Channeling Xining: Tibetan Place-Making in Western China during the Era of Commodity Housing

Abstract

Through an analysis of Tibetan place-making in China's Xining City, I argue that a focus on channeling in place-making provides a way to move beyond typical accounts of resistance and domination in urban spaces. In China's frontier cities, an ethno-territorial institutional framework has resulted in the curtailment of how and where Tibetans and other ethnic minority groups may construct places. Furthermore, a nationwide urbanization project centered around the privatization of commodity housing and resulting in the hanification of the urban environment is producing a hegemonic urbanism that appears to be reducing urban difference. Yet Tibetans in Xining are channeling their place-making efforts to not simply fit in with or fight against urbanization but to assert their own meanings and rhythms and satisfy their own place-making desires. In doing so, they are learning how to navigate urban regulations and sensibilities while creating a rhizomatic network of urban places. The result is a piecemeal approach that has allowed a minority ethnic identity to thrive in the city through the creation of a diffuse but connected urbanism. Channeling highlights the careful path that marginal place-makers must tread as they find their way through territorial regulations and commercialism in the city. This research is based on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with forty-five Xining urbanites.

我通过分析藏人在中国西宁市中的地方打造, 主张聚焦地方打造中的传导, 提供了超越城市空间中的抵抗与支配的典型说法之方法。在中国的前沿城市中, 族裔—领土制度的架构, 导致了藏人和其他少数族裔团体如何能够建构地方、以及在何处建构地方的限制。此外, 聚焦商品住房私有化及其所导致的城市环境的汉化之全国性城市化计画, 正在生产减少城市差异的霸权城市主义。但西宁的藏人不单只是通过融入或对抗城市化来传导打造地方的努力, 而是植入自身的意义和韵律, 并满足自身的地方打造想望。他们通过这麽做, 学习如何操纵城市规范与识别力, 同时创造城市空间的地下茎网络。该行动导致了让少数族裔身份认同得以透过创造发散但连结的城市主义而繁盛的零碎方法。“传导”强调边陲的地方打造者必须以谨慎的步伐, 在城市中的领域规范和商业主义中寻路。本研究是根据十七个月的民族志田野工作, 以及对四十五位西宁城市居民的访谈。

Mediante un análisis de la construcción tibetana de lugar en Ciudad Xining, China, sostengo que un enfoque sobre canalización en el proceso de construir lugar provee una manera de sobrepasar el típico recuento de resistencia y dominación en los espacios urbanos. En las ciudades fronterizas de China, un marco institucional etno-territorial ha resultado en la restricción del cómo y dónde pueden construir lugares los tibetanos y otros grupos étnicos minoritarios. Además, un proyecto de urbanización a escala nacional, centrado en la privatización del mercado de vivienda que induce a la hanificación del entorno urbano, está produciendo un urbanismo hegemónico que da la impresión de estar reduciendo la diferencia urbana. No obstante, los tibetanos están canalizando sus esfuerzos de construcción de lugar en Xining a no simplemente acomodarse con la urbanización o combatirla, sino a reivindicar sus propios significados y ritmos, y a satisfacer sus propios deseos en lo que concierne a construir lugar. Al hacerlo, están aprendiendo a navegar por las regulaciones y sensibilidades urbanas mientras crean una red rizomática de lugares urbanos. El resultado es un acercamiento fragmentado que ha permitido medrar en la ciudad una identidad de minoría étnica a través de la creación de un urbanismo difuso pero conectado. La canalización pone de manifiesto el sendero de cuidado que deben pisar los constructores marginales de lugar a medida que se abren camino a través de las regulaciones territoriales y el comercialismo de la ciudad. Esta investigación está basada en diecisiete meses de trabajo de campo etnográfico y entrevistas con cuarenta y cinco urbanitas de Xining.

Key words:

• China
• ethnicity
• place-making
• rhythm
• territory

关键词：:

• 中国, 族裔
• 地方打造
• 韵律
• 领土。

Palabras clave:

• China
• etnicidad
• construcción de lugar
• ritmo
• territorio

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Nik Heynen, the anonymous reviewers, Adam Moore, Helga Leitner, Andrew Dicks, Rinchen Tso, and Laura Brown for their assistance and advice. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2015 Political Geography Specialty Group conference.

Funding

This research was supported through the Foreign Language and Area Studies and Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad programs.

Notes

1 I am here appropriating the Chinese folk saying made famous by Deng Xiaoping to describe China's incremental economic and political reforms: “Crossing the river by feeling the stones” (mozhe shitou guo he).

2 Dean (2010) and Rose (1999) decontextualized Foucault's (2003, 2007) work on governmentality from its European empirical roots and argued that it has implications for governance across the modern world. Their work has influenced much of the research on governmentality in China's urban neighborhoods.

3 Ethnic minorities are not the only citizens of China who face pressure to conform their place-making activities to those of state planners or normative sensibilities. For instance, Han practitioners of folk religion have had to move shrines and alter their practices to accommodate urban planning orthopraxy (Abramson 2011).

4 Although the construction boom in China has drawn international attention for its apparent creation of ghost towns, many units are purchased not for immediate dwelling but for business and investment purposes. Indeed, Chinese homeownership rates are close to 90 percent, far above U.S. ownership rates (Wildau 2017).

5 It is common to find groups of Tibetans who have purchased, either privately or through a government department in their rural home counties, a number of apartments in a commodity housing complex. These residents get a discount from the housing developer and can live in proximity to one another. Several floors of a unit (a vertical subsection of a building) can be purchased, or the entire unit, which in a six-floor building, would be equal to twelve apartments.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Grant

ANDREW GRANT is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Geography and the Tibet Himalaya Initiative at University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include the political geography of ethnicity and migration as they relate to urbanization and infrastructure development in Asia.