Ethnic minority villages across Southwest China have recently experienced a dramatic increase in cultural heritage projects. Following new policies of rural development and the growth of tourism, villages are being converted into heritage sites to preserve the aesthetics of rurality and ethnicity. This article describes how architect scholars plan to create a ‘Chinese Traditional Village’ in a Dong autonomous district of Guizhou province, focusing in particular on the constraints of those plans and the negotiations. Rather than looking at plans as the end product, this article sheds light on the social dynamics of planning to reconsider the capacity for compromise between the interests and perspectives of planners, officials, and local inhabitants. Lasting compromises appear specifically in the materiality of buildings, pathways, and public space.

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The shift in China’s national economy from industrial manufacturing to technology and IT has placed constraints on the lives of rural-to-urban male migrant workers from the lower social strata. As the pace of out-migration in China slows, male rural returnees are harnessing self-reliant masculinities to reclaim status and heighten a sense of collective pride in and affiliation with their natal village. Centering on two ethnographic case studies of Dong ethnic minority male rural returnees in the autonomous district of Guizhou Province, the analysis in this article contributes to critique on the recent unfolding of the state-led “crisis of masculinity” to highlight the wider socioeconomic conditions that continue to deepen the inequalities and felt anxieties of male rural returnees.