Splintering Beijing: Socio-spatial fragmentation, commodification and gentrification in the hutong neighborhoods of 'old' Beijing

摘要

The restructuring of Beijing in the years leading up to and following the 2008 Olympics constitutes a government-sponsored project of neoliberal urbanism---a project through which the meanings of both place and belonging are being reconfigured with far-reaching implications for the city's residents. In investigating this central idea, I triangulate concepts of neoliberalism, governmentality, and urbanism to highlight the ways China's state government operationalizes selective neoliberal logics in order to shape multi-scalar urbanization policies and practices. In this study, I explore the neoliberal technologies of government applied at the municipal level to establish market parameters that serve national-level economic development goals. I argue that those who do not fit neatly into the physical and discursive construction of a modern Beijing, are often obscured from view through socio-economic and spatial displacement processes---processes which are 'legitimized' and normalized through discursive constructions of the ideal and obedient modern consumer-citizen subject.;Subsequently, this research underscores the ways that China's experimentation with selective neoliberal logics at both the city and citizen-subject scale create new parameters for being and belonging in the capital city. I extend right to the city literature and analysis to investigate how low-income and marginalized center city residents navigate the new political, economic and socio-cultural terrain as they accommodate or struggle to resist urban dispossession and dislocation.;Consequently, the spatial move out of Beijing's center city and up into the residential spaces of high-rise buildings elicits corresponding social transformations that tend to socio-economically fragment and isolate former hutong residents from the practices and the community ties that had previously defined their everyday lives. Residents pushed out to the urban periphery often move to newer high-rise buildings constructed in clusters on Beijing's urban fringe where the transportation infrastructure and social services (including education, child and elder care, health clinics, and hospitals) are woefully inadequate for the large and growing population in these neighborhoods.;The combined effects of the government's decentralization of fiscal responsibility to lower administrative units and increased privatization of residential housing complexes lead to a corresponding reduction in access to state-sponsored social services. The move up into the high-rise complexes also contributes to shifting management of care-giving responsibilities within households. Whereas the previous residential spatial configurations in the hutong neighborhoods facilitated a more distributed responsibility of care giving beyond the nuclear family unit, high-rise spatial configurations create distinct socio-spatial boundaries that redefine household gendered divisions of labor and their associated spheres of public and private care and responsibility. In this study, I draw from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2008-2009 to show how the spatial move from hutong neighborhoods into high-rise complexes concentrates caregiving work at the scale of the nuclear family unit. Furthermore, I argue that this concentrated shift is disproportionately borne by women in contemporary Beijing.