Shanghai lockdown and alienation under China’s state capitalism

In the transition from the socialist system to the postsocialist system since 1978, thousands of Chinese urbanto-rural migrant workers and students of socialist movements and urban laid-off workers of socialist stateowned enterprises were no longer safeguarded by Chinese government in terms of political status, job opportunities, welfare, and living standard. Struggling for returning to cities and integrating into the competitory market economy become the living dilemma of the two urban groups respectively. This paper explores the images of those troubled urban figures within both the Chinese Sixth Generation cinema and the Chinese independent documentary. It aims at exposing Chinese urban people's drifting experience within the postsocialist social context in relation to Chinese modern cinema. The spatial and ideological drifting of troubled urban people in postsocialist China, it shall argue, derives from the transition from the socialist class struggle to the postsocialist economy-oriented reform and from the socialist planned economy to the postsocialist market economy.

The Journal of Asian Studies, 2011

Within the context of understanding the opening up of the People’s Republic of China and the city of Shanghai, the aim of the study is to explore ‘space’ in Chinese Communist Party rhetoric, Shanghai spatial planning discourse and personal intercultural engagements. By the term ‘space’, the author refers to an understanding of societal production that integrates space as part of the analysis, taking into account the interplay between official statements on nation building, regional and urban planning, concrete built environments and people’s situated understandings of space. With this in mind, the tripartite aim establishes an understanding of how the Chinese Communist Party envisioned the opening up of the People’s Republic of China and Shanghai, how the Shanghai Municipal Government has implemented the Chinese Communist Party’s visions for the city and how young Chinese talk about their experiences of the changes taking place in Shanghai in interviews about intercultural communication in the city. The tripartite understanding of the opening up of the People’s Republic of China and Shanghai is established by the term ‘contact space’. By this term, the author illustrates and analyses the phenomenon of the opening up processes taking place in the People’s Republic of China and Shanghai, and also develops an analytical tool that allows for an analysis of how the opening up involves several integrated levels of the Chinese society. By the combined use of sociology of space and postcolonial studies, the author shows that the Chinese Communist Party encouraged a controlled insertion of capitalism within the one-party system to modernize the country. Several cities, such as Shanghai, were designated to lead the country into a modern, prosperous, socialist state. Emerging into state-sanctioned capitalist spaces within the one-party rule, the localities were named ‘special economic zones’ and ‘open coastal cities’. Through a land-leasing system, demolition and renovation of selected built environments, the author shows that Shanghai is acquiring the material and visual components of a global city. The author illustrates that the Shanghai Municipal Government produces contemporary Shanghai into a twenty-first-century post-revolutionary city anchored in ancient China, the city’s colonial heritage and Mao’s socialism. By the interviews, the author demonstrates that the city of Shanghai emerges into a contact space conditioned by its colonial history and more recent changes, the city’s geographical location and representations in literature. Illustrating China’s emerging society, the interviewees engage in culture and language exchanges, work at international companies and take part in the city’s leisure and entertainment spaces. Belonging to the emerging Chinese middle-classes, the interviewees demonstrate how they create their own contact spaces (one-to-one occasions and group gathering initiatives) and make use of established contact spaces in Shanghai (universities, language schools, international companies, leisure and entertainment spaces). The author also concludes that Shanghai’s emerging society is based in China’s own developmental discourses but also globally recognized patterns of social hierarchies and capitalist urban space.

Housing Studies, 2021

Although gated communities (GCs) have spread globally, their prevalence in China is often attributed to China’s unique tradition of gated living. In 2016, China announced policy recommendations intending to end GCs, which faced societal resistance. To elucidate the nature of this resistance, we interviewed experienced Chinese officials, practitioners, and scholars—who, inevitably, were them- selves GC residents. They challenge the policy in two ways: policy-rejectors justify gating as common sense and stress risks of ungating, whereas policy-sympathizers understand the policy shift but doubt its feasibility. Their rationales reveal ingrained cognitive dissonance and entrenched state-society tension. Such sentiments that resist ungating collectively create practical and ideological barriers to mitigating housing segregation. China’s GCs showcase how private production of civic goods prioritizes market rules and promotes individual values. China’s failure in ungating suggests that the prevalence of privately produced communities can justify exclusion, normalize “gated mindsets,” and reinforce socioeconomic and spatial inequalities.

China Perspectives, 2020

2012

This paper examines the lived experiences of property dispossession caused by the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai. Specifically, it examines an overlooked category of family in the existing literature and probes into the political production of family conflicts and breakdowns. It characterizes the prevailing regime of dispossession in contemporary China as decentralized legal authoritarianism and argues that the organization of the Expo-induced dispossession deviates from this by the distinctive state structures. For this reason, tensions within the state apparatus were temporarily suspended, meaning reduced opportunity for resistance. State monopoly in symbolic production rendered contesting claims to property ownership illegitimate and made monetary compensation the only option, which turned confrontation with the state into domestic disputes. Organized as a state-led project, dispossession also exploited displacees' past experiences of a 'caring' state or state terror, giving rise to different attitudes towards displacement and thus causing family disputes. Moreover, mobilization of the entire state apparatus also permitted the use of coercive and violent means without legal and moral concerns. Tactics that manipulated, and in some cases completely severed, the relations within and beyond the displaced families are explored in depth. The paper concludes with a call for changing the ways that dispossession has been conceived and conducted in research and practice.

PRC History Review, 2022

Reading Harriet Evans’s Beijing from Below is a moving experience of being invited into an old Beijing neighborhood and entering a dense web of relations. By listening closely into those occluded stories in the capital’s center, the book is a wonderful addition to a growing body of site-based studies of bottom-up urban experience behind China’s global rise.

Is there a labour movement in China? This contribution argues that China does not have a labour movement, but that contestation between workers, state and capital is best characterized as a form of 'alienated politics'. Widespread worker resistance is highly effective at the level of the firm because of its ability to inflict losses on capital and disrupt public order. But authoritarian politics in China prevent workers from formulating political demands. Despite the spectacular repressive capacity of the state, the central government has in fact responded to highly localized resistance by passing generally pro-labour legislation over the past decade. The consequence of this is that worker unrest has produced important political shifts at the national level, but these have come about without workers' direct involvement in the process. In other words, workers are alienated from the political object that they themselves have produced. As a consequence, when the state intervenes in labour politics, it appears to be doing so of its own accord, i.e. paternalistically. This framework helps us to understand how worker unrest in China has become highly antagonistic towards employers and the local state, while maintaining the stability of the system as a whole.