Abstract
In the dynamic landscape of Chinese urbanization, rural areas are becoming integral components of modernizing and globalizing cities, shaped both by urbanization and cultural policies that seek to revive traditional values. The research conducts 24 months of fieldwork in the urban village of Shenzhen, China, focusing on the nexus between local government and shareholding cooperatives in the context of land transformation to reveal the underlying influence of long-held cultural norms and behavioral patterns on grassroots governance. Notably, these shareholding cooperatives, as representatives of the villagers’ interests, have a strong relation with the local powerful lineage, intricately intertwining collective land management with cultural practices and governance structures. Considering the complexity of land transformation, we need to focus on the power of the actors and their sources of power. The discussion centers on the fact that, due to the long-term grassroots governance structure and the land right distribution, the Shenzhen municipal government had to identify with the local villagers and the shareholding cooperatives as “semi-government” in urban governance. At this point, the cultural-economic strategy and community development target are not only a process driven primarily by the villagers’ initiative to defend their economic and social interests. Instead, it is a combination of top-down and bottom-up processes that reconfigure the collaboration and competing mechanisms of the local government, local villagers, and these shareholding cooperatives in grassroots governance. The findings demonstrate that Shenzhen’s urban villages emerge as constitutive sites of urbanity, where cultural norms coexist with modern institutional arrangements, leading to innovative governance models.
Presenters
Ling LiResearcher, Max Weber Centre For Advanced Cultural And Social Studies, Erfurt University of Germany, Thüringen, Germany
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
CHINA, GRASSROOTS GOVERNANCE, CULTURAL GOVERNANCE, GLOBALIZED WORLD, URBAN VILLAGES
