Publicizing insecurity, privatizing security: Chinese wholesalers' surveillance cameras in a Paris suburb (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Abstract

Since the early nineties, several hundreds of Chinese immigrants have settled in what has become known as the ‘Chinese wholesalers area’. For the past two years, Chinese wholesalers in Aubervilliers have been calling on public authorities to address the problem of street robberies and violent thefts, which they experience on a daily basis. Yet, they have been encouraged by the authorities to ensure their own protection, by – amongst other things – installing surveillance cameras to film the streets. This is illegal according to French legislation on camera surveillance. Knowing this, why have surveillance cameras been adopted as a solution? This question guides the ethnographic analysis presented here of a situation where the installation of surveillance cameras was locally negotiated by the main actors involved – namely, the wholesalers’ representatives and the police.

Beyond Ethnic Enclave: Social Integration of Chinese Immigrants in Paris’s “Little Asia”

“…For an ethnic minority like the Parisian Chinese, Paugam's conventional way of defining and analyzing political engagement might do them injustice and thus needs to be problematized. As discussed in previous literature (see Kwong 1979;Lem 2010;Trémon 2013), researchers easily equate studying how Chinese inhabitants participate in local politics with looking for cases where Chinese participate in politics as a Chinese collective for an ethnic-related interest, be that against discrimination or demanding more rights. On the contrary, prioritizing the "Chinese" characteristic of identity politics downplays the multifarious histories, regional origins, genders, and sexualities associated with each Chinese member of that community, reducing these variations to an internal difference or neglecting them as a whole.…”

Social Relays of China’s Power Projection? Overseas Chinese Collective Actions for Security in France

“…The first was to organize meetings with the local police authorities to put pressure and convey their demands. The second was to collect funding to install a network of surveillance cameras inside the wholesale zone (Trémon, ). Finally, UCAS also provided support to victims of assaults and helped them lodge complaints at the police station.…”

The Multiscalar Nature of Urban Security and Public Safety: Crime Prevention from Local Policy to Policing in Lisbon (Portugal) and Memphis (the United States)

“…As a result, urban policy has been transformed by public-private partnerships, privatization, and liberalization of services (Sager 2011). Neoliberal state rescaling has affected urban security in contradictory ways; (global) cities witnessed the exponential growth of corporate security sectors (Graham 2010;Rossi and Vanolo [2010] 2012) at the same time as local governments faced the burden of budget cuts and often had to delegate the implementation of security solutions to citizens and local businesses (Peck 2012;Trémon 2013).…”