.¹⁷

Lawrence said another huge impact is on the way. The Smithsonian Institution’s annual Folklife Festival on the Mall in Washington, D.C., in summer 2007 will feature people from all the countries along the Mekong. “It’s going to be the Mekong Festival,” she said. The Smithsonian doesn’t allow prerecorded music or plastic costumes, Lawrence said, but the impact of bringing such people to America, and the publicity of the area as a tourist destination, are impossible to predict. Westerners could start flooding the ethnic theme parks, too, for starters.

There are even Christian loonies who place the lost garden of Eden—one of Western culture’s original utopias—in Yunnan. Talk about your tourist opportunities. Someone could be building a giant statue of an angel with a flaming sword right now, for all I know.

But I guess that “impossible to predict” should be the operative phrase. It’s wrong to depict consumer-culture tourism as a force that sweeps in and obliterates everything. Consumerism is founded on the idea of exchange, ultimately. It’s a transaction, not an annihilation. To the point made by Oakes and others, tourism isn’t something that happens to culture, it’s part of culture.

But consumerism is a particular kind of tourist culture, and an insidious one. It leeches meaning by putting literally everything up for sale; while also promising you can always buy something to relieve the pain, even the pain the consumerism itself causes by its soullessness. This seems to be the tension between the tourists and the toured, both of whom should be reminded that utopias by definition do not exist.¹⁸

Hilton’s Shangri-La was a sealed-off, virtually unreachable, peaceful sanctuary from a modern world viewed as insane. China’s official Shangri-La is reachable by anyone with enough money and is specifically designed so the modern world will infringe, change, inject passion and turmoil; indeed, in part as a way of making palatable a literal invasion in recent history. One can view ethnic tourism with complexity while still saying fairly that China is missing the point.

In “Lost Horizon,” the Westerners are brought to Shangri-La by one of its own natives, who dies in the effort. The hero Conway, sympathetic to the utopia’s ideals, learns the man’s name only by overhearing the comment, “They have buried Talu.” Despite Conway’s affinity for Shangri-La, he is ultimately torn away by the passions of the modern world, and returns home in stronger disorientation than before.

I wonder how many Conways will leave today’s Shangri-La. I wonder how many Talus will be buried getting them there.

¹ The utopia metaphor/symbolism was already apparent to me regarding Shangri-La tourism, but was more strongly suggested and supported for the ethnic theme parks by several sources cited below, especially Tim Oakes and Xiaoping Wu.

² “Ethnic Tourism in Rural Guizhou; Sense of Place and the Commerce of Authenticity,” by Tim Oakes, in “Tourism, Ethnicity and the State in Asian and Pacific Societies,” M. Picard and R. Wood, eds.

³ The history and main features as described in “Beautiful Indonesia (In Miniature)” by David Womack, “Cabinet” magazine, no. 7, Summer 2002.

⁴ “China: Tourism Development and Cultural Policies” by Trevor H.B. Sofield and Fung Mei Sarah Li, in “Annals of Tourism Research,” vol. 25, no. 2, 1998, pp. 362-392.

⁵ Quote and figures from Oakes, “Ethnic Tourism in Rural Guizhou.”

⁶ “Ethnic Tourism—A Helicopter from ‘Huge Graveyard’ to Paradise?: Social Impacts of Ethnic Tourism on the Minority Communities in Guizhou Province, Southwest China” by Xiaoping Wu, “Hmong Studies Journal,” vol. 3, Winter 2000.

⁷ Wu, “Ethnic Tourism,” and Oakes, “Ethnic Tourism in Rural Guizhou.”

⁸ “Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and Environment in Revolutionary China” by Roberts Marks, “Environmental History,” July 2002.

⁹ From draft version of “Welcome to Paradise! A Sino-U.S. Joint Venture Project” by Tim Oakes, which will appear in the forthcoming book “China’s Transformations: The Stories Beyond the Headline.” Draft generously supplied by the author.

¹⁰ Tim Oakes, phone interview, Feb. 9, 2006.

¹¹ R. Todd King, e-mail, Jan. 17, 2006.

¹² Sofield/Li, “China.”

¹³ Oakes, “Ethnic Tourism in Rural Guizhou.”

¹⁴ Sofield/Li, “China.”

¹⁵ Ctrip.com (http://english.ctrip.com/Destinations/Sight.asp?Resource=2973).

¹⁶ Incidentally, the plane is hijacked by a foreigner who went to the US specifically to receive flight-school training—another interesting tidbit for the government officials who claim the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were “unimaginable.”

¹⁷ “The Mysterious Mekong Starts to Reveal Itself” by Joshua Kurlantzick, New York Times, Oct. 6, 2005. Incidentally, this is a great reminder that the truly important news is always at the end of the story, and “Odds & Ends”-type news is always more telling of the human condition than the main headlines.

¹⁸ I had my own version of this complex experience during a recent visit to my utopia, the Amazon, where I found myself in the strange situation of explaining to my local tour boat captain and guide what riverboat gambling is—an idea that interested him greatly. I tried to not hold any illusions about my experiences there, but that moment felt like lighting the fuse on some great big bomb.

Significant sources not cited in the text or footnotes include: www.chinahistoryforum.com (Eden discussion); China Internet Information Center; www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2005/09/15b.html; www.infomekong.com/tai_lue_secondary.htm; “Multiculturalism: Some Lessons from Indonesia” by Lorraine V. Aragon, “Cultural Survival Quarterly,” issue 18.2, Oct. 31, 1994; Polynesian Cultural Center; R. Todd King’s travel web site; The Temple Guy.com; www.yunnantourism.com. Margaret Lawrence phone interview conducted Jan. 31, 2006. Many thanks to Prof. Oakes for extraordinary assistance. Posted Feb. 20, 2006.

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