‘IT IS MY HOME. I WILL DIE HERE’: TOURISM DEVELOPMENT AND THE POLITICS OF PLACE IN LIJIANG, CHINA

‘IT IS MY HOME. I WILL DIE HERE’

© The author 2012Geografiska Annaler: Series B © 2012 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography

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‘IT IS MY HOME. I WILL DIE HERE’: TOURISM DEVELOPMENT AND THE POLITICS

OF PLACE IN LIJIANG, CHINAby

Xiaobo Su

SU, X. (2012): ‘“It is my home. I will die here”: tourism devel-opment and the politics of place in Lijiang, China’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 94 (1): 31–45.

ABSTRACT. Although “home” is an established topic in the litera-ture, what home means for an in situ, non-travelling population that nevertheless is confronted by the influx of great numbers of tour-ists and migrants is an important question that has not been wide-ly researched. This article examines the construction and practice of home in a highly mobile world, in the case of Lijiang Ancient Town, a World Heritage site in Yunnan, China. Situating Lijiang in the context of China’s emerging consumer society, this article has two objectives. First, I will sketch a conceptual framework with-in which to address the construction of home in relation to mobili-ty, displacement and socioeconomic changes. The second objective is to examine the multiple ways in which Lijiang’s town residents dwell in displacement. Even as Lijiang ancient town largely falls into the hands of migrant businesspersons, town residents employ spatial strategies to maintain a public–private boundary, reconcile themselves to living under the same roof with tourists, or forsake their homes for economic benefit. Hence, this article contributes to the geographies of everyday life by illustrating individuals’ mul-tiple forms of strategic rationalization in handling socio-spatial transformation.

Keywords: displacement, everyday life, home, Lijiang, tourism development

IntroductionSitting comfortably in his courtyard house to talk about the future of Lijiang Ancient Town, a World Heritage site located in Yunnan, China, Lisi, age 55, insisted that he would not rent his house to migrants or live in the new city: ‘It is my home. I will die here, like my parents and grandparents.’ When I met Lisi again three years later, in 2010, he had moved out of the town. ‘I had no choice. The situation forced me to do so. A migrant businessperson rents my house and has turned it into a luxury hotel for tourists’, said Lisi with embarrassment and resignation. ‘Now I am re-tired and live in the new city to look after my grand-son.’ Lisi’s story of relocation is one among many in Lijiang which, since 1997, has undertaken radical transformation from a home place for town residents to a consumption hotspot for China’s domestic tour-ists from big cities such as Shenzhen and Shanghai.

Many town residents who moved out have empha-sized that they had no choice; those who have re-mained in the town have encountered mounting challenges due to gigantic inflow of tourists and the lure of high house rent.1 This article mainly analyses the latter group of town residents, with a focus on the lived politics of home and place in Lijiang. It explores how home – as a discursive and practical construc-tion of comfort and root (Massey 1994a, 1994b; Blunt 2005; bell hooks 2009) – is maintained or forsaken by town residents in the condition of tourism-driven dis-placement, through what Escobar (2001, p. 140) calls the defence of place, the experience of a particular lo-cation with ‘some measure of groundedness, sense of boundaries, and connection to everyday life’. Running through the stories of Lisi and oth-er residents in Lijiang is the danger caused by post-Mao China’s market fetishism which oddly co-incides with their everyday life. For the three dec-ades since Deng Xiaoping launched the economic reform in 1978, China has experienced rapid devel-opment. After the mid-1980s, a market economy allowed Chinese people more time and more finan-cial resources for consumption. A consumer socie-ty finally took shape when the central government in 1998 mobilized Chinese citizens to propel domes-tic demand and then accelerate economic develop-ment (Wu 1999; Davis 2005). Tourism is one among many forces contributing to a consumer society and propelling domestic demand in China (Nyíri 2006; Ryan and Gu 2009; Su and Teo 2009). One of the best examples to demonstrate how the rise of a con-sumer society in general, and tourism consumption in particular, transforms urban landscapes and social relations is Lijiang Ancient Town. Until the mid-1990s, the town was relatively un-disturbed, as it is far away from the agitated cen-tres of economic reform occurring in China’s coastal regions. This static state was interrupted when the Yunnan provincial government decided to develop tourism in north Yunnan in 1994; Lijiang Ancient

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Town was subsequently inscribed in the World Heritage List in 1997. Tourism has since become the most important industry in Lijiang. For instance, tourist revenues in 2010 totalled CNY 11,200 mil-lion (USD 1,760 million) and tourist arrivals reached 9.09 million,2 while Lijiang’s gross domestic prod-uct (GDP) was calculated at CNY 14,400 million (USD 2,260 million) (Lijiang Bureau of Statistics 2011). The phenomenal growth of Lijiang’s tourism industry has led to the arrival of migrant businessper-sons, plopping themselves down in residential hous-es and running tourism businesses. Currently, more than one thousand shops cluster along the town’s main streets and provide services, souvenirs, and food and drink to tourists rather than to town resi-dents. Gradually, town residents have come to rent their houses to migrants and have left the town to the hands of people from other places – migrants and tourists. In 2000, it was reported that around 14,477 residents lived in the town (Duan 2000).3 The ex-act number was unknown due to the continuing out-flow of town residents. Some respondents told me in 2010 that the population of town residents in the core area hovered somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000, while others argued that there were only a few hundred town residents. This demographic change profoundly alters the town’s economic and social relations. For the res-idents who remain in the town, their attachment to the town has eroded as local ruling elites – those of-ficials in charge of heritage preservation and tourism development – have shaped Lijiang’s built herit-age exclusively for the tourism industry (Su 2011). Strictly speaking, these residents are neither mi-grants nor exiles. They are not even on the move. Nevertheless, they are confronted with an endless influx of migrants and tourists, thus becoming local-ly displaced when the place they once called “home” has been commoditized for tourist consumption. This socio-spatial exclusion has been captured by Su and Teo (2008, p. 164) who remark that town residents have to ‘jostle with the tourists in public spaces … and many are, in fact, displaced as private capital takes over shop-houses and residences for conversion into tourist facilities’. It is further com-plicated as their home is not only a cultural symbol of root and comfort, as Lisi indicated above, but also a highly popular commodity in the tourism market. Scholars have done much to focus on local en-gagement with tourism development in China. Generally, this focus has undergone a gradual trans-formation from early description of tourism impacts

(Lew and Yu 1995) and ethnographic research on ethnic tourism (Swain 1990) to research issues rang-ing from the cultural politics of tourism in peripher-al regions (Oakes 1998) to community participation and tourism sustainability (Li 2006). A new tenden-cy, albeit tenuous, has emerged to incorporate more theories into China’s tourism (Bao and Ma 2011), such as ethnic entrepreneurism in Xishuangbana, Yunnan (Yang and Wall 2008), cultural authority in Sichuan (Nyíri 2006), and hegemony in Lijiang (Su and Teo 2009). In the case of Bai minority wom-en entrepreneurs in Dali, Ateljevic and Doorne (2003) observe that tourism development motivates a group of local women to reshape gender relations. Although the literature offers detailed empirical and theoretical insights on local engagement with tour-ism in China, inadequate attention has been paid to how ordinary people mediate tourism development in their everyday life and how their place becomes a contested site for economic return and cultural attachment. The article addresses this literature gap by us-ing home as an entry point. I will critically explore how ordinary people, who encounter in situ dis-placement in their own hometown, handle new so-cial and economic relations and emergent conflicts generated by the inflows of tourists and migrants. Particularly, this article has two objectives. First, I will sketch a conceptual framework within which to address the construction of home in relation to mobility, displacement, and socioeconomic chang-es. Drawing upon Escobar (2001), the article frames home as central in sustaining the socioeconomic connections between individuals and their place. As Escobar (2001, p. 147, original emphasis) asserts,

People continue to construct some sort of boundaries around their places, however perme-able, and to be grounded in local socio-natural practices, no matter how changing and hybrid-ized those grounds and practices might turn out to be. To capture the place specificity of the pro-duction of place and culture thus becomes the other side of the necessary reconceptualization of culture as deterritorialized and transnational-ly produced.

Indeed, people continue to construct boundaries around their places and ground their culture in their everyday life, even though they participate in trans-local networks. Moreover, they possess a deep knowledge of their home place and this knowledge



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empowers them to cope with displacement. The em-pirical analysis of town residents’ efforts to maintain or forsake their home demonstrates how the politics of place is played out in the entanglement of culture and economy. Approaching home as a discursive and practical construction, this study can generate both theoretical and empirical insights to the signif-icance of place (here in this article, home) in recon-figuring identities and mediating the condition of displacement. The second objective is to examine the multiple ways through which Lijiang’s town residents dwell in displacement. Their construction of home is not about escape from the tourist gaze or an overt resist-ance against tourism development, but rather about how to carve out a zone of comfort in a place they call home. Their experience of dwelling in the town is the mediated outcome of their own socioeconom-ic backgrounds, other social groups who flow into the town for businesses or entertainment, and the broader context of China’s modernization. For this reason de Certeau’s (1984) discussion of the tactics of everyday life provides a theoretical tenet to this article. The politics of everyday life developed by de Certeau is further illuminated by practices and alternative readings through which town residents dwell in displacement: ‘Such a politics should also inquire into … the microscopic, multiform, and in-numerable connections between manipulating and enjoying, the fleeting and massive reality of a so-cial activity at play with the order that contains it’ (de Certeau 1984, p. xxiv, original emphasis). While de Certeau highlights resistance as part of every-day life, he did not say much about reconciliation, or how people accept external forces and reconcile, or integrate, these forces into their everyday life for certain purposes. Too much emphasis on resistance could create a frame of mind that brings endless tur-bulence and relentlessness to everyday life. One should be attuned to the need to examine how peo-ple reconcile their everyday life with the social and spatial transformation in their society. I argue that the real world cannot be reduced to the ramifications of external forces “out there”, but must be derived from a complex process of negotiation and reconcil-iation among various forces “there” and “here”.

Understanding homeRecent years have witnessed increasing interest in home in relation to mobility and globalization (Morley 2000; Ellegård and Vilhelmson 2004; Blunt

2005; McGregor 2009). The literature, which shows how home is experienced in everyday dynamics of interpretation, practice and imagination, analyses the relentless influence of globalization on individu-als and how these individuals respond. Scholars de-fine home as a place that offers ‘security, familiarity and nurture’ (Tuan 2004, p. 164); however, for many people, home represents ‘a site of oppression, tyr-anny and patriarchal domination’ (Mallett 2004, p. 75); and for still others, home is invested with am-bivalent meanings and emotions that lie in people’s hearts (Blunt 2005). Recently, feminist scholars question the nature of home as a site of refuge, ar-guing that it continues to be a gendered space of vi-olence and oppression (Domosh 1998; Varley 2008; Yantzi and Rosenberg 2008). These multiple facets of home reveal what Blunt and Varley (2004, p. 4) define as a space of ‘belonging and alienation, in-timacy and violence, desire and fear’, all of which endow home with meanings, emotions, experienc-es, and relationships that lie in the centre of every-day life. Home and dwelling should be reconsidered in relation to mobility and displacement as long as moments of travel and movement underpin contem-porary society and imbue it with hybrid cultures and translocal connections (Clifford 1997; see also bell hooks 2009). This article conceptualizes home in re-lation to mobility in three aspects. First, home is a fluid and mobile space. bell hooks’ writing on home place cogently connects home with the politics of place. Conceptualizing home as a site of oppression and belongingness, she explores how black women create and sustain a home place for domestic care and nurturance in the con-text of racial oppression and sexist domination. The construction of this place evinces the efforts in liber-ation struggle for a site where ‘one could freely con-front the issue of humanization’ (bell hooks 1990, p. 42). As bell hooks (1990, p. 148) further notes, ‘at times home is nowhere. At times one knows only extreme estrangement and alienation. Then home is no longer just one place. It is locations. Home is that place which enables and promotes varied and ever-changing perspectives, a place where one discovers new ways of seeing reality, frontiers of difference.’ bell hooks’ writing on home has had much influ-ence on the politics of place. For instance, Massey (1994a, p. 119) argues that there is ‘no single simple “authenticity” – a unique eternal truth of an (actual or imagined/remembered) place or home – to be used as a reference either now or in the past’. Massey de-scribes place – home included – as a social construct

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out of multiple relations which interact at a partic-ular location. Furthermore, she contends that ‘the crisscrossing of social relations, of broad histori-cal shifts and the continually altering spatialities of the daily lives of individuals, make up something of what a place means, how it is constructed as a place’ (Massey 2001, p. 462). The representation and con-struction of home is open to contestation within a certain location; the meaning of home is fluid and permeable: ‘each of these home-places is itself an equally complex product of the ever-shifting geog-raphy of social relations present and past’ (Massey 1994b, p. 172). This point is reinforced by Blunt and Dowling (2006 p. 14, original emphasis) who ar-gue that home can be conceptualized as ‘processes of establishing connections with others and creating a sense of order and belonging as part of rather than separate from society.’ Second, home has to been understood on mul-tiple scales. In other words, home is not necessari-ly a fixed space or intact state of dwelling; rather, it may be a spatial entity ranging from country, to city or town, to private housing (bell hooks 1990; Mallett 2004; Blunt and Dowling 2006). While home can re-fer both to the private space of dwelling and housing and more broadly to ‘the demarcation and imagining of regional and racial identities and of nation states’ (Bowlby et al. 1997, p. 347), this article defines the familiar milieu as a private space referring to the home and the domestic, while the broader context as a public realm is external to the home. This realm encompasses not only the sites of capital accumula-tion and political control that involve government, work and the market, but also everyday nondomes-tic spaces like streets, parks and commercial venues (Gorman-Murray 2006, p. 56). Through this pri-vate–public spatial frame, this article then regards home as a prime site for the expression of personal or group identities and the construction of a familiar milieu in which people develop a feeling of comfort and familiarity to reconcile the negative meaning of alienation and fear embedded in hostile surround-ings at large. Scholars have observed the private–public frame, arguing that ordinary people often use a pri-vate home as a haven to withstand an external hos-tile surrounding. It is useful to recall Antonsich’s (2009, p. 801) argument that ‘in an epoch of flows, networks, overlapping scales, multiculturalism and hybridity, it is more than ever necessary to explore what remains bounded.’ One bounded place is home. Writing about uses of home by gay Australian men,

for instance, Gorman-Murray (2006, p. 57) argues that private homes are deployed for subcultural so-cialization to facilitate the emergence of homosexu-al identities and challenge ‘the heteronormalization of [public] home’. Similarly, bell hooks (2009, p. 151) describes her private home in Kentucky as a safe place, ‘a world outside of the racist enmity’, a place in contrast with an outside community filled with ‘the hostile racist white gaze’. This private–public spatial frame thus provides an entry point into understanding the politics of place and how town residents in Lijiang use their private homes to affirm their identity and maintain their tradition when they are confronted with the global tourism industry. Third, home is implicated in social relations through which people on the move make possi-ble the imagination and practice of home. Ahmed (1999, p. 78) rejects the idea that home-dwelling and away-travelling are oppositional experiences, argu-ing that home is not ‘a place with boundaries that are fixed’, but rather encompasses both familiari-ty and estrangement. Following Ahmed, Nowicka (2007) contends that mobility challenges the notion of home, arguing that a sense of home does not de-pend on a fixed entity or an exclusive attachment to a certain place. Instead, home constitutes social re-lations and spatial networks among mobile people who foster a sense of home through mundane prac-tices performed in various places, or familiar ref-erences which can be found in different locations. This viewpoint is widely reiterated in the litera-ture (Nowicka 2007; Walsh 2011). For instance, Wiles (2008) analyses the practices of home by New zealanders in London, arguing that they develop new understandings of home and self in a transna-tional space and generate a sense of community and bonds among themselves by performing home away from home. However, what “home” means for an in situ, non-travelling population that nevertheless is con-fronted by the influx of great numbers of travellers is an important question that has not been sufficient-ly researched. One exception is Ho (2006), who ex-amines how a group of Singaporeans who remain in Singapore perceive mobility and cosmopolitanism and how these perceptions affect their efforts to con-struct a sense of belonging and home and to mediate the state discourses of cosmopolitan citizenship. She argues that the mobility of foreigners into Singapore generates a detrimental impact on whether citizens feel that Singapore is home, arguing that the criss-crossing flows of transnational capital and people



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mean a rethinking of home and belonging and beg the question of ‘how we see “ourselves” when be-yond as well as within our space’ (Ho 2006, p. 398). While Ho mainly focuses on Singaporeans’ discur-sive construction of home when they encounter mo-bility, this article expands Ho’s focus and further examines how home is practiced in everyday life. Together, these three aspects of conceptualiza-tion allow me to take an ethnographic analysis of place-based practice of home in relation to tourism development in Lijiang. This article does not deny the contested nature of home in terms of gender or ignore how tourists and migrant businesses recon-figure the meanings of home in the tourism mar-ket. Rather, the point here is to demonstrate how the discursive and practical construction of home is intertwined within the special context of China’s modernization, and how individuals cope with the inevitable trend of displacement.

Data collectionThe empirical material presented here comes from a wider project on tourism-driven socio-spatial trans-formation in Lijiang since 1997. My empirical work consisted of a period of fieldwork in Lijiang during July–August 2007 and July–August 2010, which in-cluded participant observation with town residents by living in a guesthouse operated by a local resident and by undertaking activities such as having meals and tea with various residents. Through observing locals’ daily life and their relation to the physical as-pects of the town, I sought to understand and explain the actions of people who occupied their own home and their relation with migrants and tourists in the town. Participant observation allowed me to move beyond ‘a merely cerebral relationship and develop more intuitive or gut-level feelings about what it is like to be “a native” in this particular time and place’ (Fife 2005, p. 72). While observation provides much information about the daily activities of town res-idents, equally important were in-depth interviews which could provide substantial fieldwork material. I conducted in-depth interviews with 37 ordi-nary town residents (see Table 1). All of them be-longed to an ethnic group called Naxi (China’s majority group is Han). Some of them were recruit-ed through the personal network I had established earlier; others were approached randomly as I me-andered around the town. All interviews were in Mandarin, with periodic injections of Lijiang’s local dialect. Interviews were recorded with permission

and later transcribed for analysis and quote. With the exception of one respondent who once lived in the town but later moved out to the new city, all oth-ers at the time of the interviews had been living in the town from birth. The questions that I asked were multifold: Why do they choose to live in the town? How do they think of tourism development? What are they doing every day? How is the town different now compared with then? This group of respondents was not chosen as a representative sample of town residents. Rather, I sought every opportunity to approach remain-ing town residents while maintaining a diversity of groupings in order to address the daily experience of dwelling in the town. Indeed, in comparison with my initial trip to Lijiang in 2001, it was more dif-ficult to approach town residents in my latest trip in 2010. For instance, in 2010 when I pestered one local friend, who had lived in the town for over 60 years, to introduce me to more town residents, he replied, ‘You can ask me if you want to know something about the town. The fact is that the town residents I know left for the new city. I cannot in-troduce you to more residents.’ Furthermore, the respondent profile shows that the sample is more represented by people above the age of 50. Many of younger generation have left the town and settled in the new city. As I discuss in the next section, dwell-ing in the town is a challenge and this challenge, to-gether with other factors, has pushed young people out of the town.

Comfort and fear in the home placeWith the analytic goals and conceptual framework for this article in place, this section explores the ambivalent senses of comfort and fear when town

Table 1. Profile of respondents.

Profile Number

Gender Male 20 Female 17Age 20–29 5 30–49 10 50 and above 22Occupation Tourism-related employment 15 Non-tourism employment 8 Retired or unemployed 14Occurrence of interview One 29 Twice 8

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residents reiterate the stark contrast between a com-fortable living condition in the past and a fearful sit-uation at present. The area now known as Lijiang Ancient Town lies in northwest Yunnan, China. Being a political and cultural centre for local Naxi people, the town has a long history, extending back about 800 years. This long history has fashioned the town with a uniformly traditional cityscape and a well-organized fusion of residential buildings and water canals, which distinguishes the town from the new city built after 1949 (Figs 1 and 2). In exploring the reality of the town transformed into an unhomely place, town residents asserted that a sea change has happened in Lijiang. For instance, Sihua (male, age 40) said:

I’ve seldom gone to the town centre. Not neces-sary at all. It is a pure market. What is sold there is nothing relevant to my daily life. The town has

already lost its real living atmosphere. It is to-tally different from the one I knew when I was a child.

Although Sihua was a travel agency manager, he was disappointed with the town’s change which was due mainly to the tourism industry for which he worked. This radical change is also captured by Yuli (male, age 55):

Previously I knew who he or she was when I bumped into a person in the street. Now I cannot recognize them. A group of people rush to you and I don’t know whether they are tourists or lo-cals. It indicates that Lijiang has gone through a big change.

This assertion of radical transformation translates into a sense of displacement as tourists jostle along

Figure 1. A morning streetscape in Lijiang Ancient Town. Source: author’s photo (August 2010).



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streets in the town and colonize the home place that was once an integral part of town residents’ every-day life. Although this disappointment is expressed through different details, the conviction is explicit. For Sihua, Yuli and other residents, tourism devel-opment has dramatically changed the place they call home since the landscapes that they were familiar with have given way to tourism businesses. What is interesting about this assertion is that town residents reiterate how comfort and fear have permeated their homeplace. For example, Liguo (male, age 30) emphasized the formation of comfort and fear in the town:

People who live in the town are not Naxi, nor are those walking in the streets. The town is quite different from the one I knew when I was a kid. I had a sense of peace when I walked in the streets. You would not come across several

people at night. Life at that time was very peace-ful and quiet. But now, I never go through the main streets.

Fear of using the main streets is common among town residents. As another respondent, Yang (fe-male, age 50), complained,

It’s quite inconvenient when I walk in the town. After I bought vegetables from the market, on the way home I had to give way to tourists. They did not let us pass; instead, it is we who make way. They spent thousands of yuan visiting Lijiang. Hence, we have to give way. It is a basic courtesy, isn’t it?

To Liguo and Yang, streets stop functioning as a comfortable place to saunter and a site to facili-tate social relations; rather, they become a space of

Figure 2. The conjunction between the buffer zone and the new city. Located in the southwest corner of Lijiang Ancient Town, the building on the left is a five-star hotel, investment of a private company from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. The small hill in the backdrop is the highest point in the town. The building on the right is a supermarket, located in the new city. Source: author’s photo (August 2010).

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pressure and fear. All these remarks reveal an inevi-table trend of displacement, reflected in Liguo’s re-mark: ‘The true meaning of Lijiang Ancient Town does not exist any more.’ Scholars have long realized that people use free walking along streets to develop a sense of belong-ing in the comfort of their home place (de Certeau 1984). Writing about her ideal home place, bell hooks (2009, p. 2) states, ‘I need to live where I can walk. I need to be able to walk to work, to store, to a place where I can sit and drink tea and enjoy fel-lowship. Walking, I will establish my presence, as one who is claiming the earth, creating a sense of belonging, a culture of place.’ In light of this state-ment, Lijiang Ancient Town, in the wake of tourism development, is far from an ideal home place for its residents. They feel the need to evade the tour-ist gaze, avoid jostling, and tolerate clamours when walking along the town’s main streets. By refusing to use streets and encounter strangers, town resi-dents express their resistance against the condition of displacement; where their public home place was a site of comfort and familiarity in the past, it now becomes commodified by the tourism industry and colonized by tourists. This recollection of comfort and familiarity was even more prominent when town residents recalled harmonious social relations that existed in their neighbourhood before tourism development. zifei (male, age 60) narrated the sweet stories about har-monious community ties during his childhood:

When I was a kid, I could do many little things for other adults. So did other kids to help my parents. When parents had some delicious cook-ies or fruits, they would ask the kids in the com-munity to enjoy some. Now it is impossible. Our neighbour is not local and he comes here to seek money. I don’t do business with him so that I don’t have to have any connection with him. Previously neighbours in one street were like brothers and sisters. When Gengfu’s moth-er passed away, I tried my best to help him. Why? His mother was also my mother when I was young. These stories are what I call memoir. They are still sweet and warm. What a beautiful memory! In the dead of night, this sort of memo-ry is rather meaningful.

The use of childhood and community life as refer-ence points of home are well known in the literature (Holloway and Valentine 2000; Tuan 2007; Wiles

2008). bell hooks argues that one must understand the ground of one’s being in order to fully belong to a place, and that understanding invariably ‘returns one to childhood’ (2009, p. 220). Hence, zifei ex-plicitly uses the narratives of his childhood to evoke ‘awareness of the power of a culture of belonging’ and to express his discontent with the current situa-tion as if dwelling in a place with which he feels un-familiar and unattached (bell hooks 2009, p. 220). As Appadurai (1996) points out, the very expe-rience of displacement bolsters the imaginative re-source of lived, local experience through which people mediate displacement. Similarly, Escobar (2001, p. 153) argues that culture sits in places and this culture comes from local knowledge of place to foster ‘a place-specific way of endowing the world with meaning’. Memory is significant for the town residents because it generates ‘a mode of place-based consciousness’, acts as a site for return-ing home, and signifies a discursive claim of home (Escobar 2001, p. 153). Through their memory, my respondents find a reference point to secure their ex-istence against displacement and establish a tenu-ous connection with the home place where they once played, socialized and grew up, thus maintaining a sense of place when their life now is flush with tour-ists. This sense of home was so strong that my re-spondents kept recalling from their memory the best pictures of the town before 1997, such as clean water, a peaceful life, harmonious community and historical buildings. Through these pictures, these residents portray a Lijiang which exists only in their memory and evokes nostalgia for the past. Memory enables them to anchor their daily life in reference points, temporally (through childhood) and spatial-ly (through residential buildings), when their home place – the town – becomes a lucrative product in the tourism market. Lijiang is not alone in this process of heritage commodification and demographic displacement. Today, urban built heritage becomes an impor-tant resource for Chinese cities to cater to consum-ers’ increasing desire for nostalgia and to assert, at a symbolic level, economic and political control over space, as shown in the historical buildings in Kunming (zhang 2006) and Shenzhen (O’Donnell 2001). In Shanghai’s Xintiandi, the old inner city residents were forcefully displaced and most resi-dential buildings were demolished, leaving only a small portion of the buildings conserved for bou-tiques, hotels, cafés, and shops (He 2010). Hence, the landscapes of consumption, as embedded in



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residential buildings in Xintiandi and Lijiang, serve to naturalize the power relations favourable to and shaped by those in the dominant position and pro-ject these relations into everyday life. It does not mean, however, that individuals have become pas-sive recipients of what Harvey (2006, p. 135) calls accumulation by dispossession, although the com-modification of cultural forms through tourism en-tails ‘wholesale dispossessions’. But rather, they actively harness spatial strategies to reinscribe their own presence within discourses and practices of home and, in this process, reconfigure the meanings and uses of urban spaces. As this section shows, my respondents in Lijiang deploy their life stories for a feeling of comfort to mediate their displacement in the town and produce their own knowledge of place through an imagination of home.

Dwelling in displacementThe construction of home goes beyond memory and narratives. As Lijiang Ancient Town slides into a dizzying abyss of commodification, town residents’ courtyard houses salvage a small haven for every-day life. Within this haven, town residents strug-gle to consolidate their claim of home, situated in the junction between erosion of community ties and the practice of home in a highly commercial con-text. The struggle can be found in some residents’ in-sistence on living in the town rather than in the new city. Usually, they have two options: maintaining a boundary to keep a distance from tourists, or living with them.

Maintaining the public–private boundaryA common comment made by my informants is that they enjoy their traditional courtyard houses and dislike the modern apartments found in the new city. When asked what living in a courtyard house is like, ziqiang (male, age 60) exclaimed:

Indigenous people living in peripheral regions, like us, get accustomed to living in nature. In a courtyard, it is easy to see blue sky and white clouds. If it is cold, I can stay indoors. If I want to enjoy the cool, I can be in a corridor or in the courtyard. Sitting on a couch and sipping Naxi tea, I enjoy my life very much.

This sentiment is similarly expressed by Huiyun (fe-male, age 20):

After all, we Naxi people like our courtyard. In a courtyard, you can lie on a couch, sip Naxi tea, play cards, and do other things. This sense cannot be found in other places. Even a luxury house cannot convey such a sense. Never!

In a similar way, Yang (female, age 50) explains why she still lives in the town:

Some people approached us to rent our house. I felt very uncomfortable when I realized that I had to move out of the town once I rented my house to other people. We want to live in our own home since I spent my whole life in the town. Although I am illiterate, I know my thought. I have feelings for my house. That is the reason I don’t want to move out.

These three respondents express similar feelings of belonging to their courtyard houses, and their com-ments illustrate their identity as a group that loves nature, a relaxed life, and their own ethnic culture. By connecting their identity to a particular place – their courtyard houses – my respondents feel that they belong to that place. It is a place where they feel comfortable, or at home, because part of their iden-tity is symbolized by and embodied in the unique qualities of their domestic living space (Escobar 2001; bell hooks 2009). Besides relaxing at home, they socialize with neighbours and relatives in the courtyards. Therefore, home is a haven to escape the ubiquitous tourist gaze in the town’s public space, and to develop a feeling of comfort through their routine practice of everyday life. These spatial prac-tices, as conducted by generations of Naxi people, ensure continuity and cohesion, and help the town residents to develop ‘a guaranteed level of compe-tence and a specific level of performance’ to mediate distress and displacement in a highly mobile world (Lefebvre 1991, p. 33, original emphasis). Living in courtyard houses thus denotes an im-portant life selection, for better or worse. As one town resident, zaoyu (male, age 60), pointed out:

We love the town. My children settle down in the new city and visit us every Saturday. Young peo-ple like living in the new city and also ask us to move out because of the air pollution, dirty water, and unbearable noise in the town. I insist on liv-ing in the town since I am familiar with it. We are old and love the old house inherited from our par-ents. We are not accustomed to life in the new city.

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zaoyu reveals a common sentiment shared by many town residents. For those still living in the town, the assertion of attachment and familiarity is translat-ed into comfort and belonging that emanates from living in their own houses. Unfortunately, this as-sertion has been eroded as tourism development in-duces an exodus of residents from the ancient town to the new city. Thus, zaoyu remarked: ‘Many old friends have moved out of the town. I still stay. If all of my friends move out, my life could be very boring.’ As zaoyu commented, everyday life in the town includes playing mahjong and cards, music entertainment, casual chat, and tea drinking. These activities are all part of socialization to consolidate his affinity with the town. Writing about a sense of home in relation to mobility, Wiles (2008, p. 128) argues that the ideal of home is bound up with ‘a yearning for connectedness, or social relationships that enable [people] to feel validated as individu-als’. This argument explains why zaoyu fears a bor-ing life as his connected social relations erode in the course of tourism development. All the above remarks underscore the ambiv-alence of what Clifford (1997) calls ‘dwelling-in-displacement’ and reveal the spatial frame between what is considered homely versus unhomely, attach-ment versus displacement, and private versus pub-lic. This spatial frame further illuminates a displaced experience when the town, which was once a home place to its residents, now becomes unhomely while a home-centred culture is still embedded in town residents’ everyday life. The lived experience of dwelling-in-displacement hence involves subjects enveloping themselves in a private space surround-ed by doors and walls. Nevertheless, town residents do not dwell in an already constituted space where they can remain the same, but live with in situ dis-placement and an endless inflow of tourists and mi-grant businesspersons. The home place is still here, but it is incorporated into a highly mobile world, necessitating a new social-spatial relation to home based on fear in the public space and comfort in pri-vate courtyard houses. By maintaining this tenuous socio-spatial boundary between public streets and private court-yard houses, town residents find comfort while dwelling in displacement, in large part by continu-ing their practices of everyday life that affirm their identity so that they can withstand the current dis-placement and future uncertainty which they must endure. This public–private frame resonates with Bauman’s (1998, p. 117) observation that ‘the

withdrawal into the safe haven of territoriality is an intense temptation; and so the defence of the territo-ry – the “safe home” – becomes the pass-key to all doors which one feels must be locked’. This frame also brings us back to Escobar’s (2001, p. 147) em-phasis on ‘place-based practices’ as these residents continue to construct boundaries around their home and maintain a sense of home in their everyday life, no matter how tourism development changes and hybridizes their grounds. The “secured” pri-vate home and locked doors seclude town residents from the crowded groups of tourists and forge a safe haven. Although scholars refute the characterization of home as a haven (see, e.g., Sibley 1995; Wardhaugh 1999), Lijiang’s town residents indeed rely on their own private home as a haven to resist in situ dis-placement when their public home place becomes a site of fear and displacement. Furthermore, this spa-tial arrangement of a public–private boundary nei-ther assumes the existence of a power structure of globalization and modernity to which the locals in-evitably succumb (Escobar 2001), nor reinforces ‘a representation of power as actual and preestab-lished’ which becomes the target of everyday prac-tices of resistance (Rose 2002, p. 384). Rather, the politics of place entails reconciliation and compro-mise when social groups with various capacities of power tentatively reach points of agreement so that they can make their social life possible.

Living with tourists and enabling hospitalityWhile the above mentioned residents endeavoured to maintain a public–private boundary, some other residents chose to live with tourists under the same roof. In 1999, Lijiang witnessed a huge boom in tourist arrivals. Many tourists found it difficult to secure accommodation due to the shortage of hotel rooms. Hence, Lijiang’s local government encour-aged the town residents whose homes had vacant rooms to accommodate tourists. Later on, these residents turned their residential houses into guest houses and operated tourism businesses by them-selves. Recently, more and more local guesthouse owners transferred the operation of business to mi-grants and moved out of the town to live in the new city. During my fieldwork in August 2010, some re-spondents revealed that less than 20 guesthouses in the town were directly operated by town residents, in comparison with over 700 guesthouses operat-ed and possessed by migrant businesspersons. No



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matter how these town residents ran their accom-modations business, one common feature was that they lived with tourists under the same roof. In oth-er words, the boundary between their everyday life and tourist consumption was largely dissolved. In this condition, how does this group of town residents understand the meaning of their home? Why do they choose to live with tourists? How do the place-based practices of hospitality at home empower town res-idents in relation to tourists? This section will ad-dress these questions. Respondents emphasize that the presence of tourists in their home becomes a part of their eve-ryday life. Home is more than just a physical enti-ty to accommodate human activity; it also acts as a contact zone and a site of hospitality to facilitate the interactions between residents and their tourist customers. Generally, these respondents point out at least two related results. First, living with tour-ists can enlarge residents’ horizon and help them to obtain much information about a world beyond Lijiang. As Lisi (male, age 55), a guesthouse owner, revealed:

I am receiving fresh stuff from other places. Then I can make many friends. Our home is a small platform. Through this platform, we can interact with tourists. My purpose is, several years later, that I can avoid Alzheimer’s disease. My spiritual life can be enriched and my men-tality should be young. I believe I can achieve these purposes through constant interaction with tourists. I want new knowledge; I want to know the external world. Hence, I benefit a lot from tourists.

Lisi’s assertion of the benefit from living with tour-ists reveals how town residents convert displace-ment and tourism development into opportunities for their enrichment and improvement. This asser-tion is echoed by zhao who accepts that, in general, tourism becomes a part of his everyday life:

Running the guesthouse is fun. I really enjoy it. Besides this business, I do not have other impor-tant things to do. Additionally, tourists and I can communicate with each other. I can introduce Lijiang’s history and culture to my customers and let them know. Then I can receive informa-tion about various places. This process is pleas-ant. Many of my customers become my friends, drawing on the communication between people

and people, between place and place, and be-tween country and country. My guesthouse has accommodated tourists from dozens of coun-tries. I maintain connections with many of them by phone.

For Lisi and zhao, their home becomes a platform of hospitality through which they chat with tourists in the courtyard, talk about the latest events happening in Lijiang and elsewhere, and get suggestions about how to improve their businesses. For them, living with tourists can bring more business opportunities and sustain a socio-spatial network between home and elsewhere, and between themselves and their tourist friends. Hence, the practices of everyday life generate a new source of power to these town resi-dents without jeopardizing ‘their embeddedness in circuits of … capital and modernity’ (Escobar 2001, p. 142). This finding concurs with Darling’s (2009, p. 658) argument that the ‘offer [of hospitality] im-plies a sense of spatial ownership, of “at home-ness”’. This ownership draws on the translation of local knowledge into power to educate tourists and maintain control of their own property. The second result of accommodating tourists at home is that town residents use their home to exhib-it local ethnic culture and share their heritage with tourists. By exposing their everyday life to tourists, these guesthouse operators foster an “authentic” mi-lieu through which their customers can cultivate a more meaningful experience of consumption in Lijiang. As one interviewee, Yuhua (male, age 55) remarked:

The purpose of our business is not for profit. We want to preserve this house – my home. Some tourists like it very much. They want to experi-ence Naxi ethnic culture in a residential house. They choose our guesthouse. … Some tourists do not live here, but want to visit our house. It is fine. They said how wonderful it is. Quite a lot of foreigners! We do not charge them any ad-mission fee as long as they like to see the house. Thus, we can promote Lijiang’s heritage as well as our house. These tourists will develop a con-servation consciousness.

To these respondents, home represents both a feeling of comfort and a cultural connotation of Lijiang’s heritage. Their home not only belongs to them, but also is shared by a larger group of people including tourists. The ability to welcome tourists hospitably

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reveals and reaffirms their control of a place which they can call home. By offering a homely place for tourists to expe-rience the Naxi way of life, these guesthouse own-ers thus turn their residential houses into a space of hospitality to link Lijiang with the tourism indus-try. The material form of home constitutes what Escobar (2001) terms as cultural sites where tour-ists and town residents are brought into a contact zone which entails the lived experience of everyday life and the consumption of authentic Naxi culture. These residential houses crystallize new meanings of home which involve friendship, socio-spatial net-works, and economic and cultural exchange, ex-plaining how people ‘practice the local in the global’ (Friedman 1997, p. 276). By absorbing translocal el-ements, these new meanings portray non-capitalist images of Lijiang and project town residents into the domains of capital and modernity (Clifford 1997; Escobar 2001).

Occupying home, occupying placeAs Massey et al. (1999) note, individuals have to claim a place to position themselves in their com-munity and become a social subject. By doing so, people have to ‘occupy that place, fully and with-out hesitation’ (Massey et al. 1999, p. 112). For Lijiang’s town residents, they need to occupy a place through which they can develop their social subjec-tivity even though they keep receding from tour-ism zones to avoid congestion, noise, and the tourist gaze. This recession stops at their houses, and a spa-tial frame is demarcated between the touristic spac-es of commodification and their private spaces of courtyard houses. Without hesitation, they “occu-py” their houses and invest their deep feeling in all the details of spatial arrangements, personal stories, and everyday practices. To town residents in Lijiang, home is not so much a physical entity fixed in the courtyard hous-es, but rather a meaningful dwelling, a performative way of everyday life through which they make their home while in displacement (Morley 2000). For ex-ample, Lisi asserted that, ‘I have lived here for 55 years. I was born in this courtyard house. I have been in the town ever since and have developed a spe-cial sentiment for the town, but I don’t know how to explain this sentiment.’ Then Lisi explained that his everyday life is embedded in his courtyard house through planting flowers, playing mahjong, having tea with friends, enjoying the sun, and listening to

water flow. This relaxed pace of life actually lures some previous residents back to the town for a visit. As Laohe (male, age 65) said, ‘Even after I moved out of the town several years ago, I still came back to the town every day to play mahjong. The new city is quite chilly and the ancient town is comfortable.’ To Laohe, the town is still a place called home. To town residents in Lijiang, home is something akin to a vast and complex whirlpool replete with the am-bivalence of dwelling and displacement, entwined with fear and comfort. The occupation, however, is conditioned by the process of tourism development. As town residents concede to the economic profits gained by convert-ing their courtyard houses into tourist guesthouses, or succumb to traumatizing living conditions due to noise, congestion and pollution, they give up their occupation and leave their home to migrant busi-nesspersons. For instance, Yang (female, age 50) expressed a deep feeling for her house and never thought of moving out when I first met her. In 2010, I was told that she had rented it out for stable eco-nomic returns and moved to live in the new city. In another case, Gengfu (male, age 55) described his previous neighbour’s story: ‘There is a bar direct-ly opposite to our houses and it stays open until one to two in the morning. It creates so much noise that my neighbour had to move out even though he cher-ished his house very much.’ As the tourism industry exerts a strong influ-ence on town residents’ everyday life, and com-mercial benefits from house renting erode town residents’ insistence on living in the town, the extent to which town residents maintain the use value of their home dwindles. Indeed, their claim of home is located on the threshold ‘between memory and nos-talgia for the past, everyday life in the present, and future dreams and fears’ (Blunt and Varley 2004, p. 3). Unsurprisingly, Lisi expressed his fear: ‘I don’t want migrant businesspersons to rent my house for a guesthouse. Because of this attitude, I sometimes have conflict with my son (who wants to rent the house for economic returns). We have disputes.’ While the fear finally crushed Lisi’s will to live (and die) in the town and forced him to forsake the house, many other residents cannot predict the fate of their house when it passes to the next generation. This fear is captured by Harvey (2010, p. 192) who argues that ‘the deeper meaning that people as-sign to their relationship to the land, to place, home and the practices of dwelling are perpetually at odds with the crass commercialisms of land and property



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markets.’ Harvey (2010, pp. 247–248) further as-serts that ‘questions of security, fear of others, so-cial preferences and prejudices all play their part in the fluid conflicts between social groups over the control of space and over access to valued assets’. Town residents have established a proprietary sense of ownership over and belonging to the town, but this sense is facing enormous challenges. Hence, the sentiments asserted by my respondents are re-flective of ‘widespread fear of dispossession’, eco-nomically and culturally (Harvey 2010, p. 248). While town residents’ struggles against disposses-sion can foster a seedbed of discontent for further conflicts, more and more residents choose to leave their property to migrant businesspersons and to monetize their property through rent. Social soli-darities which are built upon community ties, mem-ory, and culture are rapidly eroding, despite town residents’ resistance to the mechanism of capital ac-cumulation and their endeavour to occupy a spot which they can call home.

ConclusionThis article has sought to further an understanding of home through a focus on the local claim of home in a highly mobile world. In analysing the findings, this article has drawn on the works of bell hooks and Massey to explore the multiple meanings of home as a site of comfort and fear. Escobar’s idea of place-based practice has also been employed to illustrate the role of home living in helping town residents to develop feelings of comfort in an un-homely home place, and to mediate their experi-ence of displacement caused mainly by the tourism industry. Beneath town residents’ claim of home is the articulation of a politics of place. By ana-lysing how town residents maintain and forsake their home in the town, this article concurs with Escobar’s (2001, p. 163) argument that the con-struction of place, embedded in the process of local meaning-making, has become ‘a place-based local-izing strategy for the defence of local models of na-ture and cultural practices,’ even though localities are incorporated into translocal economic and cul-tural movements. Home is central in this process, as the case of Lijiang has shown. When displace-ment seems increasingly to be the norm, the making of home can be ‘a political act, a form of resistance’ (Clifford 1997, p. 85). This making of home is both a defence of place to withstand in situ displacement brought by tourism development, and a politics of

place to mediate ‘a global and all-embracing cap-italist system’ (Escobar 2004, p. 223). The recent development in Lijiang, however, exemplifies how the defence of place through everyday practice of home living is threatened by the logic of accumula-tion by dispossession. Theoretically, this article has further explicated the complexity of everyday life by critically exam-ining how town residents mediate their experience of in situ displacement. Living in the town becomes an important practice which de Certeau (1984, p. 36) refers to as ‘strategic rationalization’ which embod-ies an effort to ‘delimit one’s own place in a world bewitched by the invisible powers of the Other’. By becoming aware of the practices that both resist and reconcile tourism-driven accumulation by dispos-session, we gain insight into how the practices of everyday life are continuously being reconfigured in the entanglement of culture and economy. The stories recounted here not only describe home as a discursive and practical strategy in everyday life to define and occupy a bounded place for cultural at-tachment, but also reveal the fragility of this spatial occupation in relation to the ubiquitous presence of tourism commodification in the town. In addition, some residents choose to participate in the hospital-ity business and accommodate tourists in their own houses. They can see the direct benefit brought by this choice and exert control over their own home. Their living with tourists explains how the tourism economy can be ‘organized differently from current neo-liberal dogmas’ to develop a spatial ownership of their home and sustain non-capitalist practic-es such as self-enrichment, education and friend-ship (Harvey 2010, p. 192). Their practice starts by bringing some space under control and results in a defence of the local by identifying themselves as a group with a unique culture (Douglas 1991; Escobar 2001). Even as Lijiang Ancient Town falls largely into the hands of migrant businesspersons, town res-idents employ spatial strategies to maintain a pub-lic–private boundary, live with tourists under the same roof as a means of reconciling the situation, or forsake their homes for economic benefit. Hence, this article contributes to the geographies of every-day life by illustrating individuals’ multiple forms of strategic rationalization in handling socio-spatial transformation. What, then, are the implications of the Lijiang story in understanding China’s dramatic transforma-tion? As China’s emerging middle classes have en-joyed more personal freedom and have accumulated

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greater affluence, they now aspire for a modern, or even hypermodern, lifestyle not only in their home place but also in destinations such as Lijiang. Lijiang has been highly regarded as a model of eco-nomic development and heritage preservation for many Chinese cities to demonstrate that consump-tion, rather than production, is a crucial driving force to promote economy and urbanization. Urban landscapes have become a battlefield for capital ac-cumulation and identity making, giving rise to an endless process of resistance, coercion and recon-ciliation. Indeed, as Harvey (2010, p. 246) argues, accumulation by dispossession often generates ‘dis-ruptions of social networks, and destruction of so-cial solidarities can be every bit as serious. Loss of social relations is impossible to recompense with a money payment’. Harvey’s argument raises critical issues about social justice and the right to the city in the course of urban transformation in China. While a complex matrix of political-economic power is structuring how urban spaces in China are used and negotiated, more attention must be paid to how the practices of everyday life nurture urban spaces and foster a defence of place against consumerism, dis-placement and commodification.

AcknowledgementsThis paper has benefited substantially from com-ments by the two anonymous referees and the edi-tor. The financial support of the Center for the Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon is grate-fully acknowledged.

Notes1. “Town residents” here refers to those who are born in Lijiang

and then spend most of their lifetime in the town. Migrants who live in the town are not considered in this article.

2. Domestic tourists account for over 95% of Lijiang’s tourism market.

3. Lijiang Ancient Town, with a designated area of 3.8 km2, in-cludes two parts: a core area and a buffer zone. For this study, “the town” refers to the core area which is about one-third of the town and has been strictly conserved. The buffer zone is a mix of traditional residential houses and concrete buildings, and has gradually lost its heritage value.

Xiaobo SuDepartment of GeographyUniversity of OregonEugene, OR 97403-1251United StatesEmail: [email protected]

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Documents

‘IT IS MY HOME. I WILL DIE HERE’: TOURISM DEVELOPMENT AND THE POLITICS OF PLACE IN LIJIANG, CHINA