Rethinking the oriental city: The urban process and the mobility of urban elites in China’s ethnic southwest

Thesis

Over the past seven decades, state-orchestrated geographic processes have profoundly shaped the urban landscape and everyday life in the southwest ethnic periphery of China. This spatial texture, formed through multiple shifts, presents a hybrid amalgamation rife with uncertainties, paradoxes, and contradictions. It involves a territorialization process that defines urban realities in ethnic regions through military-administrative spatial transformation, dependent relationships, and a social hierarchy centred around central power, exemplified by the contradictory realities of being Han and Nuosu-Yi. Zhaojue (Juojjo ꏪꐦ, Ch.昭觉) in the Liangshan Nuosu region serves as a prime example. Existing academic approaches to China’s urbanism and ethnicity studies often fall into binary juxtapositions such as West/non-West, past/present, state/subaltern, power/resistance, and majority/minority. These narratives tend to overlook the paradoxical overlaps of these contradictory elements on the ground. This dissertation addresses these gaps by exploring the geographic processes of Zhaojue through both urban and ethnic lenses, examining how contradictory elements relate and interact rather than compete.

Drawing on extensive historical urban ethnography from 12 months of fieldwork, this dissertation explores in-depth how urbanism, nation-building, and ethnicity are negotiated and spatially constituted within China’s socio-political landscape. It introduces the concept of centripetal urbanism, based on Bulag’s concept of state centripetalism and literature on “affective states” and post-colonial critiques. Centripetal urbanism is defined as state-orchestrated urbanization underpinned by a state redistributive system integral to the ongoing top-down extensive state-building process aimed at fostering political loyalty and economic dependency among peripheral populations. The geo-ethnic politics and the qiandan economy of Zhaojue’s urbanism reveal both the Chinese state’s dominant and affective dimensions in shaping the spatial-social formation in the ethnic periphery. Consequently, I argue that the urbanisation of Zhaojue must be viewed in terms of the inherent dilemma faced by modern multinational states in establishing legitimacy among cultural others.

This dissertation contributes to area studies of China and urban studies by highlighting the heterogeneous ways urbanization unfolds. The dissertation links urban studies with critical explorations of politico-ethnic dynamics, not necessarily tied to neoliberalism or post-colonialism. Additionally, it broadens and deepens our understanding of several key themes in Chinese urban anthropology: mobility and hierarchy, encouraging thinking beyond binaries and embracing paradoxical realities.

Authors: Chen, Y

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-rbv24p8aa
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: social mobility; Nuosu-Yi; centripetal urbanism; ethnic elites; urban anthropology; geo-ethnic politics
• Subjects: Anthropology; urban studies; migration studies; ethnicity studies