Beyond the urbanization of people: Reconsidering rural and urban identities in the Chinese megacity

Description

This paper examines the subjectivities created during the past decades of China's rapid urbanization. In a Chinese context where a long history of segmented labor markets and formal urban citizenship policies have created a historic divergence in the life chances available in rural and urban areas, "urbanization" plays out across legal, subjective, and affective realms. Contrary to understandings of urbanization as a depoliticized demographic shift in which large numbers of rural residents smoothly or unproblematically come to reside in cities, the question of what it means to "be urban" in China's bounded urban polities is therefore fraught and politicized. Thinking with Chinese and anglophone scholarship that has theorized urbanization as a process that involves both demographic shifts and the transformation of subjectivities, this paper explores the possibilities of an expanded conception of urban life that might be able to untangle connections between urbanity and class in urban China on one hand, while on the other hand maintaining an appreciation for the contributions of avowedly rural spaces and people to cities and urban life.

Period	24 Mar 2025
Event title	American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting
Event type	Conference
Location	Detroit, United StatesShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International