The death of urban China

One of the great pleasures in reading Harriet Evans’s Beijing from below is how it subverts on two levels. One is to show how the socialist state failed to control the capital’s underclass: despite numerous disciplinary projects, the neighborhood of Dashalar remained independent in spirit, at least until state-sponsored gentrification killed it. Here we see the reform-oriented state, eager to get rid of what it imagines to be social diseases (primarily petty commerce and pleasure) that Dashalar exemplified, with scant regard for its inhabitants. The second is that it calls into question how so much of contemporary history, and especially contemporary Chinese history, is written and understood. Evans shows how indispensable it is to combine three facets of information gathering: archives, ethnography, and oral history. Too oftenwe read books that only deal with archives (the classic historical approach) or with oral history (which we might think of as journalistic, although of course not exclusively). Evans shows how these methods should be combined with the ethnographic insights of observing a place. To me, her approach should be self-evident, but her need to justify her methodology shows the problematic siloing of academic disciplines. Also laudatory is her desire to keep the residents’ real names (p. xvii). It is unfortunate that she ended up, against their will, changing their names, but such are the paternalistic conventions of much of modern-day social sciences. As a journalist who worked in China for more