When Village Meets Financial Tsunami: Reconfiguring Urban Space and Cultural Belonging in South China

UC Berkeley's Center for Chinese Studies presents a talk by Helen Su on village life in a district of Guangzhou that is being developed into a new Central Business District.

Helen Siu, Anthropology, Yale
Lan-chih Po, Discussant. International and Area Studies Teaching Program, UC Berkeley

This presentation focuses on village life in a district of Guangzhou that is being developed into a new Central Business District (CBD).  Villagers in the district are absorbed by the city while tied to collective property ownership and “rural” statuses left from a Maoist era.  The penetrating power of the late socialist state, the intensely volatile global market, and modernist landmark schemes are intertwined to dominate the residents’ predicaments and sentiments.  Their lives are suspended in a political past and a cultural vacuum that they are ambivalent with, and an economic future they have little control.  The paper engages with theoretical literature on post-socialisms, global-local interface, history, power, and displacement.