Publishers details for: Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System from Origins to Reform, by David Bray, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005. xvi + 277 pp. US$60.00 (hardcover).

Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System from Origins to Reform [Book Review]

Michel Agier’s Managing the Undesirables is one of several texts that addresses the complex and proliferating humanitarian infrastructure that is increasingly prevalent in regions of the world besieged by violence and displacement, but his work stands out as particularly important and innovative. Agier addresses some of the central questions facing our world today: belonging, personhood, and the ability of those most cut off from political power to speak for themselves and shape their own lives, and he does so in a way that combines passion and keen observation. In doing so, his work should be of interest to a broad range of sociologists who study social inequality and the structures (even those built from the best of intentions) that perpetuate it. In this volume, Agier explores the concept of humanitarian government, the political apparatus set up during emergency situations that takes responsibility for the life and death of individuals no longer protected adequately by a state. For as Agier shows, a refugee camp is far more than a place of shelters and emergency food aid. They are places in which someone decides who gets plastic sheeting and who does not, who receives food rations and for how long, what social programs should be put into place and who should be in charge of them, and what barriers need to be constructed (barbed wired, armed guards, cinderblock walls) to ostensibly protect those inside but also to protect the local population from incursions of these displaced ‘‘undesirables.’’ Further, these ‘‘camps’’ are hardly temporary shelters; many have existed for decades, taking on the appearance of towns and cities with entrepreneurs setting up small businesses and political elites emerging from the post-flight chaos. And yet, the camp is a hybrid social form, taking the shape of something entirely new from what existed before in the lives of its inhabitants, and as Agier convincingly argues, it exists in a state of exception, outside the bounds of the political and social life that humanitarian law and human rights ostensibly guarantee. Agier uses his ethnologist’s eye for culture to analyze observations he made during fieldwork in refugee camps in Kenya, Zambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea between 2000-2007, accessing the camps through Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF; in English, Doctors Without Borders). His affiliation with MSF gave him a level of flexibility and independence (particularly from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees) that allowed him sufficient time in the camps to not only observe humanitarian government at work but also the response of the refugees under its purview. He combines his observations with detailed histories of different migrations, explaining the historical and geographic paths that led different groups of refugees to the camps that he studied. Agier demonstrates the discursive power that humanitarian organizations have over defining and categorizing the displaced individuals in the camps; defining a person’s status as a refugee leads to acceptance into the camp and the security that brings, but the denial of such status leads to rejection and often deportation back to life-threatening circumstances. Once determined as a refugee, a person’s suffering and vulnerability come to define their place in the camp and the world, with moral hierarchies created around different definitions of vulnerability with different access to resources provided by the humanitarian organization. This process, Agier argues, de-socializes refugees; they lose their individual personhood and either become ahistorical, pitiable masses that the charitable-at-heart seek to keep alive, or potential threats to order and the safety of the non-displaced that must be managed or

In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis

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Over the last few decades we have witnessed a global U-turn in prevailing housing and urban policy agendas, spread around the world by the driving forces of globalization and neoliberalism. The new paradigm was mainly based on the withdrawal of states from the housing sector and the implementation of policies designed to create stronger and larger market-based housing finance models. The commodification of housing, together with the increased use of housing as an investment asset within a globalized financial market, has profoundly affected the enjoyment of the right to adequate housing. Taking the World Bank's 1993 manifesto as a starting point and the subprime crisis as its first great international flashpoint, this essay traces some key elements of the neoliberal approach to housing and its impact on the enjoyment of the right to housing in different contexts and times. The reform of housing policy — with all its components of homeownership, private property and binding financial commitments — has been central to the political and ideological strategies through which the dominance of neoliberalism is maintained. Conversely, the crisis (and its origins in the housing market) reflects the inability of market mechanisms to provide adequate and affordable housing for all.

https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/5001824.pdf

Neoliberalismo reciente: la FinanCializaCiónde la vivienda propia y el dereCho a la vivienda* Late NeoliBeralism: The Financialization of Homeownership and Housing Rights

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Housing commodification has led to the development of gated neighbourhoods in China. However, the types of gated neighbourhoods are very different from each other, and include ‘commodity housing’, ...

/pdf/the-variegated-role-of-the-state-in-different-gated-esm2bkrjr4.pdf

The variegated role of the state in different gated neighbourhoods in China

Collaborative neighborhood governance and its effectiveness in community mitigation to COVID-19 pandemic: From the perspective of community workers in six Chinese cities

Set against the wider background of global suburbanization, this paper contributes to the emerging literature on the formation of technoburbia in China, and more importantly, the potential “urban c...

The trials of China’s technoburbia: the case of the Future Sci-tech City Corridor in Hangzhou

Within a relatively short span of four decades, China has transformed itself from a country dominated by renters of public housing to a country with one of the world’shighest rates of homeownership. Radical reforms of the housing provision system have created a variety of housing pathways for different generations. Against this background, this paper adopts the ‘state–market–family triad’ in Esping-Andersen’s welfare state regime to examine three main pathways to homeownership: market-acquired, public-subsidised and family-supported, with a particular focus on the differences between generations. Based on data from the 2013 China Households Finance Survey, the empirical analysis verifies the transition to a more liberal housing system, in which the responsibility for housing provision has shifted from the state to the market. Meanwhile, families have become a vital social institution assisting young cohorts to achieve homeownership. The results also show that men are more likely to turn to family for housing support, a practice that reflects Chinese traditions. Moreover, the findings show that higher educational attainment has enhanced people’s independence from both the state and the family in terms of acquiring a home, and that institutional factors—particularly hukou status— largely determine people’s access to public-subsidised housing.

Tingting Lu

Papers

Place attachment in gated neighbourhoods in China: Evidence from Wenzhou

The variegated role of the state in different gated neighbourhoods in China

Collaborative neighborhood governance and its effectiveness in community mitigation to COVID-19 pandemic: From the perspective of community workers in six Chinese cities

The trials of China’s technoburbia: the case of the Future Sci-tech City Corridor in Hangzhou

Pathways to homeownership in urban China: transitions and generational fractures