The menace of the market: Migrant youth, heroin and AIDS in rural southwest China

This dissertation examines how changing political economy has shaped heroin use and AIDS in Limu---an impoverished mountain community of the Nuosu minority in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan Province, China. I investigate the dual epidemics from the perspective of the Nuosu's particular positionality in China's haphazard modernization trajectories over the past half-century: from the non-state autonomy to socialist modernity (1956-1978), and then to capitalist modernity (post-1978). My investigation reveals that the severity of the epidemics among the Nuosu in a rapidly globalizing new world order is not something whimsical or accidental. The epidemics demonstrate a complicated case in which overwhelming forces beyond this peripheral community have been translated into social and individual suffering at the local level.;Beginning in the early 1990s, the Nuosu youth who ventured out to cities encountered heroin and, later, AIDS. I consider this phenomenon to be a new "rite of passage" initiated by the Nuosu youth when they began to embrace the market economy which is unprecedented in local history and has enabled them to enter an experientially new and materially affluent world. This entrance also carries its entrapments, as the youth' search for individuality and personal gratification in capitalist modernity has produced unintended consequences.;In response to the emerging crises that have consumed many young lives, the local Nuosu community launched its kinship-based campaigns for drug control. Through these community initiatives, we see how Nuosu peasants creatively revived and reformulated their once-suppressed traditions to cope with contemporary problems. Meanwhile, the state also began its related intervention, which was parallel to and yet detached from the grassroots endeavors. The intricate interfaces among the rise of youth individuality, the revival of indigenous social agency, and the decline of state legitimacy illustrate that the emerging epidemics and the efficacy of the corresponding interventions cannot be fully understood as merely local and contemporary issues. The phenomena of drug use and AIDS in this Nuosu community are global in nature and historically embedded in China's shifting modernization trajectories.