villages make the city

In this special issue, contributors highlight a range of cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of China’s chengzhongcun ??? (urban villages, or “villages surrounded by the city”). As spaces of constant renewal and unprecedented accumulation, urban villages demonstrate how China’s insertion into the global capitalist economy relies on the tenuous and contested relationships between land, labor, and capital, which are often overshadowed by narratives of rural-to-urban development in state capitalist and postsocialist contexts. The authors examine how, since the 1980s, the capitalist drive for profit and the continuing institutional legacy of the Mao era have worked in tandem to shape China’s postsocialist development. The contemporary Chinese urban villages resonate with the formation of worker’s villages in the 1920s-30s when the capitalist state attempted to contain the capital-labor antagonisms in fixed spaces fostering self-disciplined responsible citizens, social harmony, and nationalism through regulations of workers’ everyday life.

Contributors: Nellie Chu, Jane Hayward, Malgorzata Jakimów, Tong Lam, Minhua Ling, Ralph Litzinger, Tzu-Chi Ou, Megan Steffen, Mengqi Wang,Yang Zhan, and Qian Zhu.