Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China / Edition 1 available in Paperback, eBook
Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0804770255
- ISBN-13:
- 9780804770255
- Pub. Date:
- 10/14/2010
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0804770255
- ISBN-13:
- 9780804770255
- Pub. Date:
- 10/14/2010
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China / Edition 1
Buy New
$26.00Buy Used
$19.01-
-
SHIP THIS ITEM
Temporarily Out of Stock Online
Please check back later for updated availability.
-
Overview
This ethnography pits the Nuosu youths' adventures, as part of their passage to manhood, against the drastic social changes in their community and, more broadly, China over the last half century. It offers fascinating material for courses on migration, globalization, youth culture, public health, and development at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804770255 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/14/2010 |
| Series: | Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Passage to Manhood
Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest ChinaBy Shao-hua Liu
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7024-8
Chapter One
The Meandering Road to Modernity
IN AUGUST OF 2004, I sat discussing my interest in AIDS and contemporary Nuosu social change with several Nuosu friends who had gathered in Xichang, the capital city of Liangshan Prefecture. One of them, a high-ranking government official, half-jokingly remarked, "If you want to study how Communist governance has failed us Nuosu, go to Zhaojue County!" Then he added with a tinge of sarcasm, "And there, you will also see what effect the Han people have had on the Nuosu."
My eventual understanding of Zhaojue's recent history and the AIDS problem in the county confirmed this official's comments. During my intensive fieldwork in Zhaojue's Limu Township in 2005, I came to realize that all that remained in this county, after China launched its market reform in 1978, were the tatters of failed socialist modernity projects implemented over the previous two decades. The county had pointedly been bypassed in the capitalist development scheme; in 1978 the Liangshan prefectural government moved its capital from the county seat of Zhaojue County to Xichang City. Both the collective and the market reform eras have brought about controversial developments for the Nuosu in general and Zhaojue in particular. Problems of drug use and AIDS concomitant with the drastic social transformation of the Nuosu there have more recently been added to the long story of the county's hardships.
My examination of the historical twists and turns that have shaped Nuosu society must be understood within the sweep of China's modernization projects, which began in 1956. Once incorporated into the Chinese state, the Nuosu had little choice but to accept and try to adjust to its grand development plans. The shifting position of the Nuosu within the state has thus been a consequence of China's modernization efforts, which occurred in two distinct phases with uniquely different characteristics; these have produced diverse long- and short-term effects in Nuosu communities.
Watershed Events in Nuosu History
Within a mere fifty years, the Nuosu people experienced three distinct types of social life: kinship-based local autonomy (before 1956), socialist collectivism (1956-78), and market capitalism (post-1978). Beginning in the 1950s the Nuosu, a nonstate, pre-monetary, kinship-based society, was first forcibly incorporated into the Chinese socialist polity. It became one of the fifty-five officially recognized minority nationalities and was subjected to radical transformation in order to acquire a "civilized" status. The top-down command governance established during the collective era firmly wrapped the Nuosu into the socialist state. Subsequently, Nuosu communities were relegated to the periphery of state-initiated modernization projects and marginalized during the market reform era, when capitalist-oriented development favored the coastal provinces and metropolitan regions over the poor, minority-dominant interior. In China's twentieth-century state-building process, the Nuosu suffered doubly, both as an "uncivilized" minority nationality and as rustic "backward" peasants (Cohen 1993; Litzinger 2000). The Nuosu's marginalization can be vividly seen in Zhaojue's recent history.
Zhaojue County is located in the so-called core area (fuxin diqu) of Liangshan, where the great majority of residents are Nuosu. Zhaojue County has perhaps the most concentrated Nuosu population in Liangshan: of the approximately 200,000 residents, nearly 97 percent are Nuosu, and the rest are mainly Han people, mostly government officials, teachers, and businesspeople residing in the county seat (Sichuan sheng 2002). This county encountered the Chinese Communists earlier than many other core areas, and in 1952 the new Communist government chose it to be the prefecture capital of Liangshan. Before then, no external state agency had successfully established a permanent presence in this remote Nuosu-dominant area enclosed by mountains.
Old Liangshan as a Peripheral Power over Han Chinese
Prior to the 1950s, Liangshan had been an independent and sovereign territory, not ruled by either imperial China or theocratic Tibet. The Han referred to the Nuosu in Liangshan as Lolo, independent Lolo, or Yi (i.e., "barbarians"). Their relationship with the Han state had been both aloof and tense owing to their political autonomy and the practice of capturing and enslaving Han Chinese. Traditionally, Nuosu society had four strata: nzymo ([Ch.] tusi, or ruler), nuo (black Yi, or aristocrat), qunuo (white Yi, or commoners), and mgajie and gaxy ([Ch.] wazi, or slaves). Han state officials and individuals could not readily gain access to Nuosu-dominant areas without the protection of strong nzymo and nuo (Goullart 1959; Lin 1961; Winnington 1959).
Before Communist rule, Nuosu society had no consistent political organization or power structure above cyvi (Nuosu lineages and clans) (Lin 1961). The Nuosu people recognize only a few dozen large clans, despite their sizable population in Liangshan (Ma 1999). Unlike the Han Chinese, who record their ancestry in written genealogies and usually commemorate only recently deceased immediate ancestors (Cohen 1990), the Nuosu memorize complete genealogies of lineages by rote (Hill and Diehl 2001). Teaching children to recite their genealogies, including both the father's and the mother's lines, has been an important part of Nuosu family education. Through the seniors' intensive instruction and the children's extensive drilling on lineage ancestors, most Nuosu children between the ages of four and six can recite family genealogies to thirty or forty generations and understand that they cannot survive without their paternal and maternal lineages (Ma 2003). Kinship principles traditionally dictated Nuosu people's social classifications, marital options, and residential distribution. Further, individual rights and obligations, as well as hereditary professions and public authorities, were couched in kinship terms. Social morality and cosmological beliefs were also embedded in their kinship universe.
Limu was a typical Nuosu community that had both strong lineage organizations and a strict social hierarchy. Limu was nominally a region that belonged to the nzymo lineage, the Lili, while the de facto ruler in daily life was the resident nuo lineage, the Ma. Under the nuo, there were two sizable qunuo lineages, the Lewu and Anyu, and several small- to medium-sized qunuo lineages. Before the 1950s, slaves were said to be either Han Chinese who had been captured by nuo and qunuo, or their offspring.
The traditional Nuosu way of life was subsistence agriculture, with sheep and goat pasturing in the mountains. Their main crops were buckwheat, corn, and potatoes (Lin 1961). In the pre-state era (circa pre-1956), the Nuosu in the core area did not have a currency-driven market economy or fixed marketplaces; barter was the main way of obtaining the goods and services that people did not produce by themselves. The few Nuosu people who had experience of market mechanisms at that time traded primarily on the ethnic borderlands of Liangshan, and that trade had everything to do with opium.
The Introduction of Opium to Liangshan
China was overwhelmed by opium consumption in the late nineteenth century. By 1906 about 16.2 million people, or 3.6 percent of the total population, were daily opium smokers (Courtwright 2001, 33; Newman 1995, 787). The ever-growing demand for opium, as well as the promised profits from this cash crop, bolstered mass poppy production in southwest China, especially in Sichuan Province, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century (Bello 2005; Trocki 1999).
Around 1910, Han people introduced poppy cultivation into Nuosu areas, with the assistance of certain nzymo and nuo, and grew it in remote and isolated mountains as a way of evading the anti-opium campaigns launched by the Qing court (Zhou 1999). In subsequent decades, opium planting became widespread in Liangshan because Nuosu landowners, mostly nzymo and nuo, realized that they could use it to trade with Han people for silver ingots or dollars ((tuotuo yin or bai yin), cloth, salt, and other everyday commodities. Opium soon changed the Nuosu landscape. As historian Doak Barnett commented after a trip to the borders of Tibetan and Nuosu areas in Sichuan in 1948, "Most Yi [Nuosu] were farmers, and one of their principal crops was opium" (Barnett 1993, 415). The Chinese government's surveys of Liangshan in the early 1950s, including Nuosu core areas as well as ethnically mixed areas, also indicated that between 50 and 80 percent of the households, both Han and Nuosu, engaged in poppy farming and that 50 to 60 percent of the local populations smoked opium regularly (Sun, Shi, and Zhu 1993, cited in Zhou 1999).
Opium altered the closed economy of Nuosuland most significantly by involving the Nuosu in a monetary trade that tipped the balance of the Nuosu-Han relationship. The influx of sudden wealth through the opium trade also brought with it deadly new weapons-guns, rifles, and bullets-that replaced the Nuosu's old weapons, such as bows and arrows, poles and sticks, leather shields, and long knives. New armaments enabled the locally powerful Nuosu to protect their clans and dependents, to feud with their Nuosu enemies and other ethnic groups, and to capture more Han slaves for opium production and other labor (Lin 1961; Sichuan sheng 1999; Zhou 1999). Opium trade usually took place in the periodic markets held on the borders of Nuosu-Han habitations, not within Nuosu-dominant areas (Leng and Ma 1992; Liu 2007). Occasionally opium was also bartered between the Nuosu themselves in exchange for slaves or other needs. For example, a qunuo who wanted to smoke opium had to exchange food with the opium-growing nuo.
The introduction of opium to Nuosu society presented a novel and luxurious commodity whose consumption occurred along the lines of preexisting social strata: mainly only wealthy and powerful people could enjoy it. The embodiment of social hierarchy and wealth status in the consumption of opium is part and parcel of contemporary Nuosu reminiscences concerning this substance. An old bimo (ritual healer), who is classified as a qunuo, rehearsed a Nuosu saying: "'Opium is the food and candy of nzymo and nuo.' Only nzymo, nuo, and well-off qunuo could afford to smoke opium." For this reason, he himself took up opium smoking in the 1940s, for the sake of "gaining face."
Limu, like other Nuosu areas in old Liangshan, underwent changes brought about by the introduction of opium and new weapons. Before 1950 only a small number of Han people traveled to Limu as merchants. They paid protection fees to the powerful nuo for permission to enter Nuosu territories and for escorts composed of armed nuo and their slaves. The eighty-two-year-old granny Qubi, who had spent her whole life in Limu, recalled in 2005:
I first saw Han people when I was around six or seven years old. They didn't have a "horse's head" [i.e., look monstrous] as we imagined. [Chuckle.] ... Han merchants came to us to exchange cloth and salt for sheepskin and pig bristles. Nuo might exchange opium for silver ingots, and we qunuo women exchanged eggs for thread, which we used to make clothes. Han merchants had to ask nuo for permission and protection beforehand, lest they become slaves.
Opium brought great fortunes and power to the Nuosu. Nevertheless, the enormous power they wielded over various ethnic groups, including the Han in this border area of the Southwest, evaporated after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. When the new Chinese state launched the Democratic Reform in minority-dominated peripheral areas in 1956, the imposition of state authority rapidly and drastically transformed Nuosu society in terms of its social structure and its relationship with the Han.
1956 as the Beginning of Socialist Modernity
The establishment of the Chinese Communist polity in Liangshan in the mid-twentieth century marked the beginning of the Nuosu's modernization experience and eventually ushered them into a socialist version of the "Brave New World." Socialist China attempted to transform the Nuosu in line with its goal of achieving a unified, modern nation-state. All previous Chinese polities-whether imperial or nationalist-had attempted to define just who are properly Chinese and determine how to "civilize" the peripheral "barbarians," but as Harrell (1995, 1996) points out, socialist China instituted the most sweeping and systematic measures to achieve these goals. Socialist China adopted the Marxian-Morganian evolutionary theory to justify the transformation of "backward" cultures and societies into "advanced" ones. The state agents for modernization projects, such as ethnologists who studied and categorized the minorities, described the Nuosu according to the state's established typologies. The state relegated the Nuosu to a low rung on the human societal development ladder, classifying them as the only remaining "slave society" extant in China in the 1950s. Fixing their identity as members of a uniquely backward "slave society" was only the first act of the state's official stigmatizing of Nuosu people and communities. As Giddens has noted, "The practical impact of social science and sociological theories is enormous, and sociological concepts and findings are constitutively involved in what modernity is" (Giddens 1990, 16). In other words, this official label would be integrated into the contemporary Nuosu's construction of the self (Hill 2001), and it has continued to negatively inform the Nuosu about their own culture, society, and people.
From the 1950s to the late 1970s, China experimented with socialist modernity through centrally planned governance in order to realize the utopian Marxist goal of equality. As William H. Sewell argues, however, totalitarian states' practices have never been successful in achieving cultural uniformity. The typical cultural strategy of such powers is "not so much to establish uniformity as it is to organize difference. They are constantly engaged in efforts not only to normalize or homogenize but also to hierarchize, encapsulate, exclude, criminalize, hegemonize, or marginalize practices and populations that diverge from the sanctioned ideal" (Sewell 2005, 172). Under the Chinese state, the Nuosu have experienced these transformations within only one or two generations.
The Democratic Reform
The socialist state's enormous army "liberated" Liangshan in 1950. Two years later, the Communist government chose the county seat of Zhaojue County to be the capital of Liangshan Prefecture in its efforts to firmly establish itself in the Nuosu core area. Its initial governance simultaneously upset the Nuosu social hierarchy and incorporated that hierarchy into the party-state. Slaves were released from the control of the nuo. Some of the slaves, dubbed "progressive proletarians," became core cadres in the party. At the same time, cadres in the Liberation Army in Zhaojue County were ordered to assign members of the traditional Nuosu aristocracy to new governmental positions in 1951 because "their functions were crucial" to mediation between the ruling newcomers and the local Nuosu populace (Luo 1999). The incorporation of local elites into a new governmental apparatus where they acted as state-community intermediaries was a common practice in the early days of socialist China (Harrell 2007).
The new socialist state did not immediately introduce the sweeping changes to Nuosu areas that it instituted in Han-dominant areas. The state moved ahead gingerly with its socialist projects, largely owing to its dread of long-standing Nuosu power and its sensitivity toward minority-Han relations. The government waited four years before it initiated any large-scale project in Liangshan; but in 1956 it finally undertook a major program called the Democratic Reform, which ran until 1958. Resistance, especially from the nuo, to the state's imposition of power over Nuosuland sparked violent protests, military confrontations, and killings in many parts of Liangshan, Limu included.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Passage to Manhood by Shao-hua Liu Copyright © 2011 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Preface xi
Introduction: Bringing Peripheries to the Center 1
1 The Meandering Road to Modernity 27
2 Manhood, Migration, and Heroin 51
3 Multivocal Drug Control 81
4 Contentious Individuality on the Rise 104
5 Failed State AIDS Intervention 130
6 AIDS and Its Global Stigmatization 162
Conclusion 187
Notes 199
Bibliography 207
Index 225