Paper short abstract:

At Lugu Lake, in southwest China, county, provincial and national officials use pollution - environmental, cultural and moral - to justify their decisions regarding tourism development.

Paper long abstract:

As mobility and consumption link to create the rush of domestic tourists across China, more and more "remote" peoples are called upon to commoditize themselves - both to package themselves and their group identity for tourism consumption as well as to present a packaged space for the "golden hordes" of wealthier tourists descending on their locales. As these locales become better known and widely visited, local, regional, and sometimes higher level players become involved in the decisions and policies that frame the changes and the "preservation" of these areas. In Yongning, northwest Yunnan, the Mosuo at Lugu Lake have attracted hundreds of thousands of tourists, and the rural infrastructure and culture has been obliged to accommodate the weight of these visitors. Romantic tourist notions of the lake include both a land of wise matriarchs and a feminist paradise or a land of frolicking maidens and a place for quick and easy trysts. Meanwhile, Lugu

Lake itself becomes increasingly polluted from the wastes of visitors, and performed Mosuo culture becomes increasingly accommodating to the tourist demands. Within this paper, I take a CCTV expose on pollution and prostitution at the lake as a starting point to explore the strategies of using pollution - environmental, cultural and moral - as means of jockeying for control over the lake area, and how it acts as a trope that locals, as well as county, provincial and national officials use to justify their decisions regarding this space.

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