Making tea, making ethnic minority women: Women’s labor, ethnicized femininity, and the Pu’er tea business in contemporary China

ABSTRACT

Women have long shaped China’s tea trade while being, in turn, shaped by it. This can be seen especially clearly in Pu’er tea businesses in Southwest China. Cultivated by the Hani (Akha), Bulang, Lahu, Dai and many other ethnic groups, the marketing of Pu’er tea as an exotic and ethicized product has been inevitably entangled with the transformations of social practices amongst these ethnic groups. Women of these tea making ethnic groups do essential work at every step on the journey of the tea from field to cup. Simultaneously, they have been objectified and constructed as a cultural symbol of the tea in marketing and consumption practices around it. This article delves into the question of how ethnic minority women and the Pu’er tea business shape each other in contemporary Chinese society. By examining their contribution to the production of the tea and make opportunities for themselves in the tea business, this article shows that although ethnic minority women’s participation in this tea market doesn’t always lead to more equal gender relations, it empowers them to gain commercial success and respect. This process of empowerment, however, is rooted in the ethnic women’s awareness of performing femininity.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic women
• Pu’er tea
• femininity
• Southwest China

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Thomas David DuBois for reading many versions of this article and providing me with invaluable comments. Special thanks go to the two anonymous reviewers for their engaging comments. I am deeply grateful to the women in the tea industry who spent their time with me. Thank you for sharing your tea stories and your tea with me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The names of individuals, tea companies and the villages discussed in this article are pseudonyms. Unless otherwise indicated, translations of dialogs and texts are my own.

2. The Bulang is a Mon-Khmer speaking ethnic group primary living long the Sino-Myanmar border. Bulang people living in China have been culturally influenced by the Dai and their Theravada Buddhist tradition. The Bulang adopted the Dai’s writing system, clothes, dances, etc.

3. Author’s calculation based on the statistics published by Institute for the Study of Industries in China (Huajing chanye yanjiu yuan), https://www.huaon.com/channel/trend/838362.html, accessed on 28 October 2022.

4. Author’s calculation based on the statistics published by the Bureau of Statistics of Yunnan Province, http://stats.yn.gov.cn/tjsj/jjxx/202205/t20220531_1076604.html, accessed on 8 September 2022.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Philosophy and Social Sciences Planning Project of Yunnan Province [Grant No. YB2023051].