Pilgrims of Modernity: Beijing Luxury Hotel Workers in Pursuit of an Urban Future.

摘要

Through a collection of case studies, this dissertation examines how modernity is perceived, translated, and enacted among various actors in Beijing and how these perceptions influence the built environment, narratives of history, and the manner in which low-wage service workers come to belong to the urban citizenry. The first chapter concerns physical expressions of 'modernity' in Beijing. Urban planning prioritizes structuring the city around desire rather than need and thus, luxury developments are swiftly commanding an overwhelming presence. I explore unfounded assumptions of a burgeoning market before revealing how unbalanced planning is allowed to occur and to what consequence. My second case interrogates modernity at the scale of laboring bodies in luxury hotels. I demonstrate that in striving to embody attributes of 'ideal' Chinese distinction workers, employees come to value particular human qualities and the market-based rationales upon which they are based. In turn, they consent to discriminatory and hostile employment practices as a means of increasing their perceived social capital in an urban landscape that appears to manifest the inevitability of a predatory capitalist status quo, ultimately reifying the discriminatory foundations on which these practices rest. My third case directs focus on the Beijing hotel industry. I survey differences between Western and Chinese or Hong Kong managed hotels concluding that, despite divergent rhetoric, both promote managerial regimes that merge authoritarian techniques with discipline through the exercise of employee choice and autonomy. These methods gain legitimacy and potency through the employ of discourses of Western expertise, notions of spaces of the 'abject,' and various spatial techniques of labor control. I conclude my dissertation with a chapter on agency and change. The Beijing portrayed is one of exclusion whereby those without a defined place continually seek to carve a niche within only to find themselves further on the periphery. Although my cases reflect a narrow margin of lived experience the conclusion nonetheless remains disconcerting. Fortunately, the status quo is not inevitable. The agency and creativity of marginalized actors holds potential for bottom-up political change even if outlines of a more inclusionary Beijing remain only faint.