Urban Redevelopment, Displacement, and Governmentality in Nanjing’s Historic Inner‐City

Abstract

Housing‐related urban development has become a core plank of China’s economic policy since the mid‐1990s. Reports of resistance to displacement and resettlement associated with urban restructuring, once widespread, have dissipated since the early‐2010s. Using the framework of governmentality and through qualitative empirical fieldwork in the historic inner‐city of Nanjing, we try to understand the dynamics of this change. This research draws attention to how governments deploy new technologies and rationalities to regroup and push forward urban transformation. We highlight how more “advanced” disciplinary apparatuses both encourage neoliberal subjectivities among displacees and use authoritarian features to maintain the “order of things” in line with the desires of the Chinese state.

Positioning China’s state entrepreneurialism in structural coherence and multiple logics

“…For instance, the debate over control and embeddedness is shown in the difference between the totalitarian and authoritarian understandings of the state-society relationships in state-socialist China (Wu, 2008(Wu, , 2022. After the market reform, the 'fragmented authoritarian' (Lieberthal, 1992;, governmentality-related (Cao, 2022;Ong, 2007;Sum, 2019;Zhang and Moore-Cherry, 2022), post-political (Zhang, 2023), and a series of 'authoritarianism with adjectives' literature (Heurlin, 2016;Nathan, 2003), inherited the tradition of treating the party-state and the society as mutually independent fields (Immel, 2020). Such hybrids reflect the failed attempts to identify 'civil society' in China, which, in Western contexts, is believed to fill the gap between state and market (Xiang, 2004;Zheng and Huang, 2018).…”

Who is Entitled to Oppose Planning Decisions? Politics of Rightful Resistance in Tehran

“…Rightful resistance literature has initially been grounded in peasant studies, focusing on land-grabbing or developmental projects (Chau 2019;Chuang 2014;Kerkvliet 2014;O'Brien 1996). More recently, studies report rightful resistance in urban contexts, concerning bargaining for compensation (Chen and Zhang 2021;Han et al 2023) or the right to stay put in cases of redevelopment (Chen and Zhang 2021;Smith 2020;Zhang and Moore-Cherry 2022); demanding public services (Xiong 2018); protecting local living conditions (Fr€ ohlich 2020); or demanding its improvement (Larrington-Spencer et al 2021;Li and Liu 2022). In China and Russia, rightful resistance is reported as an integral part of the collective resistance (Fr€ ohlich 2020; S€ andig 2021), since it lowers risks and expands opportunities for those who perceive their property rights are being infringed by the state or private sector.…”

“…More recently, studies report rightful resistance in urban contexts, concerning bargaining for compensation (Chen and Zhang 2021; Han et al. 2023) or the right to stay put in cases of redevelopment (Chen and Zhang 2021; Smith 2020; Zhang and Moore‐Cherry 2022); demanding public services (Xiong 2018); protecting local living conditions (Fröhlich 2020); or demanding its improvement (Larrington‐Spencer et al. 2021; Li and Liu 2022).…”

Consuming ‘authenticity’? Reinterpreting the ‘new middle class’ in China through the lens of retailing changes

“…Starting in 2009, state-led urban redevelopment relocated all the local residents to urban outskirts to create space for commercial development, and demolition was the major redevelopment measure under the first wave of gentrification (Wu and He, 2005). However, this initiative caused intense opposition from the public, such as criticising the Nanjing government for 'demolishing real heritage to build fake antiques', and blaiming it had no respect for Nanjing's local culture and heritage (Zhang and Moore-Cherry, 2022).…”

“…Nanjing, a historic Chinese city, has recently experienced large-scale urban redevelopment, with its historical courtyards being cleared to create spaces for commercial development since the early 2010s (see Zhang and Moore-Cherry, 2022). Against this background, criticisms are emerging from society because these urban redevelopment projects demolished real heritage by redeveloping and reconstructing these places into a simulacrum, embellishing it with cultural references inconsistent with the place's past histories and stories.…”