In rural ethnic communities of Southwest China, dramatic transformations have been taking place in educational and social spaces. On the one hand, the state enforces universal basic education to address high dropout rates, and implements a “quality curriculum reform” to promote child-centered pedagogies in rural schools. On the other hand, marketized tourism programs have become an integral part of rural development in this region. Local landscapes and cultural practices are mobilized to produce commercialized tourism aesthetics and experience. Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Miao and a Dong village-town in Qiandongnan, Guizhou Province in 2009 and 2010, this paper explores how rural teachers negotiate education policy demands and neoliberal developmental mandates, and cope with multiple and conflicting discourses in their daily practices. As the grassroots state bureaucrats, rural teachers in the periphery both comply with and resist the pressures from the state and the market. As much as teachers self-consciously turn themselves into moonlighting entrepreneurs on the tourism market, their coping with the educational policy demands is piecemeal and perfunctory. The paper illustrates that the everyday tactics of rural teachers sometimes reproduce the dominant state and market ideologies, yet they also transform these educational and developmental ideologies by giving them new meanings in the local contexts. As well, the study highlights the hybrid subjectivities, disenchantment, and negotiations that constitute rural teachers as ethical subjects in reform-era China.