Protesting power: everyday resistance in a touristic Chinese Miao village

Abstract

Everyday resistance is a fruitful realm of study in tourism analysis. Rooted in in-depth ethnography, this article focuses on the everyday resistance in a Chinese Miao village, where the villagers were defending their interests in the context of elite-directed and capital-intensive tourism development. It reveals how particular incidents of resistance configured among these villagers, and pays particular attention to their internal politics and the cultural underpinnings of their resistance acts. Responding to various situations, these Miao peasants made rational choices among possible trajectories of action. If the resistance was direct, it was not open; if it was open, it was not direct. They, as the dominated, worked the existing system to their advantage: they cleverly utilized policy gaps to persist in their resistance; and they strategically used tourists as the scapegoat to resist the dominant. Despite the marginality and temporariness of the results, their resistance did affect the various forms of exploitation that they confronted, and was therefore significant in the sense that it narrowed the options available for the dominant regarding tourism development.