A Not-So-Simple Noodle Story

Begun in 2000, China’s Great Western Development Campaign (GWDC) sought to reinforce party-state legitimation narratives by extending economic development to peripheral regions often populated by ethnic minorities. In extending aid to minority communities, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) promoted narratives about its own provision of stability and prosperity, and endeavored to exert further control over the conduct of ethnic politics. However, while this subsidization of development in minority communities produced macro-level success, it also contributed to fragmentation of ethnic identity and perpetuation of instability in daily interactions. In this article, I examine the CCP’s attempt to subsidize the creation of a branded ethnic economy around the production of handmade noodles (lamian) in ethnic Hui communities in rural Qinghai Province. I argue that while the state’s investment in lamian did increase income in Hui communities, the migration that accompanied this developmental aid led to increased contestation of the boundaries of Hui identity and contributed to marginalization and alienation of the Hui migrants involved. I argue that these consequences stemming from the funding of the lamian economy allow the CCP to effect greater control through channeling measures. However, such measures also illuminate the limitations of performance-based legitimation strategies which justify the implementation of ever-increasing measures of control that risk overreach.