From the Tourismification of a Village to the Displacement of its Population: Expressions of a Hierarchical Relationship Between the Chinese State and the Wa Ethnic Minority

Abstract

The tourism development of the Wa village of Wengding, dubbed “the last primitive tribe” in China by public and private stakeholders in its promotion as a tourist site, is based around a complex of facilities and amenities in the village space, and tourist activities with a tendency to objectify the “primitive” aspect of “traditional Wa culture” and the Wa people themselves. This village on the periphery of the People’s Republic of China is both a locus for the expression of the expectations and representations of visitors – primarily urban Han – about this village community, and the construct of a hierarchized relationship between the Han civilisation and this ethnic minority. After more than a decade of tourism development, the recent measure to displace the village community to a “New Rural Village” in turn exemplifies what the author terms “internal primitivism”, an extreme form of Orientalism.