Village on Strike!
Uncovering discontent just below the glittering surface in Furong Village
This essay was originally posted to Twitter as a thread on July 16, 2022. It is reposted here in long-essay format with some revisions and reorganization.
It seems every couple months, Western Hunan's Furong Village goes viral on social media. It's been doing this for several years, on Weibo, Douyin, even Twitter sometimes. It’s easy to see why…it’s quite the visual spectacle:
Furong Village 芙蓉镇, also known as Hibiscus Town, is a prime attraction in Yongshun County, Xiangxi, Hunan. It's just two train stops north of Jishou on the brand new Zhang-Ji-Huai high speed rail (and one stop south of the world-famous Zhangjiajie and its “Avatar Mountains”). It lies on the north bank of the Xishui River that divides Guzhang County and Yongshun County.
Furong Village is very photogenic. An ancient village, built on the banks of a creek that originally flowed down a sloped hillside into the river. Over time, the creek ate away at the hillside, creating several cascading waterfalls. Add some colored lights highlighting the waterfall with walkways behind it and...BOOM. You've got the hottest attraction around.
But..behind all those glittering lights, Furong has some unfortunate dirty secrets. In order to introduce that, though, I first have to talk about where I stayed, how I got around, and how I gathered information. To do that, it's time to introduce the protagonist of my Furong story: Boss Xiao.
Boss Xiao is the owner of the guesthouse we stayed at while visiting Furong. His guesthouse is not in Furong at all; it's actually on the south bank of the river, in Guzhang County. A lot of online reviews mentioned how loud the hotels in the village are, especially with tourists walking around everywhere, so this seemed better to me.
Boss Xiao is a local. He joined the PLA straight out of high school and stayed for 14 years. The military doesn't pay great, but you can save literally every penny. After he got out in 2014, he worked for a few years, took all his money, and built this dream guesthouse in 2019. Perched on a hillside overlooking the river, most of the rooms have a balcony with direct views of Furong Village on the opposite bank.
This plot of land used to be his childhood home. As Furong tourism was picking up, he flattened it and spent all his savings to build this guesthouse complex/compound. The two building units closer to the river (facing Furong) are for guests; his family lives in the third unit in the back. This was the view from my balcony, on the 3rd floor:
Unfortunately, business is awful for Boss Xiao right now. Over the 3 days we spent in his 20-unit guesthouse, we were the ONLY guests.
"Before Covid, I used to get up at 5AM to start work and was so busy that I didn't have time to eat...or pee...until 2pm."
Now, he tells me, he spends his days drinking tea, fishing, and dreaming of other jobs.
"Actually, I'm not really suited for the hospitality industry, you know? I used to have a really bad temper when I was in the army. I used to get into fights all the time. But you can't fight with guests. You can’t even yell at them. You have to smile, accept whatever they say to you, even if it’s rude or crazy, and just say "sorry....sorry...sorry".
"All my friends say my personality has changed since I opened the guesthouse. Before, when we would go out to get beers and BBQ, if some asshole bumped into me or wanted to hit me, I would try to fight him. But now I just smile and say sorry....sorry...sorry. It's true. This is my personality now.”
“Really, I don't like this job. But at the beginning when we opened up, I was just too busy to even think about whether I liked it. Every day...waking up early, picking up and dropping off guests, carrying their luggage upstairs... My wife had to stand in the kitchen all day making food for guests. But now I am just so bored."
Despite his dislike of the job and the industry, he's actually very good at it. The rooms are clean, comfortable, and attractive, with great views of the river. For a small guesthouse in the Hunan countryside, a lot of thought has gone into designing these spaces.
It shows in his online ratings. He's got a near-perfect 4.9/5 on Ctrip and distinctly remembers EVERY guest that ever gave him less than 5 stars (I quizzed him one evening while drinking tea together and reading through his Ctrip reviews). Also, his service is fantastic. For 3 days, he personally chauffeured us everywhere, from Furong Village to his recommended restaurant for dinner, to the train station.
Originally, his business model was based on the fact that hotel supply in Furong Village is insufficient to meet tourist demand. So, it was normal that ALL the places to stay in Furong would totally sell out and the overflow demand would allow his place just across the river to book up as well. These days, Furong Village still has lots of tourists, but not quite enough for his guesthouse to find consistent bookings. Hopefully things get better soon…
Okay let’s go back and talk about Furong Village for a second. This village originally got famous for one big thing: being the filming location of the Chinese 3rd-gen classic film Hibiscus Town 芙蓉镇, a 1987 Golden Rooster Best Film/Best Actress winner including a young (and almost unrecognizable with that hair) Jiang Wen.
...Except back at the time of filming, this village wasn't even called Furong Villag. At the time, it was called Wang Town 王村. The film was based on a 1981 novel called Hibiscus Town that was set somewhere in southern Hunan (but without specifying a certain location). For the 1986 movie, the film producers chose to portray this fictional location by filming in Wang Town. Later in 2007, Wang Town formally changed its name to match the tourist interest in the titular "Hibiscus Town" (which before that didn't actually exist anywhere in Hunan). On the Guzhang County side of the river, I even saw some road signs pointing the way to “Wang Town” that hadn’t been updated in the last 15 years.
From what I can gather by looking at old travel blogs, Furong Village was a smaller regional attraction for quite a few years. In 2012 it earned its 4A tourist attraction rating, but tourist traffic was light. There were guesthouses, a few vendors, a few teahouses. Film buffs went to check out locations from the movie.
Its status as a quiet, traditional village for movie buffs to visit got shaken up when the site developer got the idea to upgrade Furong Village to a 5A tourist attraction. A new development company was established, with the local government as a minority investor to a Changsha investment firm, and then the money spigot opened up. 100s of millions of RMB were spent on upgrades. Amphitheaters, a tourist center, a waterfall trail...
When Boss Xiao opened his guesthouse in 2019, Furong Village had already turned itself into something more like a theme park with a waterfall rather than a sleepy traditional village. Six performance shows a day. Crowds already massive and growing. 200+ new buildings, doubling the town's size. Even now in 2022, with Covid affecting tourist numbers, the place is packed.
We walked around the village on our second day there. With the exception of the waterfall itself, it was everything I hate about Chinese tourist towns. Naggy vendors. Expensive tourist traps. Roasted sausages on a stick. Vape stores. Loud dazzling performances in fake costumes.
The waterfall and scenery and the night views of the village lit up with fairy lights were still awesome, and that's what we were there for. We tried to focus on those and not dwell on the things that cheapened the experience, because it is indeed very pretty!
But overall, it was a little disappointing. When Boss Xiao picked us up later, it got worse. He asked us what we thought of Furong Village, and we answered it was OK, but too commercial. "At least it helps the economy" I said. "Yes, Furong is rich now" he said. "We're still poor on my side of the river..."
"I feel the villagers of Furong have a lot of disruption to their lives though" I added. "They live inside a very busy tourist zone...there's no privacy and the loud bars are open quite late. How much do they get for their dividends? (分红)”
"What dividends?" Boss Xiao asks.
I'm surprised. The tourist villages I visited in Longji Rice Terraces last year and Dehang Canyon just a few days ago allocate a percentage of ticket sales for the locals whose lives are on display for tourists. There are real local residents living in Furong Village, surrounded every day by an endless stream of tourists, and they surely are impacted by it. "If they don’t get a cut of the tickets, then why would they agree to have their village developed like this?" I ask.
"They don't, really." Boss Xiao answered. "Actually, they have conflict with the development company". He tells us that since last year, when the 5A rating was earned, relations have been VERY bad between the residents of Furong Village and the Furong tourism development company. In fact, last year about 300 of the residents and vendors even called a general strike and closed their shops!
Because the locals aren't working for the tourism company, they can’t actually stop the operations of the tourist zone with their strike. But they could ensure that there are no shops, restaurants, or guesthouses for tourists to use within it. So that's what they tried to do.
Their complaints were as follows:
The residents are upset that the attraction is open & selling tickets all the way until 11pm. It used to be until 8pm, after which everything closed, but the operator extended the hours to stop people from entering for free in the evenings. Now the tourist zone is “open for business” almost all day, and they can't rest, or get any peace and quiet.
While residents of course don't have to pay to enter their own village, there was no special allowance for family members coming to visit from nearby counties. If they weren't a Furong Village resident, they had to pay. It was a discount (60 RMB vs. the full tourist price of 108 RMB) but they felt it should be free.
Rumors of sleazy business practices. According to Boss Xiao, one very famous rice tofu restaurant in the tourist zone (that was featured in the movie) was making 3million RMB a year and the tourism company decided they wanted a piece of the action. They offered the owners a rent of 1million RMB a year to retire and allow the company to operate the shop instead...but the owners refused, because they were happy to keep working and make the money for themselves, without splitting to anyone. In retaliation, the tourism company stopped bringing package tour groups to that shop and let copycat vendors with the same product to open with similar-sounding names in the same area. (Boss Xiao was really indignant about this one).
According to Boss Xiao, after one week, terms were renegotiated, so the strike was partially successful. They got the closing hours pushed forward to 10pm instead of 11pm, and lowered the entry fee for one neighboring county (where I assume most of the impacted family members live) to 30 RMB instead of 60 RMB. They agreed to re-open after, and it's seemingly been a cautious peace since them. I guess it can be considered a victory(?)
I didn’t find out what happened with the famous rice tofu shop, although I did go there myself to try their food, and I did see some copycat vendors in the neighborhood, so I guess that’s still a problem. But the shop was a set used prominently in the 1986 movie and has hosted many famous actors, singers, and politicians over the years, pictures of whom adorn the walls. In 1997, they were even visited by the (at the time) Deputy Party Secretary of Fujian Province, some guy named Xi Jinping. So I guess their business is probably fine.
After hearing all that, I had some pretty mixed, and mostly negative feelings about Furong Village. While it's clear the locals are finding ways to economically benefit from their town's fame, it mostly feels like they are helpless/involuntary passengers in this scenario.
However, I think I DO get why they aren't getting dividends like the other villages I saw. Unlike Dehang/Longji, their lifestyle/culture is not the tourist consumption draw here. The locals here ARE ethnic minorities (Tujia) but this isn't ethnic tourism. Furong is more famous for other things.
Later I checked the Furong tourism company ownership shares. I found it's 30% owned by the local government and 70% owned by a big sole proprietorship investment company in Changsha that is also involved with a half-dozen Hunan tourism projects in this part of the province, usually with local gov't as the minority partners. The owner of the investment firm is also a local Tujia minority woman who got her education and work background in Changsha. Interesting...
At the end of the day, is it a disaster? Nah. The locals are still living well, all things considered. Remember, Boss Xiao is jealous of them! But the sleaziness of the development company made this feel this arrangement is lacking in equity for the locals, who even felt it was necessary to strike! It was my first time to see this development model in China, with the local government a minority partner to a deep-pocketed private sector investor (who maybe calls the shots too?). Before this point, I’d only ever seen local tourism projects with local government as the lead developer/investor. I think I prefer that model.
Now the key question: Knowing all this, would I still recommend going to Furong? Here are my thoughts:
If you would be turned off by the heavy commercialization, the question for you is whether the scenery is good enough to balance out the negative aspects (and that’s going to be a personal judgement). Lots of places in China have this problem of over-commercialization, potentially ruining what are otherwise wonderful sites. It's a similar story here. The scenery wasn't ruined for me and I still found a way to enjoy it. For others, it would be too much (I would not recommend going during Golden Week though…or even on a weekend).
On the other hand, if your concern is MORAL equity, and you want to boycott the attraction on those grounds, I'd invite you to rethink your position and go anyway. The loss of your individual tourist revenue means almost nothing to the investment company, but means everything to locals like Boss Xiao.
Of course, it totally sucks that a rich investment firm put you in that position; you can't spend money inside and support the village economy and unless you pay a greedy company their pound of flesh at the door. But frankly, your "moral boycott" only makes it even tougher on the locals.1
So, if you think you can handle the crowds, and your main concern was the morality issue, I say go, pay the stinkin' company their stinkin' ticket price, and then spend 5x as much on drinking and dining and souvenirs inside, to the direct benefit of the villagers whose livelihoods now depend on it.
This concluded my first section on the Furong Village area. In my next section, in an effort to avoid giving more money to that Changsha investment firm, I avoided one scenic area and instead visited an off-the-beaten-path, dangerous but very fun canyon hiking trail. Stay tuned.
This logic can be applied to a lot of issues in China, not just tourism in Hunan…
Wow! Sounds like a company town without the strife. Surprised anyone would stand to let a company tax visiting relatives.