Dancing with bulldozers: Migrant life on Beijing's periphery

Abstract

This paper details two research encounters with Beijing. It explores the connections migrants make with the city in navigating it, and offers this as a way of thinking about cities. The first encounter is with poor internal, sometimes called ‘floating’, migrants in Xiao Jiahe on the NW edge of the city. The second is with UK migrants in the gated community ‘Capital Retreat’ on the NE edge of the city near the airport. Both locations are city arrival-portals of different kinds. The (incommensurate) streams of migration through which these portals are coproduced are placed side by side, exposing migrants' routine and irregular mobility and the urban knowledge guiding their navigation of the city. In this juxtaposition it becomes clear that urban navigational skills are more appropriate to the analysis of migration than definitions based on formal educational and occupational skills commonly deployed by migration scholars. Comparison of navigational skills in these portals reveals the imagination, flexibility and resilience of internal migrants and the fears, difficulties and incapacities of UK migrants. Most importantly, migrants' navigational skills expose the city through the connections they make with it, providing new ways of thinking about cities through their constitution in migrant fabrics: migrants don't just live in cities, but make them. From these two close encounters, I suggest that intimacy and distance, protection and exposure, overlapping conditions of urban existence, provide a way of conceptualizing the city-as-migrant-fabric. The contrasting realities of these two city portals in the making, lived side by side, are not quite a matter of parallel lives. In making the city by living it, internal and foreign migrants each produce for the other the circumstances in which the city must be re-navigated, thus producing it as a living nexus of disparate, intersecting journeys, in which the logics of accumulation through land speculation provide significant forms of traction for both groups. This paper describes how global capitalism makes urban life in the capital city of (post) socialist China through the lens of migrant life, demonstrating the analytic advantages of spatially dynamic, biographical and comparative approaches to contemporary urbanism.

Key words:

• internal migrants
• UK migrants
• Beijing
• city-making

Notes

1 The research on which this paper is based was funded by the British Academy. All names have been changed to protect informants’ anonymity.

2 When they are compared it is with other rural to urban migrants in the Global South.

3 This part of the research begun in 2007 when I surveyed the British population of Beijing registered with the British Embassy. At that time they numbered 500.

4 I use the plural here because I could not have done this research without the young sociologists/interpreters from one of Beijing's leading universities who accompanied me to Xiao Jiahe and helped immeasurably with this research. I thank them and the professor whose generosity and contacts made this research possible.

5 This quote comes from an earlier investigation of rural to urban factory workers in plastic factories in Fuzhou.

Additional information

Caroline Knowles is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London.