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Domicide, Social Suffering and Symbolic Violence in Contemporary
Shanghai, China
Arguing from a Bourdieusian perspective, this paper reconstructs the notion
domicide in order to maintain its critical edge and configure it as an important
field of study. Through this, it explores the ways through which local residents in
Shanghai lost their homes to the World Expo 2010 and unravels the material and
symbolic violence involved in shaping the experiences of unmaking and
remaking a home. In doing so, this paper challenges the category of “happy” or
“willing” displacees that deliberately, or unintendedly, conceals the perversity of
displacement and legitimatizes it as natural or even politically and morally good.
It joins the urgent call for treating displacees with greater respect and dignity and
for reconsidering our political responsibility given the belated nature of domicide
effects.
Keywords: domicide, property dispossession, violence, urban Shanghai
Introduction
In less than three decades, Shanghai’s landscape has been drastically transformed. The
modernist city is built on the ruins of homes to millions of Shanghainese. While many
displacees who disagreed with the resettlement plans ended up homeless (see Shao,
2013), most displacees were relocated off-site, often to planned communities at urban
fringes or remote suburbia. The presence of large resettlement sites has offered an
excellent opportunity - one that scholars in the west seldom had (see Newman & Wyly,
2006) - to work with displacees and advance our understanding of displacement and
forced evictions. Indeed, a large body of literature has been dedicated to this topic, most
of which revolves around the causes of rampant property dispossession and material
violence involved in this process (Hsing, 2010; Shao, 2013; Wu, 2016). Significantly
less attention has been directed toward the experiences of moving homes and to those
much subtler forms of violence that enable, and more perversely legitimatize or
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naturalize, displacement and forced evictions. The suffering of the displacees, if not
completely omitted, often occupies a marginal position in the rhetoric space.
This unfortunate oversight has serious theoretical and political implications. As
Peter Marcuse (2010: 187) wrote, “if the pain of displacement is not a central
component of what we are dealing with in studying gentrification…we are not just
missing one factor in a multi-factorial equation; we are missing the central point that
needs to be addressed”. Centering on suffering not only contributes to raise awareness
and generate empathy so that political intervention can be formulated; but also helps to
reflect and confront the more disturbing question as to the ignorance or denial of human
suffering in the first place.
The objective of this paper is to fill this gap and bring the lived experiences of
unmaking and remaking a home to the fore. It does so by arguing with and against the
notion of domicide (Porteous & Smith, 2001) – the murder of homes. With it, this paper
pays attention to the complex and layered subjective experiences of losing homes,
especially the well-documented grief syndrome. Against it, this paper problematizes the
narrow view of victimhood, especially the exclusion of “willing” or “happy” displacees
as victims of domicide. It contends that subjective experiences of victimhood must be
reconciled with objective processes of victimization. This holistic approach allows us to
locate structural roots of individual experiences and unravel the ways in which those
experiences are manipulated to maintain social order and reproduce inequality. Here, I
draw upon Bourdieu’s insight on durable domination and social suffering (Bourdieu,
1999b, 2000, 2001). Through Bourdieusian lenses, this paper seeks to maintain the
critical edge of domicide and recast it as an important concept for critical research
(Nowicki, 2014).
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Empirically, this paper examines displacement and forced evictions caused by
the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai. According to official statistics, more than 18,000
registered households were relocated from the waterfront area in the city center. But, the
actual scale is far larger because the official measure is based on a narrow
conceptualization of displacement as a spatial phenomenon that only involves physical
displacement. In this regard, the Chinese language may have aided in adopting this
narrow perspective. Both chaiqian (demolition and relocation) and dongqian
(resettlement) are compound words in Chinese and both lay explicit emphasis on
physical movement through the word qian. Neither account for exclusionary
displacement1 (Marcuse, 1985) and symbolic displacement2(Atkinson, 2015; Davidson,
2009; Feldman, Geisler, & Menon, 2011; Paton, 2014).
Displacement caused by the Expo may be considered as an extraordinary case
because of exceptional conditions created for the Expo, which were not always
available in other instances of displacement. But, its organization and discursive
justification were similar to other cases. One noteworthy aspect is the dominant frame
that paints the Expo-induced displacement as a long overdue state intervention to
housing distress and neighborhood deprivation. This is echoed by the theme of the
Shanghai Expo – Better City, Better Life. But, manipulating the desire for a good life is
neither new nor unique. As in the history of displacement in Shanghai or in other
Chinese cities, better life has been widely and consistently used to justify and naturalize
displacement as a good thing. Therefore, the extreme case of the Expo-induced
displacement is capable of illustrating prevailing patterns and tactics of displacement
inside and outside Shanghai.
The paper proceeds with a short critique of existing approaches to assessing the
impacts of displacement in China before moving to introducing the notion of domicide
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and addressing its conceptual limits by using Bourdieu’s conceptual tools. This is
followed by an overview of sources of data and justifications of methodological
compromises. Section four further contextualizes land clearance for the Expo, focusing
on material and symbolic practices that in a systemic way victimized the displacees. In
the last section, this paper delves into the feelings of leaving homes and dissects the
clashes between the displacees’ view of chaiqian and dominant points of view so as to
lay bare the violence that the latter inflicts.
Domicide: A Bourdieusian Reconstruction
The rediscovery of the exchange value of land has led to a systematic land clearance to
transform cities of socialist production towards cities for consumption and speculation
in reform China. Although chaiqian has been heatedly debated, unfortunately, little has
been said about the lived experiences of displacement. Within a handful of empirical
studies, residential satisfaction measurement, underpinned by the reductionist view of
displacement as movement in abstract space, is the dominant approach that has been
used to assess the impacts of chaiqian (Day, 2013; Li & Song, 2009; Wu, 2004). While
this approach offers an overview of displacees’ post-chaiqian well-being, such survey
study sanitizes and silences inexpressible pain, obscures the processes of losing homes,
and overlooks the efforts of displacees in adjusting to changes. Because of such
deficiencies, interpretation of the survey result can become quite misleading and
insensitive. For instance, Li and Song (2009) rationalized the overall positive evaluation
of chaiqian impacts by the displacees to the financial strength and active monitoring of
the process by the Shanghai government and to the significantly improved housing
conditions. Based on this, they warned against over-generalizing the hardships and
grievances of the displacees. For them, the often heard painful experiences of losing and
remaking a home is deemed insufficient, or perhaps too idiosyncratic, to make a case
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against the disruptive effects of displacement in general, at least not in Shanghai
(p.1104).
This paper refers to the notion of domicide. Coined by Porteous and Smith
(2001), domicide is defined as “the deliberate destruction of home by human agency in
pursuit of specified goals, which causes suffering to the victims”(p.12). It has been
extended by Shao (2013) to document lasting corporeal pain of displacees from losing
and defending homes in Shanghai. The paper utilizes this notion for its two major
strengths. First, the notion considers bodily experiences of losing homes an important
analytical and political concern. Home is emphasized as a nurturing space that provides
security, comfort, rootedness and belonging to dwellers. This is not to deny the fact that
home can be experienced in quite ambivalent ways (Blunt & Varley, 2004). But,
negative experiences, such as gender violence or patriarchal oppression, do not
contradict the ideal of home as a place of sanctuary, fundamental to the formation of
identity and the basic needs for security and control.
With Marc Fried (1966) and Peter Marris (1961, 1974), Porteous and Smith
(2001) explored emotional distress caused by the destruction of homes and compared
them to the reactions over the death of a beloved person. They elaborated that domicide
might result in:
the destruction of a place of attachment and refuge; loss of security and
ownership; restrictions on freedom; partial loss of identity; and a radical
decentring from place, family, and community. There may be a loss of historical
connection; a weakening of roots; and partial erasure of the sources of memory,
dreams, nostalgia, and ideas (2001:63).
By directing attention to grief, loss and pain, Porteous and Smith partook in the
symbolic struggles against those sterile, technocratic and rationalistic representations of
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displacement. In China, for instance, chaiqian has been largely reduced to matters of
compensation or private property rights (contra Hu, Hooimeijer, Bolt, & Sun, 2015; Li
& Song, 2009; Weinstein & Ren, 2009). The notion of domicide emphasizes emotional
distress and enhances moral and political sensitivities towards the suffering of others.
Displacement is not just about annihilation of physical buildings. It simultaneously
disrupts interpersonal networks and destroys important aspects of identity. Subsequent
relocation means more than changed living conditions. It is a change of way of life
(Marris, 1974). To treat displacees with respect and dignity, as Porter (2009) has
passionately argued, it is then necessarily to look closely into the lifeworld of displacees
and understand the disruptive processes as they see and feel about.
While the question as to how chaiqian is felt largely concerns the experience of
individuals, inquiries into the meanings, causes and implications of such experience
invariably problematize the social. Herein lies the second strength of this notion.
Porteous and Smith (2001) considered domicide, although politically and socially
conditioned, to be a conscious act. Hence, they assigned culpability directly to social
agents instead of an abstract structure or impersonal corporate entities (Porteous &
Smith, 2001: 19-20). They identified many reasons for domicide of different scales and
correctly argued that domicide is a highly uneven process – some people, in some
places, are more vulnerable to becoming its victims. It tends to reinforce existing socio-
spatial patterns of inequality, insecurity and oppression, forcing upon people that have
already been marginalized, excluded and penalized. This point has been confirmed by a
number of recent studies in different contexts such as the UK (Gray & Porter, 2015;
Kallin & Slater, 2014; Tyler, 2013), the United States (Desmond, 2016), India (Boo,
2012) and China (Campanella, 2008; Shao, 2013).
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What those heterogeneous groups of domicide victims had in common is their
uncountability in social and numeric senses (also Butler & Athanasiou, 2013: 100-101).
Some bodies or some bodily experiences are not recognized to be relevant. Calculative
practices under financialized capital accumulation, as Sassen (2010: 23) argued, has
even made land more valuable than the people live on it. However, the construct of
uncountability takes on several disguises. At best, it entertains a paternalistic view that
considers, with contempt, victims of domicide as inferior and domicide is in their own
interest (Porteous & Smith, 2001: 188). A related variant takes an apologetic stance,
naturalizing the suffering of domicide victims as an inevitable sacrifice for the greater
good. In the worst case, the othering process dehumanizes the victims or even views
them as enemies of the state (Porteous & Smith, 2001, chapter 3). According to Adams
and Balfour (1998), those disguises are tactics to make it easier to consciously commit
cruelty against fellow human beings. The first two is representative of moral inversion,
defining disturbing acts as worthy or good whilst the last one creates a socio-
psychological distance to enable morally troubling conduct.
While victimhood is central to domicide, Porteous and Smith (2001) had a
somewhat contradictory conceptualization of victimhood, which undermined the critical
power of this notion. They rightly pointed out the varying extent, intensity and course of
domicide experience depends on the ways in which domicide is conceived by the
displacees and the resources that are available to help them to cope with the distress.
The question is: are people victims if they lost their homes because their homes stand in
the way but they do not experience any emotional distress? For Porteous and Smith,
they declined to categorize residents who welcome (2001:12) or are content (ibid, p.
182) to give up their homes as victims of domicide. This position is echoed by Shao
(2013: 26), excluding willing and happy families as victims. Such a position contradicts
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with the original understanding of victims, which is deliberately defined in a broad way
as “a person who has been unjustly treated” and whose “human or economic power has
been weakened” (Weisstub cited in Porteous and Smith, 2001: 13). It also overlooks
processes that victimize displacees in more hidden forms in the long run. Moreover,
even if displacees do not recognize the injustice in it or feel substantial emotional
upheaval from moving homes, it does not change the unjust nature of the process, nor
the structural inequalities that led to it, nor the effects on reproducing unequal social
order.
Conceptual oversight on victimhood here may have serious consequences. It is
vulnerable to misinterpretation and political manipulation and may contribute to
perpetuating the myths surrounding displacement. For instance, improved living
conditions and the lack of emotional distress have been repeatedly used to
delegitimatize critical perspectives, euphemize violent undertakings and deflect our
attention from raw injustice in this process. For instance, Kearns and Mason (2013)
recently argued that any a priori normative judgement of displacement need to be
suspended and we need more neutral terminologies because “residents may like change
more, or respond to it better, than many commentators expect” (p.21). Therefore, as
they claimed, a robust research should be more “balanced” (p.2), “objective and
considered” in assessing the spatial restructuring process in our time and avoiding
creating “hegemonic discourse” that obstructs the “truth” (p.21).
To address this conceptual limit and recast the critical notion of domicide, I
propose to engage with Bourdieu’s work on durable domination and social suffering. In
The Weight of the World, Bourdieu and his fellow researchers (1999c) documented
various kinds of miseries that have their causes in structural inequalities. Similar to his
disapproval of economic reductionism, Bourdieu (1999b) rejected the sole use of
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material deprivation in considering human miseries and argued instead for positional
suffering that encapsulates social exclusion, generational conflicts or ethnic
confrontation. His view of positional suffering is rooted in his theorization of society,
that is, a space comprising of different fields where agents with different species and
volumes of capital compete to define and acquire legitimate capitals (e.g. economic
capital, cultural capital, symbolic capital). Conflicts and domination are thus central to
his conceptual frame. He paid particular attention to the clashes in values, orientations
and interests between dominant and subordinating social groups. He considered such
conflicts to be important sources of suffering as well.
This has led to the other influential notion of symbolic violence which, as
Bourdieu contended, is a crucial mechanism of durable domination. Symbolic violence
is reflective of Bourdieu’s philosophical position on knowledge construction and
reflexivity. It is derived from his exploration of the two-fold truth of reality – the
objective truth of outside observers that study a social game and the subjective truth of
insider actors that play the social game. It is because of the two-fold truth that social
games are difficult to describe because
“those who are caught up in them have little interest in seeing the game
objectified, and those who are not are often ill-placed to experience and feel
everything that can only be learned that understood when one takes part in the
game…” (Bourdieu, 2000: 189).
Bourdieu warned against a one-sided approach for possible failure to account for
the divergence in the two-fold truth and thereby incapable of fully capturing the ways in
which asymmetrical power relations and domination are reproduced, especially those
that work through the minds of the dominated. At issue here is, as Burawoy (2012)
succinctly put, how is domination obscured and secured? Bourdieu’s proposal to
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address this question properly requires a reconciliation of the two-fold truth. This entails
two epistemological breaks – a break with subjective experiences to construct an
objective truth and then a second break with the objective truth to explore subjective
experiences and understand the (re)production of the objective truth as legitimate and
natural. Bourdieu considered symbolic violence to be a more effective means than
coercion or material violence in obscuring the objective truth and thereby securing
domination in modern society. It occurs when the point of view from dominant groups
is universalized and accepted as legitimate and natural by those dominated without
questioning the inherent injustice (Bourdieu, 1991, 2000, 2001). It is a hidden form of
violence but has real consequences for victims. Because, it works through fabricating
reality for dominated social groups and cultivating their sense of place in society, and
this further exacerbates unequal distribution of material and symbolic resources. It is
also a dangerous form of violence because victims tend to misrecognize it and they do
not experience it as such. This may be a result of the offer of compensatory satisfaction
or consolation prizes that mythologize and conceal injustice and domination; or because
of many taken-for-granted assumptions of the social world that lodge deeply in the
cognitive schemata of social agents (Bourdieu, 2000). Either way, victims seem to be
complicit in the reproduction of their own subordination.
Bourdieu’s insight is relevant to recast domicide on two aspects. First, changes
in material living conditions are insufficient to capture other dimensions of domicide
effects, especially positional suffering. Second, it is necessary to reconcile subjective
experiences of victimhood with objective processes of victimization in order to flesh out
the two-fold truth of domicide and possible divergences. If, as Porteous and Smith
argued (2001: 106), everyday domicide is produced by “the normal, mundane
operations of the world political economy”, it is crucial to bear in mind how its working
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creates structural injustice, contributes to the predicament of the dominated,
manipulates their hopes and desires, and moulds political agency. The problem with the
category of “happy” and “willing” displacees is that it readily privileges subjective
experiences and loses sight of wider processes of global political economy, especially
the dynamics of the real estate sector, that restrain opportunities and seduce submission.
Residents who welcome displacement because of long-term under-/dis-investment or
lack of alternative means to satisfy their needs are also victims of domicide. In those
circumstances, their consent or choice is significantly restrained by structural
inequalities.
With these points in mind, this paper tackles the myths about chaiqian in China.
It considers two important aspects of symbolic violence. First, chaiqian is often reduced
to a matter of housing that is devoid of historical and social qualities. Its function for the
land centered regime of accumulation and for legitimacy of the party-state tend to be
toned down or completely ignored in both dominant point of view and displacees’
experience. The interest of displacee is made secondary to political and economic gains
for the elites. Discourse of chaiqian as social intervention to housing distress is flawed
for the same reason. The cause of housing distress that legitimized intervention is often
overlooked. Moreover, intervention is premised on giving up one’s homes and
supportive networks on the one hand and on owning private property in modernist
apartment blocks as the only option on the other. By eliminating alternatives to address
housing distress and seducing displacees into the propertied class, the property regime is
sustained and reproduced, benefiting most the elites from the process. Second, the
calculus of chaiqian have narrowly focused on monetary compensation and living
conditions improvement. It excludes emotional experience from moving homes.
Similarly, it overlooks suffering and distress from subordinating positons in various
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fields. As this paper will show, some displacees have been socialized to such dominant
views, misrecognizing the injustice and violence in those perspectives.
Against this backdrop, this paper insists on displacees from the property-led
development being victims of domicide, whether or not they consent to move or they
derive a sense of satisfaction from changed living conditions or from successfully
bargaining for a better resettlement deal. By doing this, my interests are two-fold, For
one, I wish to highlight variegated processes that have victimized displacees, some of
which are less visible yet have more lasting effects. For the other, I wish to invoke the
potential of victim as a shared identity to transcend internal divisions within displacees,
which is important for political change.
Research Methods
Empirical materials for this paper were gathered during a six-month fieldwork in 2012.
Most displacees I worked with were from the Sanlin Expo Homeland (SEH) in Pudong
and the Pujiang Expo Homeland (PEH) in Minhang. They were either private property
owners or public tenants before being wholesale displaced from the Expo site. Most of
them accepted resettlement deals without putting up a meaningful fight. They represent
the group of displacees that were under-represented in Shao’s (2013) study. Due to the
difficulty of access, renters of private properties – migrants mostly – and displacees
who took monetary resettlement deals without buying those discounted apartment were
unfortunately overlooked in this paper.
Both SEH and PEH are giant planned gated resettlement sites, consisting of
several gated communities. Within each community, there are several arrays of
apartment buildings of mixed heights and some communal facilities such as community
gardens, community centers and gymnastic equipment. In general, SEH has a higher
density because it resettles two-thirds of all displacees and is built on land of higher
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values. Therefore, there were fewer spaces for displacees to spend time outside their
apartments. As a result, many displacees reused second-hand furniture and converted
bike shacks and hallways into informal meeting spots. These were places where most
research participants were recruited. Interviewing displacees in public spaces brought
two challenges. First, displacees tended to moderate their comments with the presence
of others. Second, it was difficult to control the interview process. One-to-one
interviews frequently expanded to group interviews of various sizes lasting up to several
hours. This methodological compromise was made because the fieldwork was
constrained by a structure of fear. Some displacees viewed me, a male adult stranger, as
a threat to their security because of their vulnerabilities to theft and fraud in the
resettlement neighborhoods3. Others feared about possible political repression for
commenting on state violence to a western-trained student. Unwanted surveillance from
the local authority also forced me to improvise fieldwork plans and minimize the risks
to research participants.
Most questions during group interviews were directed more toward memories of
demolished homes and communities and the experience of the displacement process.
When possible, follow-up visits to interview displacees individually were arranged in
order to get a better view of households backgrounds and personal experiences (n=18).
Purposeful sampling was used to pursue themes that emerged in preliminary analysis
such as family breakdowns or bureaucratic terror. In total, oral accounts from 184
participants collected at individual (n=61) or group settings were retained for final
analysis. The younger generation (under 40s) were under-represented (n=2). This
unfortunate limit was caused by their lack of interest in social research and the timing
when most interviews were conducted. The limit was offset by the fact that they were
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less likely to be knowledgeable or active in chaiqian negotiation, a major source of
emotional distress.
Tyranny of Experts: Making Lives Uncountable
This section focuses on the site choice of the Expo and the organization of the Expo-
induced domicide. It does so to demonstrate the ways in which the displacees’
vulnerability to domicide was exacerbated and their lives were made uncountable by
political and cultural elites. The Expo-induced displacement is a project for land
development and regime legitimacy rather than for the benefits of displacees.
The World Expo is a one-off international transient event with an aim to showcase
technological progress and national power. Managed by Bureau des International
Expositions (BIE), an undemocratically created international organization that is mostly
run by diplomats in Paris, the Expo is turned into a tool of BIE member states to
advance their political interests by capitalizing on their voting rights for the bidding
states (Chen, 2010; Roche, 2000). The frontstage spectacle of the Expo conceals many
backstage political lobbying and diplomatic maneuvers4(Chen, 2010). Land clearance
related to the Expo, if it mattered at all, is only a small part of a larger geopolitical
game. On the other hand, BIE refuses to take human rights protection as part of its
organizational ethics. This was made clear when evaluating Shanghai’s candidacy.
Opposing voices worrying about possible human rights violation, especially during
displacement, were considered to fall out of the BIE’s remit (Chen, 2010: 197). Suffice
it to say, the fate of displacees was set when Shanghai submitted the formal proposal to
host the Expo in 2010.
To win the bid at any costs, the Shanghai government entertained the tastes of
diplomats and international expertise. The choice of the Expo site is a case in point. The
initial proposal was to host the Expo in Shanghai’s suburbs because more land was
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available there at much lower costs. This gave way to the plan of hosting it along the
waterfront in the inner city because the latter was favored more by diplomats and
experts of BIE (Chen, 2010:103-107). It would be a lie to argue that the Expo-induced
chaiqian was motivated to improve the quality of life of the displacees, at least this was
not the case nor was the primary concern when the Expo bid was initially conceived.
To the Shanghai government, the waterfront was in fact not a bad choice. Since
the 1990s, especially after the fiscal reform in 1994, land commodification and real
estate development have generated substantial public revenues. Displacement is
indispensable in this process for manufacturing a huge demand for housing on the one
hand and for assembling land for sale on the other. But, recommodifying land in the
inner city is politically limited by fragmented authority over actual land ownership and
by possible risks of large scale dislocation. This area was not considered initially
because of the fragmented property rights and the huge scale of residential and business
displacement it involved. Occupying 5.28 km2, the place was dominated by self-built
housing of varying conditions and industrial complexes. Of them, the Jiangnan Shipyard
(with a military background) and the Shanghai No.3 Steel Company (owned by the
state) occupied over half of the pre-expo site and overpowered the Shanghai
government. Relocating them, if not impossible, required considerable political effort
and financial costs. The Expo offered an opportunity to reclaim land back from
powerful land masters for recommodification. This economic rationale was explicitly
spelt out in the bidding report. The value of land surrounding the Expo site was
expected to increase by 300% (Shanghai Expo Bidding Committee, 2002). In fact,
anticipated revenues from redeveloping the post-expo site was what the Shanghai
government bet on when it decided to pour resources into land clearance and
preparation. With only four out of fifty-six country pavilions preserved after the Expo,
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the plan was to transform the area for high-end cultural facilities, luxury hotels, upper-
class dining places, exclusionary elite enclaves and a new central business district
(Shepard, 2015).
The real estate agenda of redeveloping the waterfront was made more appealing
by identifying with prevailing values of aesthetics and environmental sustainability. For
the bidding committee (2002), this place was the source of urban maladies. Attention
was directed towards the pollution of industrial operations and resultant impacts upon
environment sustainability and public health (ibid). This was a legacy of socialist land
planning that sited space of production in close proximity to that of social reproduction
(Lu, 2006). The industrial landscape was also considered a challenge for real estate and
infrastructure development surrounding the Expo site, and obsolete for the overall
strategic plan of upgrading the waterfront of Huangpu River since the 1990s (Shanghai
Expo Bidding Committee, 2002). Hosting the Expo was believed to bring new iconic
landmarks to this site akin to those on the Bund or the Lujiazui Financial District, both
of which are only a few kilometers away (ibid). Aiding to this justification was the
cultural tropes of xiazhijiao (lower quarter) and penghuqu (shanty town). In collective
representations, both are pejorative terms that stigmatize deprived neighborhoods
outside the colonial settlements (Honig, 1992; Pan, 2005). In socialist China, those
tainted neighborhoods were natural targets of state intervention in order to manufacture
legitimacy for the party-state (Huanle Renjian Editorial Committee, 1971). The to-be-
displaced neighborhoods on the Expo site were considered to be part of xiazhijiao.
Repeatedly emphasized in Chinese media was the absence of public infrastructure,
modern conveniences and distressed living conditions in those neighborhoods,
overlooking underinvestment under different regimes of accumulation and the pressure
from the property-led development in reform China. Those cultural frames lent
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legitimacy to justify the state-led chaiqian for the Expo to be in the interests of the
general public and the displacees, despite that this was a judgement assessed entirely by
political elites and planning experts.
Whilst it is common to exclude the voices of displacees in development projects,
it is categorically different to falsely represent them. According to the bidding report, an
ex-ante impact assessment showed that 89% of displacees supported the Expo-induced
chaiqian whilst 70% believed that it would lead to substantial improvement of their
living conditions and environment quality (Shanghai Expo Bidding Committee, 2002).
However, the investigator involved in this assessment informed me that those figures
were cautiously worded as “estimates” in their original report to the bidding committee
because they were not given enough time to conduct an actual study (interview,
05/2012). A liar has the advantage of knowing what was expected. For the bidding
committee, removing such cautionary remark from the final report served the purposes
of presenting well-reasoned rational arguments and creating the illusion of mass public
support – two important factors in evaluating the candidacy of bidding cities – and in
doing so, it also deflected attention away from possible contestations about the Expo
and the responsibilities towards the host society.
The organization of the Expo further undermined the interests of the displacees.
Nationalist sentiments were paramount, considering the Expo to be an excellent
occasion to shake off the humiliating colonial backward past and to demonstrate
China’s re-rise as a global power. These sentiments underpinned the regulation on the
Expo-induced chaiqian (hereafter RED). Shanghai government issued an ad hoc
regulation that overrode regulations on other levels and deprived the displacees of the
minimum legal protection under pre-existing legal framework (Shanghai Municipal
Government, 2004). RED strictly limited to outlining the obligations of displacees
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without any information on their rights. Article 3 ordered that displacees yingdang
(should or must, interchangeable here) submit their interests to the needs of the Expo
and evacuate themselves from the site according to the project progress and deadlines
specified in the displacement permit as if it was a matter of obligation. Even in the event
of disputes, RED referred to the Shanghai Bylaw on chaiqian and allowed related
properties to be demolished first before settling disputes. Whilst the directives of must
and should are categorically different in terms of legal obligations in English, in
Chinese, as Cao (2004:66) nuanced, yingdang might “signify a kind of indirect
command latent with moral connotation” yet its substitution of bixu in legal texts
implies no lesser legal force. Through this word choice, the state-led eviction crew
moderated the authoritative tone without weakening the coercive power of this
regulation. It astutely appeals as much to moral censorship and peer pressure as to the
authority of the state and the violence of law.
To coordinate resources and efficiently remove displacees out of their homes,
the Shanghai government mobilized the entire bureaucratic system. State agents from
different agencies within Shanghai, as well as outside Shanghai when necessary, were
recruited and assigned to negotiate with displacees. They were joined by professional
chaiqian companies - mostly associated with state backgrounds – and a clandestine
group of illicit violence specialists. To maintain a law-binding façade, legal
practitioners were dispatched to the frontline. However, their presence was not to
defend displacees and fight against displacement but to teach them about their right
place in this eviction process. The collapse of the bureaucratic and legal system
tolerated the mixed use of exhortation, persuasion and intimidation during meetings
with displaced families. Entering into such negotiations implies submission, making
displacees victims of this land development game. Key to those meetings were
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compensation. Chaiqian was trivialized into a technical matter of money, calculation of
which was based on the technocratic view of home as a tradable and quantifiable
commodity bereft of historical and affective qualities. To speed up the process, fear and
anxiety was actively produced and exploited. In some cases, this was staged by hired
thugs that caused no severe damages but to teach displacees to be submissive. In other
cases, petty theft was committed with the tolerance of the police. Against this
background, many displacees caved in and moved out to temporary shelters. On
average, they waited for one and a half years before the resettlement apartments were
delivered.
Domicide and Social Suffering
In my fieldwork, most displacees were puzzled initially at my question “how do you
feel about chaiqian”. Partly because they were victims of symbolic violence, submitting
to the technocratic view of chaiqian as a matter about money, housing wealth and
improved living conditions. Emotional distress was too insignificant to register. Partly,
it was because of the difficulty to communicate pain, suffering and distress. This section
unravels the experiences of losing and moving homes. While less acute and
overwhelming at the time of interview, which was about six years after the
displacement, the grief syndrome as reported in the literature could still be identified.
Those narratives directly challenge technocratic views of chaiqian and demonstrate
symbolic violence involved in subjecting the displacees to an even more oppressive
socio-spatial order.
Losing Homes: “It felt like abandoning a child”
The ways through which displacees’ lives were made uncountable remained largely in
the backstage. Many displacees came to know their homes were slated for demolition
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after formal notices were sent out, despite the fact that Shanghai’s hosting of the Expo
was confirmed in 2002. They were desensitized because rumors of chaiqian had been
circulating for years but nothing had actually happened before the Expo. Many knew
well the financial and political difficulties for the government or any businesses to
reclaim a land parcel of this size. They were also confused by the controversies over the
site choices. Such uncertainty was reinforced by the absence of a concrete spatial plan
for the Expo at that time. When the notice of chaiqian finally came around in
2005/2006, they were usually left with a few months, or even weeks in some cases, to
pack and move out. The project time of the Expo dictated the temporal structures of
displacees. To them, time became too scarce during chaiqian to find proper closure with
familiar places and people that constitute the structure of meanings (Marris, 1974: 4)
developed over a long span of their life trajectories.
Mrs. Shen (in her 70s) was not the only displacee who compared the process to
that of a war: fast, stressful and chaotic. It took less than a week before her family
signed on the resettlement deal and moved out. She did not ask contact information of
her friends and neighbors because she thought they were too busy coping with their
moving and she would meet them again in the resettlement sites in a couple of years. To
her disappointment, she had only met one old friend from her old neighborhood at the
time of the interview (May, 2012).
To many displacees like Shen, what chaiqian really entails was a question they
had been deprived of the opportunity to properly consider because of the pace of
chaiqian and the somatic exhaustion from many “negotiation” meeting with the eviction
crew. Incentivized politically and monetarily5 , the eviction crew deployed a wide range
of tactics to divide and rule, as if their monopoly of law was insufficient. This included
careful research into the household composition and power dynamics of displaced
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families, oppressing collective resistance, long meetings to solicit agreement as well as
intrusive visits to displacees’ homes, even their workplaces and schools. These tactics
robbed displacees of meaningful control of the chaiqian process as well as their
everyday life.
The loss of dignity, respect and control, especially within their own homes,
angered many displacees. Mrs. Wan (in her 80s) reported an incident when a staff of the
eviction crew thumped on the dining table at her living room in order to bring her sons
back to the discussion of resettlement offers (March, 2012). The act of thumping
inserted the eviction crew’s authority and insulted Wan’s position as the household
head. She recalled how she scolded the eviction staff, “pound as you wish. The table is
mine. If you pound again, I will leave. I do not feel like continuing the negotiation. The
house is mine. How come you are so menacing when you are after my house?”
With no chance of staying put, displacees were preoccupied by bargaining for a
settlement deal. Mourning was more common at later stages, bursting out at moments of
leaving homes with removal trucks knowing that this would be a one-way journey, or
witnessing their homes falling into pieces, or until they had resettled in transitory
apartments and realized what was lost in this chaotic process. In response to my
question as to their feelings of chaiqian, few of them could articulate their intense
feelings other than the memory of crying. This simple communicative act of crying tells
us a great deal about their sorrow and pain from the loss of attachment, belonging and
connections.
“I cannot remember how many times I cried at that time. Sometimes I even
woke up suddenly and cried at night. I am not lying…It only took two
months before everything was bulldozed to the ground” (Mrs. Chen,
March 2012)
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“my daughter cried all the time in the first few months we moved out. She
was at the junior high school there so she had to go back to the old
neighborhood. She was born and grew up there.” (Mrs. Deng, March
2012)
As the initial site of our being in the world, home is an extension of self and this
home-related identity is formed and reproduced through diverse home-making practices
(Blunt & Dowling, 2006). Porteous and Smith (2001: 12) argued that, “the wilful
destruction of a loved home can thus be one of the deepest wounds to one’s identity and
self-esteem, for both of these props to sanity reside in part in objects and structures we
cherish”. This is vital to understand the pain of many displacees who had constantly
improved their living conditions by pooling resources from their extended families and
kinships in order to materialize their imagined home. While acknowledging differences
in appearances and building quality of their homes, displacees valued their homes for
embodying the memories of their livelihood struggles against material hardships and for
testifying to their moral standings as resilient and respectful. To senior generations,
their homes witnessed their sacrifices as parents and family heads and embodied hope
for coming generations given that renovation remains a much cheaper option under a
neoliberal housing regime. For these reasons, home destruction means not only an
annihilation of their identities but also a denial of their sacrifices and respectful status.
Mr Wang in his 80s was an engineer before his retirement. He lived in an old
house inherited from his parents. Due to the deteriorating conditions, he renovated this
old house twice before it was finally torn down for the Expo. He was in charge of the
new design and supervised the two renovation process. An old gate was carefully
preserved in both efforts for sentimental and aesthetical values. Commenting on his
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feelings, he could not hide his sadness, guilt, self-blame and anger, “My ancestor made
our home and I could not even protect my ancestor’s treasure” (March 2012).
His feelings were shared by Mrs Li (in her 50s) who compared the loss of her
home to that of abandoning a child in her testimony.
People say that a child is flesh of the mother. Moving here feels like
losing a child. What kind of mother would abandon her child? You
cannot do anything about it. They want your land (May, 2012).
Her reference to the popular saying is reflective of Fullilove’s (2005)
comparison of cutting off one’s roots in a familiar place to corporeal trauma. Root
shock is coined by Fullilove to capture “the traumatic stress reactions to the destruction
of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem” (p.11). She explains this as a result of the
destruction of the mazeway that functions to navigate our everyday movement and
maintain external harmony with the environment. It provides familiarity and security, a
functional attachment that helps us to manage everyday life. To most displacees, such
functional attachment was provided by their communities, with whom they shared their
life projects (Manzo, Kleit, & Couch, 2008). Due to their low mobility and dense social
contacts, the displacees had a strong sense of community in their old places. They
looked out for each other and developed strong supportive networks. This was
important for them to cope with material deprivation and stigma, and has been
dismantled by chaiqian.
Mrs Fang (in her 60s) repeatedly lamented the loss of community. She recalled
the tragedy of a resident in the resettlement site who passed away at home due to a
sudden illness but was only found days after. As she regretted, this kind of thing would
have never happened in her old place.
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When you are not well, people would come to help you out with the
chores and take care of you. If people don’t see you for a day, they
would come and check if you are fine. This kind of renqing (relations
and emotions) has gone (June 2012).
Whilst rebuilding physical structures is easy, rebuilding this supportive network
and sense of place is a categorically different matter. It is very demanding, if not
impossible, because it has been lodged deep in the displacees’ mind. To senior
displacees, slowly dying of depression, anger and sorrow was the final outcry of their
bodies against the disembedding, disconnection and disruption. Mrs. Zhu was sad about
losing several old neighbors who died shortly after moving homes:
some died of anger because of displacement-related conflicts within their
families. Some could not get used to live in the new place. Old people
could not be compared to young people. They don’t like moving around
(March, 2012).
To most displacees, the destroyed past worked like a phantom limb, memories
of which constantly flashed back and continuously guided their movement after they
had moved to new places. Mr. Dong’s experience is germane here. He lived in his old
place for more than fifty years and he revisited it many times after it had been razed to
ground. Sometimes, it was because he missed his old place. On other occasions, it was,
as he explained, “unconscious”, “like being possessed”.
It was so deep in your mind, you know? Decades of life there….All had
gone. It was empty. I stood there with feelings that I could hardly
describe. My heart was emptied. All empty. There was no way back. No
way back. I should have taken some pictures. Back then, I did not realize
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I need pictures. Now, it is all in my memory. All in memory (May,
2012).
Flawed consumers and symbolic violence
Chaiqian is not just about rent extraction and capital accumulation. It is also about
constructing a hierarchical social space, sorting different social groups to their right
places. The way in which the displacees were positioned in the economic field, and the
housing field in particular, is an important source of symbolic violence and grief.
To start, the Expo was conceived as a civilizing project to improve the quality of the
local population. Many educational campaigns were organized to teach local citizens
proper etiquette in order to become “presentable” and “respectable” cosmopolitan
citizens before the arrivals of “foreign” guests. This was part of the population strategy
that the bidding committee and the Shanghai government had in mind. For them, the
Expo was to “rationalize” and “optimize” (Shanghai Expo Bidding Committee, 2002:
212). Specifically, this meant to replace the displacees by the desired social group who
are younger, better educated or foreigners (ibid). Instead of questioning such raw
injustice, a research team headed by Professor Zheng Shiling from the prestigious
Tongji University rationalized further and endorsed such views (Tongji University
Research Group for Expo 2010, 2006). In their report, people with high credentials and
entrepreneurial spirits were to replace the displacees as a logical outcome of things.
Their line of thinking finds roots in the suzhi (human quality) discourse which
arbitrarily categorizes and codes the population into a hierarchy with differentiated
values. Exploitation of people with lower quality is mystified as improvement of their
personal quality and naturalized as morally legitimate and just (Kipnis, 2007; Yan,
2003). Although cautiously worded, what was implied in both texts is that the
predicament of the current land users manifests their own low quality and unfitness for
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the new accumulation strategy. Displacees were deemed as inferior citizens, flawed
subjects, or what Bauman (2004) might call wasted lives. They were of lower value
because they could not generate as much economic outputs, therefore they no longer
deserved the location where they lived and were obliged to give away their land for the
other group. Otherwise, their continued existence on the Expo site was unhealthy for the
growth of the economy. In this sense, the Expo is a social cleansing project, reinforcing
the ladder of socio-spatial citizenship. To entertain the moral consciousness, planned
resettlement neighborhoods in the suburbia worked well to create conditions for denial
or indifference to the sufferings of the losers in this social game (see Cohen, 2001). As
Bauman (2004:27) argues, “we make the wasted humans invisible by not looking and
unthinkable by not thinking”. Chinese elites sought a once-and-for-all quick fix by
mapping out the undesirables and expelling them out of the sight of the superior groups.
Depreciation of displaced bodies went hand in hand with depreciating their
properties at a rate that neither strictly corresponded to location nor to actual housing
quality, but to an arbitrary hierarchy of homeownership. This then ridiculed the claim of
chaiqian as a market driven process as if the consumer sovereignty of displacees was
meaningfully respected. Mrs Huang (early 40s) who built her own two-storied house
astutely pointed out the ways power asymmetries and hierarchized consumer citizenship
ruled the process,
“my old home was by the waterfront, across from X [name of a gated
commodity housing neighborhood]on the other side of the road. When
they valued my house, they referred to the average value of public
housing in this area. A few thousand per square meters only. They did
not use the value of the buildings in X – tens of thousands per square
meters. Why my house is only comparable to public housing? Did it not
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make more sense to use X as a reference? Such a central location. It did
not count.” (March, 2012)
During the Expo-induced chaiqian, apartment buildings constructed by private
developers were arbitrarily assigned higher exchange values than self-built properties or
public housing, reinforcing the ladder of homeownership in the Chinese context6. This
lends legitimacy to the argument that resettlement is redistributive intervention because
it offers the displacees the chance to buy apartments built to modern standards, catching
up with commodity housing purchasers. In this logic, chaiqian is more than a migratory
process. It signifies an upward class mobility and freedom. Or at least, as the
technocrats want us to believe, it allows the displacees to be able to capitalize on their
newly purchased apartments once the re-sale ban is lifted after five years, if the
displacees wish to sell them and relocate elsewhere. It expects the displacees to
graduate to asset owning/maximizing homeowners who are ready to cash their
properties in the open market to satisfy their needs of various sorts.
Some of above arguments resonated with some displacees. Mrs Zhu (late 60s)
was not alone in internalizing the hierarchized homeownership. Resettlement was the
once-in-a-lifetime chance to upgrade their family’s living conditions and become a
homeowner. Being sent to support the development of the inland region during the
socialist era, her family was stuck in absolute poverty upon their return to Shanghai.
Her family of five lived in a small place in Puxi. She told me frankly that displacement
was a huge relief to them. According to her, she would have worked for several lives to
buy a property like her new home. Her son’s family would have gone through the same
pain as she and her husband did. “Too bitter” as she commented. Rather than see her
poverty as a result of state violence and structural inequality, she took a fatalistic
position, “it was fate. Unlike you [the author], we didn’t have much education. We
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could not make big money. Have a home worthy of a million, we should feel content”
(June 2012).
Her experience was shared by a group of public housing tenants and collective
hukou holders. The latter group was usually migrants who were employed by state-
owned enterprises and lived in factory dorms or rental properties. To them, resettlement
apartments were the only chance to become a homeowner in contemporary Shanghai.
This was more so for the collective hukou holders. Acquisition of a private property is
the precondition for them to become citizens of Shanghai without further dependence
on their factories. This means that their spouses and their children could also access
public education, social securities and public services on equal footing as local citizens.
They therefore fought hard but also cautiously in order to secure a resettlement
apartment and gain a permanent foothold in Shanghai.
By welcoming chaiqian, the displacees seem to have consented to the violence
against their homes and themselves. They were seduced and locked into the new
property regime with their fate closely tied up with the ups and downs of the housing
market. They misrecognized and relinquished structural injustice and inequalities that
led to their predicament and that made their desire for a decent place to live only
achievable by waiting and accepting chaiqian. By joining the ever expanding propertied
class, they were also made susceptible to the values associated with homeowner society.
This has the effect of reducing their interest to protecting the property values and thus
allying with other homeowners to defend the housing market (also see Harvey, 2008). It
also serves as concrete examples for the ruling elites to perpetuate the myths that
chaiqian is the only way out of poverty and housing distress for people on the lower
rung of society. Moreover, it made it difficult for people who wish to be excluded from
the prevailing property regime or to defend their right to stay put. The interlocking of
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the housing ladder, property regime, citizenship hierarchy and welfare arrangement
becomes a crucial mechanism to allow the ruling elites to profit from land and housing
development and contain grievances at the same time.
However, the dominant view of resettlement housing is not unanimously
accepted. Also acknowledging the exchange value of the new home, Mr. Ding (50s)
however did not internalize graduated citizenship. He survived from the attack of his
stable employment at a state-owned factory by taking over a low-paid reassigned
position instead of settling on a one-off payment and finding a job elsewhere (May
2012). This experience seems to have made him more critical of the nature of the state
and the ongoing reform. He remarked, “the communist party is too cunning. They are
better than you [in calculating]. You cannot beat it”. Speaking of his status as propertied
class, he offered a widely shared skepticism against private property ownership.
Of course, I own this new home. But can I sell it? If I sell it, where
would my family live? Can you find any apartment lower than 1 million
yuan in Shanghai now? Even mine in this shitty location is now worth
over a million! After selling it, my family would have to sleep on the
streets. Who wants to move around all the time anyway? For the average
citizens (putong laobaixing), having a stable home and getting by
peacefully is all we ask for.
Ding’s view is reflective of most displacees who still see their new home as
dwelling space whose use value transcends the exchange value. The way the housing
market functions deprive them of the opportunity to capitalize on their newly acquired
graduated citizenship without compromising their quality of life. Some displacees
planned to sell their properties in the future but this was more a consideration of the
younger generations’ marriageability. “No place to live, no place to love” as
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commented by Pellow (1993) on the impacts of severe housing shortage upon family
dynamics and intimacy has been replaced by “no place to live, no chance to love” in
contemporary Shanghai where ownership of private housing becomes a key marker of
self-worth and living separately from one’s parents decisively affects marriageability
(Zhang, 2010). For the displaced whose purchasing power is limited, the oppressive
housing market, reinforced by the generation gap and familial obligations, effectively
polices the class boundaries and restrains freedom.
Mrs Huang’s (50s) son was in mid-30s and still lived with them (March 2012).
According to Huang, several girls broke up with her son because her family was unable
to purchase another apartment for her son to form his own family. When I interviewed
her, she was considering an offer from a potential buyer. She planned to use the money
to buy a small two-bed room apartment as her son’s wedding apartment and the rest to
rent a room from a farmer far away from where they were living. She saw displacement
as the root of her predicament because she would have been able to renovate her house
if they were still living in her old place. Home as understood as a collective social
reproduction project means that the displacees may never fully become the graduated
citizens that the technocrats had expected.
Ding’s and Huang’s view shows another distinction from the technocrats’ view
of chaiqian. To the latter, chaiqian is a matter about here and now whereas for the
latter, it is as much about the present housing crisis as about housing needs of
generations yet to come. Arbitrary monetary resettlement offers and discounted
resettlement housing are mostly for the displacees to address immediate housing needs
after the uprooting. This has led to increased competition within a displaced family,
forcing them to balance intra-/inter-generational interests and thereby translating
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confrontation with the state-led bulldozer regime into internal conflicts over the
distribution of family assets and resettlement.
Like their old homes, resettlement housing was not on top of the housing ladder
either. Both sites were poorly connected by public transport when the residents first
moved in. Displacees from Pujiang relied on a shuttle bus to commute to work in the
city center until the operation of an extended subway line two years later. For this
reason, many displacees had to find new jobs closer to where they live. Both
resettlements were only equipped with one clinic with no capacity to handle
emergencies and severe illness. While displacees from Sanlin were still able to use
public hospitals by one hour’s bus ride, displacees from Pujiang were living in fear and
worry. A hospital was planned there at the time of negotiating the deal but when this
fieldwork was conducted in 2012, it was still under construction. It took at least an hour
for an ambulance to come from the nearest hospital.
The spatial planning of both resettlement sites features clear functional divides
and favors car traffic. There were limited public facilities and communal spaces within
residential compounds. It discourages social contacts and communal life. Despite active
efforts of fostering interactions, the sociological sense of community was still largely
missing. Many displacees never met their old neighbors again after uprooting and they
did not even know their next-door neighbors in the resettlement sites. Gone were the
days when they could visit each other’s homes, chat by the doorsteps or come to help
out each other when they are in need. This triggers an acute disidentification with their
new homes amongst many displacees. To many, home meant the annihilated past.
Displacement and resettlement in the countryside were experienced as relegation and
banishment. This was more acute amongst displacees from Puxi. Mr. Ma (50s) called
the Pujiang Expo Homeland as the most backward part of the third world that no
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authority would care whereas his old place was the first world whose prime location
would guarantee all the attention (May, 2012). His comment is not unfounded because
administrative and fiscal decentralization within the city has delegated much
responsibility of provision and maintenance of public goods and services to lower levels
of authorities which are usually financially weaker than authorities within the urban
core.
Summarily put, resettlement housing was not built to deliver Shanghai’s answer
to the theme of the Expo – how to make city life better. It does not honor the sacrifices
of the displacees to give up their homes for the event, nor does it address the needs of
the displacees. In fact, when the displacees signed on the agreement, most resettlement
apartment were not yet built. The displacees purchased in hope and embraced all the
risks and uncertainties out of trust in the state-led eviction crew. Apart from the
resettlement plan with minimal information on sizes and floors of individual new
apartments, there were no legally binding documents describing or guaranteeing the
delivery of collective facilities and public services. This made it easier to casually alter
the spatial layout, push up the density of development or to cancel the construction of
some public facilities. Residents from Sanlin were frustrated about the development of a
cluster of six-floor apartment buildings on the site that was promised to be a food
market and communal center.
This failure is not because of negligence but by design, as a senior planner from
the Municipal Government of Shanghai frankly confessed:
Of great concern to us back then was how to relocate people in a most
effective way. We certainly thought about planning of the resettlement
sites, but there was no point spending too much time on it. The prime
agenda was to move these residents out as soon as possible so that the
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site can be prepared for hosting the Expo. Besides, the displacees are
practical. Their priority lies in the size and the function of their living
space. They are not yet at the stage of caring about designs, overall
plans, aesthetics, etc. (July 2012).
Displacement and resettlement worked together to create a hierarchized social
space, locking the displacees on the lower rung of the socio-spatial order. The hierarchy
has a “naturalizing effect” (Bourdieu, 1999a: 124), legitimatizing the reproduction. The
account from aforementioned Ding is relevant here. He was acutely aware of the unjust
nature of chaiqian; however, instead of challenging it, he rationalized the off-site
resettlement arrangement. I confronted him on this point and he quoted a line from a
Hindi movie Awara to justify,
The son of a thief always turns out to be a thief and the son of a good
man always turns out to be good. This is how society works…. If you
have beijing [political background] or you are super rich, the city is your
paradise. For the poor, this is your fate. Accept it (May 2012).
Conclusion
Arguing from a Bourdieusian perspective, this paper has attempted to reconstruct the
notion of domicide by reconciling the objective processes of victimization and the
subjective experiences of victimhood. By taking this position, this paper refuses to
entertain apologetic rhetoric that displacement is not always a bad thing because it may
be welcomed by the displacees or may have improved the residents’ living conditions.
This is not to deny the existence of a wide range of experiences of losing homes, some
of which might be contradictory. I argued that narrowly focusing on the subjective
experiences is inadequate to understand diverse meanings of homes and multiple forms
of violence involved in dispossessing and destroying them. Subjective experiences need
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to be placed within the structure of interests and power in land development in order to
sketch out the landscape of violence in domicide. Given the ways through which the
land and housing markets function, it is unlikely that people whose homes are targeted
for speculative development can escape from being victimized because their fates are
tied up with the volatility of the property market. The important point is, intervention to
housing distress, with or without state assistance, should not be preconditioned upon
giving away old homes. Nor, as Madden and Marcuse (2016: 88) recently argued,
should it be used to “enhance political stability, to intensify exploitation, to undermine
resistance, to impose cultural uniformity, or to shore up the legitimacy of a prevailing
system”
With this theoretical frame, this paper set out to dissect the political construction
of social suffering of people who lost their homes to Shanghai’s city building project.
Instead of focusing on involuntary evictees who were victims of extreme bodily
violence, this paper is based on narratives of grief, loss and suffering from the
displacees who accepted resettlement deals without putting up any significant fight.
Since the legitimacy of displacement has been largely derived from these resettlement
arrangements keeping uprooted people sheltered in apartments built to modern standard,
the pain and suffering from the displacees reported in this paper debunks the myths
surrounding chaiqian in China. Their narratives also cast light on the ways through
which consent to chaiqian was manufactured and the symbolic and material violence
involved in unmaking and remaking a home.
Based on the displacees’ oral accounts, the paper shows that domicide effects as
reported in existing literature is widely shared by the victims of the Expo. Annihilation
of homes meant a partial elimination of their identities, destruction of their attachment
structures and an assault on their dignity and decency. The displacees have been
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consistently treated as flawed citizens whose arbitrarily encoded low values for the
accumulation of capital decides the location where they live and the quality of their
places. To many, their newly acquired resettlement apartments remain largely a place to
live rather than a property ready for sale on the market. This is reinforced by their view
of home as a durable social reproduction project, which calls for generational sacrifices
in the absence of state intervention in housing affordability and thus gives domicide
experiences a generational quality. Therefore, chaiqian is not an opportunity for upward
mobility but reinforces – if not widens – class boundaries, locking the displacees on the
lower rung of class hierarchy. Symbolic violence is evident by excluding emotional
distress as relevant outcomes of chaiqian, by misrecognizing or forsaking structural
inequalities as the cause of their predicament, or by subscribing to the view of owing
property as the only alternative out of housing distress. Structural inequalities and raw
injustice of domicide is thereby concealed, upon which the domination of the powerful
elites is secured and reproduced.
By voicing the grievances of the displacees, this paper concurs with the call to
prioritize planning for and with the people who are displaced and treat them with
greater respect. Hebert Gans (1962:220) lamented rampant displacement in the
American context over four decades ago, “American redevelopment planning so far has
proceeded on the assumption that relocation is secondary to redevelopment. Thus, great
pains are taken with planning for clearance and the reuse of the site, but plans for the
present occupants of the site are treated as by-products of the redevelopment proposal”.
To him, at the heart of the injuries of the displacees was their treatment as “by-
products”, not out of the callous intention of the powerful elites, but because of the
discrepancies between technocratic and popular views of places, which allowed the
reproduction of a repressive social and socio-spatial order and caused great pain to those
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evicted. Evidence as presented in this paper suggests that displacees in Shanghai’s
context were not “by-products” but were considered to be the wrong people in the
wrong place, or worse, the dispensable, disposable, wasted or subhuman. It is urgent
that we center our attention on the domicide effects and consider the future of the city
we are building. To this end, we do not need sophisticated theories of justice or
morality, but, as David Smith (1994), echoing Porteous (1988), suggests, ask a simple
question to ourselves, what would we feel if we are going to lose our own homes and
communities?
A final point this paper wishes to highlight is the belated nature of domicide
effects. At the time of the fieldwork, most displacees had already lived in the
resettlement sites for five years on average. Domicide remains a widely shared
experience as reflected in their persistent longing for what have been lost, the crisis of
identity, the alienation from communality and the pain in coping and adapting. Fullilove
(2005) argues that domicide can last for a life time because victims retell and relive the
narratives of uprooting and those narratives become an integral part of who they are.
Therefore, it is better to understand domicide effects as constantly unfolding and
incomplete. They do not cease at the moment of uprooting. They can be triggered by
diverse material and symbolic practices, such as research encounters or generational
wealth transfers. In view of this, we should not put a temporal limit on domicide effects
nor on our political responsibilities for their suffering.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful for the constructive comments and encouragement from three anonymous
reviewers, Tom Slater, Jamie Pearce and Elvin Wyly. I also thank the funding support
from European Research Council [Grant Number: 313376] and the Foundation for
Urban and Regional Studies.
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37
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1 Exclusionary displacement refers to the situation when people are prevented from living in a
place which they would otherwise be able to because of changed conditions of residency
brought by gentrification (cost, tenure, etc).
2 Symbolic displacement here refers to the experience of displacement in situ due to changed
characters of neighbourhoods or the loss of personal positions in society.
3 On one occasion, a senior female displacee rejected my request to interview her in public but
came back later with her friend, telling me that she felt unsafe.
4 According to Zhixing Chen (2010), then deputy director of the Shanghai Expo Bidding
Committee, the committee dispatched 37 lobbying teams to 86 countries of 88 BIE member
states. In exchange for a favourable vote, the Chinese government promised many incentives
such as increased investment and listing some countries as destinations for Chinese tourists.
5 As I have mentioned earlier, the Expo induced displacement mobilized the entire bureaucratic
system. For elite politicians and bureaucrats, apart from financial rewards, evicting families
was a political task that mattered to their career prospect in the bureaucratic system. In a
political system where public officials are appointed without any traceable justification, it
might be presumptuous to establish a causal link between performance and political career of
the bureaucrats. Yet, the rises of several officials who were involved in the Expo chaiqian
suggests a convincing pattern, such as Zhang Xuebing (became assistant to the mayor and
director of public security bureau in 2008), Tao Ye (key negotiators with “stubborn”
households during the Expo-induced chaiqian and became office assistant of Pudong Expo
Area Management office in 2012) and Cao Yazhong (deputy commander of the Expo-
induced chaiqian in Pudong section and now chief of environment protection bureau of
Pudong district government). For chaiqian companies, it was their business to remove
families from the site.
6 One justification for the differential valuation is the state ownership of land, hence value
created as some commentators argue must be captured by the state. The weakness in this
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argument is that self-built housing owners, like commodity housing owners, have acquired
the right to use the land.