Abstract
This chapter offers an ethnographic study of urban politics through the experience of a community living in a poor area of Harbin, China, at the end of the 2000s. Situated in the north-east region of China, and more exactly in the province of Heilongjiang, Harbin became an urban laboratory for the urban policies of Maoist communism for three decades (1950–1980). Here I analyse the influence of different reforms and the process of urban transformation that occurred during my fieldwork.
I wish to thank Giuliana B. Prato and Italo Prato for inviting me to contribute to this ambitious project and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful criticism and comments. I am also grateful to Emeric Houry, teacher of English at Lambersart High School, for his help.
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- 1.
On the relationship between micro- and macroprocesses in urban anthropology, see also Pardo and Prato (2013).
- 2.
That phase is still currently in progress, and the year 2000 only marks the end of the survey made by Junhua .
- 3.
Between 1950 and 1976, the organization of cities by the danwei confined life between four walls, creating borders within the urban space . The traditional urban organization dictated by the danwei was characterized by the fixed residence and immobility of the populations and the abolition of privacy (Davis 1995, 2–3) . It is about a highly controlled environment corresponding to a standardized pattern, based on a mapping requirement with the objective to reduce the need for transport. With this working units model, China went further than the Soviet Union in the fusion between workplace and living quarters (Gaubatz 1995, 30).
- 4.
According to a survey carried out in 2005 by the Harbin City Office of Statistics, the Harbin population is considered to be around 9,750,000. It reaches 4,500,000 within its inner territory. In 2007, 9,854,000 inhabitants could be counted, equal to half the population of Beijing. With a density of 183.5 per square kilometre, the population rate increase is 28/1000. The distribution by age group is 1,366,000 people for the 0–14 age bracket, 7,628,000 people for the 15–64 age bracket and 756,000 people for the 65-year-old and above age bracket. The distribution of the population is 4,834,000 female to 4,916,000 male individuals. Some 93.45% of the population comes from the Han ethnic group.
- 5.
Our study focused primarily on the life stories of a dozen families during the various stages of urban renovation. However, I do not discuss the details of their lives here. This will be part of a separate publication in which I address the cognitive aspects of how feelings and perceptions interact with the urban space .
- 6.
Hutong are a type of narrow residential street commonly associated with northern Chinese cities, which resemble the courées of the industrial districts of northern France .
- 7.
- 8.
User’s right is very ambiguous and therefore very easy to twist, especially since its definition and interpretation have gradually been left to local authorities to determine when managing particular situations.
- 9.
That latter can administrate a city and the neighbouring smaller towns.
- 10.
In the double sense of reconstruction and rebuilding.
- 11.
The committee was created in 1949 and was inherited from the Maoist state apparatus to handle the district population. Originally used as a propaganda tool for the party, since the late 1980s it has turned into an organization to address local issues.
- 12.
BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South-Africa and refers to the close economic collaboration among these countries.
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Labdouni, K. (2018). A Revolution of the Urban Lifestyle in China? An Ethnography of a Harbin Neighbourhood. In: Pardo, I., Prato, G. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Urban Ethnography. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64289-5_19
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