Scales of knowing

Abstract

Beijing from below is not the same as “Beijing down and out.” It is not only about poverty. By foregrounding the voices of the marginalized, the book represents a newway of knowingBeijing—and urbanChina, in general. The life histories of the six families cast a sharp light on how social and political changes in the People’s Republic have shaped hundreds of millions of lives. The “Interludes” following each of the six narratives explicate connections between “private pains” and “public issues” (Mills 1959). The issues discussed in the book include changes in employment,welfare provision, urban policing, marriage patterns, gender roles, intergenerational relations, historical legacies of revolutions, the role of the party-state, and, naturally, urban development. They are all great concerns to the Chinese, and beyond. The voices from below and the views from above, Evans stresses, should be read as “distinctive, mutually constitutive, and contradictory parts of a multiply layered history that incorporates both, not simply revealing the truth of the one against the other” (p. 12). Evans’s research is firmly grounded in a particular location: an old neighborhood known as Dashalar, immediately south of the Tian’anmen Square. But Dashalar is not taken as a distinct placewith its coherent internal structure or organizational pattern, and the book is not a “community study.” Indeed, at least in traditional terms, there is hardly any genuine neighborhood community left in urban China; conventional community studies would tell us little about what is going on. Instead, the book implicitly treats the neighborhood—or more precisely the two or three