Delights in farm guesthouses: Nongjiale tourism, rural development and the regime of leisure-pleasure in post-Mao China

Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Yanqi Valley, 70km north of Beijing, this dissertation explores a Chinese version of rural tourism called nongjiale (delights in farm guesthouses). Nongjiale tourism has been booming over the last two decades not only as a new form of holiday making among members of the urban middle-class Chinese but also as a viable family enterprise among millions of peasants in China. This dissertation attempts to illuminate nongjiale's socio-cultural and political implications in terms of its articulation with the state agenda of rural development and the politics of consumption in post-Mao China. The first chapter of this dissertation attempts to draw a conceptual map to approach nongjiale tourism from a critical perspective and introduces the research site and data collection methods. The second chapter characterizes nongjiale tourism in terms of its origin, development, themes, and socio-cultural traits based on both ethnographic and textual data. The third chapter traces the trajectory of rural-urban relations in contemporary China to historicize the social construction of rural-urban fault-lines manifested through nongjiale tourism processes. The fourth and fifth chapters deliver an interpretive elucidation of two key aspects of nongjiale tourism experiences: the gastronomy of nongjiafan (farmer's home-made meals) and the architecture of nongjiayuan (farm guesthouses). The last chapter unravels the complex articulation of nongjiale tourism, the state agenda of rural development and the politics of consumption in post-Mao China. In so doing, it also attempts to capture the emergence of a new politico-cultural regime that engenders a new hedonistic subjectivity of consumption replacing the old Maoist subjectivity of socialist production and asceticism. Based on a series of ethnographic and historical analyses, it reaches to the conclusion that rural-urban social boundary-makings are a crucial vehicle of identity formation, cultural hierarchies, and power relations in changing fields of power and meanings in Chinese society today.