Spatial meaning-making and urban activism: Two tales of anti-PX protests in urban China

ABSTRACT

Urban space plays an important role in shaping the meaning-making process in relation to urban activism, especially for disorganized, spontaneous, and short-lived protests occurring in authoritarian regimes. Taking protests against locally unwanted land use (LULU) projects as an example, this article examines how urban space shapes the meaning-making process in relation to 2 anti-paraxylene (PX) protests in Kunming and Maoming. Particular attention is paid to how residents’ interpretations of the hazards of PX shaped the meaning-making process on social media. In the case of Kunming, a city with a long history of natural environmental conservation, the primary frame employed by residents was environment and health risks. In the case of Maoming, a large petrochemical industrial center with severe air pollution, residents expressed their opposition toward the PX project by emphasizing strong distrust in local government. Participants’ differentiated meaning-making processes were shaped by the dual space of cities, namely physical conditions and associated meanings and place-bounded historical memories of daily life. This article contributes to the scholarship on cities and social movements by integrating the theories of space/place and the theory of framing to analyze the spatial meaning-making process in relation to urban activism in China and in transitional economies in general.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Professor Yip Ngai-ming and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. In light of these characteristics, this article uses the terms urban activism and popular protests interchangeably to refer to the Chinese counterpart of social movements.

2. Only Weibo tweets were used in the quantitative analyses for two reasons: first, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to systematically collect all relevant posts from the Internet, and it is more feasible to examine posts from an influential online platform; second, Weibo has been one of most influential battlefields for public events in China since 2010, and online posts on this platform can effectively reflect the public mood toward influential controversies. Given that blog/forum posts were more detailed without the limit of 140 characters, they were used in the qualitative analyses.

3. It should be noted that not all downloaded Weibo tweets were pertinent to the PX controversies. Quantitative analyses estimated that approximately half of the tweets in Maoming and one third of tweets in Kunming were noise that happened to contain the keywords. Fortunately, the conclusion still holds even if we rescale the frame proportions.

4. Although NGOs had to a certain degree sustained the oppositional action beyond street protests (Sun, Huang, et al., 2017), their role in shaping online frames should not be overexaggerated. Analysis showed that only 0.16% of Weibo tweets mentioned Green Kunming.

Additional information

Funding

This study is partially supported by the Shanghai Social Science Foundation (2017EZZ002),Chinese National Social Science Foundation (12CSH043), the School of Social Development and Public Policy's Research Fund at Fudan University.

Notes on contributors

Xiaoyi Sun

Xiaoyi Sun is Assistant Professor in the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University. Her research interests include environmental politics, urban governance, and state–society relations in urban China.

Ronggui Huang

Ronggui Huang is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Fudan University. His research interests include urban sociology, digital sociology, and social movements.