Ethnographic perspectives on the mediation of informality between people and plans in urbanising China

The interactions between people and plans in urbanising China, the theme of this special issue, raise crucial questions for our understanding of the dynamics of urban change, aptly illustrated by the papers in this section. Rereading Herbert Gans’ (1968)People and Plans for this special issue, I was struck by his argument that in planning something like a park, we must ask which cultures will be reflected in the plans, those of the professionals producing or the people who are intended to be users? If the choices are based on professional judgements only, the park may not achieve its objectives. Alternatively, ‘the plan may be altered informally by people as they make use of the park’ (1968: 6). In taking inspiration from Gans for this special issue on people and plans in urbanising China, I found informality relevant for its mediation of relationships between the plans and the people, as well as among the people who make the plans, and those who have to cope with them. Attending to how informality operates within government, as well as among the people who are targeted or affected by plans, is particularly important in China. As Zhang et al. (2018) emphasise, the tolerance of unauthorised uses of public spaces is facilitated by a ‘kind of regulatory vacuum’ in local planning which relies more on administrative oversight and discretion than on municipal codes, making room for ‘negotiation and compromise’.

These papers reveal important aspects of urban change. They focus on the people more than the plans, something that as an anthropologist I certainly appreciate. But in China plans are everywhere, so we can see their influence in all dimensions of life, and in each of these contributions. Xiao and Bian (2018) rigorously examine the impact of household registration (hukou) practices on people’s opportunities. Rural migrants to cities that do not transfer or convert to urban hukou have much lower incomes than those who are formally urban residents. Rural hukou holders with college education do much better than those without, but still have much lower income than those with urban household registration. However, college education makes it much easier for rural residents to convert their residency status. The hukou question, widely discussed, is at the centre of decisions about the future character of Chinese cities.

We must remember, however, that those who write and approve plans are people too, and they pursue their goals using diverse forms of governmental informality, compromises, deals and arrangements. On hukou, different urban jurisdictions are applying very different rules to interpret the official policy of making transfer/conversion easier. De Herdt and Olivier de Sardan (2015) usefully analyse these as involving ‘practical norms’ which often are more pervasive in local situations than are the official norms that they are supposed to enact. Such practical norms often ‘go without saying’, unlike the explicit rules that may ‘say without doing’. They also differ from the ‘moral economies’ that Mengqi Wang (2018) describes as widely talked about, and which operate in dynamic tension with the political economies of commodity housing instituted by the state, and profited from by local governments and real estate companies. The moral economy that Wang describes is talked about in terms of ‘rigid demand’ for housing among people with little choice due both to the unaffordable cost of housing in relation to their incomes and the irresistible expectations that young people will buy a house before marrying. Contradictions and conflict between these different norms and regimes of value are leading to urban protests which could become much greater and more volatile if the government fails to manage the housing bubble and the challenges posed by its possible deflation. Wang’s account of how ordinary people see the situation offers an insightful lens on the broader trajectories of the urban political economy in China.

Ethnographic approaches seem particularly useful for making sense of situations. Ethnography originally was employed by anthropologists to document the complete way of life of preliterate peoples. This was very important in places where scholarly reliance on written documents and statistics was not possible. Interviewing only went so far because of the challenge of communicating across cultural gulfs and the universal tendency to take one’s own culture and practices for granted, so that they ‘go without saying’ (Smart, 1993). Subsequently, an ethnographic approach became more broadly conceived of as a research design that attempted to understand a culture, institution or social situation as seen by the ‘natives’, the people who were involved with those contexts, and whose lives and aspirations were entangled with what those contexts made possible and constrained. Ethnography produces insights through making the exotic familiar and comprehensible, but also through making the familiar exotic, unveiling the taking for granted assumptions and the complex skills involved in the performance of everyday life. As Catherine Wanner (2013: xvi) says about ethnographic research on post-socialist societies of Eastern Europe ‘novel dimensions and unforeseen zones of capitalism emerge for which we struggle to find categories, labels and models of analysis’. Document analysis and surveys can only take us so far. Uncovering the complex cultural interpretations and interpersonal interactions that make everyday life and accomplishments possible requires openness to surprise, with unexpected twists and turns as research progresses. Ethnography is the research design most effective for producing unexpected results and challenging assumptions about what processes are most central to the explanation of the situations that in aggregate make up the novel phenomena of contemporary Chinese urbanisation.

Plans frequently, perhaps usually, change the city through unintended consequences more than in accord with their formal objectives. I read these papers with an eye to people’s informal impact on the implementation of plans, since it seems one of the most important interfaces between people and plans. People’s actions profoundly influence outcomes. I see parallels with some aspects of my own research on planning in colonial Hong Kong. Douglas Uzzell (1990) argues that plans often fail when they use regulative planning styles based on coercion. He argues that generative planning, based on information, can be more effective. The planning style in China is clearly regulative rather than generative. Yet this is true in colonial Hong Kong as well. What made possible its success in resettling several million squatters into one of world’s largest and well-respected public housing programmes? Hong Kong has achieved other accomplishments, such as rapid transition from poverty to wealth. It also has one of the world’s most effective anti-corruption programmes.

In my own research, I found that squatters interacted with regulative planning practices in ways that produced generative responses and altered how the plans were actually implemented (Smart, 1990, 2006). Squatter clearance in Hong Kong before 1954 was clearly regulative planning based on power rather than knowledge. Clearances required extensive deployment of personnel with the capacity to use force. Coercion, however, resulted in violent reactions in some cases. Such reactions could lead to diplomatic and other difficulties for the Hong Kong government, and in turn London. Ultimately, squatter clearance was transformed into squatter resettlement as the most practical way to enforce the clearance plans and regain control over valuable land. This outcome fit the real needs of the affected population much better than did the old policies of clearance without resettlement. People’s responses can, in certain circumstances, modify regulative planning processes. In doing so, they may increase the effectiveness or appropriateness of the interventions, without this being intended. We learn more when we examine an urban process as it plays out over time rather than only at one interval (Smart, 1990), as is well demonstrated in the article by Zhang et al. (2018) on resettlement.

The Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (2006) estimates that between 1995 and 2005, there were over 10 million forced evictions from just seven countries: Zimbabwe, China, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, India and South Africa. China, the country with the largest number of evictions, accounted for 4,142,933 of these. China’s rapid urbanisation has been founded on massive amounts of displacement and resettlement, so Zhang et al. (2018) study is extremely useful for understanding the human and spatial consequences of these processes. They found that although the former villagers had little choice about the resettlement plans, their informal livelihood and socialising activities substantially changed the government’s intentions about how both public space and private space was used. The result was proliferation of unlicensed shops in their new homes. These shops responded in many cases to the loss of income-generation possibilities for the older and poorer residents. The large number of these shops in turn limited the local officials’ ability, and willingness, to end the nonconforming commercial uses, with one official quoted as saying that ‘overreaction may lead to discontent en masse. We need to be more flexible’. Another insisted that they would eventually ban all such uses: ‘The timing is not right yet, but our principle will not change’.

More generally, people’s experience of urban life and use of local spaces, including their own, influences how planned changes work out in practice. Planners and governments try to implement their plans in particular places that are already lived in. What is drafted in plans and what actually occurs on the ground can, and probably should, differ starkly. Regulations may be applied selectively. Individuals can avoid enforcement through personal or political influence, or by paying bribes. The prevalence of infractions or resistance, or simple non-cooperation, may make implementation impossible. To discover the true impact of planning we must look at how it is applied in administrative practice. Looking at the plans may be interesting, but it’s not enough. Processes occurring during implementation can generate influences upon the most authoritative planning regimes. The plan as drafted tells us little about the outcomes. Some regulative planning systems fail to implement their plans. Plans are usually modified in ways not predictable from the plan itself. The implementation of any plan is subject to information deficits, fundamentally limiting the chances of success of top-down planning. These very limits may allow influences to be generated that partially respond to actors’ knowledge about their own real needs. Intersections between formality and informality affect urban planning, influence what kinds of plans can be achieved at particular points in time (for example, toleration of informal activities may increase during economic downturns), and help to determine what outcomes are produced in both short term and long term.

Discussing how people can resist planning activities, even if only through deflection and reinterpretation, is of great importance in challenging perceptions of the powerful Chinese state. Yet, the articles by Non Arkaraprasertkul (2018) on Shanghai and Yang Zhan (2018) on urban villages in Beijing complicate the usual narrative lines. Both consider cases where local people are proactive in initiating and encouraging the redevelopment of their neighbourhoods, challenging pervasive ideas in the gentrification literature that local people are being involuntarily displaced by the in-movement of wealthier people.

Arkaraprasertkul explores a kind of gentrification that I believe exists elsewhere but is generally neglected in most of the literature. It is somewhat more commonly discussed in more positive narratives of ‘improving areas’ such as those promoted by advocates of ‘urban revitalisation’. He describes a situation where residents of one of Shanghai’s historic areas with many architecturally important buildings, who desire more ‘modern’ and comfortable dwellings elsewhere, help to promote redevelopment and their own ‘displacement’. He talks about this in terms of ‘self gentrification’ or ‘gentrification from within’. He concludes that they are the main forces behind the redevelopment rather than the local government or real estate developers. These initiatives followed a parallel process where residents rented out the first floors of most of the buildings to new, often trendy, businesses, becoming small-scale landlords, while remaining resident in the less commercialisable spaces, even turning balconies and corridors into their own living spaces. His argument is all the more persuasive because of the rich ethnographic material, based on two years of fieldwork, that he provides. There is, however, always the question for ethnographers of whether the attitude he describes is widespread or if there are also residents who hold deep emotional attachments to the area and would prefer to find other ways to improve the conditions of their dwelling places, should such an option be feasible.

His account of gentrification carried out by long-time local residents resonates with Zhan’s article, as well as with Guo et al. (2018). The latter depict Liede villagers as ‘major players in redevelopment’. The villager as developer and/or rentier has largely been neglected in the dominant narrative of rural/urban citizenship divisions as oppressing those unable to escape rural status (Smart and Smart, 2017). Yet, as Xiao and Bian (2018) mention, the advantages of rural property in some places result in at least some rural people rejecting the opportunity to transfer their hukou to urban status (see Li and Smart, 2012, for a detailed account of why this can result). Yang Zhan shows that the rural population in urban China is particularly starkly divided in such urban villages (Zhan, 2018). Those who have hukou in urban villages in Beijing (and elsewhere) have become landlords who profit from their entitlement to land to operate a rental market for informal housing. Zhan’s article has the great merit of providing a detailed account of such informal landlords and how they produce and rent housing, a category that is very poorly studied, not only in China, but in urban studies more generally. Rural migrants from elsewhere rely on the urban villages for cheaper rent than available elsewhere. However, Zhan also shows that non-local rural migrants find ways through entrepreneurship to profit from the informal housing system in the urban villages, whether it is by manufacturing doors or recycling bricks. The diversity of rural migrants in Beijing is clearly laid out in this article, and should be a useful corrective to the dualistic treatment of rural and urban in many treatments of urban China based on secondary sources.

In recent years, the housing boom has come under both political and economic pressure. Macroeconomic conditions combined with the large increase of developed land to result in decreased demand for land and dropping land lease fees. The Guangzhou government, according to Guo et al., blamed the 21 approved urban village redevelopment schemes, which were planned to supply an additional 11.9 million m² of building land (Guo et al., 2018). The fear is of more ‘ghost cities’ of the type that are haunting accounts of China’s newly shaky expansion, raising fears on stockmarkets and commodity exchanges around the world.

All of these articles raise ghosts in various different ways. Wang discusses the lingering spectre of Maoist egalitarian ethics, and how they continue to influence contemporary urban disputes (Wang, 2018). Zhang and Wu show how the ghosts of rural forms of sociality take possession of Pingchang New City and undermine the modern ways of life that it was intended to evoke (Zhang et al., 2018). Arkaraprasertkul follows the commercial appropriation of the shades of Shanghai’s colonial past, and the ways in which the exchange value produced by these desirable phantoms allow those who lived with them to move to other, more comfortable urban dwellings (Arkaraprasertkul, 2018). Zhan describes urban villages that have been transformed dramatically, yet still are animated by the distinctive legacies of their rural past (Zhan, 2018). Without effective collaborations between official plans, practical norms and popular norms and moral economies, plans are likely to be shades of themselves, but shades that can be immensely destructive if they do not fit with the needs of residents. The interface between urban China’s people and its plans needs both scholarly and political attention, if the Chinese cities of the 21st century are not to be haunted by the collusions and collisions of the past and the present.