A Pumi Village and Its Controversial Roads - Part 2 of 2

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In today’s China, hundreds of thousands of small and struggling villages are facing a growing dilemma between development and preservation. In this two-part series, journalist Yongfeng Feng describes how one minority village has grappled with this challenge.

Jinhui Yang is a middle-class resident of Yushichang, a small Pumi minority village under the Jinghua administrative village in China’s southwestern Yunnan Province. His family earns around 3,000 yuan (US$380) annually, most of which is spent on his children’s education. Selling a horse or cow earns Yang about 1,600 yuan (US$203) a year, and a couple of heads of sheep can bring in 200 yuan (US$26) each. In addition, he sometimes picks wild fungi and sells them to buyers from the outside, which brings in another 300 yuan (US$38) or so. To buy necessities like salt and tea, Yang trades chicken and pigs for the money, while crops and vegetables from the family’s land provide just enough food to meet daily needs.

 “To get rich, build a road.” According to Yang, this slogan is common across rapidly developing China, but it doesn’t seem to be working in Yushichang. For a long time, he has suspected that outside logging companies in fact paid for a recent road built in the village, and that they undertook the project to facilitate access to the copper mines said to be in the area, or to the region’s rich natural forests. Local residents would benefit little from this extractive activity, Yang believes, but would pay a price. “Timber businessmen are very astute, and they expect something from us as a pay-off. Even though the government allows felling only Yunnan pine, they can still cut down our high-value trees such as spruce, fir, and Chinese yew, and transport them secretly to the outside through the newly built road.” Although the logging cap for the area is only 1,000 cubic meters a year, Yang notes that no one can really stop loggers with close government connections from felling thousands of cubic meters of trees.

Nujiang Prefecture, where Yushichang is located, is also home to various mineral deposits, most of which are sparsely distributed or tightly bound together, making them difficult to refine. Yet mines throughout the region are being exploited indiscriminately. “When Lanping [County] allowed zinc mining in the 1980s, almost everyone rushed to the mountains overnight and dug holes for zinc,” recalls Daoqun Yang, party secretary of Jinding Zinc Industry Ltd. Co, the most famous local enterprise in Nujiang Prefecture. 

According to Kaiyuan He, Daoqun Yang’s supervisor “everyone was feverishly digging holes and looking for zinc, and as a result, the government received few taxes and local people got little benefit.” On the other hand, he notes, natural resources and the local environment suffered considerably. “The front river of our village, for example, has been polluted by large amounts of discharge from small mining factories for more than ten years. The pollution has raised severe complaints from the local residents.”

Alternatives to Extraction

As an alternative, Daoqun He is pinning his hopes on a strategy for the sustainable development of Hexi County (the administrative unit within Lanping Country where Yushichang is located). He is trying to develop a 6,250-hectare base for growing herbs. “We have rich vegetation and agreeable weather here,” he explains. “The lands for taro and buckwheat cultivation will be good enough to be converted into herb plantations.”

This ambitious plan has stirred excitement in Jinghua Adminstrative Village. Zhouze Yang, the head of the village committee, was spurred to take other local officials on a trip to some of the more-developed villages in Yunnan Province to learn from their successes in herb growing and ecotourism. “We are gearing up a pilot project on growing medicinal herbs, and will maybe extend to ecotourism later,” Zhouze Yang explains. “We welcome anyone who is interested in investing in these projects.”

Jinhui Yang, the skeptic, is less optimistic. “Planting medicinal herbs requires certain technologies, which are not easy for our villagers to obtain. Relying on outside investments can also run certain risks. What shall we do if no one wants to buy the herbs that we grow?”

Instead, Jinhui Yang is putting his confidence in the livestock business. “If credit cooperatives would allow us to take out small loans and pay them back within five years rather than one year, or if there is a poverty-relief program that could help each household acquire 20 sheep, we will raise them in a sustainable and collaborative way, or even have a technical advice council. A few years later, more than half of us will be better off. And this does not require any road building at all,” Yang says.

Yushichang is home to some 90 households, and an investment of roughly 400,000 yuan (US$5,600) would fulfill Jinhui Yang’s dream of 20 sheep per household. “When we get rich, we will gradually construct a tap water system, build roads inside the village, and pay for teachers and household sanitation,” he explains. “And of course, Pumi culture in Yushichang will be better preserved with our economic confidence.”

Cultural Crossroads: Opening to the World or Bringing It Back Home?

On August 12, 2006, seven Pumi girls took to the stage at Beijing’s Laoshe Teahouse to perform their group’s distinctive music, dance, and songs, which they have painstakingly perfected over the past three years. They are members of the “Pumi Culture Training Group,” a pilot program of Zhe Chen’s Chinese National and Ethnic Culture Preservation Project. This October, the group will attend the Gala of Folk Songs, a cultural showcase in Beijing supported by China’s Central Television (CCTV). Although none of the performers has had professional training before, the performance is considered a shot in the arm for the fading Pumi culture.  

Dexiu Yang, one of two participants from Yushichang Village, joined the group early on. She is inspired to uphold the Pumi traditions, along with young people from other villages. “Traditional Pumi culture not only means folk song and dance, but also includes worship and sacrifice, herbs, embroidery, and oral skills,” she explains. “There are fewer people in our village who know about these traditions. Those who are left have been invited by Teacher Chen to teach us their skills. We learn from them at night and do our other work during the day.” Sometimes, the students’ interest in learning the old traditions is misunderstood by other villagers, and they are scolded for spending too much time dancing and singing instead of farming. Yet the group has survived the hardest times, says Dexiu Yang. “We are getting more support from the village, and also earning a reputation for our performance in the outside world.”

The students’ teacher, Zhe Chen, has been extremely grateful to the Pumi elites for their support in preserving the local culture. Chen started out working with the local government, but found that the relationship was unreliable, suffering from frequent shifts in policies. In contrast, the Xifan Culture Dissemination Center, composed of Pumi elites, is the cornerstone for the revival of Pumi culture. “We were curious of what Teacher Chen wanted when he first came to the village,” says zinc company secretary Daoqun Yang. “Did he also want our trees or mines? Now we know that he came for the revival of our Pumi culture. This is actually our own responsibility, but we certainly give him support. You see—the girls and boys in his group even look like professional performers now.”

Guodong Yang, who teaches worship and sacrifice to the group, is now 83 years old. He explains that China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s fragmented Pumi culture. “Many precious components are gradually disappearing as elderly people pass away. Teacher Chen’s effort is very timely.” Another resident, sixty-seven year old Guopeng He, teaches traditional lyrics to the students. “Pumi songs used to be a necessary part of our daily life. When we gathered at events such as weddings and funerals, we would sing. And everyone liked it. Once we started singing, people would come up and listen quietly. The more original and at ease you sung, the more popular you would become.” He explains how villagers would spend three hours singing about a tree, starting from its roots and continuing to the tips of its branches. “But now, only one or two people in other villages are able to join with me in such conversational singing.” Since the new cultural group was set up, however, He notes, young people in the village sit beside his fireplace at night to learn the traditional Pumi songs. “Some of them have already grasped parts of them,” says He.

“One of the highlights of the project is that it has opened a door for our children to show the outside world the essence of our Pumi culture, through frequent journeys,” notes Daoqun Yang. “So far, they have traveled to Kunming [the capital city of Yunnan], Beijing, and Shanghai. Some television crews even came and made films of them.” 

Older residents worry, however, about what the Yushichang’s younger residents will do next, once they start flowing out of the village in this way. Will they showcase the Pumi culture only to the outside world, or will they also bring it back home, for new generations to learn?  Performer Dexiu Yang hopes to do both, noting that when the group returns from their latest trip to Beijing, they will aim to spend more time with the villagers. “Our dance is not for show but a life necessity,” she explains. “Pumi culture originated from our village and from the surrounding forests. We all love Yushichang, and hope more people in the village can see and learn the rich Pumi culture that has been passed down to us.”

In the end, however, only time will tell how successful these efforts are, and what impact the new roads, development, and outside influences will bring to tiny Yushichang village.

Yongfeng Feng is an acclaimed editor and journalist who has worked at China Guangming Daily since 1995, reporting and writing on science and technology issues. He also works as a columnist at China Economic Times, and Shenzhen Economy Daily and has published one novel and several poems.

Outside contributions to China Watch reflect the views of the author, and are not necessarily the views of the Worldwatch Institute.