A B S T R A C TThis historical-ethnographic study of village enclaves in Guangzhou explores the intensified entrenchment of villagers in a Maoist past when they faced market fluidities of a postreform present. It underscores a rural-urban spatiality and a cultural divide between villagers, migrants, and urbanites that are simultaneously transgressed and reinforced. It highlights discursive categories and institutional practices that incarcerate the residents, who juggle lingering socialist parameters with compelling market forces and state development priorities. Connectivity and exclusion, agency and victimization, groundedness and dislocation as lived experience are captured by the historically thick social ethos in the enclaves. This article rethinks issues of emplacement and displacement, dichotomy, and process. [village enclaves, rural-urban divide, spatiality and migrancy, displacement, historical anthropology, postreform South China]

In the mid-nineteenth century, a gentleman in Xiaolan having the Mai surname wrote in his memoir:Age eighteen, the forty-seventh year of Qianlong's reign [1782], there was a chrysanthemum festival. Each major surname group put on floral displays, and six platforms were set up throughout the town. There were scores of theatrical troupes whose performance brought together kinsmen and friends. The tradition of the festival started that year. • The narrative continued, Age twenty-seven, the fifty-sixth year of Qianlong's reign [1791], the chrysanthemum festival of that year was more elaborate than before.Age fifty, the nineteenth year of the reign of Jiaqing [1814], the town held another community-wide celebration. The staging of chrysanthemum operas the year before prompted the lineages to conduct a third festival. It has been twenty-four years since the last gathering. The He surname group provided two sets [of floral displays], the Li surname one set, all at their focal ancestral halls. Our own lineage mounted a display at the hall for an ancestor of the sixth generation. The weisuo [military colony] set up its own in front of the Guandi temple. 2 The Xiao surname mounted their display at the hall for their focal ancestor. The Xitu [a neighborhood division] gave a display at the Zhong ancestral hall. A Li lineage also had its own display, as did the Liang of Luoyong and the Shifu temple.

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This chapter takes a slice from the census records to examine policies, assumptions, and procedures related to a recent period of in-flow from China and to assess their impact on Hong Kong’s present and future human landscape. I focus on two waves. First, those who crossed the border to Hong Kong, often illegally, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were labeled “new immigrants” and treated with scorn by some Hong Kong residents. They found work and were absorbed into the Hong Kong society. Many returned to their native places for marriage. In the 1990s, they started to bring to Hong Kong their mainland spouses and young children, who formed the second wave of newcomers. This wave is also known in popular parlance as “new immigrants” and, since the mid-1990s in official categories, as “new arrivals.” The meaning of the label changed somewhat, from one marking difference in the 1980s, to one hardened against those seen as society’s burden. These two waves of immigrants have posed complicated human resource and social issues for Hong Kong.

This review uses multilingual sources to illuminate China–Africa encounters in historical, socialist, and postsocialist contexts. It emphasizes interregional connections over time and uses nuanced ethnographic accounts to complement macrogeopolitical analyses. The article focuses on mutual stereotypes as well as on the negotiation of social and cultural barriers in everyday life. It challenges static, bounded conceptual categories in social science and policy research. The ethnographic studies cited highlight the complexities of human agency and historical legacies on the ground and show the contested democratization of space and opportunities that ensue both when Africans enter Chinese social fields and vice versa. In the process, these examples force us to rethink analytical assumptions about mobility, hierarchy, and political economy in ways that complicate Cold War–derived understandings of both China and Africa.