The place: ways and memories (data and methods)

2The village is perched on a mountain ridge, and the Yellow River (Tib. Rma chu) flows by at the bottom of the mountain in the valley where the village cultivated small plots in 1951. Because of the abundance of willow trees growing on the bank of the river, they named it Willow Valley or Kya rta khug in Tibetan. They did not build houses there except for simple adobe huts for temporary stays during the harvest season. Until the early 2000s, most families lived in Hor, farming and raising livestock, mostly sheep, goats, pigs and cattle, to supplement their food and income sources.

4As of 2020, when I began my research, the officially registered number of households in this community indicated by household registration status (Ch. hukou) jumped to 80 (55 households in Willow Valley and 25 households in Cadre School). This included residents in Hor, Willow Valley, Cadre School, and the county town. When asked by an outsider where they were from, they would often answer, “Hor”. Within their community, however, they differentiated themselves according to the place of their current residence.

6After the walk in the village, I was thirsty. I found the old road leading down to a spring in a deep canyon, the only source of drinking water for both people and their livestock. The road was pretty much washed away, with big open cuts and holes left behind by floods. In the canyon, I walked quietly, afraid of making any amplified noise that might disturb the spirits inhabiting there. From underneath a pile of stones, a trickle of clear water flowed silently. I had a drink of the fresh spring water in my cupped hands. It was salty. Later an old woman confirmed that the water always tasted like that. She reminisced, “With that salty spring water, we made delicious tea”.

7A lot of the village land was enclosed with fences. I tried to climb over the fence while struggling not to get caught between the wires like the poor animals who had lost their lives doing probably the same (there I saw some animal hair and bones). A web of black plastic water pipes lay exposed on the land dotted with young pine trees. Villagers were not allowed to graze their livestock in the fenced land, even though in principle the village as a collective entity was the sole owner and user of the village land (Ho 2001, 2005). Recently, the government made the announcement that soon all the houses there would be razed to the ground and the village site would be converted into farmland suitable for mechanised agriculture.

8There I remembered that once an elder said, pointing to the flat top of a hill, “The Mongols did that to the hill before they left. They believed that in a beautiful place like this, blessed with hills shaped like eggs radiating positive energies, highly capable and successful people would be born here in the future. So, to stop the birth of such people in this village, they deformed these hills. Also, look at the two hills behind my house. They used to resemble a pair of dragons facing one another, a very auspicious sign, but the Mongols ruined it by cutting a path through them. You can still see it”.

9Indeed, some parts of the village landscape evoked personal and family histories. On another occasion, again pointing to a small spot on the main mountainside, the same elder recounted the tragic death of his grandfather’s older brother. He said, “One day when my grandfather’s elder brother was herding on the mountains, he saw some Hui Muslim men stealing livestock from the neighbouring village. People in that village found out about it, and they chased after the thieves, yelling for help. Immediately he jumped into action. He had a gun, a musket, on his back. Back then it was not unusual to carry a gun because wolves roamed the area. He climbed that small hill there and prepared to set up his gun. Unfortunately, the thieves saw him trying to shoot at them. They fired a shot first and it hit his head. He was killed there, and at the time he was only 21 or 22 years old. He was married and had a young son. His father did not send his widowed daughter-in-law back to her parents. Instead, he took her as his wife and later they had a son, too”.

10When I was there conducting fieldwork, the reforestation project had just been completed, and a new project involving house demolition in Hor was under negotiation between the village and the local government in terms of compensation. To gather ethnographic data, I used participant observation as a key research method. In addition, I relied on other methods, including visual documentation and interviews. I had the opportunity to sit in three village meetings regarding house demolition, and at the meetings I observed and listened to heated discussions. Furthermore, I took photos of the places and the surrounding landscapes.

Land contested

13In spring 2021, the local county government launched a campaign to plant trees on the surrounding mountains in Hor, responding to the central government’s call for ecological conservation and construction in Qinghai. That year President Xi visited Qinghai and emphasised the significance of ecological values that Qinghai holds for the rest of the country. Previously, at the 18^th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, in 2012, President Xi promoted the idea of constructing “ecological civilisation” (Ch. shengtai wenming) and attached to it the same importance as economic development, using slogans such as “Clear waters and green mountains are as valuable as gold and silver mountains” (Yeh 2022). It is a continuation of the central government’s efforts on environmental protection, dating back to the reform years in the early 1980s (Hou et al. 2021). Towards the end of the last century and the beginning of this century, China’s GDP-driven development became critically questioned in the wake of environmental problems such as the floods that devastated millions of people in 1998. Thus, government officials and scholars began to rethink China’s development model, which had focused on material growth alone. In 2003, a landmark shift occurred, heralding a sustainable approach to development summed up in catch phrases including “scientific development concept” (Ch. kexue fazhanguan) and “harmonious society” (Ch. hexie shehui) (Gallagher 2005; Zheng & Tok 2007; Wu 2011).

15A year later, in 2022, all the houses in Hor were demolished and the plots consolidated into farmland. The families whose houses were razed received a fixed amount in compensation, although villagers strategised and made great effort to maximise their compensation. To utilise resistance from people and the pressure the local government was working under to complete the assigned task, the village leadership quickly formed a temporary committee and decided to report a higher number of houses for demolition in addition to the village school and temple. The plan was to distribute the extra money among later established households that would not be qualified for compensation because they did not have houses to be torn down in the original village site. Then arose a problem, contesting what constituted a household among the villagers. Disagreements persisted and consequently jeopardised their plan.

18As of summer 2022, trees were planted on the mountain slopes and irrigated regularly with a network of pipes and small reservoirs, drawing water from an upper stream in a nearby ravine. The reforested land was enclosed with fences and managed by the local government. It was off-limits to the villagers and their animals. Also, the original village site was flattened and consolidated into farmland suitable for industrial agricultural production. The demolition of their old houses signified the completion of their resettlement that began two decades ago in the sense that it ended the possibility for them to return. Until then, villagers visited Hor occasionally and kept their houses, albeit mostly emptied, for socioeconomic and sentimental values. An old lady said at a village meeting, half-jokingly, “We need our old house in case our children don’t want us to live with them”. Most importantly, villagers saw the economic potential there. They knew that, when necessary, they could go back to raise livestock, a labour-intensive yet viable economic enterprise. At the end, the village lost their houses and the majority of village land to the state projects. Old village landscapes were altered, and new landscapes were constructed. Villagers were left confused about whether the state or the village collective owned the new land.

Whose land?

19Today, after going through some major agrarian reforms, farmers in China have the right to use the contracted farmland and the right to manage it, and yet they do not have property rights, which belong to village collectives (Zhou et al. 2021). In other words, there is no private land. Furthermore, as Ho (2005) says, the notion of collective ownership is not clearly defined and in fact left ambiguous in law so that government can manoeuvre that ambiguity to expropriate land from people when necessary. Indeed, local governments, often acting as a higher-level collective, expropriate land under the guise of the “public interest” from village collectives and assume ownership. In pre-modern times, the customary land tenure system allowed individual families in the village to claim ownership and property right over the farmland they developed on the communal village land, and they could even sell it. Perhaps partially because of that many Tibetan farmers conceived of themselves as the de jure landowners, forgetting or unwilling to acknowledge that they only possess use and management rights to the farmland allocated to them through de-collectivisation under the household responsibility system in the early 1980s.

20The village land belonged to the village collective as a whole, so no individuals in the village could own it. At the same time, anyone could claim to “own” a piece of land as long as it would not directly challenge any particular individual. Nevertheless, it could potentially lead to conflicts if two individuals claimed the same land or boundaries became disputed. Unlike other more economically developed areas in China, the village had no incentives to make use of their collective land for economic profits either by building factories or bringing in outside investments. There was no collective effort on that front, but individual farmers were claiming and using communal land for their own economic gains. Adhering to the traditional way of claiming land ownership, villagers would simply mark a piece of communal village land as theirs by planting trees. In other words, taking advantage of ambiguous land ownership and unclear property rights, as well as overlapping laws (official and customary) and weak enforcement, individual villagers continued to make land claims and assert ownership.

21Some land disputes escalated into violent confrontations between individual families in the village, but rarely they caused the outbreak of large-scale violence involving extended families. Villagers lamented that nowadays others in the village were economically and politically calculating and were not worried about social or moral ties that once held them together as a community. Many agreed that the relationship between the individual families and the collective village had grown weak. Often, villagers blamed this kind of moral decay on capitalist competition created by the market. They expressed nostalgia, almost idealising it as egalitarian and peaceful. In fact, their family histories suggested otherwise; there was violence in the village that sometimes ended up with people severely injured or even killed, in which case the perpetrators and their families were “pressured to leave the village”.

22When the villagers first learned about the house demolition project, they held a meeting and everyone present expressed opposition to it. However, the village leadership who attended government meetings was convinced that the government was adamant in their efforts to tear down the houses and turn the land into farmland. The village leader advised villagers to “speak bitterness” (Ch. suku; Tib. dka’ ngal bshad pa) to seek sympathy from the government so that they may get higher compensation. At the meeting the villagers vented their mixed feelings of despair, resentment, sadness, and nostalgia.

23More village meetings ensued, but not many people showed up. In the following days, the village leader left voice messages in the village WeChat group, asking people to cooperate. Yet, they made a show of defiance by refusing to move their possessions out of the old houses. Also, the village leader emphasised repeatedly in the WeChat group that it was important for every family to send a representative, preferably a man who could make decisions on behalf of the family, to attend meetings. However, women and elderly people came to the meetings. Actually, during this time of the year most villagers, especially men, were away from home, working temporary jobs elsewhere. To assuage people’s distrust and suspicion of him collaborating with the government, the village leader told them that he stopped attending the government meetings regarding this matter. In fact, many villagers did not know about the relevant government policies. An elderly lady insisted on the need to stand up against the authorities. She rejected the assertion that it was a central government policy, accusing the local government of power abuse and land grab. After many long discussions, the village agreed on the futility of their resistance; finally, under increasing pressure from the village leadership, they decided to cooperate with the government, hoping to maximise their compensation, but they did not succeed as it turned out.

24The village politics surrounding land expropriation and compensation was complicated, as it involved choosing sides and persuasion, affected by personal networks and kinship relations. At these public meetings, villagers were careful about what they said. They did not openly criticise anybody or voice disapproval of others’ opinions, even though they did not necessarily agree. Without understanding the subtle operations of relations between people and families in the village, it would be difficult to make sense of what villagers were saying or not saying. As one of my interlocutors said, “People say one thing and do another. They do not talk straight, so it’s hard to know what they are truly thinking”. The scholar He Xuefeng says,

Understanding the structure of small kinship groups is the key to understanding village politics […] The density of economic interests and the rural social stratification formed by economic development have further promoted the active performance of small kinship groups in village politics”. (2021, p. 291)

25However, this statement is partly correct, for it presupposes the unity of kinship groups, which is frequently challenged due to conflict of personal interests – close kinship relations are not strong enough to hold people together. For example, recently the village party secretary got into a dispute over money and land with his elder brother, which soured their relationship.

26Often villagers were not well informed about government policies. The higher-level authorities would sometimes withhold certain information to their advantage, fearing that too much information would hinder their efforts to implement the policy. Of course, the village leadership’s assistance and cooperation were instrumental. They discussed and strategised with village leadership and sometimes made private deals with them to win their support. For example, after successfully persuading the village to agree with the demolition, the party secretary obtained the contract to consolidate the entire village site and quickly finished the project. Therefore, acting as brokers between the village and the government, the village leaders were distrusted and criticised by fellow villagers for not taking care of their interests and sometimes they were accused of negotiating with the government for personal gain.

Land undivided: the politics of membership and distribution

27The cultural politics of social organisation and membership is bound up with state-led community building through resettlement. After decades of social upheavals and restructuring, a dual system of sociopolitical arrangements exists today in Tibetan communities, with the modern state administrative system continuing to penetrate and replace traditional social institutions. Nevertheless, informal social institutions persist and evolve because of their embeddedness in local social and cultural norms, giving rise to a disjunction between state organisational schemes and local community norms. This is particularly true of community membership. The government recognises officially registered households and administrative villages as primary social entities at the local level, while the local community sees complexities surrounding family and household, acknowledging people’s social connections with their community through lineage, kinship and ritual practices.

28Community membership was frequently contested because government subsidies and benefits were provided on the basis of households. As a result, new issues and questions arose; what defined a household and what qualified as household membership; this raised special questions about women who married outside of their villages. In order to obtain separate hukou and thus more household-based government benefits and village resources, some families in the village insisted that they consisted of two or more households, even though in reality they lived as one large extended household. To their advantage, the state upheld the “modern” notion of a small nuclear family and issued separate hukou to households in these families. Moreover, some married daughters, who traditionally moved to their husband’s place of residence, claimed membership in the village on the basis of uxorilocal marriage, meaning they did not end their rights in their natal village. What’s more, those who did not have hukou in the village claimed membership because of their ancestral connection and kin in the village. In other words, villagers were taking advantage of this dual system of tradition versus publicly accorded rights to seek benefits.

29Tibetan farming villages were territorially defined and their membership was exclusive and restricted through rituals such as the worship of local deities. Outsiders could join a village through marriage. Although this village went through structural changes in terms of political and economic organisation, particularly during the years of communes and production brigades, its territorial boundaries were mostly retained. Larger traditional communities and polities that were composed of several “natural” villages or groups of natural villages were split and reorganised within the tri-level rural administrative structure, with communes, production brigades and production teams. At the county-level, reorganisation that caused traditional structural breakups in administration was common. But natural villages as basic social and territorial units did not change significantly even during the land reform years in the early 1950s.

30As members of the village community, all village households were entitled to equal share of the land. In principle, farmland should be reallocated periodically according to demographic change in family size due to birth, death and marriage. However, given how complicated implementation could be, especially when it would destabilise land tenure, in many communities there were no major land re-allocations (Kung 2000). Like many other villages in this area, this village did not have land redistributed simply because of a change in membership and thus landholdings remained the same since the early 1980s, regardless of the increase or decrease in family size. Some families lent their fields to those who needed additional fields without any payment as long as they took care of the fields and covered the expenses for irrigation and ploughing. And some farmers swapped fields to bring their fragmented plots concentrated together for easy farming. Now the village was faced with the challenge of what to do with the new farmland made from demolishing their old houses in the original village site. Some villagers suggested the village gives a share to everyone including daughters who married out as well as those employed by the government, while others did not agree.

31In the past, daughters who were married out of the community and lived with their husbands’ families in another community were no longer considered members of the family and the community. By law, regardless of whether they were married out or not, their hukou or household registration determined and indicated membership. Yet, because people suspected that hukou could be forged and the hukou system contradicted the traditional way of determining membership, hukou was disregarded for deciding membership and eligibility for benefits. For example, a married daughter could keep her hukou in the village and keep her children registered in her hukou. But most women followed local custom and transferred their household registration to their husband’s community, thus renouncing their membership and leaving their share of farmland to their natal family. In the event of divorce, they would usually return home and receive a piece of farmland from their family if they wished to establish their separate household, but not so if her natal family did not have enough land or she did not receive a share of farmland under her name from the village during the decollectivisation in 1983.

32The hukou booklets issued in recent years did not indicate the rural status because the system did not make a distinction between the rural and urban residency any more – in their hukou, farmers were simply registered as residents with their home addresses. In order to register as new members, marriage certificates and birth certificates are required, as well as verification and approval from the village committee and township government. Hukou no longer restricts mobility and residence as it used to. However, the hukou status can offer benefits tied to a given locality, in this region the promise of rural development backed up with favourable policies and more resources and subsidies, helping poor farmers with subsidised housing and cash aid.

33Some families asserted that they had consisted of two or more independent households and therefore each and every household should be entitled to compensation. This corresponds to Levine’s idea of conglomerate households, a term used to describe arrangements in which two or more married children remain with their parents, living in separate houses or places and yet functioning as one large household that is “simultaneously extended and joint, in that it includes multiple generations and several married siblings” (2021 p. 91). Indeed, this type of conglomerate household was common in this community because most households, if not all, were multigenerational, and could be divided into at least two nuclear households with grandparents being one and parents and their children as another. In fact, in this village there were 55 registered households with 11 being single-person households and 5 consisting of grandparents and their grandchildren, whose parents were registered separately. If a house were the indicator of a household, then they would not match that number – there were only 38 houses in the village.

34Since village collectives owned rural land in China, they decided how to distribute their communal land. The challenge was what constituted village membership and who should be included in the distribution. Those families who had adult children working in the public government sector wanted a share for them and their children, even though technically they were not considered farmers because they were state employees living outside of the village and their hukou was no longer registered within the village. Nevertheless, these people continued to call this community their home and the community indeed regarded them as members. They made monetary contributions when the village raised funds for village events and projects such as repairing the village temple. In addition, they actively participated in the worship of village deities and in village events and rituals. In doing so, they continued to assert membership in the village. However, when it came to receiving government welfare benefits and village resources such as farmland, residence in the village became the key criteria, but it did not go unchallenged.

35One villager expressed his discontent about allocating land to those villagers who were no longer farming in the village. His family received fields for four people in the early 1980s, and almost four decades later they still farmed the same fields. When he and his brother got married and set up their separate households, they divided the fields between them. The two brothers’ wives and children did not receive any additional fields from the village. Now the two households with 12 people together tried to make their living on the same amount of farmland originally allocated to 4 people. For him it was not fair for families like his to share the newly made fields with those married daughters and state employees. According to traditional customs, married daughters were no longer community members, and by default, once employed by the state, village members would lose their rural hukou status and thus could not receive benefits from the village collective. All of that created discord in the village and the village leadership could not distribute the fields. As an alternative, the village could lease out the collective farmland and divide the money from it among villagers, which would please the government because the government’s plan was indeed to industrialise and commercialise farming. Yet some villagers feared that they might lose their land.

Land transformed

37Over the past two or three decades, a lot of development-induced land expropriations took place in communities close to urban centres – their spatial proximity and hence market value made their land an easy target (Sargeson 2013; Chuang 2014; Wong 2015). Remote mountainous communities, however, were not out of reach. In Qinghai, local governments used to cite ecological reasons to move pastoralists from their land, and in more recent years they employed poverty alleviation as a justification to relocate them to “easy areas” (Ch. yidi) supposedly endowed with better economic opportunities and potential for better livelihoods, with better access to the market, schools and hospitals (Ptáčková 2019, 2020). Within the past several years, many villages in this area were resettled under the programme of resettlement for poverty alleviation. Their old houses were torn down and their fields were enclosed for the purpose of “ecological construction”.

38In this particular case of land expropriation, deterritorialisation is used in a literal sense to refer to the very act of demolishing houses and flattening the village site, simultaneously accompanied by reterritorialization through converting that land into arable fields and creating new sites for housing in locales favoured by the government, which is the case for villages that went through resettlement recently just before the state declared victory over absolute poverty in the country in 2020. Deterritorialisation has erased the village landscape, destroying sociocultural and political landscapes of the village reified in built structures on the land. For example, the spatial arrangement of houses in relation to one another manifested people’s kinship and social relations, not to mention the cultural and historical significance of the houses and communal buildings like the temple within the village.

40Scholars have argued that resettlement is a political manoeuvre in the way that it brings these communities within state control, thus creating conditions for effective governance as intended by the state. For instance, using deterritorialisation to conceptualise post-displacement, Wang (2022) identifies resettlement with the state’s efforts to transform the resettled residents into more governable subjects. Some Tibetan scholars (Gaerrang 2015; Zhaxi 2019) have made similar arguments in terms of Foucault’s idea of governmentality in their studies of housing and resettlement in Tibetan areas. However, that does not address how the resettled people manage to make the best out of their situations. Generally speaking, in a lot of the literature on resettlement, resettled people were portrayed as passive victims. True, in many cases, they did not choose resettlement, but for a variety of reasons they did not completely oppose it either. They acted on it to protect their economic interests primarily. For example, they tried to make demands and set conditions when negotiating with the government. Given the asymmetrical power relations, in which they found themselves when negotiating with the government, they resorted to “speaking bitterness” as a strategy to seek sympathy and higher compensations. Regardless, they had to go through a difficult process of adaptation, making the transition from a traditional subsistence livelihood in the mountains to a capitalistic market-oriented livelihood.

41Villagers did not necessarily resist change, per se. For them, change was not an end, rather a continuation of life in new ways and forms. Within the larger context of China’s development and urbanisation going on in this region over the past two decades, villagers have been preparing for changes. Needless to say, it was difficult for them to give up their ancestral homes and leave their land to which they had close social, economic and cultural attachments. They had concerns and were aware that its implications were profound because their removal from their original home environment changed their mode of production and hence socioeconomic relations within the community. Nonetheless, as I will show, the affected people were resilient and adaptive in dealing with changes.

42In this community, villagers, especially the younger generation, complained about farming because small family farming did not make sense economically, and yet as farmers they were expected to continue on farming unless they no longer had farmland. In fact, under the household responsibility system farmers cannot leave the contracted fields unused. Also, the elderly people to whom I talked described farming as a way of life that was culturally significant and economically stable for their livelihood, while younger people engaged in off-farm cash-generating activities were willing to abandon farming altogether. Although it brought food for self-consumption, family farming did not yield cash revenue since the small plots of farmland were not enough to produce any substantial surpluses. Moreover, the prices of food crops such as wheat were kept low by the government (Wu 2016), while the prices of consumer goods soared. In a way, the old subsistence economy was no longer sustainable as the cash economy became dominant. Everything – from time and labour to animals and vegetables – was commodified and thus calculated and traded in terms of monetary value. For example, some villages near county towns grew vegetables in their gardens and sold them in town to augment their cash income. In the past, few local Tibetans were engaged in selling their agricultural products in the market because trade was stigmatised and seen as an embarrassing thing to do. On the contrary, nowadays more Tibetans were actively seeking market opportunities to make money. No doubt, Deng Xiaoping’s famous slogan, “To get rich is glorious”, resonated with them.

On the move

43One afternoon I sat down with Lhamo, a lady in her early sixties, outside of her house, while she busied herself making straw brooms. At the time she lived in Willow Valley with three of her seven grandchildren, taking care of them. While living with her younger son’s family, she also tried to help her elder son’s family with childcare and household chores when she could. Except for the two youngest grandchildren, still toddlers, all others attended school. She was concerned about her grandchildren’s education because her sons and daughters-in-law were too preoccupied with making money outside to pay attention to their children’s education. His younger son recently returned from digging caterpillar fungus in Golok, a pastoral area in the province, as a wage labourer working for a cousin in the village. And his wife ran a small business in the county town, selling clothes. Since he returned, he was doing what locals called zhor las or sideline work, referring to various part-time jobs demanding physical labour in and around the county town.

44It was almost harvest time. Willow Valley was still quiet, and many homes were locked. The temperatures fluctuated around 35-Celsius degrees over the past few days, and the wheat fields were turning yellow by day. Nowadays with the availability of combine harvesters for hire, harvesting no longer required a lot of effort and time. The combines cut the wheat, break the grain from stalks and collect it in a tank while separating them from chaff and stalks, which are left on the fields and collected by another baling machine that turns into bundles of hay for livestock. Some local Tibetans owned these machines as a means to make money and they travelled from village to village during the harvest season. It took six hours for the machines to finish all the work that Lhamo’s family spent more than ten days on in the past. This year they reaped approximately 1000 kilos of wheat, which would not be enough to last the entire year. During harvest her son and daughter-in-law also came to help. They sun-dried and winnowed their wheat and stored it away within three days.

45Looking at 15 bags of wheat stacked up in the courtyard, her son said, “In terms of economic returns, this was a poor investment”. To put it in perspective, he could earn a daily wage of 300 yuan as a skilled worker, working as a bricklayer, excavator operator, or a truck driver at a construction site. After digging caterpillar fungus for 40 days, he brought home 12 000 thousand RMB. In the market, this year’s crop output was valued at around 3 000 yuan. For young farmers, farming was not worth their while, considering the effort, time and money invested in it. He could earn enough money to buy that much grain in 10 days (of course, provided that he finds a job). However, the elders I spoke to did not look at farming in simple economic terms. They believed that farmers should farm regardless of crop outputs. They cited reasons such as food safety, self-sustainability and maintaining traditional ways of life. Actually, the elders staying at home did most of the farm work, and in this way they remained productive. One can argue that they emphasised the importance of farming to demonstrate the value of their contribution to the family.

46That summer, there were fewer than ten families living regularly in the village. The elders and children constituted the majority of the people I met in the village. Once in a while a car, a motorbike, or a loud tractor came, and they disappeared quickly. Young people, especially men, were pressured to go out for work, as I learned from talking to some of them when they returned home for a short visit. They went out to make money so that their families could support and sustain a lifestyle, which became increasingly dependent on cash. Nevertheless, it was not the case that they could find a job and stay employed for a long period of time. In some instances, they went to relatively faraway places (within the province) where they worked for several months. Also, the majority of the families in the village owned apartments in the county town and preferred living in town.

47In recent years, more and more villagers became self-employed, venturing into business enterprises that included taxi services for men, retail businesses such as selling clothes and vegetables for women, running bakery and barbershops by women, and making and selling handicrafts like Tibetan tents and robes by men in the county town. These enterprises entailed financial resources and skills. They provided a more or less steady income throughout the year. Three families in the village purchased taxis with expensive fees for operation permits. With that kind of investment, they earned a good monthly income. One of them admitted, “I earn as much as an average government-employed civil worker now”. Also, there were a few entrepreneurial villagers, taking higher stakes in businesses like construction and caterpillar fungus. They hired fellow villagers and/or others from neighbouring villages to work for them as daily wage workers. For instance, one family in the village was involved in contracting government projects to build houses for resettled nomads in another county. They purchased expensive machinery including an excavator, a digger, etc. The two adult sons operated these machines and worked on the projects.

48The increasing use of large machines in farming freed a lot of labour from villagers, accompanied with the growing population and dwindling size of farmland due to cultivation of walnut trees in the fields, as well as house construction. Villagers ranging in age from 20 to 50 participated in cash-generating activities outside the village. The local government provided vocational training such as culinary skills, machinery operating skills and traditional handcraft-making skills for local people. In order to motivate participation, trainees were paid a small amount of money. In a government report, higher-up provincial level officials inspecting and auditing the training projects criticised the local government for their inadequate screening for targeted trainees and lack of knowledge about their real problems and needs, failing to consider the employability of people trained in certain skills based on market needs and demand. To deal with this issue and the sustainability of the resettlement projects, the development of local industries became necessary and important.

49The local government provided subsidies to agricultural cooperatives (Ch. nongye hezuohe) that households joined. For example, in 2022, for rural revitalisation projects the county received funding from the provincial government equivalent to 22 million US dollars approximately, and almost half of it was earmarked for the industry development such as building large-scale animal farms raising cows, chickens, and even donkeys. In the neighbouring village, there was a large chicken farm subsidised by the government, owned by a village cooperative and operated by several women from the shareholding families. In actuality, some cooperatives were not cooperatives because they were actually a single-family operation. However, to qualify as a cooperative and register as such so that they would be eligible for government subsidies, the founders of the cooperatives would ask their relatives and friends in the village to join the cooperative in name.

50In Willow Valley, there were two such government-subsidised cooperatives, raising sheep and pigs in pens approved by the government. Recently, more households in the village started raising livestock, pigs primarily because of a hike in pork prices for self-consumption and sale. Usually people in their fifties, who were considered too old to perform physically demanding jobs outside, took up the work. A young couple in their mid-thirties was also engaged in this because they were recognised as an impoverished household receiving government cash aid, which in return required the wife to provide public services like cleaning village streets and watching the reforested land. The husband was a village cadre working as a youth union secretary, and he was paid for his miscellaneous community services. Hence, they could not leave home for work elsewhere.

51For villagers, the most desirable employment was the public government sector, providing a stable monthly salary with good benefits. A government job did not only bring better income but also social status and power. However, it was difficult and extremely competitive to obtain a government job as a teacher, doctor, or civil servant. Education was key for villagers to find such a job and it probably provided them the best opportunity for social mobility. This village had more government workers than its neighbouring villages, with most families (23 out of 38) having at least one member working for the government. That reduced financial burdens for families and, moreover, improved their overall financial security and social status. Families with government workers were usually better off, and older parents were not so pressed to work odd jobs. Some parents would move to town to live with their adult children and their families.

52Perhaps one might argue that farmers were in the process of proletarianisation, with many of them working odd jobs most of the time in non-farm commercial and industrial sectors and becoming more dependent on them as main sources of income. Over the past several years, 38 households in Willow Valley diversified their economic resources, diminishing their reliance on farming crops alone. Some ventured into commercial businesses and services that were once dominated by people of other ethnicities like Han and Hui in the area. Until recently, people from this village were not engaged in these kinds of commercial activities, and in fact trade was not appealing socially and culturally. Nevertheless, the villagers’ attitudes shifted. They were willing to take on any honest jobs that would generate income for them. As money became increasingly important, it pushed them to move into new trades and jobs. Economic differentiation began to emerge, leading to social stratification manifested in the purchase of private vehicles and apartments in town, and new houses in the village.

Pha yul: a place of belonging

53For Tibetans, pha yul, meaning literally father’s homeland, is the place of belonging with deep ties to that particular land, landscape, people and spiritual beings, namely local deities. Makley (2018) notes that her Tibetan interlocutors refer to the apartments they own in town as rgya khang or Chinese houses and differentiate them from what they call home in their original rural community where they (or their father) were born and raised. Though living in urban spaces, they trace pha yul back to a rural community and associate it with elements of Tibetan rural background and landscape in their imagination (given the majority of the Tibetan population lived in rural areas as farmers and pastoralists until one or two generations ago).

54Pha yul is manifested in the form of a house in the village and it is steeped in local culture. Jin et. al (2022) argue that “home” and “face” as informal institutions embedded in traditional Chinese culture, value systems and community norms exerted a tremendous influence on farmers’ decision to not relinquish their residential land (Ch. zhai jidi) when they were offered compensation even after they moved into towns and received urban status. It was the same for people in this village in regard to pha yul. It involved homestead, another land issue entangled in land expropriation and house demolition. In principle, every household was guaranteed a homestead. Willow Valley had 55 registered households with 171 people, but there were only 38 houses in the village. It means that 17 households were entitled to a homestead from the village collective so that they could build houses in the village. The standard bureaucratic procedure was to apply to the village committee for approval first, and then to the township-level government and last to the office of land and resources for final approval. Since it entailed too much paperwork and red tape, villagers simply did not bother with it. Several years ago, the local government stopped issuing permits to build houses in the village altogether. Nevertheless, villagers continued to build houses on their farmland.

55For Tibetans in the area, a house is literally the “face” of the family because it signifies the family’s social status (Zhaxi 2023). As villagers tried to emulate one another, houses began getting extravagant in both size and use of materials. Building a house was a collective project that required financial contribution and labour from all members of the family, both nuclear and extended (the closer to the family, the more contribution is expected). In the village, the household was the most basic economic unit with all financial resources typically shared and managed by the male head of the household. Indeed, as Zhaxi says, a house is more than just a shelter because its social and symbolic capital is significant. Therefore, those planning to build a new house were under pressure to surpass other houses, especially in the use of timber, which was the most valued and expensive construction material. The overall criteria for a nice house included size or the number of rooms and area, as well as timber and exquisite handmade woodwork. When villagers made comparisons between houses, they would look at the dimensions of wood pillars and beams as the most crucial quantitative indicators of a nice house – the longer and larger pillars and beams, the more expensive and thus the better they were. Thus, houses represented “face”, creating competition among villagers to get ahead of one another in the community.

56People leaving home in the village for work for short or long periods of time wanted to return home to a nice house eventually. In fact, people’s desire to return home in the countryside became even stronger in recent years when the government started to direct resources to the countryside by building new infrastructure like asphalt roads, running water, sewage and telecommunication services. Having worked and lived in urban centres as rural migrants, villagers experienced first-hand a plethora of problems and concerns, including pollution, stress, food safety, cash dependency, a sense of displacement, and discrimination. In a way, exposure to urban life strengthened their appreciation of rural life.

57Nonetheless, for villagers, owning an apartment unit in town was a symbol of family success and a sign of a better easy life as opposed to a rural life with intensive labour and lack of modern amenities such as indoor heating in winter, during which most of the houses remained empty nowadays – 33 out of 38 house owners in the village-owned apartments in the county town. Last year a family purchased a new apartment. Until then, the husband drove a taxi in town while his wife and sons lived in the village. Although the town was only approximately six miles from the village and it took only about 15 minutes after the completion of a newly finished asphalt road, villagers still found it imperative to own an apartment because of peer pressure and the status associated with it.

58On the other hand, government-employed villagers, known as las byed pa (or simply workers) yearned to build a home in their natal village where they had parents or close relatives living, contributing to a new phenomenon sometimes described as counter-urbanisation. In other words, villagers aspired to enjoy the benefits of both the rural and urban life. The rural and the urban divide began to merge and boundaries were less defined. The long-held notion of the urban and rural divide became obsolete, since the state started to push for a new type of urbanisation in 2014 (Peng et al. 2021), emphasising the integration of rural and urban elements in the process of urbanisation in situ, hence breaking down the segregation between the rural and the urban. According to the government, the new rural development programmes including rural revitalisation or “beautiful village” aimed to attract people and resources back to the countryside to develop it.

59In summer 2021, three families in the village began to build new houses for their married sons. As sons grew up and got married, after consulting with the male elders in the clan, their father would prepare to establish separate households for them. Usually, the oldest son would get married first and start his household separately. However, in one instance, there was a difference of opinion regarding who should inherit the big house that their family was building then. The grandfather would like the oldest son to own it, but his father did not agree because he wanted the youngest son to have it. It seemed that the grandfather and the father had their favourites. To justify his position, the grandfather said, “According to the local customs, the oldest son should leave and live in the newly built house, while the youngest son inherits the old family house and lives with the parents”.

60Also, married-out daughters sometimes received land from their natal families. The village leader inherited a large plot of wasteland on a hill in the valley, which his late father had claimed many years ago. When the village moved down, he and his younger brother split the land between them with the help of an older male cousin of theirs – their two out-married sisters also received a piece of land each, albeit small. Subsequently he turned the land into arable fields and built a new house. In order to increase the value of his land in the event of government expropriation, he planted walnut and poplar trees instead of food crops on his land. With enough land in his possession, he planned to build two houses for his sons, and he wanted to give a piece of land to his married daughter so that her family could build a house on his land if they needed. Usually a married-out daughter would not bring her husband back to her home unless they were faced with extreme hardships. Levine (2021) reported cases of families moving back and forth between the husband’s and wife’s natal home residences due to shortages of grazing land in pastoral areas.

Community growing connected

62Villagers were proactively trying to maintain and reinforce a sense of community that was perceived under threat because of the state-led community building projects. Makley (2018) claims that the state’s efforts to build shequ (Chinese) or an urban neighbourhood community (usually consisting of two or more villages) leads to the demise of sde ba (Tibetan) or village community. In terms of land ownership, once identified as shequ, they lose their collective rights to land because the state owns urban land (Ho 2005). My findings suggest that new informal networks emerged and superseded old traditional social organisations such as sde ba. For example, the notion of sha khrag rgyud pa, a broad Tibetan term referring to relatives from both sides of parents, was increasingly significant as people expanded their social networks in order to deal with life challenges in the market-based economy. This particular kinship idea transcended community boundaries as it was more inclusive in the sense that even married-out daughters and their families from the outside community were also included in this category.

63In summer 2022, for the first time, a large family reunion was held in honour of a 90-year-old man from the village during the three-day celebration of a religious ritual that attracted devotees to the local monastery in the mountains. Nowadays these large family gatherings, which people characterised using a Chinese term, jiazu juhui (clan gathering), gained popularity in this Tibetan area as a way to foster a strong sense of lineage and kinship. Over a hundred people, young and old, from different places and socioeconomic backgrounds, got together and spent days cooking, eating, singing, drinking and playing together. At the reunion, the male elders lectured the younger generation, emphasising solidarity among kin and asking them to help one another when in need. It can be argued that the emergence of family awareness was a reaction to weakening relations within the community. These large extended family reunions stressed the importance of kinship ties in the face of division and individualisation within the community.

64The reunion created an occasion for relatives to meet and get to know one another, particularly for the younger generation growing up in separate communities. As one of them said, “In this day and age, we need relatives more than ever before”. More and more people had left the village community to work and live in urban places. It was difficult to see one another as often as they used to when they lived together in the same village. Even though living in the same village, most people did not spend time together because they were either preoccupied with their work or away from the village for long periods of time. Also, the reunion was an opportunity for this extended family to demonstrate their unity, success, and prosperity to people attending the public religious rituals. They invited fellow villagers and friends to their tents to enjoy a feast.

65Due to mobility provided by education, work and trade, one’s residence in a confined territory was no longer a factor so important to the extent that it determined one’s membership in a community. Within the past two decades, the community grew and expanded tremendously in terms of population and the number of households both living in the community and outside in urban places. Regardless of where they lived, they all saw themselves belonging to the community. It challenged the widely held notion of the rural community conceived of as rigid and bounded, as opposed to open, flexible and fluid. In fact, now most of the families in the village were hybrid in the sense that they were engaged in both farming and non-farming activities, living in their residences both in the village and town, with family members together and separately from time to time.

66A few years ago, young men in the same age group (Tib. kha ya na zla) in their thirties revitalised an old tradition of village children paying respects to the village elders during Losar (Tib. Lo gsar) or Tibetan New Year. Working in urban places as state employees, most of them were college-educated, earning monthly salaries. They raised funds to buy gifts and visited every family with an elderly person above age 60. Their actions won praises from the community. This year they organised a feast for all villagers during a local festival known as lnga pa’i tshe bzhi (May Fifth or Medicine Buddha Festival) happening on the same day as the Chinese Dragon-Boat Racing Festival. These young people, who studied, worked and lived outside of their community, valued their social and cultural roots in the village. They were eager to return home and to find a sense of belonging in the community that they feared vanishing. Motivated with their attachment to pha yul and a strong nostalgia, these educated young people were playing an important role in rejuvenating their community by hosting village-wide events and getting their families to connect with other fellow villagers.

Conclusion: ever-changing, never-ending

67Oftentimes land expropriation and resettlement go hand in hand. As I have tried to show, land expropriation touches upon contentious issues including land tenure, resource distribution, community membership, and sociopolitical structures (including family and household composition). Due to conflicts of self-interest exacerbated by capitalist relations in the free market economy, land expropriation polarises the community, creating tensions among villagers. Land expropriation, coupled with resettlement, imposes upon villagers a new livelihood that reduces their dependence on land as farmers, and many families have no choice but to search for sources of non-farm income outside of their community. In fact, the state pushes them to engage in the market by removing them from their land in an effort to increase productivity and efficiency of their resources such as the labour, land and capital they possess. Now the community is more fully exposed to the competitive capitalist relations in the market and people tend to pursue private accumulation and self-interest at the expense of others and the community.

68In addition, resettlement as a state-led community building scheme uproots the community, undermining traditional social structures and cultural institutions in profound ways. Consequently, a sense of community crisis has emerged. Among justifications for resettlement, poverty is one used more often in recent years, as indicated by rural development programmes such as “poverty alleviation”, “beautiful countryside construction” and “rural revitalisation” in general. Furthermore, resettlement is instrumental in integrating people into the nation-state through infrastructures built into the concentrated resettlements and utility services like power, tap water, gas and the Internet, making them vulnerable and dependent on the state and the market, hence debilitating the community. However, I am not suggesting that resettlement is solely responsible for the fracture of traditional community. In fact, a multitude of (internal and external) factors, conditions, and forces (or mixes of them) such as traditional practices, modern education, market economy, globalisation, as well as carefully planned policies and social engineering projects like resettlement come into play and contribute to changes affecting communities like Hor. As implied in the description of the place at the beginning, it is important to see resettlement as an ongoing process situated in a broad historical context. In this particular case, resettlement is one key element that is part and parcel of urbanisation that different stakeholders, namely the state and locals, get entangled in and act on it for their own ends.

69Being acutely aware of the weakening of social cohesion in the community, villagers respond to it, giving rise to a new pattern of social networking built on the traditional notions of pha yul (fatherland/home), sha khrag rgyud pa (kin from both paternal and maternal descent lines), and kha ya na zla (peers), as well as new forms of association through work and school. To borrow Giddens’ idea of disembedding (1990), the state lifts people out of social relations from local contexts and restructures them through mechanisms such as capital and market, breaking down the old community, and yet people find ingenious ways to reappropriate disembedded social relations to re-embed them to local conditions. In other words, in response to the fear of community disintegration, the increasing presence of the state and exposure to market uncertainties, villagers draw on traditional ideas and ritual practices to revitalise their community and at the same time they seek new ways to reinforce and expand their social relations within the village community and beyond so as to advance in changing social, economic and environmental landscapes.