Gilding the pearl: cultural heritage, sexual allure and polychromatic exoticism on Hainan island

[PB 11.2 (2010) 119-140] Perfect Beat (print) ISSN 1038-2909doi:10.1558/prbt.v11i2.119 Perfect Beat (online) ISSN 1836-0343

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011, 1 Chelsea Manor Studios, Flood Street, London SW3 5SR.

Philip HaywardJohn Fangjun Li

Gilding the pearl:*

cultural heritage, sexual allure and polychromatic exoticism on Hainan island

Philip Hayward is Director of Research Training at South-ern Cross University (Australia), an adjunct professor of Pattimura University (Ambon, Indonesia) and editor of Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures (www.shimajournal.org).

Division of Research Southern Cross University PO Box 157 Lismore NSW 2480 Australia [email protected]

John Fangjun Li is co-ordinator of the Australia-China Music Industry Research Network and a PhD candidate at Macquarie University (Australia), studying the develop-ment of the Chinese music industry.

Department of Media, Music and Cultural Studies Macquarie University NSW 2109 [email protected]

AbstractHainan island, located between 108–111 degrees east and 18–20 degrees north (on a similar latitude to northern Vietnam), is a southern tropical ‘outlier’ of continental China that has devel-oped as a major tourist centre over the last two decades. Following an introduction to the socio-cultural history of the region, the article analyses the manner in which a series of post-war media and performance texts created an exotic and erotic image for the island (and for its indigenous Li population in particular) that has been perpetuated and extended in a range of contemporary performance practices. While this article addresses issues of representation, its discussions are not primarily concerned to identify the misrepresentation of an essential island referent (i.e. the ‘real’ Hainan) but rather to address the interplay between a set of media representations of the island and contemporary cultural performance on it. The !nal section analyses the manner in which the recently opened ‘Impression Hainan’ showcase in Haikou provides an early twenty-!rst-century in"ection of a range of the representational tendencies we discuss. Our conclusion re"ects on the impact of the exoticist and eroticist commodi!cation of the island on its indigenous minorities.

Keywords: exoticism; Hainan; Li; sexual allure; tourism

* Our title derives from the English phrase ‘gilding the lily’ (referring to the vain and unnec-essary ornamentation of an object of natural beauty) and the translation of the former Chinese name for Hainan, Chu-yai (‘the Shore of Pearls’).

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© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011.

Hainan province comprises a main island (Hainan), a number of small coastal islets and three groups of small islands to the south. With a landmass of 33,920 km2 (13,100 sq mi) and a population of just over eight million (national census 'gures, 2005), the province is one of the more sparsely populated areas of China. The present-day population is dominated by Han Chinese of mainland descent (84+%); with the indigenous Li comprising around 10 per cent (just under one million) and the remainder comprising Miao, Hui and other Chinese indigenous peoples (national census 'gures, 2005). This demographic re(ects a long history of mainland Chinese incursion into and subsequent colonization of the island that began over two thousand years ago. The island appears to have been origi-nally inhabited by indigenous people of Austronesian descent who were largely displaced by Li Chinese from Guangxi Province around 100–500 &). Mainland Chinese settlement began in limited areas during the Song Dynasty (960–1279 &)), when the island (and its northern tip in particular) was commonly referred to as Chu-yai (‘the Shore of Pearls’). Despite this romantic name, mainlanders regarded the island as a troubling and barbarous region in need of ‘civilizing’ Han in(uence (see Schafer 1970). As Schafer has noted in his survey of Song period literature:

The 'erce and brilliant world of Hainan, surrounded by blank, primordial waters, provided little that the Chinese imagination could grasp. Mirroring no familiar conception, it could paralyze the minds even of cultivated men. Or if some comprehensible content could be discerned, it was likely to be a loath-some and deadly vision—a scene as unlike the good homelands far to the north as possible (1970: 102).

Han colonization intensi'ed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dis-placing the Li from much of the north and precipitating con(ict that saw Miao mercenaries from Guizhou brought in to support Han settlement, many of whom subsequently settled on Hainan (and descendents of whom now number around 60,000, mainly located in the inner west of the island). One of the most distinctive aspects of Hainan’s remote, exotic otherness to mainland China, as perceived by various Han travellers, settlers and administra-tors, has been the socio-sexual morés of its indigenous population, which have persisted to the present, albeit in a somewhat diluted form, despite the best endeavours of generations of Han Chinese educators and policy makers. As Yang has detailed:

Li people’s attitudes and customs concerning sex are much less restrictive than those of the Han Chinese. Unlike Mahayana Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, which regard premarital sex as undesirable or even sinful, indigenous Li religious beliefs are relatively tolerant of, or not particularly against, such sexual activities. As long as rules of exogamy are followed, unmarried young people are allowed to

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have sexual affairs freely, although they clearly acknowledge that, because of the custom of arranged marriage, most such sexual affairs or courtship will not lead to marriage… Similarly, extramarital sex is also relatively tolerated (1998: 203).

While this, in itself, was signi'cantly ‘other’ to more conservative Han morés, its manifestation in a series of cultural practices rendered it visible in public social practices. As Yang also details, the interaction of groups of young Li men and women in rural areas has traditionally included a number of dance-based interactions and, particularly, ‘erotic musical activities’ (which he abbreviates as ‘EMA’ [ibid.] Also see Yang [1990]), designed to facilitate amorous interactions through what might (in a western context) be termed the socially-sanctioned ‘serenading’ of potential partners. In addition to individual EMA encounters, fes-tivals such as the annual Funiangfu event in Dongfang Zhen continue to attract young Li. Reporting on one festival he attended in the 1980s, Yang has described how:

[a]t night bon'res are lit in the 'elds, and people sing, dance and play games around the 're. Hainan is often referred to by the local people as ‘the island where summer goes on for ever’; the warm and usually pleasant tropical climate provides favourable conditions for outdoor EMA. Lovers may 'nd secluded spots or may go back to their lonnggui [communal youth houses] for intimacy (1998: 206).

Con'rming concerns about the potentially transformative effects of the ‘barba-rous’ island upon Han migrants discussed by Schafer (1970), such practices have not historically been con'ned to the Li. The descents of Han migrants who settled on the island several centuries ago now represent a distinct (‘localized’) cultural minority in their own right. Numbering around two million, this population is pri-marily distinguished from more recent Han settlers (discussed below) by their use of a particular local dialect of Mandarin. In the case of some old Han communities, such as those living around Danzhou (in northwest Hainan), their proximity to and awareness of Li socio-sexual customs and behaviour has led them to develop similar practices (Yang 1998: 207–12), dispersing erotic cultural activity and more ‘open’ attitudes to sexuality across the island. Han awareness—and, in some cases, adoption—of Li social-sexual customs and attitudes has created a pervasive image of the island as a place of signi'cant difference from mainland China, providing a particular in(ection to the island’s ‘character’ as perceived by travellers, more recent settlers and tourists. The ethnic make-up and identity politics of the island has been further complicated by distinct sub-groups within the majority Han population arising from more recent waves of migration, which Feng and Goodman summarize as comprising:

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‘Old Mainlanders’—Han migrants and their offspring who relocated to the island in the 1950s (c. 1 million), who speak standard Mandarin (1997: 55)Overseas Chinese migrants who relocated from South East Asia (and Indonesia and Malaysia in particular) in the 1950s and 1960s as a result of ethnic tensions and/or community violence and who speak standard Mandarin1 (c. 1 million) (ibid.)‘New Mainlanders’—Han migrants and their offspring who began arriv-ing after the economic reforms of the late 1980s (c. 800,000) who speak standard Mandarin (ibid.)

As this brief schema suggests, the complex make-up of contemporary Hainan society2 resists any easy division into indigenous and exogenous/migrant groups and identi'cation as Hainanese by members of any one group (and/or the inter-married offspring of various groups) occurs along a shifting range of historical and cultural credentials and sensibilities.

Post-war history, Hongse niangzi jun and representations of HainanThe stabilization of Hainan as an annex of Guandong province in the nineteenth

century allowed mainland Chinese business operations to exploit its primary resource base with particular regard to its mineral deposits and, later, rubber plan-tations and rice 'elds. But while Hainan remained a relatively peaceful and under-developed tropical ‘backwater’, its turbulent past recurred in a new guise in 1927 when its inaccessible interior became a base for communist insurgents 'ghting oppressive landowners and their Guomindang (Nationalist Party) supporters. The communist campaign continued over the next decade, at varying levels of intensity, and from 1943 on received active support from Li insurgents. Li communities were severely affected by the Japanese invasion of Hainan in 1938–39, not so much by the presence of foreign invaders as by the intrusion of Han Chinese from coastal regions (eeing inland to escape Japanese control. Li resistance erupted into an armed rebellion in 1943, with militants led by Wang Guoxing subsequently forging an alliance with communist forces, 'ghting against the Japanese until their with-

1. Although some original migrants and a small proportion of their offspring retain the ability to use Bahasa and/or other South East Asian languages. 2. Which also includes another distinct minority group, the predominantly Muslim Utsul people (c. 7000), who relocated from Indochina in the early eighteenth century and live mainly around the southern city of Sanya; a bilingual population who speak an Austronesian indigenous language along with Mandarin.

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drawal in 1945 and then against the Guomindang government that re-assumed administration of the island. Although driven from much of the Chinese mainland in late 1948, Guomingdang forces held out in areas of Hainan until October 1949, when they (ed to their residual island stronghold of Taiwan. Hainan’s historical signi'cance as both the earliest location for communist rebellion and as a place where Chinese indigenous peoples and communists fought together to oust Guomindang rule was recognized in the national celebra-tions of the declaration of the ‘People’s Republic’ of China in late 1949. A number of Li were brought to Beijing and presented to and acclaimed by Chairman Mao Zedong. As signi'cantly, as the only ethnic minority to actively collaborate with communist forces during the revolutionary struggles, the Li were singled out as a ‘model for minorities’ (Ramsey 1987: 246) and a group of Li performers were invited to Beijing to present a distinctive Li dance, the ryun-she. The dance, tradi-tionally performed as part of extended funeral rites (Yang 1995–96: 111–12), is similar to the Filipino tinikling and involves (traditionally, male) dancers stepping rhythmically between bamboo sticks that are clapped together by seated percus-sionists. Abstracted from its cultural context, the dance achieved national recogni-tion and was subsequently adopted as a featured item by Guandong Province’s Minzu Gewutuan (‘Ethnic Song and Dance Troupe’) and was performed widely during the late 1950s and 1960s (at the same time as its traditional practice and function subsided due, in no small part, to national policies aimed to eradicate ‘superstition’). As Yang has identi'ed, despite Communist disdain for traditional religious beliefs and practices, the Chinese Government required and promoted ‘the professional arts to use materials and forms of folk art for political propa-ganda purposes’ with the ryun-she being used to ‘symbolize the Li people’s love and respect for the Communist party’ (1995–96: 112). Li people were brought into the national spotlight in the 1950s through their incidental representation in one of the most prominent 'ction texts of the 1960s and 1970s, a multi-media product entitled Hongse niangzi jun (‘The Red Detach-ment of Women’). Written, initially as a novel, by mainland Chinese writer Liang Xin, Hongse niangzi jun celebrated the Hainanese insurrection of the 1930s and, in particular, the role of female combatants. The novel was adapted into a feature 'lm in 1960, directed by Jin Xie, and garnered ‘best 'lm’ and ‘best direction’ prizes in the inaugural national Hundred Flowers Awards in 1962. The 'lm gained wide distribution and exposure in China, with the director estimating its total national audience at 600 million people (c. 75% of the total national population at the time) (Liang 2001). Despite an absence of ‘box of'ce’ data from the Cultural Revolution, audiences for 'lms appear to have been sizeable in the period and Xin’s claim is, in all likelihood, substantially correct.

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A ballet version of the narrative premiered in Beijing in October 1964. The ballet had its genesis in a critique of the European ballet repertoire being per-formed in China in the early 1960s and, speci'cally, Premier Zhou Enlai’s sugges-tion that the Beijing Ballet School ‘move beyond foreign ballets about “princes and fairies” and try to create something more revolutionary such as a work depict-ing the Paris Commune or the October Revolution’ (Roberts 2008: 6). Taking this one step further, the company produced an adaptation of Hongse niangzi jun. Freely interpreting and embellishing its 'lm referent, the ballet included a number of elements that required extensive reinterpretation of the traditional Moscow derived choreography that had previously dominated Chinese ballet. As Roberts (2008) identi'es, the military theme and sequences required a much more assertive body performance style from the female dancers (an aspect informed by the company’s attachment to an army corps for project research) and a different rhythmic approach to realize those elements of Li traditional dance that principal composer Wu Zhuqiang incorporated into individual dance numbers. The score is notable for its incorporation of Li traditional music, most notably in the Li women’s dance sequence in Act III but also in its modi'cation of the Li song Wuzhi Shan, Wu Tiao He (‘Wuzhi Mountain, Five Rivers’) to provide the melody of the chorus to the musical piece Wan Quan Heshui Qing You Qing (‘Thousand Spring Waters are Pure and Pure’) used to accompany the Douli Wu (‘Bamboo Hat Dance’) sequence and in the use of a range of ‘exotic’ indigenous wind, percussion and string instruments incorporated into a western-style orchestra.3

A 'lm version of the ballet followed in 1971 (directed by Li Wenhua). While representations of the Li are incidental to the main thrust of the drama, the rep-resentation of young Li women is striking for its barely concealed eroticism at a time when Chinese authorities were stringent in censoring unnecessary romance or eroticism in dramatic arts. One particularly signi'cant routine occurs in Act III as part of the celebration of the tyrant Nanbatian’s birthday. The routine is clearly differentiated from the more compliant performance of Nanbatian’s personal slave girls by the Li women being ushered on stage by whip-cracking thugs. The routine involves nine female Li dancers, eight dressed in identical red costumes and one, the lead dancer, in a red skirt and white top. The main dance is preceded by a sequence when two men twist and contort the lead dancer’s body before she escapes into the women’s ensemble routine. As Ling Eng comments, their dance has ‘the highest degree of ethnic quality’ in the ballet (2009: 31) by virtue of its music sourcing a Li folk tune (with its distinct melodic intervals), its performance

3. See Ling Eng (2009: 30) for identi'cation of these.

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exclusively on indigenous instruments (that sound appropriately exotic even if an audience cannot identify their locality of origin), moves derived from Li tra-ditional dances and its dancers’ ‘ethnic’ costumes. The costume element merits comment. Unlike all the other female characters in the 'lm, who wear trousers or ankle-length skirts, the Li peasant girls’ skirts are signi'cantly shorter, at just below knee level, suggesting a lack of physical inhibition. This skirt length, and the skirt’s loose 't, also allows the lead dancer to reveal a signi'cant amount of lower thigh during her feature pirouettes—a particularly surprising occurrence in an of'cial sanctioned Cultural Revolution era production. This costuming was not unique to the 'lm; indeed the short skirt came to signify Li female identity more broadly. Of the 28 photographs of different dance styles shown in Kerfen’s 1985 survey of Chinese Dance, for instance, the only one in which the dancer’s skirts are short—in this case, slightly higher still, at knee length, is a photo of the Li ‘Straw Hat Dance’ from a stage performance of Hongse niangzi jun (Wang 1985: plate 7—unpaginated Appendix). In subsequent decades the hem continued its upwards migration, with contemporary Li dancers’ mid-thigh hemlines affording even more glimpses of (esh during their routines at cultural villages and festivals. The presence of the Li dance in the ballet (and, later, 'lm) became more signi'cant after 1966 since the performance of folk dance material during the Cultural Revo-lution was highly restricted as a result of the perception of leading artistic policy makers, such as Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, that folk dances were ‘unhealthy’ and/or ‘pornographic’ and that their music was suspect as ‘decadent’ (Wang 1985: 106). As discussed in the Introduction, the signi'cant element of erotic music and dance activity in Li culture makes their exemption from censorship and restriction all the more signi'cant (and paradoxical). While Ling Eng comments that the ethnic elements of the Li women’s dance in the 'lm are so accentuated that the dance seems ‘forced and even contrived’ (Wang 1985: 106), particularly when performed by enslaved young Li women for a tyrant as a birthday treat (ibid.); a counter-reading can also be suggested. In this regard, the Li women’s ability to express physical energy and joie de vivre—even if coerced/faked—presents a powerful image for masculine heterosexual desire to engage with and grounds for fantasizing about the inherent compliance and sexuality of Li/indigenous women (in implicit contradistinction to conven-tional Han women). In this regard, the Li dancers offer an exposition of female physicality and energy enacted against an exotic visual backdrop (identi'ed as a speci'c place—‘Hainan’) that was striking at a time of ‘politically correctness’ and programmatic austerity. The ballet received a major boost in 1967 when it became one of a small group of (initially eight) of'cially sanctioned yangbanxi (‘model performance works’)

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that came to dominate Chinese cultural life during the following decade.4 The prominence and promotion of these works ('ve Peking operas, three ballets and a symphonic work) during 1966–76 was remarkable and was solely dependent on the power that the Communist Party, and its Cultural Revolutionary cadres in particular, exercised over public culture in the period; achieving a ‘market pen-etration’ for a small group of cultural texts that exceeded anything that western media conglomerates could imagine. Far from market ‘saturation’, the promotion of a limited number of texts required constant repackaging and reformatting of the core ‘properties’. In addition to its 1971 screen adaptation, the ballet was also adapted into a Peking Opera form in 1972 that was adapted for the screen in the same year by director Cheng Yin. In the early to mid 1970s the two 'lm versions and stage productions continued to attract audiences and to represent impres-sions of Hainan in mainland China. Although substantially less widely dispersed, the ballet’s images of Hainan culture, and of lithesome Li women in particular, were extended and comple-mented by a further dance work designed and debuted by the (previously dis-cussed) Guandong Mingu Gewutuan in 1972. Entitled Xi song liang (‘Happily Giving Grain’) the work represented young Li women delivering fruit and vegetables to a government warehouse in lieu of tax. While the authors have not been able to view a performance of the work, Clark wryly identi'es that the female characters seem to 'nd the activity a source of ‘unbridled delight’ and observes that the ‘expectations of interaction between male and female performers were achieved by having the young women engage in banter and mild teasing with the driver of the vehicle carrying them and the grain’ (2008: 172). As he goes on to emphasize, the dance’s location in Hainan ‘among non-Han peoples allowed for more easy allusions to a heavily disguised sexuality’ (ibid.)—and further identi'es Hainan as a place of sexual latitude. Despite the wide circulation of images of Hainan’s tropical and cultural dif-ference in Chinese public culture during the 1950s–70s, the nature of the social and political system during the period mitigated against the development of tourist enterprises in Hainan that could exploit the local ‘branding’ and promotion offered by them. But, as subsequent sections outline, this situation underwent a major turnaround in the 1980s as China moved to a more economically liberal and pluralist system. The phenomena we address embody an allusive and complicit representation and perception of locations that has been articulated by Jewell and

4. Beyond its inexorable promotion as a yangbanxi, the success of the ballet’s overall design and of the opportunity for individual virtuosity it gave to its lead dancers is evident in its longev-ity (with the most recent stage revival in Beijing in 2007 at the recently opened new National Theatre).

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McKinnon in terms of media products’ role in creating new ‘associative cultural landscapes’ premised on ‘cultural or artistic associations…rather than any signi'-cant or present material culture’; resulting in places that ‘are social constructions, created and in turn, promoted to attract tourists’ (2008: 154).

‘Exotic substitution’: the development of tourism (1988–present)The rapid development of tourism in Hainan over the last two decades was initi-ated by the designation of Hainan as a new province and new Special Economic Zone in 1988. The former delivered a substantial degree of local autonomy and the latter extended an experimental project for encouraging economic develop-ment that had commenced in 1983.5 Feng and Goodman have identi'ed that the Chinese Government initiated these measures since the Hainan’s remoteness and marginality made it ‘expendable’, in that:

It was such a small economy, accounting for only half a per cent of the nation’s GDP, and its physical separation from the mainland meant that it would not do too much harm to China as a whole if experimental reform on the island led to unpleasant results or even chaos (1997: 61).

Hainan’s ‘physical separation’ from the mainland is a signi'cant conceptual point. Located at one remove from the mainland, its ‘islandness’ made its special status more manageable and less problematic than delineation of a mainland region contiguous with other areas as a special zone. One area that attracted immediate investment was that of tourism, in the form of the establishment of hotels, various tourist attractions and related service industries. The key players in this were recent Han migrants who had been attracted to Hainan for essentially similar reasons to subsequent tourists—i.e. the climate, access to relatively unspoiled coastal and inland landscapes and a pervad-ing sense of cultural otherness cued by the islands’ cultural minorities. Hainan thereby offered what Toru Mitsui (1998) has described—with speci'c regard to Japanese perceptions of its southern tropical isle of Okinawa—as a ‘domestic exoticism’. Indeed, Hainan can also be analogized to both Florida and Hawai’i as place of both lifestyle and/or retirement relocation and tourist visitation for US citizens. And, just as Mitsui (1998) has emphasized, the appeal of the island was substantially assisted through the popularization of songs extolling its virtues. In the case of Hainan the work of songwriters Zheng Nan, Xu Dongwei and Liu

5. A project initiated by the State Council in partial emulation of the Special Economic Zone status awarded to Shenzen and Zhuhai in the same year.

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Changan (from the mainland city of Guangzhou) was particularly signi'cant. In the early 1980s they co-wrote two ballads, Qing Dao Tian Ya Hai Jiao lai (‘Welcome to the Ends of the Earth’) and Wo Ai Wuzhi Shan, Wo Ai Wanquan He (‘I Love Wuzhi Mountain, I Love Wanquan River’) in a conscious effort to promote the island to outsiders.6 Both songs went on to become widely popular in China and the former is now closely associated with the city of Sanja and the nearby park at Cape Tian-Ya-Hai-Jiao, on Hainan’s southernmost tip (where it plays on loops over speakers located along the walkways). The promotion of the island through song continues to the present in the form of lavishly packaged CD material such as Hainan Zhi Sheng (‘Voice of Hainan’) (2009) by the Xiu Xian Lu You He Chang (‘Leisure Tourism Chorus), an album of songs including material by Nan, Dongwei and Changan, whose lyrics are reproduced over striking colour photographic images of the coast and mountains, providing an evocative audio-visual souvenir of Hainan’s tropical attractions. Re(ecting on the island’s 'rst decade of major tourism development and marketing, Feng and Goodman have identi'ed that state-imposed restrictions on overseas travel during the 1980s and 1990s led to the development of Hainan ‘as an exotic and appropriate substitute, offering a very different lifestyle’ (1997: 76). Despite their contention that the development of airport facilities had con-siderable potential to attract international tourists (ibid.), the current situation remains essentially similar to that of the previous decade, with the majority of tourists (96%) being of mainland Chinese origin (2007 'gures7). While a sub-stantial number of westerners visit the southern tourism centre of Sanya, in particular, a signi'cant proportion of these are westerners resident in Hong Kong or major commercial centres such as Shanghai and Beijing who (y in directly for short breaks (with Russians,8 Taiwanese9 and South Koreans10 also visiting in sig-ni'cant numbers). Sanya itself is testament to the rapid rise in Hainan tourism. Little more than a 'shing village in a sparsely populated corner of the island in the early 1980s, the area has seen major and rapid development, with tourism

6. See http://www.qldao.com/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=862 for discussion. 7. As quoted in 'China Tourism New' online, 5 May 2008: http://tinyurl.com/2ad62xq. 8. An aspect manifest in both the Cyrillic signage and visual iconography ((ags etc.) adorn-ing a number of bars and hotels in central Sanya. eChinacities.com (2009) identi'es that 150,000 Russians arrived at Sanya International airport in 2008. 9. Taiwanese tourism began in 1988, when the Chinese Government lifted restrictions on Taiwanese travel to China and peaked at 150,000 in 1988. A period of severe decline followed with numbers dipping to 33,000 in 2003 before gradually reviving to the present (Chen 2008). 10. eChinacities.com online (12 January 2009) identi'ed that 140,000 South Koreans arrived at Sanya International airport in 2008: http://www.echinacities.com/cityguide/sanya/whatson/ InPulse.aspx?WID=2313 (accessed May 2009).

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now contributing an estimated 700 million yuan rmb (about US$103 million) per annum to the local economy (2007 'gures11). Only formally incorporated as a city in 1987, Sanya is now home to a population of c. 600,000 (all-year-round) residents and has spread along the coast and nearby estuarine areas in a continuing series of hotels, ‘second home’ apartment blocks and residential complexes. This expansion has been actively aided and encouraged by the Sanya city government, which identi'ed tourism as its main development priority in 1998. This expansion has led to the displacement and relocation of several Li communities along Yalong Bay without adequate compensation.12 As Wang and Wall have emphasized:

As a means of stimulating economic growth and generating employment, tourism was planned in a top-down fashion and led by the ‘tourism 'rst’ prin-ciple… Under this kind of rapid and aggressive development, the interests of communities that were ‘in the way’ of development were given scant attention (2007: 71).

From its early phases Sanya and, to a lesser extent, Haikou, was associated with prostitution, with this aspect forming part of its attraction for male visitors. While illegal, prostitution has increased signi'cantly across China since the early 1980s. By the early 2000s this aspect of Hainan’s appeal was well known internationally, as recognized by a 2001 report in the UK Independent newspaper which asserted that, ‘Hainan's massed ranks of prostitutes—from the capital Haikou to Sanya's Yalong Bay, longer than Hawaii's longest beach—are stealing sex tourists from Thailand and the Philippines’ (MacLeod 2001). In an ironic inversion of the socially ‘organic’ erotic music activities of the Li and some long-established Han communities described in the Introduction, the principal erotic music activity in contemporary Sanya takes place in premises that present themselves as karaoke parlours where patrons can enjoy the company of young women known as xiaohie KTV (‘Miss KTV’—after the ubiquitous karaoke music video apparatus) either onsite or off-premises (Liu 1994; Goodman 2003). The phenomenon is now so established that tourism information websites openly include information on the local industry for intending visitors.13 The connection between the island and female charms was further cemented by Sanya city council, which successfully bid to host the annual Miss World Beauty pageant in 2003 at a new custom-built (tiara-shaped) venue. The event was so successful that it was repeated in Sanya in 2005 and 2006 and returned again in 2008.

11. As quoted in 'China Tourism New' online, 5 May 2008: http://tinyurl.com/2eozfwz. 12. See Wang and Wall (2007) for a discussion of the displacement of one such community, the Tang Fang hamlet. 13. Such as http://www.hainanhotels.travel/.

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Along with these ‘leisure’ developments, a number of local entrepreneurs responded to a market opportunity driven by what Schein (1997) has identi'ed as a sense of monocultural disenchantment among urban Chinese populations following the Communist Party’s emphasis on cultural homogenization during the 1960s–1990s. She characterizes this response as producing a ‘powerful yearn-ing’ to recapture China’s lost past of cultural heterogeneity that, in turn, led to a widespread tendency for ‘individual and state culture producers to turn to minority cultures as reservoirs of still-extant authenticity’ (1997: 72). She describes this as a process of ‘internal orientalism’ premised on the ‘fascination of more cosmopolitan Chinese with “exotic” minority cultures in an array of polychromatic and titillating forms’ most often based on ‘a class/gender asymmetry’ in which ‘minorities were represented chie(y by rural women’ for ‘male urban sophisticates’ (1997: 70). Her characterization is particularly apposite for developments in Hainan in the 1990s. The development of ‘internal orientalist’ facilities in Hainan in the 1990s, has been researched by various authors (such as Xie and Wall 2002 and Yi 2004), who have re(ected (in various manners, and to various degrees) on issues concerning the authenticity of the performances on offer. While such a focus is understand-able, these analyses have not acknowledged the extent to which the ‘referent texts’ of these performances for audiences, and the (mostly non-indigenous) managers of the facilities, are not so much ‘essential/authentic’ indigenous practices but, rather, the representations that have been promulgated in media forms such as the aforementioned Hongse niangzi jun variants or other subsequently re-worked forms of traditional culture. While in-depth research needs to be undertaken about the motives and perceptions of a range of performers in the mid to late 2000s, preliminary 'eld research undertaken by the authors in early 2009 suggests that, after two decades, performers in locations such as the popular Bing Lang Gu village have reduced their cultural performance to short sequences that suit the tourists who move quickly through attractions as part of organized packaged tours. Villages such as these are not then, in any senses, the ‘community tourism’ ventures promoted by Yi (2004), and cultural productions tend to be compound (and often eclectic), an aspect evident in Bing Lang Gu village’s combination of Li and Miao elements. Indeed, the village is anything but authentic in its representations of Hainanese traditional culture and its dramatic entrance (see Figure 1) is more evocative of the 1950s’ US ‘tiki’ kitsch attractions than traditional Hainanese village architecture. In this context, historical detail is less important than the inscription of present-day versions of cultural traditions in media that suggest historical depth—see for instance the frieze depicting modern female ryun-she dancers, as if the tradition of such gendered performances pre-dated the 1950s (see Figure 2).

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Figure 1. Grand gateway to Bing Lang Gu cultural village (photograph by Philip Hayward, 2009)

Figure 2. Frieze at Bing Lang Gu representing modern style of ryun-she with male and female dancers (photograph by Philip Hayward, 2009)

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Exotic femininity is also much in evidence. Soon after stepping through the park’s imposing ornamental gates, tourists have the opportunity to be photographed surrounded by young smiling Miao girls who playfully pull the ears and lightly pinch the cheeks of male patrons for the bene't of the camera. Further into the village, a small courtyard hosts regular performances of the ryun-she, featuring young Li dancers who are eagerly photographed by visitors (see Figure 3, below).

Figure 3. Ryun-she performance, Bing Lang Gu village (photograph by Philip Hayward, 2009)

In addition to the Li and Miao cultural villages, there are also a number of tourist attractions associated with the overseas Chinese who were ‘return migrants’ in the 1960s. These primarily attract mainland Chinese tourists and provide variously weak, ersatz and/or collaged representations of South East Asian and/or broader international cultures. As with any such attractions, the quality, success, stand-ards of maintenance and patronage for these vary. The Dong Nan Ya Cun (‘South East Asia Village’) in Xinglong Hua Farmer, Wanning City, for instance (visited by the authors in April 2009) comprises a visibly decaying park in which attractions include a young women dressed in traditional Thai costume with whom visitors can pose for photos and a small stage on which a quartet of elderly performers perform a seven-minute set of Indonesian festive song and dance material, allow-ing visitors vicarious access to the South East Asian cultures that overseas Chinese previously had access to. In contrast to the low-key nature of the South East Asia village, which was minimally patronised when we visited, the Xinshi Jiju Yuan (‘New Central’

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Theatre) was bizarrely eclectic and exoticist and was packed to (over) capacity. Illustrating the ‘exotic substitution’ paradigm referred to earlier, the venue and its show merit extended description. If the 1980s represented a moment of pro-nounced post-modernism for the West (cf. Jameson 1984), when bricolage and pastiche were prominent cultural aesthetics; the Xinshi Jiju Yuan show represents a more delayed moment (and speci'c location) where exoticist tendencies are articulated in elaborate mélanges for audiences for whom domestic forms of exoticism are the only choice available to them. The venue is located in the small inland town of Xinglong, close to a number of major hotels, and is a standard part of packaged coach tours from southern China. The venue seats around 2000 customers, the majority of whom arrive a considerable time before the perform-ance and entertain themselves by queuing to perform karaoke onstage before the show commences. On the night we visited (in April 2009) the venue’s seating was full some twenty minutes before the performance started and subsequent arrivals were shepherded down to spaces at stage front and in the emergency exits and were each provided with a plastic bucket which they inverted and perched on for the duration of the performance. The venue’s décor was (vaguely) Thai themed but any sense of potential cultural authenticity was dispelled when the lights lowered and the sound of Brazilian performer Deodato’s 1972 disco version of the 2001: A Space Odyssey 'lm theme (Richard Strauss’s ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’), boomed out over the venue’s sound system as the curtain rose on a static tableaux of dancers dressed in a skimpy showgirl variant of Thai traditional costume. The music then segued to a rousing orchestral version of the gallop from Jacques Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld (1858) to which the dancers performed a demure version of the iconic Parisian can-can. Subsequent song and dance numbers included a pseudo-Egyptian sequence and a (highly subdued) salsa routine. Interspersed among these numbers were extended comedic banter from the MC and a ‘Wild West’ style whip-cracking and knife-throwing routine. As varied and diverting as these sequences were, they were the prelude to a segment of the show that audience reaction indicated was the anticipated ‘main event’. This comprised the arrival onstage of a quartet of slim, poised and scantily clad South East Asian ‘ladyboys’ (young transvestite/transsexual males known as transpinays in the Philippines and kathoeys in Thailand). These performers (who are major tourist attractions as performers at South East Asian venues such as the Alcazar and Tiffany’s in Pattaya, on Thailand’s southeast coast, and the Amazing Philippine Theatre in Manila) were fervently received by the crowd and were mobbed as they left the auditorium at the interval, with a scrum taking place in the foyer as patrons (particularly, middle-aged men) jostled each other to pay for a photograph alongside the performers (see Figure 4).

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Figure 4. Promotional poster outside the Xinshi Jiju Yuan advertising the main attraction—‘ladyboys’ (photograph by Philip Hayward, 2009)

Hainan’s cultural villages and shows provide a signi'cant brand embellishment to an island location that has been increasingly identi'ed as a ‘sun, sand, sea and sex’ des-tination. In this regard, the characterization offered by Han Shaogong (chairman of Hainan’s Cultural and Arts Federation) of the recently opened ‘Impression Hainan’ show (discussed below) is accurate and apposite for Hainan tourism in general:

Impression Hainan focuses on the theme of escaping from the bustle and returning to nature—it is a human being's basic desire for a happy life… The sea, sunshine, beach and coconut trees—these are basic elements of a coastal resort… The tourists don't come to Hainan to see big stars or high-brow opera… happy music and dancing, pretty girls and boys and magic visual effects are what they want to see (Unattributed 2009).

Yet, as the following section details, local threads weave through the representa-tion of a more general island/tropical tourist experience presented in ‘Impression Hainan’, thereby maintaining a link to Maoist-era Chinese culture and a more speci'c cultural heritage.

Impression Hainan‘Impression Hainan’ is staged in a speci'cally designed venue (see Figure 5) on the seashore of Haikou, a short distance from the city centre and close to

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hotels, beachside restaurants and karaoke facilities. Its design is striking, par-ticularly at night, when its illuminated exterior emphasizes its inspiration—a beach-weathered sea urchin skeleton.14 Its interior also has a spectacular design feature in that the oval inner auditorium has its back section cut away, opening up a quarter of the auditorium space to the exterior; giving the audience a view of the beach and ocean behind it and providing its performers with an extended performance space on the actual beach. Complementing the strik-ing architecture, the show is notable for the quality of its lighting equipment, which not only provides dramatic colouring and shading but also state-of-the-art (quasi-3D) visual effects; a high quality audio set-up and an auditorium (oor capable of being raised and lowered in sections for dramatic effect. The Provincial Government’s investment in the facility both recognizes the signi'-cant contribution of tourism to Hainan’s GDP (estimated at 14% in 2004 and rising15—representing 17,100 million yuan rmb [about US$2,515 million] gener-ated by 18,450,000 tourists [2006 'gures]16) and, as signi'cantly, a local desire to signi'cantly increase this.

Figure 5. ‘Impression Hainan’ venue (illuminated) (photograph by NS Motor, 2009)

14. That is, a sea urchin with its spikes worn off. 15. As quoted in 'China Tourism New' online, 5 May 2008: http://tinyurl.com/2eozfwz. 16. As quoted in 'China Tourism New' online, 5 May 2008: http://tinyurl.com/2eozfwz.

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The ‘Impression Hainan’ show was audience-tested in March 2009 and opened to the public in April. It comprised an (approximately) 60-minute-long spec-tacle utilizing the talents of around 100 performers, drawing on the skills that its celebrated director, Zhang Yimou, had displayed at the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. ‘Impression Hainan’ opens with dimmed lights and a voice asking the audience to relax into the ambience, as they hear the sound of waves and stare across the venue (oor, entirely covered in closely packed beach umbrellas. A slow piano piece enhances the tranquil mood and an impressive lighting display sweeps across the umbrellas that are then manipulated choreographically by individual performers. The scene—and audi-ence focus—then shifts back out past the (oor as eight vivacious, swim-suited young people emerge from the beach area and cavort as two actors dressed as star'sh lazily rise from the sand. The umbrellas then become the focus of the action again, opening and closing to create geometric patterns. The 'rst noticeable signi'er of Hainan occurs in the next section, as the popular song Wo Ai Wuzhi Shan, Wo Ai Wanquan He plays over the sound system before the show's 'rst high-tech coup de spectacle occurs in the form of a three-dimensional light projection that appears to bath the arena (oor in (owing waves (eliciting gasps from the crowd on the night we attended) as rollerskaters move swiftly through the images. Later in the show the water projections are used for even more spectacular effect as dolphins appear to dart and leap across the waves, to similarly impressed crowd reactions. The show is overt in its presentation of a youthful hedonistic image, with young bikini-clad women and blue-briefed men appearing en masse in spectacular tableaux at various points, emphasizing plentitude and youthful vigour. This image of bikini-clad femininity is at marked odds with another sequence that appeals to a very different moment and assertion of female presence. Depart-ing from the beachly, the show features a sequence where the venue’s impressive mechanical-architectural facilities are operated so as to produce a ‘landscape’ of raised blocks and water-'lled channels that, together with the presence of four young women clad in military garb and bearing ri(es, immediately signi'es and references back to the Hongse niangzi jun texts and the actual history that inspired them. Fittingly this sequence is greeted with rousing applause, activating a deep-seated association from those who were familiar with the texts during their peak period of circulation and those younger members who have been familiarized with the inspirational narrative at school (with further applause rising as young soldiers wade up to their necks through a watery passage, carrying their ri(es high, proud and dry).

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Other sequences also draw on local inspiration (although their speci'c ref-erents may be less known to tourist audiences than the exemplary story of the women’s brigades). Another striking sequence involves the central (oor area 'lling with water to ankle level to allow a mass of slim young men to perform elaborate and energetic splashing routines before sinking even further and (ooding to a depth that allows them to engage in synchronized swimming. This is one of the points where the show draws on local and more general indigenous associations, modernizing elements of tradition for its spectacle. Water-splashing, known as Po Shui, is a traditional cultural performance form that is practised by several indigenous groups in southern China, most notably the Dai, who stage it daily as a tourist event in a village outside Jinghong (in Xishuangbanna autonomous region). In Hainan the practice is most often asso-ciated with Li and Miao communities, and is represented in events such as the annual water-splashing festival held in Baoting in July. The adaptation of this as an element of ‘Impression Hainan’ recalls earlier incorporations of speci'cally local performance forms into Mao-era dramatic texts (and also, historically, the particular signi'cance given to Po Shui performances in national festivities in the 1970s and 1980s due to former Premier Zhou Enlai’s noted affection for the practice [Wang 1985: 108]). Other signi'ers of locality include an extended slapstick routine featuring green-clad 'elementals' and coconuts that climaxes—somewhat surprisingly—in a loud rendition of the Beatles' 'Hey Jude', with the elementals entering the crowd, clapping and swaying and distributing coconut drinks. Aside from this slightly bizarre animation of ‘coconut branding’ for the island, there are two further allusions to the island’s local culture. One comprises a brief enactment of the ryun-she dance, performed by a small group of performers, dressed in contemporary casual clothing at the rear edge of a cleared area outside the venue, close to palm trees on the beach. Their very marginality to the spectacle enacted on the main (oor of the auditorium emphasizes the routine’s token-ness, particularly when followed by a comic skit involving the performers climb-ing coconut palms and dropping nuts down on those below. The positioning of this sequence renders it a faint echo of both Li culture and its history of repre-sentation in ballet and 'lm (in marked contrast to the dramatic visual fanfare of the women’s brigade sequence and the images of youthful mass vigour and celebration of beachiness conveyed elsewhere). The remaining local cultural allusion is even more tokenistic; amidst the skimpily dressed youngsters waving enthusiastically to the audience at the close of the show is a lone young female dressed in (an approximation of) ‘ethnic’ Li costume, who is otherwise entirely absent from the show (see Figure 6 below).

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Figure 6. ‘Impression Hainan’ 'nale (2009) (with performer in Li-style costume at right) (photo-graph by ACCP, 2009)

ConclusionThe manner in which Hainan’s contemporary brand image has drawn on elements promulgated during the Cultural Revolution serves to con'rm Clark’s observation that the 1966–1979 era is linked in a complex manner to prior and subsequent moments of Chinese culture. As he asserts:

the commercial commodi'cation of culture that has characterized Chinese artistic life in the last quarter century was made possible by the ideological commodi'cation of culture in the Cultural Revolution. Constant and repeated re-working of model works in those ten years included what we might now identify as cross-genre product tie-ins… The commodi'cation made the rise of the cultural marketplace in the 1980s and 1990s seem less of a break with the past than has generally been assumed (Clark 2008: 4).

The continuing resonance of Cultural Revolution era texts provides further con'r-mation that such texts were not so saturated with speci'c ideologies that they could not be open to multiple interpretation from audiences who could both ascertain and appreciate the central inspirational messages and also notice, enjoy and subse-quently deploy the ‘colour’ of Hainan and the spaces and opportunities it suggested. In this sense, the ‘nefarious complicity’ of the referent and its image (Derrida 1976: 56) is in play here, a signifying game that (necessarily) eschews authenticity and

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replays and ampli'es stereotypes and their inscriptions of marginality. While the Li were present and committed in the history of resistance against the Guomindang, their representation in the Hongse niangzi jun ‘model performance’ texts and in ‘Impression Hainan’ is essentially as a garnish to the ideological operation of texts serving very different purposes and interest groups. As Liang, Umezaki and Ohtsuka (2003) have pointed out, the impacts of tourism on the Li population have been complicated and not always advantageous. Aside from a small number of cultural show performers, remunerative opportunities arising from tourism over the last two decades have principally comprised low-paid service jobs or, for young women, employment as sex workers. The latter are, of course, unlikely to be the subject of modern valedictory dance, song or 'lm texts; their activities are only alluded to in the most distanced and wholesome manner in the presentation of young women in extravaganzas such as ‘Impression Hainan’. The ‘sun, sea, sand, sex’ formula is nevertheless pervasive and contemporary society allows no such heroic roles for local women as the kind evoked in the Hongse niangzi jun narratives—the price of progress in China’s own ‘tropical paradise’. Similarly, the exotic and erotic ‘otherness’ of the island’s indigenous Li has now been displaced by a more industrial sexualiza-tion largely premised on international models and fantasies.

AcknowledgementsA number of Chinese academics assisted our research but are not individually acknowledged here due to the nature of our critique of certain aspects of Chinese cultural policy and our sensitivity to their positions; their cooperation and enthu-siasm was, however, invaluable. Yang Mu also merits credit for his assistance with the project (and for having produced a seminal thesis on Li traditional music), Thanks also to Paul Clark and John Jenkins for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.

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Gilding the pearl: cultural heritage, sexual allure and polychromatic exoticism on Hainan island

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