Raymond Zhou

Is there Pu'er power in a name?

By Raymond Zhou (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-03-03 07:35

What's in a name?

That question was asked of a person, but it could also be of a place. Anyway, some people are scratching their heads over why the city of Simao in Yunnan Province will take on the new moniker Pu'er coming April.

The raison d'tre is simple and straightforward: The city is best known for Pu'er tea, with half its workforce in the business. Historically, the place was named Pu'er because it has the Pu'er Mountain where the choice tea is grown.

These are reasons legitimate enough on condition that local people back the idea. However, it does not take a rocket scientist, or a cultural historian for that matter, to know that, for all the justifications, the name change is one of practicality: A place name is the brand name of the place. Why hammer an unfamiliar name into the consciousness of outsiders when you are readily associated with a fine product category?

It would be like Hoover or Xerox spending millions to promote unknown aliases as their corporate identification, and then one day realizing that they always had the greatest intangible assets in their hold.

A few years ago, another Yunnan city caused a stir when it adopted a fictional name. Shangri-La was the creation of James Hilton in his 1933 novel Lost Horizon. Several places have claimed to be the inspiration, including the Tibet Autonomous Region, northern India and Pakistan. But in the end, it was Zhongdian, an ethnic Tibetan region in Yunnan, that successfully got itself rechristened Shangri-La. Although it is difficult to quantify how much of its boom in tourism can be credited to the name change, it is obvious the new name has helped.

When I visited Guizhou last year, local officials were stumped by how much their province was misrepresented. For one, the suffix "zhou" is usually for a city, not a province. Then, two of the most popular folklore, enshrined in Chinese allegories, depict local people as either blindly arrogant (ye lang zi da) or at wit's end (qian lu ji qiong).

How do you transform perceptions like that? It was heartening to see they turned the negative stereotypes into self-deprecating humor.

A name change will entail certain costs. Think of all the signage and stationery that need to be replaced. But compared with the potential benefit, it is inconsequential.

A place name may be carved in stone, but it doesn't mean that under no circumstances should it be altered. So many places have undergone multiple makeovers in labeling that history students have a field day with all the records.

That said, the decision for renaming should not be made lightly. A name gathers the moss of cultural wealth, and a frequently changing name would be like a rolling stone. What if a place is known for a natural resource but later evolves into a high-tech hub, eclipsing its old glory?

If the Chinese mindset were to take hold in Silicon Valley, San Jose and the surrounding cities would wrangle for the right to incorporate the word silicon in their city names.

But then, municipal administrators in the US do not have a fraction of the clout of their Chinese counterparts. It's market forces that determine the business mainstay of the city, and by extension, its public image. In China, the parent bureaucrats (fu mu guan) call most of the shots, especially molding the city's persona.

Such centralized power has both its pluses and minuses. It is top down and more efficient. If it's correct, its benefits could be maximized; if amiss, the disaster also hits harder. The name change for Pu'er took four years to deliberate. Let's hope it works wonders.

raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 03/03/2007 page4)