Session 56: Tensions in Urban China: Transformed Relations and Reconfigured Spaces among Families and Communities

Organizer and Chair: Danning Wang, Montclair State University

Discussants: Yanjie Bian, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Charlotte Ikels, Case Western Reserve University

Keywords: China, urban space, social stratification.

In fast-changing urban China, the transformed relations between individuals and the spaces in which they live are reconfiguring "traditional" power structures and social networks in both public and domestic domains. With this panel, we address this interaction between social stratification and social space by locating our understanding of China’s emerging social classes and their local impacts within the physical spaces of urban communities and domestic spaces in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Hong Kong. Adding to scholarly studies of rural-urban migration, housing consumption, and labor management in contemporary China, our panelists’ ethnographic works discuss the intricate ties that exist between the creation, maintenance, and transformation of social relations and the social spaces in which these relations take place. Papers examine the formation of new social relationships in gated communities, the transformation of domestic relationships in the distribution of housing property among urban working class populations, the creation of inter-generational power struggles in migrant family households, and the reconfiguration of gender politics as it relates to a stratified socio-spatial urban landscape. Together we intend to demonstrate how vertically arranged (top-down) institutional forces function at local levels, and how hegemonic power is contested and filtered at multiple layers in local settings.

Modernization and Socio-Spatial Reconfigurations in Suburban Beijing

Friederike Fleischer, City University of New York

The economic and social transformations of the past two decades in mainland China have profoundly changed the physical landscape of Chinese cities. The contrasts and contradictions between the emerging social classes are especially visible in the expanding suburban areas which turn these into important locales for research on the effects of the reforms. Based on 14 months of field research in 2001–2002, this paper analyzes the socio-spatial processes and transformations in an emerging suburban area in the northeast of Beijing. Centered around the people who either live or work in the locale, I analyze the development of the area as the result of the interplay of history, politics, and planning, with a special focus on the effects of the transformations on women’s lives. The paper shows how in the current transformation period, gender, age, and education work together to define specific physical and social spaces for the inhabitants of the locale. The picture that emerges is one in which individual actors and various agents describe overlapping and intersecting circles of movement and influence, which for women concomitantly represent the differing scopes of choice and hegemony. I argue that today’s re-stratification processes, which include gender, are deeply affected by spatial reorganization. The paper sheds light on the particularities of the colossal urban transformation in China, above all the emergence of new social hierarchies, which in turn are connected to the deepening of pre-existing divisions between rural and urban spaces.

Migration Melodramas: Class, Housing, and Mother-in-Law/Daughter-in-Law Conflict in Hong Kong

Nicole Newendorp, Harvard University

In this paper, I discuss the connection between class, intergenerational power relationships, and housing in Hong Kong. On the basis of sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork that I performed in Hong Kong between May 2001 and July 2002, I examine the role that public housing provision plays in creating intergenerational power struggles among Hong Kong mothers-in-law and their mainland Chinese immigrant daughters-in-law. Anthropologists writing about Chinese kinship patterns in the 1990s have highlighted important changes in Chinese family norms—such as the rise of the conjugal unit and the weakening of the "traditional" control exercised by mothers-in-law over their daughters-in-law—and indicate that such changes have resulted primarily from the greater economic power enjoyed by younger generations. In Hong Kong, however, a number of factors contribute to the seeming "replication" of traditional mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relations among lower class families living in public housing, where immigrant women’s power within their husbands’ families is relatively weak. I argue that Hong Kong’s unique housing environment, current and past policy controlling the provision of public housing units, as well as discrimination against mainland Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong, all contribute to the creation of a mother-in-law/daughter-in-law kinship dynamic that appears to mirror traditional relationship patterns but is nonetheless significantly different. Furthermore, I address the interesting question of how the state provision of housing in Hong Kong and its effects on family relationships both parallel and diverge from the impacts of mainland Chinese state-provided housing of the pre-reform era on family life.

Owners’ Associations in Neighborhood Shanghai

Tianshu Pan, Georgetown University

As an outgrowth of my past research on community building practices under socialism, this paper examines the extent to which the ongoing processes of neighborhood gentrification have shaped the collective experiences of everyday life in Shanghai’s various localities. Based on field investigation and intensive interviews conducted in two gated communities (the Lotus Pavilion and the Green Land) in Shanghai’s Chang-ning District between 2003 and 2004, I explore the ways in which the members of the owners’ association (yezhu weiyuhui) developed innovative strategies as they constantly struggled for autonomy, legitimacy, and rights in routine practice. By focusing on the pivotal role of the owners’ association in mediating and resolving the existing conflicts between the residents and the property management company (wuye guanli gongsi) and real estate developers, this paper investigates the transformation of the local political landscape facilitated by one of the key social forces representing the real interests of the residents in newly developed housing communities. Incorporating perspectives from urban anthropology that give centrality to individual voices and expression and the use of urban tools to resist, control, and manipulate, my study seeks a deeper understanding of the changing relationship among highly motivated social actors including government officials, corporate developers, property management companies, (official) neighborhood organizations, and the residential communities.

The Value of the Tangible Asset: Private Housing Property and the Domestic Relationship in a SOE Dormitory Neighborhood in Tianjin

Danning Wang, Montclair State University

China has been considered as a relational society in which kinship and pseudo-kinship ties facilitate favor exchange. Inequality in urban housing is not necessarily predicted by the monetary, occupational, or educational assets of households or individuals. With appropriate family ties, individual citizens can access various services and commodities that are otherwise distributed along the lines of economic class. The performance of parental roles and filial obligations also affects the distribution of family property. Since 1988, the state has sought to detach housing from work units, treating housing stock not as a social welfare benefit but as a marketable commodity. Basic low rent public housing units received during the socialist era have been transformed into private tangible assets during the privatization process. Based on my ethnographic research in a state-owned enterprise (SOE) dormitory neighborhood in Tianjin in 1997, this paper intends to examine the distribution of housing property among the family members as it relates to the transmission of employment to the adult children during the substitution (dingti) system in the early 1980s. It shows that a temporary state policy that was originally designed to resolve urban unemployment intensively shaped domestic relationships and unexpectedly set up the framework for the reconfiguration of domestic power and the practice of family culture in the late socialist era.