Precarity in Urban China: Surviving in Capitalist Ruins

The Chinese city now exists in a time and space where the economy slows, work intensifies, and Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream” of social mobility seems to dim. In this context, surviving and thriving in the city has become increasingly resource intensive and experiences of precarity have diversified. As Margaret Hillenbrand (2023) has recently demonstrated, states of precarity in China’s urban spaces have been largely underexplored by scholars. Yet exploring precarity in Chinese cities can help us scrutinise the “global city” (Saskia Sassen, 1991) with a local eye: international capitalism under state-managed conditions has created particular pressures and responses which call for academic investigation. 

Funded by the IAS Critical Area Studies Fund, this half-day workshop uses Anna Tsing’s (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World as a gateway to invite participants from the humanities and social sciences to explore these local conditions, particularly in connection to the idea that meaningful lives and meaning are pieced together in the “ruins” of capitalism. The concept of capitalist ruins invokes images of what is left behind in the wake of capitalist advancement and reminds us that capitalism has boundaries and externality, domains of non-capitalist experience from which capitalism itself scavenges. Using Tsing’s work as an entry point, this workshop invites researchers to think of their work in China’s cities in connection to these notions of “salvage accumulation,” and to explore the “landscapes of unintentional design” that rapid development leaves behind, while also drawing attention to the global pull of supply chains and markets. Ranging from lived experiences of precarity and informal work, the gig economy and social media livelihoods, to urban exploration, to urban design and planning policy, through to play and rebellion in the city, this workshop aims to highlight the Chinese city as both a space of precarity and a space made out of the creative response to that precarity. 

PROGRAMME

12:00pm
Registration and coffee

12:30pm-1:15pm
Opening keynote: Margaret Hillenbrand (University of Oxford) “The Logic of Expulsion in Contemporary China”

1:15pm-2.45pm
Panel 1: Precarious Lives (Moderator: Alison Lamont, UCL)
· Chun-Yi Sum (Boston University), “Thank you, Poverty”: Student Volunteerism and the Affective Labor of Gratitude Education in China
· Harriet Evans (University of Westminster), Getting By: Everyday For Today in Defiance of Precarity
· Siyu Tang (University of Oxford), From Surplus to Utopia: Migration into China's Rust Belt
· Jingyu Mao (University of Edinburgh), Producing Precarity: Seasonal Bonus, the Hyper-flexibilization of Labour and Welfare Arrangement by Migrant Factory Workers in China

2.45pm-3:15pm
Coffee break

3:15pm-4:45pm
Panel 2: The Fabric of the City (Moderator: Annabella Mei Massey, UCL)
· Maurizio Marinelli (UCL), Rethinking Prosperity in Hong Kong: The Hazardous Conflation between Precariousness and Precarity
· Mengqi Wang (Duke Kunshan University), The Repair of Homes: Everyday Living in “Rotten-Tail-Buildings”
· Kevin Wang (University of Oxford), Gaming the System in Xiong’an New Area: a Planned City with Landscapes of Unintentional Design
· Giorgio Strafella (Palacký University Olomouc), The Rise and Ruins of the Songzhuang Art Village

4:45pm-5:30pm
Closing keynote: Carwyn Morris (Leiden University) “Spores: Subcultural Ruination and Subcultural Flourishing in China”

Please note this workshop will take place in-person at UCL, London. Refreshments will be provided during the day, and a speaker’s dinner will be provided after the event at a local restaurant.