International Center for Cultural Studies

Report｜Higher Education Sprout Project, Ministry of Education

2026-06-10

Event Report | Toward an Understanding of “Release” (Fangkai): Labor, Minerals, and the Transformation of a Mountain Region in China’s Long 1980s
Date: May 28, 2026, 20:00–22:00 (GMT+8 / Taiwan Time)
Venue: Online forum
Event page: Link
Event photos: Link
Speaker: Nicholas Bartlett (Assistant Professor of Contemporary Chinese Culture and Society, Barnard College, Columbia University)
Moderator: I-Yi Hsieh (Assistant Professor of Institute of Visual Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University)
Subproject: Environmental Crises and Multi-species Justice in the 21st Century: Toward Decolonization Beyond the Human
Subproject IV Principal Investigator: I-Yi Hsieh
This Report written by Fen-Ni Yu (Ph.D. student from Institute of Anthropology, National Tsing Hua University)

Bartlett’s opening slide (lecture screenshot)

This lecture was the second annual lecture in the series organized by ICCS Subproject Four. We invited the American anthropologist Nicholas Bartlett to discuss his recent publication, Toward an Understanding of “Release” (Fangkai): Labor, Minerals, and the Transformation of a Mountain Region in China’s Long 1980s (2025). The talk presented a still-developing branch of Bartlett’s current research on the history of mining in China. Looking back from his doctoral research on heroin users and treatment regimes in Gejiu, southwestern China, from 2008 to 2012, to his later turn toward the mining history that is deeply entangled with the life histories of “drug users,” one can see that his research trajectory has repeatedly unfolded around the “mountains” of Gejiu, Yunnan. In the memories of the “heroin generation,” composed largely of people born in the 1960s and 1970s, Bartlett encountered this mountain and, through it, reconstructed a history of state and private tin mining in Gejiu during China’s long 1980s:
“That was when I went up the mountain… That was when I went to the mountain… My life changed on the mountain…”

Gejiu City, Honghe Prefecture, southern Yunnan (lecture screenshot)

Gejiu, once known as China’s “Tin Capital,” contains some of the country’s highest-quality tin deposits. From the 1950s onward, tin mining in Gejiu was dominated by the state-run Yunnan Tin Company, and mining activity was concentrated within roughly ten kilometers of the city center. The period from 1985 to 1995 was Gejiu’s belated long 1980s: after 1985, large numbers of people began entering the mountains to mine tin privately, and mining became central to the local economy and social organization. After 1995, the government gradually began to regulate and reorganize the industry. In 2008, Gejiu was designated a “resource-depleted city.” Even so, with the development of labor, technology, and infrastructure—what Bartlett conceptualizes through the term “neng” (capacity, energy, or potential)—Gejiu remains one of the world’s major centers of tin production today.
Bartlett entered Gejiu in 2008 to conduct fieldwork on the local heroin generation. In confronting this “mountain” that had once drawn people in and later left them behind, he began to ask what kinds of economic and political transformations had set these minerals in motion, and how an entire generation had gained, and then lost, what had once appeared to be possible paths of livelihood.

Bartlett with his book on the heroin generation, Recovering Histories (Bartlett, 2020) (lecture screenshot)

A tin solder bar given to Bartlett by a couple from the heroin generation when he left the field: likely taken from Yunnan Tin’s stock in the 1990s, it is at once a keepsake and a material symbol of history (lecture screenshot)

Because travel was restricted during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bartlett moved toward the “mountain” through local archives, historical documents, and ongoing contact with a small number of key interlocutors. From newspapers and oral recollections, a mining-development slogan associated with Hu Yaobang began to emerge: “Open big minerals, release small minerals, intensify extraction, and let the water flow.” In Gejiu in 1985, just after mining was “released” from state-led development, people’s understandings of “big” and “small” were full of contradictions. Which kinds of workers counted as “big”? Which forms of production counted as “small”? Which organizations should be “released”? What, ultimately, was being released? Bartlett uses the concept of “neng” to grasp the interaction between economic imagination and materiality. In the local context, neng could refer both to the energy contained in mineral deposits and to people’s capacities or labor potential. People and minerals, in other words, seemed to share a language of potential, release, and circulation.
The life history of Xun Wei, from the son of state-owned-enterprise workers to a private mine owner, is itself a history of the circulation of neng. After the 1950s, the state built a large-scale state-run tin-mining system in Gejiu. Around tin mining, it assembled a fully equipped urban world: state enterprises provided workers with housing, education, medical care, and other welfare benefits. In the late 1950s, Xun’s parents moved to Gejiu city. His father worked for Yunnan Provincial Nonferrous Geology Bureau Team 308 (hereafter 308), and his mother worked at a noodle-shop cooperative supported by 308. Xun thus born and grew up with access to various forms of collective welfare. Yet because positions were in short supply, he could not inherit an “iron rice bowl” job from his father as his two older brothers had done. Still, like his mother, he could obtain employment opportunities provided by the state enterprise.
Xun’s life trajectory changed after the “release” policy was introduced in 1985. The state supported “individual” miners like Xun in forming teams for small-scale mining, allowing them to enter mountain areas that had previously been monopolized by state enterprises and extract surface mineral veins (1) . State enterprises, meanwhile, continued to develop underground mining, which required long-term investment. Through networks of relatives, friends, and fellow townspeople, Xun gained basic knowledge of mining and recruited two or three temporary workers to form a team and go up the mountain together—an example of what might be called “collective capacity.” By the late 1990s and 2000s, during the period of “intensification,” Xun discovered high-grade deep tin deposits near a tunnel network that the state had developed earlier. This brought him considerable wealth. Yet the rapid expansion of the mining area also brought in large amounts of external capital. Gejiu became a semi-militarized infrastructural space of resource seizure and protection, where private mine owners armed themselves to defend their mines against raids and looting. Xun’s mine was later taken over by an investor from Singapore, and Xun was gradually pushed out.

Before the pandemic, in 2018, Xun Wei took Bartlett to Old Yin Mountain, where Xun had made money, used heroin, and seen the course of his life transformed when he was young (lecture screenshot)

During this period, early collective enterprises such as Xun’s were gradually eliminated. What remained was a field of competition between large state-owned enterprises such as Yunnan Tin Company and large private mining operations, each developing its own forms of capital, labor markets, and political networks. State-owned enterprises also began to learn from the labor organization, speed, and risk-management practices of private mining. They adopted short-term labor contracts and dismantled the “iron rice bowl” system—absorbing and institutionalizing the neng of private mining. This mirrored how private mining, during the period of “support,” had absorbed the neng of state enterprises in the form of infrastructure. In practice, the two sides became increasingly similar during the period of “intensification,” forming a shared labor market in which workers moved back and forth between state-owned and private mines. Amid intensifying violence and exclusion, Gejiu’s tin production rose to the top ranks globally. Behind this lay the release of neng generated through the friction between people’s economic imaginations and material conditions since the “release” of the long 1980s. The new mechanisms of labor mobilization laid a mountainous prehistory for the world that would later be consumed by heroin.

Discussion session (lecture screenshot)

The discussion session made the lecture’s arguments more complete. First, one participant asked Bartlett to explain the relationship between his mining research and his research on heroin. Bartlett responded that when he entered Gejiu between 2008 and the early 2010s, the local economy was undergoing rapid transformation. Many people with histories of heroin use had also been laborers during the mining boom. But as mining declined and the city turned toward new economic directions, they found it difficult to migrate to Shenzhen, Kunming, coastal cities, or other new centers of opportunity as younger people did. Nor could they easily reenter a stable local labor market. For them, being “left behind” was not simply an individual condition; it was also the sharpest feeling produced by the decline of a resource city.
Another question concerned whether the mountain carried local beliefs or cosmologies that exceeded material interest. Bartlett acknowledged that most of his interlocutors understood the mountain through money-making, success, risk-taking, and the local economy rather than through ancestral spirits or myths about minerals. Still, he also mentioned gendered taboos in the mining area: women entering mine tunnels were often seen as inauspicious, and some believed that their presence would cause good mineral veins to disappear. This suggests that the mountain was not governed only by economic logic; it was also shaped by cultural imaginaries of gender, the body, and taboo.
Other participants asked whether oral history alone could support historical argument. Bartlett said that oral history is extremely important, but that reconstructing a fine-grained mining history still requires cross-checking with local newspapers, archives, technical materials, and other sources. Our moderator, I-Yi Hsieh, also brought up the example of retired miners in Jiufen and Jinguashi, Taiwan, who have worked to preserve mining memories on their own. This example reminds us that mining histories told from the perspective of miners themselves remain rare in both China and Taiwan.
Finally, the discussion returned to the “long 1980s” and the question of qunzhong (“masses”). Bartlett explained that a “qunzhong” is not a fixed and unchanging population, but a position that can shift according to political and governmental needs. The same people might, at one moment, be called small miners in need of support; at another, they might be called illegal miners, environmental destroyers, or even objects to be cleared away. This is also why Bartlett does not want to describe the reform period simply as “post-socialist.” It was not a new world that arrived after socialism ended, but a process in which older infrastructures, state-enterprise systems, labor identities, and local relations continued to be reorganized.

Conclusion: Rethinking “Release”
The most powerful aspect of the lecture was that it reopened the seemingly familiar reform-era term “release.” What was released was not simply the market, nor only mineral resources. Also released were people’s labor power, local relations, the infrastructures of state-owned enterprises, desires for risk and adventure, imaginations of wealth, and the violence and exclusion that accompanied them.
Gejiu’s mountains, therefore, were not only sites of resource extraction; they were also windows onto the Chinese reform era. Through a tin ingot, a tunnel, a map, and a group of people left behind, we can see a larger question: when resources are accelerated into development, who is included in the story of “development”? And after that story changes direction, who is renamed as a problem, a risk, or a burden? This is the question Bartlett asks us to reconsider through Gejiu’s “long 1980s.”

Notes

1 Bartlett added that the Hui were among the earliest groups to enter the mountains. Because of the 1975 Shadian Incident, local governments were especially sensitive to issues concerning the Hui and thus permitted Hui miners to begin small-scale mining in order to maintain ethnic unity. It is also important to note that “individual” in policy language was, in practice, a cooperative form of labor organization from the very beginning—one that was attached to, and reproduced through, existing local networks and infrastructures.

References

Bartlett, N. 2020. Recovering Histories : Life and Labor After Heroin in Reform-era China. University of California Press.
———. 2025. “Toward an Understanding of ‘Release’ (Fangkai): Labor, Minerals, and the Transformation of a Mountain Region in China’s Long 1980s.” Positions : Asia Critique, 33(3), 425–449.