The Return of the Repressed： Peasant and city space in the Pearl River Delta
Date Issued
2007
Date
2007
Author(s)
Ip, Iam-Chong
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
This study attempts to answer two new questions. These two questions emerge out of the social transformation since the open policy and economic reform in contemporary China. They are also inspired by the urban theories and research in recent years. The first question involves the contemporary significance of “city”. Beside the changes in administrative system, what new urban spaces appear in contemporary China? The second question is about subjectivity. The operation of state power turns the problematic of urban discourses into a top-down perspective. It is only concerned with how various groups of people adapt to the new environment and how they integrate themselves into the government policies and institution. However, it neglects how various social groups actively produce urban spaces and the social processes involved. Answering and responding to these questions, one could be able to look for new directions for urban studies in contemporary China. This is also the cutting point for exploring modernity. This study focuses on two groups of people from the grassroots in the Pearl River Delta, peasant workers from inland province and local peasants. With the field experience in Zhongjing village, Town S, Dongguan city as the site of this research, I analyze the urban processes from the subjective experience of peasant workers and local peasants.
In Pearl River Delta, peasant workers are the labor force of this “World Factory”. They comes from inland province to cities and coastal areas. They are placed at the subject position of “dagong zai/mei”. Many studies point out that the production regime shapes this social group, and in the labor process, it replicates the inequality of the current social system, including urban-rural and regional disparities. This study attempts to further explore the dimension of reproduction and to specify the articulation of the social relations of production with the urban politico-economic process. The social conflict brought about by capitalism emerges neither in the collective consumption for labor reproduction (such as housing and education), nor in the urban politics initiated by state intervention. As “dagong zai/mei”, they are alienated from the society of industrial towns. There are two types of new spaces are noteworthy. The first one is kinship and native-place relationships. Another one is factory-dormitory regime. Most functions of collective consumption are absorbed into capitalist production and space. The identity of “dagong zai/mei” is not a class identity. It is an individual subject to factory discipline, monitoring and even absorption. This identity position restricts them from developing into members of the local society. They are not able to settle down and take roots in it as a social class.
Yet peasant workers do not accept these institutional arrangements passively. They strongly respond to this new power configuration. Even though the factory-dormitory regime builds up the individualized identity of “dagong zai/ mei”, many peasant workers seek partial or complete ways out of factory-dormitory to establish their “homes”. Some even becomes self-employed in the local retailing market. In the midst of the interaction between the factory and the local market, there emerges the local peasant workers' communities. In their daily discourses, they see their “homes” and the identity of “boss” as a space of autonomy and freedom. To become a boss is to achieve upward mobility. Their desire of gaining the identity of “small boss” arises from their frustration by the alienated system of wage labor. They desperately pursue access to money economy, commodity circulation and local market. Their urban experience of alienated labor is not “blasé” defined by western sociological theories. What they detest is factory system and wage labor rather than city life. But ironically these two systems bring them both freedom and fetter. In response, they do not retreat to their individual psychology; instead they actively plan to escape and imagine ways of upward mobility. From this perspective, “petty bourgeois-ization” is not only getting out class alienation, but also a sort of money fetishism, a special kind of urbanity.
The local peasant undergoes the process of class differentiation within rural village. From the 1980s onwards, they are under the pressure of proletarianization. They lost farm land and advantages in local market. These transformations change the social division of labor in rural village. The only way against this process is the expansion of village government and its administrative power. The need of strengthening security force leads to more recruitment of young people. It mitigates the pressure of proletarianization and forms the basis of the local society. In the 1990s, a new class structure is also formed by land expropriation and speculation. After the late 1990s when the land speculation no longer runs high, the local cadres could not accumulate wealth and capital by expropriating farm land. In spite of it, a small group of wealth people have become established over the past two decades and the privilege of cadres continues to exist in the industrial production system. They could rely on factory to further capital accumulation. The power of local cadres in the industrial production is still an important factor widening class difference and shaping local geography.
In the context of class differentiation and the formation of local society, various “collectivities” or communities comes out as the important social relations in urbanization. They play important role in the spatial politics of the village. Villagers re-invent and revitalize their historical heritage and build up social connections. Their moral economy poses a great challenge to the authority of the part-state power in the grassroots. The new governance of village also relies on it. The emergence of these communities are consequence of the alienation of peasants from their land. With their land as “social goods”, they conjure up a community consensus of moral economy to fight for their interest and negotiate with the village government.
The social agencies identified by this research were and are repressed by socialist China. But now many communities return to contemporary urbanism and modernity in oblique ways. This study attempts to contextualize itself in the contemporary Chinese discourses on modernity. It addresses their difficulties in establishing a critical perspective facing intellectuals in the new context,. They are not able to identify and call for any social agent in theory and practice. This study, from the perspectives of subjectivity and space, shows the diversity of newly emerging urbanities, particularly the autonomy of “household-market” and community, and the new meanings of “informality” and “tradition”. They provide a new beginning for contemporary Chinese intellectual to formulate critical perspectives and social engagement.
Subjects
珠江三角洲
城市
城市過程
社群
村落
現代性
China
Pearl River Delta
city
urban process
peasant
peasant worker
community
village
modernity
urbanity
Type
thesis
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