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ABSTRACT
After being showcased during Shanghai EXPO2010, Dafen village has been put forward as an example of “best practice” governance that has transformed a backward urban village into an art cluster. Behind this glorified image is a continuously re-constructed social landscape. In this study, we adopt the approach of state territorialization, drawing insights from the Foucauldian concept of governmentality as disposition of things—in particular people and their relations to land. At issue here is how the dynamic process of territorialization, combined with the Chinese version of moral citizenship, serves the remaking of subjects, landscape, and their relations. In Dafen village, the experiment of fabricating conditioned welfare within China’s welfare system conjures up a new hukou arrangement and new forms of inclusion and exclusion. By exercising the technology of self-regulation, the state seeks temporal and fragile alignments with selected social groups. The outcomes are contingent and frequently take the form of new configurations of power.
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful and constructive comments. We are in debt to Shenjing He, Lily Kong, George Lin, Deborah Martin, and Tim Oakes for their inspiring advices. The errors in the present version are, however, our own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The history of trade painting can be traced to the sector of Chinese export painting, which emerged in the late Qing Dynasty. During that period, Chinese students who studied abroad introduced Western oil painting to Guangzhou, with some pioneers setting up their own master-apprentice studios. The fusion of Chinese and Western painting technologies and styles, coupled with the comparatively low price derived from cheap labor, rendered these paintings attractive in the overseas market of decorative painting. During the heyday of Chinese export painting (1830s to 1860s), workshops of the same type occupied almost all shops on Tongwen Street in Shisanhang, then the busiest commercial zone in Guangzhou. Before China closed its doors to the outside world in 1949, the surviving part of the industry moved to Hong Kong.
2. The category of Sanlai refers to three types of production: processing the imported raw material (laiyang jiagong), processing with provided samples (laiyang jiagong), and assembling provided components (laijian jiagong). In Shenzhen, the Sanlai yibu sector was the initial experimental form of coordination engaging foreign capital and enterprises. At that time, the trade-painting industry was registered under the scheme of Laiyang jiaogong (processing with provided samples).
3. Since the early 1990s, the promulgation of homestead policy required villagers, who used to own land within the village collectively, to merely claim a piece of land called a homestead (zhaijidi), which entitled villagers to construct a house for living purposes.
4. For instance, “Art, Inc.” published on The Yale Globalist, see: http://tyglobalist.org/in-the-mag/art-inc-2/; “China’s Factory for Fake Art Tries to Beat Slump” on Bloomberg, see: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a4.SEBCP0Pw8.
5. It is very difficult to get reliable statistic data on the population in Dafen. All statistic data used in this study are compiled by authors based upon several sources: leaflets and yearly reports published by the Dafen Management Office, the website of Dafen Art Industry Association (DAIA), and interviews to local officials and directors of DAIA.