Abstract
The Chinese state envisions the building of the Tengchong-Myitkyina road in Yunnan as a key element in the integration of China, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and areas beyond. Tengchong has proposed itself as a “bridgehead,” eschewing associations with remoteness and dead ends and embracing the region as vital to a newly imagined spatial continuum. Local authorities must negotiate and reinterpret multiple histories, invoking the Southern Silk Road and the Stilwell Road (despite its ideologically problematic role as a Nationalist fighting area), to reconfigure Tengchong, complying with the central government’s narrative of Communist history, and harmonizing with road-building policy initiatives.
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Notes
- 1.
After the Tengchong-Myitkyina road completed, Local television station broadcasted a documentary entitled A Broad Road to the End of World (大路通天涯), which by now provides the most detailed account of the whole process of road reconstruction. The number of workers died is from the documentary transcript.
- 2.
For a detailed history of the Stilwell Road, see Anders (1965).
- 3.
According to China Statistical Yearbook, among 31 provinces, Yunnan’s per capita GDP ranked second to last in 2010. China has 55 ethnic minority groups and there are 25 in Yunnan.
- 4.
In 1992, a travelogue published by six young Yunnan scholars signaled the formal adoption of this new term to describe the old caravan roads. For details, see Mu et al. (1992).
- 5.
Among the most famous ones are Li Genyuan (李根源), a Republican-era politician and Ai Siqi (艾思奇), a Marxist philosopher in the 1950s and 1960s.
- 6.
According to Yunnan Daily, it took less than three years for the Tengchong airport to surpass half a million passenger flow a year, making it the fastest grow county-level airport in China. http://news.yunnan.cn/html/2011-12/23/content_1968178.htm, accessed December 28, 2011.
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Acknowledgments
I want to express my gratitude to the generous support I received from the Andrew Mellon Foundation’s New Directions Fellowship, which enabled me to carry out the “roadology” project in the past four years. I also want to thank Dr. Jianbin Guo at Yunnan University for his assistance of conducting fieldwork in Tengchong. Early versions of this article have been presented at the 16th Congress of the International Union of Ethological and Anthropological Science in 2009 and the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 2009.
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Zhou, Y. (2013). Branding Tengchong: Globalization, Road Building, and Spatial Reconfigurations in Yunnan, Southwest China. In: Blumenfield, T., Silverman, H. (eds) Cultural Heritage Politics in China. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6874-5_13
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