China Perspective Issues
Judith Audin
Civic Duty, Moral Responsibility, and Reciprocity: An Ethnographic Study on Resident-volunteers in the Neighbourhoods of Beijing
ABSTRACT: This paper, which is based on ethnographic field research, analyses the system of resident-volunteers in the neighbourhoods of Beijing. Between co-optation networks, surveillance missions, ritualised practices, and ordinary exchanges of sociability amongst neighbours, volunteering is an interesting form of citizen participation in urban China. The volunteer networks are made up of inhabitants who are selected and involved through the norms of civic duty, personal acquaintance, moral obligation, or persuasion, in order to contribute to the production of local public order. Finally, this specific form of voluntarism reveals, from the perspective of retired people, how shared socio-political practices are created and perpetuated within an institutional volunteering system. KEYWORDS: Beijing, inhabitants, volunteering, commitment, participation, reciprocity, residents’ committee, neighbourhood, ethnography.
Editorial - Intermediary Political Bodies of the Party-State: A Sociology of Mass and Grassroots Organisations in Contemporary China
Luigi Tomba, The Government Next Door: Neighborhood Politics in Urban China
ZHOU Ying. 2017. Urban Loopholes: Creative Alliances of Spatial Production in Shanghai’s City Center
Editorial – Ruination and the Production of Space in Contemporary China
Reconnecting Spatialities in Uninhabited Industrial Spaces: Ruination and Sense of Place in a Coal Town (Datong, Shanxi)
ABSTRACT: Far from dense Chinese cities that experience fast demolition, ruination in Kouquan, a coal town in Datong, is a slower process that generates new practices and meanings. Uninhabited industrial spaces continue to produce a sense of place where large industrial corporations no longer operate and where most residents have moved away. This article brings out new perspectives on the effects of ruination in an industrial area by moving away from the lenses of the work unit, demolition, heritagisation, or decline. Based on direct observation, informal discussions with local residents from 2016 to 2019, and an online review, this article shows that ruination produces spatialised narratives and practices closely entwined with the local population’s experiences, as well as with other actors’ direct and indirect interactions with places: these actors reconnect to the uninhabited town through dwellings, artistic production, religious practices, or simply through their visits to Kouquan, becoming urban explorers themselves. Ruination leads remaining residents, former locals, visitors, government actors, journalists, and artists to the production of new representations of the uninhabited town. KEYWORDS: coal mining, land-subsidence, ruination, Shanxi, memory, art, industrial spaces, urban fringes.