In understand that when I have a category variable in a model passed to a statsmodels fit that dummy variables will automatically be generated for the
statsmodels
fit
You can pass a reference arg to the Treatment contrast, using syntax like
reference
"y ~ C(Location, Treatment(reference='China'))"
http://patsy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/API-reference.html#patsy.Treatment
If you have a better suggestion for naming conventions please file an issue with patsy.