Located in southwest China, Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture was recently named one of the most poverty-stricken regions in the country and, as a result, is subject to tuopin gongjianzhan, or the state-led Target Poverty Alleviation Strategy (TPAS). For bureaucrats working to carry out the TPAS, one of their central duties is yifeng yisu, the changing of habits and customs. Even though the TPAS does not officially target ethnic minorities, the economic vulnerability of the ethnic Yi people in Liangshan makes them disproportionately subject to the mandate as compared to the wealthier Han in Liangshan.
Nevertheless, the Yi people have resisted the mandate, neutralizing some of its impacts. Still, yifeng yisu, which casts a value judgment on ethnic Yi people’s culture, unfairly burdens the Yi people and could be considered cultural imperialism. Importantly, the resistance of the ethnic Yi is largely ignored in Chinese media. Biased representations of the mandate’s effects downplay the agency of ethnic communities and wrongfully glorify the imposition of the mandate as bringing welcome progress to the community.
Far from being ethnically neutral, yifeng yisu heavily impacts ethnic Yi people in Liangshan since they are overrepresented as poverty alleviation targets. 51 percent of Liangshan’s nearly 5 million residents identify as ethnically Yi. Yet the Yi population is not evenly distributed across Liangshan; instead, majority Yi counties are overwhelmingly concentrated in northern and eastern Liangshan. These areas are considerably more mountainous than the rest of the prefecture, posing substantial challenges to transportation and agricultural development for Yi villagers. Consequently, in 2015, the State categorized 10 of the 11 majority Yi counties as ‘Poverty Counties,’ meaning more than 3 percent of residents live on less than 2,300 RMB (353.8 USD) per year. With this, the TPAS—and therefore yifeng yisu—is a policy that mostly and significantly affects the Yi people in Liangshan.
Importantly, there have been extensive efforts to enforce the mandate. An anonymous bureaucrat given the pseudonym Yu, who has been implementing Targeted Poverty Alleviation in Liangshan since 2018, disclosed that one of his daily tasks is explaining the mandate to the Yi villagers he works with through home visits and village meetings. Though he does not have the legal right to punish Yi villagers who violate the mandate, he does report that the mandate requires limiting the scale of participation in burial and marital rituals and advocating against local superstitions. As Yu explains, this includes regulation of Bimoism, the Yi people’s religion.
The Yi community combats this pressure to change their culture largely through passive resistance, especially relating to marital rituals. When asked to evaluate the effectiveness of yifeng yisu in the village he works in, Yu says that Yi villagers and even the local Yi governmental officials “make promises in words [to follow the rules of the mandate], but do not change much in action.” For instance, yifeng yisu prohibits lavish cash gifts as well as the killing of oxen by Yi villagers since the government believes such practices perpetuate their poverty. Yu explains that locals quickly figured out ways to bypass the rules: They started killing pigs rather than oxen and switched to giving gifts of cigarettes, wine, or wreaths rather than cash.
Yifeng yisu’s efforts to reduce the practice of Bimoism face more overt resistance. Officially, Yu and his colleagues must report any Communist Party members who ostentatiously practice Bimoism and discourage villagers from Bimoism-related spending. However, Yu acknowledges that Bimoist rituals remain extremely popular in the villages. In fact, practically all of the Yi Communist Party members practice Bimoism, making it difficult for him and his colleagues to voice any censure for fear of backlash.
Other Chinese scholars have documented similar hostility to yifeng yisu from Yi communities in other Liangshan counties. Tang Qianhua, a Chinese anthropologist, records an instance when Yi villagers ignored an order by the Liangshan government to change a fixed date for the Yi Torch Festival to encourage more tourist participation. Instead, both citizens and high-ranking Yi officials secretly celebrated the festival according to their original calendars.
Despite consistent passive and active resistance to yifeng yisu, mainstream state media tends to downplay the Yi people’s unwillingness to follow it in Liangshan, choosing to celebrate the “progress” the mandate has brought to the region. In sources ranging from the Liangshan Regional government’s press releases to national reports summarizing the TPAS’s achievements, yifeng yisu is hailed as bringing “scientific, healthy, and civilized new ways of life,” marked by “good social practices,” such as “modest weddings and funerals [and] filial piety” to the Yi people. Some state-owned media outlets concede that Yi villagers oppose the changes, but the resistance is interpreted as a result of the Yi people’s “deeply-rooted bad habits” and “lack of awareness of their backwardness,” which stem from thousands of years of slave society and isolation.
This biased representation is problematic in its own right—it downplays the experiences of the Yi community, harming their self-perception. Indeed, organization theorists have long emphasized the extensive and sustained impacts street-level bureaucrats can have on the self-images of the groups with which they work. In Jinyang, a county in Liangshan, these bureaucrats carried out as many as 1,540 educational meetings under the TPAS, preaching to the Yi villagers to “be grateful [to the Communist Party],” “work hard,” and give up on “backward habits.”
Moreover, the state media’s misrepresentation of reality on the ground feeds into a narrative that eventually justifies the Communist Party’s cultural imperialism. Scholars have pointed out that, inspired by Lewis Morgan and Friedrich Engels’s accounts of the different stages of society, the CCP has placed each ethnic minority group in China on a scientific scale representing the material stages of social progress, with socialism as the end goal. By casting Yi people as primitive and unable to advance themselves, the CCP attempts to legitimize its arguably imperialistic interventions, including its rejection of Yi ethnic traditions. Though the Chinese government mostly refrains from explicitly stating that Han culture is superior, some of yifeng yisu’s contents clearly laud Han culture as the standard that ethnic groups should strive to achieve. For instance, Jinyang’s Village Rules, issued for yifeng yisu, ban the consumption of tuotuo rou, a traditional Yi dish, and encourage the substitution of traditional dishes for Han dishes instead. Unsurprisingly, the county government issued an article deeming banquets thrown under the new rules “classy and posh” compared to traditional Yi banquets.
While yifeng yisu is on the surface an ethnically neutral mandate, the disproportionate impact it has on ethnic minorities proves it to be a thinly veiled “civilizing” mission that holds Han culture as the standard of superiority. Fortunately, the local Yi population’s strong resistance has thus far rendered the mandate largely ineffective in bringing substantial changes to the material practices of local rituals and customs. However, just earlier this year, the CCP foregrounded the importance of yifeng yisu and demanded that regional governments take concrete actions to promote Targeted Poverty Alleviation. The future impact of yifeng yisu on the cultures of ethnic minorities remains unclear, but it is certainly worrying.