“THEY COME IN PEASANTS AND LEAVE CITIZENS”: Urban Villages and the Making of Shenzhen, China

Abstract

This essay examines the ongoing process of postsocialist transformation at the intersection of cultural and economic forces in an urban environment through the example of the so‐called “urban villages”(chengzhongcun) in Shenzhen, China, a booming southern Chinese city and former Special Economic Zone next to Hong Kong. This essay ethnographically examines the role of former rural collectives encircled by a city that has exploded from farmland to an export‐driven city of over 14 million people in little over one generation. These villages form an internal other that is both the antithesis and the condition of possibility for Shenzhen city. By co‐opting the market economy in ways that weave them into the fabric of the contemporary global city, the villages become as much an experiment as the Special Economic Zone itself. This essay analyzes the urban–rural divide as complicit in each other's continued production and effacement and explores how village and city exploit the ambiguities of their juxtaposition in the making of Shenzhen.

“My life is elsewhere”: social exclusion and rural migrants’ consumption of homeownership in contemporary China

“…In the past few decades, urban villages have proliferated in several Chinese major cities, notably Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Wuhan Xiang 2005;Zhang 2001;Bach 2010). In these places, urban villages function as one of the primary living quarters for rural migrants (Song et al 2008).…”

“…This has given rural migrants the opportunity to reinvent themselves as entrepreneurs at a low cost. This discussion of the absence of the state can be seen inXiang (2005) andZhang (2001)'s discussion of the state power in their ethnographies on Zhejiangcun Bach (2010). also stresses this in his study on urban villages in Guangzhou.…”

“…2 Indeed, Danta village was filled with crowded apartments, dusty construction sites, narrow and garbage-strewn streets, cheap and dingy restaurants, small shop fronts, and peddlers' rickshaws. In the popular Chinese discourse, places like Danta are called chengzhongcun, or urban villages, which often are disparaged by the local people as ''dirty, chaotic, and substandard'' (zang luan cha) (Bach 2010). With the hope of changing their fortunes through hard work, in the beginning, this couple believed their stay in Danta village would be only temporary.…”

Morphology and Spatial Dynamics of Urban Villages in Guangzhou’s CBD

“…Some observers regard the concentration of inexpensive rental housing in villages as an advantage for cities, eliminating the possibility of self-built housing on the fringes while meeting an enormous need for housing for low-income service workers whose jobs are in the central city [2,11,12,16]. The sustained presence of large numbers of rural migrants in such enclaves within the city has drawn attention to the sense of wellbeing of these populations, their social insertion in the city, their tenuous economic situation and their attitudes vis-à-vis the city [17][18][19][20]. To a considerable extent, the literature represents a search for equitable solutions for the second wave of governmentled village redevelopment, and so is appropriately focussed on community development process.…”

Negotiating a Concurrence: Tracing the Visible/Invisible Relocation within Migrant-Inhabited Cities of China

“…There is a tendency to assimilate aspects of the new system with components of the old, even creating ground for conflict. In positing a multidimensional concept of assimilation, such assimilation is accomplished through alterations happening in community on both sides of the ethnic periphery through boundary crossing, obscuring and transforming (Alba & Nee 2003).…”