I went with 3 other westerners to a Wa festival in Ximeng about 8-10 years ago - one of our number knew somebody who knew somebody, and the 4 of us got free hotel rooms (there couldn't have been more than about 5 other westerners at most there, and we were obviously invited so that the CCBC camera and other coverage would perhaps appeal to more foreign tourists). The festival was essentially a tourist show, very well choreographed and so forth, enjoyable, not 'authentic', with scores, perhaps over a hundred, of group dancers in a big outdoor amphitheatre which sat several thousands. Evening, in an indoor theatre, there was a play featuring the Wa, supposed to show their rise from ugly-barbarian savagery thanks to the arrival of PLA soldiers. Point is, this thank-God-for-the-PLA theme was embarrassingly overdone, reminded me of some of the more cardboard elements of dance of the Cultural R. period, and I almost walked out, as it seemed to me so single-issue and propagandistic that I felt it amounted to pandering to Han-cultural attitudes about the inferiority of the non-Han, especially the Wa - it was all Party propaganda about the end of headhunting etc, otherwise nothing really about the Wa. I wonder if this emphasis is particularly strong in such tourist performances concerning the Wa, given that they present easy targets for such a treatment. Yeah, I've read that certainly many Wa were indeed glad to see the end of headhunting, and I'm not necessarily disputing that it has been good that their long resistance, carried out from their mountains, to incorporation into a wider national society had finally come to an end back in the 1950s - however, the show I saw reminded me of the kind of thing that had once entertained the prejudices of 'White' people in the old American South, or in South Africa.

Wouldn't worry about that happening, Lester - I've seen no indications of it around town.

I take cloudtrapezer' comment, or anyway most of it. As for moving out of the city, another choice would be to use public transportation or a bicycle within it as much as possible.

umm - capitalism/

If Beijing wants to promote this they'd better do something about all the bloody hukou problems that have contributed to different classes of citizenship and have fueled China's capitalist rise by providing cheap labor with little recourse, thereby enabling rather serious economic differences so that the Chinese economy now competes 'successfully' with that of other countries on the usual tilted table of global capitalim.