2. Street-corner society and everyday politics in the Beijing hutong

Abstract

This chapter studies the politics of everyday life and social change in the Beijing hutong (胡同) through an ethnographic lens. Unlike the political experience of the urban middle class in new housing compounds, the hutong presents specific localized power configurations inherited from a long-term evolution of everyday social interactions with the urban fabric. Coping with the alteration of the social fabric – the loss of local references in the face of growing anonymity – hutong residents invent tactics of resistance through discrete ‘arts of making’ to resist the biopolitics of urban redevelopment, while at the same time, participate in the official, state-led, neighbourhood political life in the context of growing anonymity.