Cultural strategies of development: Implications for village governance

Since the early 1990s, culture has come to be recognized as a significant regional development resource in China. On January 10, 1990, People’s Daily printed a speech by Minister of Culture Li Ruihuan titled “Some Questions Relevant to Enhancing the Outstanding Elements of National Culture” (Guanyu hongyang minzu youxiu wenhua de ruogan wenti). According to Guo Yingjie, this speech was the Party’s green light for the development of national and local folk cultures, resulting in the rapid publication of many books, magazines, and encyclopedias on regional folk art, opera, dance, acrobatics, painting, and calligraphy. In his speech, Li also instructed that “cultural sites and relics,” ancient texts, and manuscripts were to be preserved, protected, and restored; that new buildings, especially libraries, museums, theaters, schools, parks, and bridges, should contribute to a “physical environment that exhibits distinct national features” (Guo 2004: 31). Guo interprets Li’s speech and its implications in the context of the Party’s post-1989 turn to traditional culture, part of a broader effort to rekindle nationalism and shore up its legitimacy within and control over an alienated society. But the new regionalist renaissance initiated in part by Li’s speech can also be interpreted as part of a broader “cultural turn” in regional development strategies, one in which cultural resources have come to be viewed as possessing equal if not greater economic potential than traditional factor endowments typically marshaled by local governments in their development planning. In addition to the Party’s efforts to rekindle national pride in the wake of

widespread post-Tiananmen malaise, the cultural turn in 1990s regional development was also a direct outcome of the state’s fiscal decentralization. With central government revenues in a dramatic free fall because of a dysfunctional tax system inherited from the planned economy, fiscal responsibilities were increasingly devolved to local governments (see Oksenberg and Tong 1991; Wong 1991; Wong et al. 1995; Lardy 1998; Wedeman 1999). This resulted in a new entrepreneurial outlook on the part of many local governments as revenue generation came to be regarded as the primary function of the local state. In this climate of entrepreneurialism, local culture is being viewed increasingly not just as a resource for pride, nationalism, and Party

legitimacy, but as a viable and even dynamic economic sector capable of significant revenue generation, particularly in situations where the local state’s capital investment resources were limited. As Minxin Pei (2003) has noted, however, this entrepreneurialism has not reversed the declining effectiveness of the Chinese state to fund public services at the local level. The turn to culture raises the question of whether cultural strategies of development have ameliorated or exacerbated the government’s increasing inability to provide for the public’s basic needs. Examples of the cultural turn in China’s regional development abound

(Feng 1999a; Oakes 2000; Goodman 2002). On a provincial scale, there have been efforts to reconstruct provincial identity by mobilizing regional cultural symbols in the hope that a popular sense of regional cultural identity will somehow translate into a vibrant commercial economy, increased investments, and increased revenues. Prominent examples include the rise of Nanyue culture in Guangdong (Lary 1996), Chu culture in Hubei (Friedman 1994), merchant culture in Shanxi (Zhang Zhengming 1998) and Anhui (Zhou and Li 1998), and Gan culture in Jiangxi (Feng 1999b). Municipal, district, and county governments have also been involved in exploiting cultural resources for development purposes. Often this simply involves turning a local specialty product into a “culture” in order to laden its exchange value with symbolic capital. Thus, counties throughout China have been promoting themselves as hearths of such things as “Hunan lotus culture,” “bamboo weaving culture,” “paper-cut culture,” “bamboo shoot culture,” “liquor distilling culture,” “tea culture,” and so on. These examples illustrate the way that culture is often viewed in simple instrumental terms, as a mere label meant to enhance the value of an export product. Yet cultural strategies of development often mean much more than this. While there remains a great variety of ways in which local governments

approach culture as a development resource, there is consistency in the view that the culture industries represent an enormous untapped resource for many places. Thus, while local governments are increasingly interested in promoting local culture for development, they are hoping to rely on a growing commercial sector in order to develop these resources. This entrepreneurial approach to development-which could be characterized in terms of a public-private partnership in the development of cultural resources-is remarkably similar to that taken by many North American cities. The “entrepreneurial city” emerged in the context of a broader transformation in the United States political economy whereby public goods provision was transferred to the private sector. Despite being widely viewed as a withdrawal, or shrinking, of the state vis-à-vis the market, this “neoliberal revolution” in fact saw a growth in collaboration between government and private actors. As argued by critical geographers, the concept of the “entrepreneurial city” suggested that North American urban governance had been transformed from a system of managerialism and public oversight to one of market boosterism. Cities, it was argued, were privatizing formerly public

industries and services (such as education, utilities, and public transport), and turning to the private sector to promote urban economic growth (Logan and Molotch 1987; Jonas and Wilson 1999). One particular criticism of urban entrepreneurialism argued that it ceded to the private sector the public spaces within which urban street democracy was thought to thrive. Culture necessarily played an important role in urban entrepreneurialism

because turning cities into economic growth machines meant emphasizing their unique place-based amenities and endowments. Thus, in addition to being redefined as entrepreneurial rather than managerial, city governments were seen as deliberately fostering a cultural economy. Cities sought to attract culture industries to invest in the urban labor market while at the same time helping to produce and improve the city’s image. In an age of flexible accumulation, mobile capital, and geographically expanding labor markets, cities now competed with one another for exposure in a globalizing economy. Place-based attributes like local cultural distinctiveness thus became important in distinguishing one city from its competitors. Logan and Molotch (1987: 294) argued that municipal officials were “in the business of manipulating place for its exchange value.” Selling places, however, was not at all a risk-free prospect. David Harvey (1989b) argued that North American cities became market players and that they assumed the financial risk of private investment. Entrepreneurialism was a risky undertaking in terms of urban governance because development projects became “such a focus of public and political attention that they divert concern and even resources from the broader problems that may beset the region or territory as a whole” (Harvey 1989b: 8). Since the emergence of entrepreneurial cities in North America, culture

has become a key focus of international development on a much broader scale. Culture is now recognized throughout much of the world as a vital partner in the generation of economic value chains. Disputes over the treatment of the “culture industries” have taken up a greater and greater share of WTO negotiations, and this was true in the case of China’s WTO accession as well. And culture has become central to the development agenda promoted by UNESCO, as evidenced by its promotion of the “World Decade for Cultural Development” (1988-97). Culture is now regarded as the key to sustainable economic development. As noted by Michael Keane (2004: 82), “This kind of cultural development is based on the vision of a future in which national governments deliver basic public services such as telecommunications, health, and education, while facilitating the conditions for value-adding knowledge-based industries based upon sustainable development models” (see also Matarasso 2001; Yüdice 2003). We also see here a belief that cultural strategies of development are a vital part of a larger package of “good governance” on the part of the state. If cultural strategies of development are indeed comparable between local

governments in China and those in North American cities, then the following question presents itself: what are the implications of China’s cultural

strategies of regional development for local-level governance? Asking this question, of course, implies several others. What is the role of the state in China’s cultural strategies of regional development? To what extent does the entrepreneurial city model match China’s regional political economy? Have cultural strategies of development in China resulted in the privatization of formerly communal cultural resources? If so, has the privatization of culture had any impact on the state’s provision of basic welfare? Or, have cultural strategies in fact succeeded in generating a stronger sense of local identity? Has cultural development resulted in stronger social networks and community ties, resulting in more effective local self-governance? This chapter represents a preliminary attempt to address these questions by looking at the ways cultural strategies of development in Guizhou province have influenced village governance. I examine three case studies, each revealing different ways that villages have engaged state development strategies, each with different outcomes. The chapter thus raises an additional question to those above: how do cultural strategies-which are typically thought to emerge from and predominantly benefit urban regions-relate to rural communities? In a situation where public money seldom flows down to the villages, do cultural strategies improve village access to welfare provision? That is, do cultural strategies contribute to the kind of governance outcomes hoped for by UNESCO, or is culture a resource that only continues the diversion of funds towards revenue generation and away from basic needs? By examining the cases of three villages which have engaged Guizhou’s

incipient cultural economy in different ways, I argue that cultural strategies of development in China introduce a capital logic that greatly influences village governance. Cultural strategies create economic value where none before existed and thus initiate new struggles over ownership among villagers, state actors, and entrepreneurs. The privatization of cultural resources has presented new challenges to village governance even while it has been promoted as both an answer to the fiscal challenges faced by many rural communities and a key to the establishment of a new kind of rural citizen. As revealed in the case studies, villagers have responded to these challenges in a variety of ways. And while it is clear that cultural strategies are undoubtedly reshaping villager subjectivity in significant ways, they often do so at the cost of new kinds of social polarization. It should be noted at the outset that this chapter does not propose a defi-

nitive analysis of China’s cultural economy. Its focus is rather on the implications for governance of the local state’s development strategies, in which the cultural economy figures prominently. The notion of a “cultural economy” is often associated with two broad arguments in the social sciences: first, that there has been a broad “cultural turn” in economic knowledge and, second, that the value of economic goods is increasingly dominated by symbolic or cultural properties (du Gay and Pryke 2002). Of the former argument-that culture is regarded as an increasingly important way in which we understand the economy-there is little dispute. But the latter

claim remains highly debated. Thus, while Scott Lash and John Urry (1994), Allen Scott (2000), and Sharon Zukin (1995) all argue that the political economy of North American cities has undergone a cultural turn accompanied by the rise of a “symbolic economy,” Daniel Miller (2002: 173) has argued that there is no convincing evidence of such a shift and that the assertion that the economy is now more cultural than before represents “a sleight of hand through which a shift in academic emphasis is presupposed to reflect a shift in the world that these academics are describing.” Regardless of whether China’s economy can be said to have undergone some sort of “cultural turn” in any empirical sense, I argue that the local state nevertheless behaves as if this is in fact the case. The cultural economy in China is thus very real in a policy sense, if not in an economic sense, and such policy has specific material outcomes on the local scale. Describing these outcomes is therefore the primary objective of this chapter.