planet-clio.org/toc

This article examines the ways in which taxi driving and China’s quest for global ascendency are interlinked and enmeshed. Inspired by de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life and his conceptual formulation of “strategy” and “tactic”, this article explores how taxi drivers, through their everyday practice of driving, found ways and moments to tactically challenge and appropriate so-called “civility campaigns” and a rising China. By demonstrating the numerous instances of tactics taxi drivers used, I argue that their socio-economic marginality did not, in fact, reduce them to a “powerless” position. I bring in Foucault’s analytics of power and governmentality to add to de Certeau’s work by helping to explain the intertwined relationship between government and governed to shed light on the complexity implicated in the dynamics of power relations and resistance. I examine the period around the 2008 Beijing Olympics as it involved large-scale attempts to showcase China through (urban) transformation.

Quelle: http://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/giga/jcca/article/view/803

Kommentare geschlossen

Bittersweet China: New Discourses of Hardship and Social Organisation

Januar 7, 2015, 12:08 p.m., Michael B. Griffiths, Allgemein.

This paper argues that new interpretations of “eating bitterness” (吃苦, chiku) have firmly entered the landscape of China’s social organisation. Whereas the bitterness eaten by heroic types in China’s revolutionary past was directed towards serving others, now the aim of eating bitterness is self-awareness. Furthermore, bitterness-eating, which once pertained to rural-urban migrant workers as opposed to discourses of urban “quality” (素质, suzhi), has now also been taken up by the urban middle classes. A new cultural distinction, therefore, adds dignity to migrant workers while potentially marginalising a wide range of unproductive people, both urban and rural. This distinction ultimately mitigates risk to the Chinese regime because the regime makes sure to reward those who eat bitterness. This paper is based on ethnographic data gathered in Anshan, from the rural areas surrounding Chengdu, and our analysis of a TV show about a peasant boy who becomes a Special Forces soldier.

Quelle: http://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/giga/jcca/article/view/802

Kommentare geschlossen

planet-clio.org/toc

New Eastern Europe | 6/2014

Index on Censorship | 4/2014

Rewriting the Chinese National Epic in an Age of Global Consumerism: City of Life and Death and The Flowers of War

Fordlandia: the rise and fall of Henry Ford’s forgotten jungle city

American Railroad Labor and the Genesis of the New Deal, 1919–1935

Occupational mobility of black migrants in the West during the 1950s

Projecting the Good Life at Home and Abroad: Lineages of the Chinese National Image from 1949 to the Present

Rethinking China’s Soft Power

Driving the City: Taxi Drivers and the Tactics of Everyday Life in Beijing

Bittersweet China: New Discourses of Hardship and Social Organisation

Neueste Beiträge

Neueste Kommentare

Archiv

Kategorien

Meta