ABSTRACT
Although Guizhou's colonization has been a process extending back several centuries, it entered a fundamentally new phase in the early twentieth century. Nationalism became the primary source of legitimacy for bringing China's peripheral regions and peoples into the folds of a unified and modernizing Chinese society. While modern nationalism certainly added ideological fuel to the state's agenda of political and economic integration of peripheral territory, it more significantly provided a new justification for cultural integration. An integrated nation-state required not only advanced administrative and economic institutions, but also a unified and modernized culture enabling people throughout the territory to communicate, trade, and otherwise interact with one another. As suggested in Chapter 1, however, the project of nation-building and creating a modernized civic culture had simultaneously to invent a placed, museumified, and all-but-lost folk tradition upon which to build a sense of popular solidarity. In Guizhou, therefore, modernization and integration served to produce a foundation of local traditions from which to build a developed culture and economy. Even as the state continued to brand minority culture as “unhealthy” to the development of socialist modernity, it maintained a posture of selectivity, claiming the right to choose particular symbolic aspects of non-Han lifestyles to add to the stew of a (multi)national state. Touristic modernity in Guizhou embodies this seemingly paradoxical aspect of nation building: the simultaneous development of modernity and tradition, or the modernization of tradition.
