‘Peasants are peasants’: Prejudice against displaced villagers in newly-built urban neighbourhoods in China

Abstract

Chinese

This article explores contemporary prejudice against displaced villagers in urban China, drawing on a project on urban sprawl in Yinchuan where rural villages are absorbed into the urban area. The research demonstrates that media discourses about chaiqian baofahu and suzhi that stigmatise displaced villagers are being actively reproduced in everyday life in newly built urban neighbourhoods. Urbanites’ prejudice against displaced villagers can be viewed as, on the one hand, a result of the feelings of relative deprivation from unfavourable comparisons with displaced villagers, while on the other hand, a response to maintain a positive ingroup identity – in this case, an urban and ‘civilised’ way of life. The article then examines the effectiveness of contact as a means for reducing prejudice, and reveals that intergroup contact in urban neighbourhoods does not necessarily create mutual understanding and trust. The article highlights the structural causes of prejudice and concludes by arguing for social transformation to challenge and reduce prejudice.

Keywords

contact hypothesis displaced villagers intergroup relation prejudice relative deprivation theory social identity theory

Introduction

As the cities of the 21st century are characterised by increased mobility and diversity, the issue of living with difference is coming to the fore (Valentine, 2008). The last two decades have seen growing research interest in negotiations of difference in everyday experiences and encounters regarding race and ethnicity (Amin, 2002), religion and sexual orientation (Valentine and Waite, 2012) and class (Valentine and Harris, 2014). Meanwhile, prejudice has been recognised as an important concept within geography. Scholars have focused on how prejudice is justiﬁed by those in the majority (Valentine, 2010) and inflected by specific histories and geographies (Valentine et al., 2015), and whether contact with difference is effective for reducing prejudice (Mayblin et al., 2016; Valentine and Sadgrove, 2014). Notwithstanding its development, the work in geography and urban studies about difference and prejudice is largely based on the western experience. Non-western cities as sites of difference and encounter have been understudied, despite the fact that these cities have achieved extraordinary growth in the past few decades.

In China, urbanisation and urban development have brought people from diverse groups to live together in everyday urban spaces. The increase in people of rural backgrounds in cities has led to the emergence of two new social categorisations in official, media and academic discourses –nongmingong (rural migrant workers) and zhengdi chaiqian nongmin (villagers rendered landless and displaced under urban encroachment, termed `displaced villagers' for short in this article).¹ Discrimination against rural migrants has been well documented in the literature (Chen, 2013; Du et al., 2018; Jacka, 2005). Although the designation of rural migrants by official documents and the media as ‘mangliu’ (blind floaters) has disappeared, rural migrants in cities today are still second-class citizens at best (Du and Wang, 2018). Notwithstanding that mobility and diversity create the potential for intergroup interactions, migrants are keener to establish local connections but are constrained in ‘shallow’ interactions (Du and Li, 2010; Wang et al., 2016, 2017).

Unlike rural migrants, displaced villagers do not go to the city; instead, the city comes to them (Chen et al., 2014). Since the enactment of the Land Administration Law in the late 1980s, China’s urbanisation has been promoted by land reforms (Yeh et al., 2011). From 1985 to 2015, China’s urban built-up area expanded from 8842 km² to 40,941 km² (NBS, 1986, 2016). In the process of urban sprawl and land development, numerous villagers in peri-urban areas have lost their homes or farmlands or both. The number of landless or displaced villagers is unavailable from official sources. It is estimated that at least 52 million villagers were landless or displaced between 1987 and 2010 (Ong, 2014). While landless or displaced villagers are often recognised as victims of Chinese urbanisation in academia (He et al., 2009; Ong, 2014), prejudice against them is rife in media and public discourse. They are labelled as ‘chaiqian baofahu’, literally ‘displacement parvenus’, who get rich overnight because of displacement compensation and engage in conspicuous consumption, gambling and drug taking (Xinhuanet, 2015). The word ‘parvenus’ not only expresses how displaced villagers from a lower social class have gained wealth overnight, but it also has a connotation of ‘di suzhi’, literally, low quality.

In this article, we focus on the prejudice against displaced villagers in contemporary China, which has received limited attention within academic literature even if many scholars have discussed the ‘othering’ of peasants and rural migrants in China. Most displaced villagers are resettled in ‘concentrated villages’ (nongmin jizhong juzhu) (Ong, 2014) and are thus largely segregated from urban residents. When urban residents and displaced villagers live together in mixed neighbourhoods, does this space of encounter increase or reduce prejudice? Are urbanites’ perceptions of displaced villagers influenced by the media and public discourse about ‘baofahu’ and ‘di suzhi’? We address these questions by drawing on original empirical research conducted as part of a study about rehousing those villagers rendered landless and displaced under urban expansion.

The study area is in the eastern outskirts of Yinchuan, the capital of Ningxia Hui Minority Autonomous Region.² As a response to China’s Western Development Plan, the local government initiated the ‘Big Yinchuan’ project in 2002, which aimed to build a modern and regional central city. Expansion of urban space was identified as a pressing issue for the modern development of the city (Liu, 2005). The city has since experienced phenomenal growth. The built-up urban area increased more than three times from 48 km² in 2000 to 167 km² in 2015 (NBS, 2001, 2016). Since the early 2000s, villages in the study area have undergone successive waves of land development. The former rural land was transformed into commercial centres, science parks, urban residential neighbourhoods, parks and greenery, etc. Thousands of villagers were resettled in relocation housing locally and became new urbanites. Some laid-off urban workers, whose workplaces were near the villages, were also resettled in relocation neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, the relatively low housing price and emerging urban job opportunities attracted urban residents and migrant workers into this newly urbanised area. As a consequence, diverse groups live together in the newly built urban neighbourhoods.

The fieldwork was conducted in 2014 and 2015. Participants were composed of 160 households mainly from five relocation neighbourhoods, including 112 households of displaced villagers and 48 other households. The latter included laid-off urban workers, migrant workers and other urban residents who were either owners or tenants in the neighbourhoods. This study mainly derives from interviews with these 48 ‘other’ households, supplemented with interviews with displaced villagers. Each interview, lasting between one and two hours, was audio tape-recorded, transcribed and then analysed using NVivo. The names of neighbourhoods and participants have been withheld to protect anonymity.

We first review the origins of prejudice and the contact hypothesis about how contact reduces prejudice. Since both rural migrants and displaced villagers originate from peasants, prejudice against the two groups inevitably has its origins in the disdain for peasants. We then track the origins of the disdain for peasantry in China, which is pivotal in the construal of landless villagers in contemporary urban discourse. Using relative deprivation theory and social identity theory, the subsequent sections investigate, for the case of suburban Yinchuan, the phenomenon of prejudice against displaced villagers in neighbourhood everyday life, and explore whether intergroup contact may help reduce prejudice. The final section concludes.

The origins and remedies for prejudice

In his classic work The Nature of Prejudice, Gordon Allport offers incisive insights into the origins of prejudice and methods for its elimination. The group process is identified as central in the characteristics of prejudice: ‘it may be directed towards a group as a whole or towards an individual because he is a member of that group’ (Allport, 1954: 10). Prejudice thus can be defined as ‘any attitude, emotion or behaviour towards members of a group, which directly or indirectly implies some negativity or antipathy towards that group’ (Brown, 2010: 7).

According to realistic conflict theory, groups competing for scarce resources show a tendency towards intergroup prejudice. However, real or perceived conflicts of interest are not the only origin of prejudice. Social identity theory assumes that individuals try to achieve or maintain a positive ingroup identity through favourable intergroup comparisons – the ingroup must be perceived as positively distinct from the relevant outgroups. Threats to the positive distinctiveness of the ingroup will provoke a search for differentiation from the outgroup, as well as prejudice. Furthermore, prejudice towards outgroups can also be caused by feelings of relative deprivation stemming from unfavourable social comparisons. Relative deprivation theory suggests that when the outgroup is perceived to be doing better than the ingroup, the latter is likely to feel deprived and to display disdain for the outgroup (Smith et al., 2012). In sum, prejudice towards outgroups can be viewed as a response to threats: threats to the material interests of the ingroup (realistic conflict theory), threats to the distinctiveness or integrity of the ingroup (social identity theory) and threats to the ingroup’s social position (relative deprivation theory) (Brown, 2010).

Can prejudice be altered or reduced in certain circumstances? Allport (1954) recognises that intergroup contact enables people to learn about ‘others’ and ultimately leads to reduced prejudice. However, contact alone is not enough. Allport’s contact hypothesis specifies four conditions, that is, social and institutional support in promoting the contact; the development of meaningful relationships; equal status between groups; and co-operative activity. Intergroup contact can potentially reduce prejudice only when these ideal conditions are present.

In their studies on European cities (Mayblin et al., 2016; Valentine and Sadgrove, 2014), Valentine and her colleagues also recognise that fleeting encounters with ‘others’ in public spaces are not sufﬁcient to break down prejudice. Rather, they highlight the importance of ‘meaningful contact’, that is, contact which ‘actually changes values and translates beyond the specifics of the individual moment into a more general positive respect for – rather than merely tolerance of – others’ (Valentine, 2008: 325). Moreover, their studies (Valentine, 2008; Valentine and Harris, 2014) call for attention to socio-spatial inequalities and power in the debate about prejudice. Indeed, a complete understanding of the phenomenon of prejudice against any social group requires attention to the very structure of the society and the associated resource allocation. In the following, we briefly review the social structural forces of the disdain for peasantry in China, which plays a significant part in the way prejudice against landless villagers is produced and reproduced.

The disdain for peasantry in contemporary China

The idea that the city represents a higher level of civilisation than the countryside, as observed in western cultural traditions, is something new in China (Mote, 1977). The stark rural–urban contrast has been induced by the pre-Communist industrialisation and modernisation processes, as well as western influence and the emergence of foreign-dominated treaty ports (Cohen, 1993). The ‘othering’ of peasantry in China is also a modern phenomenon, and is related to the dominant or elite discourses on modernity in the early 20th century. The adoption of the new term ‘nongmin’ (peasant) by the modern intellectual and political elites creates a new and negative representation of China’s rural population, who are ‘passive, helpless, unenlightened, in the grip of ugly and fundamentally useless customs, desperately in need of education and cultural reform’ (Cohen, 1993: 154–155). Such a construction ofpeasant ‘backwardness’ allows for a moral claim to political privilege and power.

Under the socialist system, the rural–urban differentiation is reinforced by the urban-biased economic priorities and the heavy industrial development strategy. Living standards and opportunities are much better in cities than in the countryside. Through the administrative classification of China’s population into urban (or non-agricultural) and rural (or agricultural), based on household registration (hukou), the socialist state turns the invented peasant into the statutory peasant (Cohen, 1993). The peasantry as a status group is put in an unfavourable position, whereas urban residents enjoy preferential treatment. The gap between urban and rural was further widened after economic reform that opened up the coastal cities. Although rural migrants can work in cities in the reform era, they are seen as outsiders who threaten the morality and social order of the city (Pow, 2007). Rural migrants are marginalised not only by their inferior ‘peasant’ label but also by their migrant status or non-local hukou status.

One of the key terms employed in the negative perception of China’s rural population is suzhi. The sacralisation of the term suzhi is tied to two major propaganda campaigns in the reform era. First, the term ‘population quality’ (renkou suzhi) has been used in birth control propaganda since the early 1980s. Second, `suzhi jiaoyu' has been used to translate ‘competence education’ by education policymakers since the late 1980s. Due to the authoritarian structure of language use in China, the official discourse of suzhi has become popular since the 1990s (Kipnis, 2006). The term is flexibly used in a variety of contexts and is related to various attributes, including education, culture, morality, manners, psychology, physiology and genetics (Jacka, 2005). At the same time, as social inequality becomes more visible, suzhi articulates the boundaries of newly differentiating social strata (Anagnost, 2004). Nongmin, including rural migrants and displaced villagers, are marked out as having the lowest suzhi. Kipnis (2007) argues that the suzhi discourse provides a way of speaking explicitly about class without actually using the word ‘class’ itself. The deployment of suzhi diverts attention away from structural inequalities created or endorsed by the state to the attributes of human beings and how to improve them (Jacka, 2005).

Built on existing studies on the ‘othering’ process of specific groups in sociology, geography and social psychology, as well as on living with difference based on the western experience, this study picks up the next thread of discussion to examine the evolution of difference and prejudice in China’s rapid urbanisation. More specifically, this study revisits the social construction of the ‘other’ under the new material and ideological conditions in China’s urbanisation, to examine the phenomenon of prejudice against displaced peasants in neighbourhood everyday life.

Displaced villagers as the ‘other’ in urban neighbourhoods

As mentioned earlier, the neighbourhoods in the study rehouse not only displaced villagers but also a number of laid-off urban workers, migrant workers and other urban residents, many of them from humble backgrounds. These people used to live spatially segregated and socially differentiated lives: as self-sufficient peasants in the countryside and as urban workers in work unit compounds. Urbanisation, accompanied by a massive demolition process, has meant the tearing down of rural and urban residences that were in the way of urban expansion and relocating of people with different backgrounds in a mixed way, providing a unique setting to study how people live with difference in a modernising post-socialist society. In this context of ‘the city coming to villagers’, it has been more ambiguous who is the insider and who is the outsider.

Parvenus and the relatively deprived: Socio-economic change and the morality of work

In the process of land requisition, different compensation policies have applied to the affected urbanites and villagers, due to the urban–rural dual land tenure system. In our case study, displaced villagers received one-off financial compensation for the expropriation of farmland, attachments, crops and vegetables, and urban housing units for the demolition of village houses, together with the conferment of urban registration status and pension insurance. For urban housing demolition, the affected urbanites are relocated to new housing roughly equivalent to the original floor space, which is usually converted to one or two flats. Compared with urbanites, displaced villagers often receive larger relocation housing floor space because rural homesteads usually occupy large areas. In our sample, 35% of the displaced village households received two flats or fewer, 30% three flats and another 35% more than three flats. Among the interviewed urban residents, some received relocation housing that was just enough for them to live in, some purchased a flat with almost all their life savings, while others could not afford to purchase housing and became tenants living in the villagers’ relocation housing. With such comparisons available, urbanites who have received limited (or no) relocation housing feel particularly deprived.

For laid-off workers, such feelings of relative deprivation arose not only from comparisons with displaced villagers, but also from comparisons with their own past. Under the dual economy and dual society in socialist China, the urban population was economically and socially superior to the rural population (Chan, 1996). They were entitled to state-provided jobs, housing, education and social and medical services. However, the foundation of their superiority has been largely dissolved in the process of market-oriented reform, when China privatised the property market, higher education, healthcare and most of its state-owned enterprises. Large numbers of state-owned enterprise workers became unemployed. Termed xiagang (off-duty) workers, they experienced downward social mobility, lost their political privilege and social status and underwent psychological hardship through being cast aside by the state (Gold et al., 2009). As housing inequality has become a critical driver of economic inequality in recent years (Li and Du, 2014), the economically disadvantaged groups, including laid-off workers and other urban poor, are further marginalised.

In this evolving environment, those urbanites from poor socio-economic backgrounds express their anxiety about their loss of superiority through comparisons with the ‘new rich’ who come from an ‘inferior’ status to themselves, even though some of the urbanites themselves originated from peasant backgrounds. This is suggested by the case of one interviewee who successfully married from the countryside to an urban family decades ago and had felt lucky for having left her rural background behind and become an urban worker, but who had now been laid-off and envied her rural relatives for their sudden fortune:

They do nothing but every family has five or six or even 10 flats. We, on the contrary, bought this flat with our small salary. We can never buy so many flats in a whole life! ... My daughter’s husband’s uncle is a local villager and has many flats. His rental income reaches RMB100,000 per year, just rental income! Peasants have a much better life than urbanites … We used to live in the countryside. Later we four girls in my family married urbanites. Peasants in our village all envied us. (Urbanite, female, aged 61, primary school education, retired and former laid-off worker, homeowner, N74)

The distinction between ‘we, urbanites’ (ingroup) and ‘they, peasants’ (outgroup) manifests the process of social categorisation. People relate themselves to social groups not only for social comparison (i.e. with which they compare to evaluate themselves) but also for the acquisition of norms and values (i.e. from which they take their rules, standards and beliefs about appropriate conduct and attributes) (Turner et al., 1987). In this study, displaced villagers are perceived to have reaped without sowing, which is unfair on urban workers who live from hand to mouth – the former receive preferential treatment and easily get several flats while the latter cannot afford a flat, or a flat of large enough size, through hard work. Here, these wage workers emphasise the moral value of work. They feel that their moral worth as hard-working workers is not recognised, which adds to their distaste for the tendencies among displaced villagers to consume without producing. In their eyes, displaced villagers’ consumerist and even dissipated lifestyles are a consequence of their personal choices: ‘Many peasants in our neighbourhood do not engage in proper work and even sell their flats, get divorced and behave badly. They get rich, but idle about, living a dissipated life’ (urbanite, male, aged 61, senior secondary school education, retired and former laid-off worker, relocated resident, N132).

Although displaced villagers are envied by urban laid-off workers, there are persisting inequalities in citizenship that continue to discriminate against peasants after urbanisation. As new urbanites, displaced villagers have lost the farmers’ safety net (agriculture) and at the same time are not eligible for safety net benefits provided to urbanites (social security), or at least not the same benefits. In this study, displaced villagers enjoy entitlements to pension insurance, but the treatment is different from that of urban workers, who may receive a pension 10 times higher than those of displaced villagers. In 2018, the average monthly pension per capita for urban workers was RMB2718, while the basic monthly pension per capita for other residents including displaced villagers was only RMB248 (YCEN, 2019).

As highlighted by the interviewed displaced villagers, urban living is much more expensive than rural living. Financial compensation for the requisitioned land does not necessarily translate into big purchasing power in urban life (He et al., 2009). The ‘new rich’ status goes hand in hand with their poor adaptation to the urban economy. Displaced villagers feel that they have no other choice but to live on their capital to maximise their life chances and avoid further marginalisation (Song, 2014, 2015). While some can earn a little money from renting out the compensated housing units, many are actually trapped in the low-end labour market, undertaking low-paid, labour-intensive and unstable jobs (Song et al., 2018):

Our land was requisitioned at the cost of RMB20,000 per mu [1 mu = 1/15 hectare] and was sold at the price of RMB800,000 or RMB1,000,000 per mu. We lost our land forever. What can we do with RMB20,000? Peasants are still peasants and cannot compare with urbanites. Urban workers can earn RMB2000 or RMB3000 every month. We cannot. Our living conditions are poor. (Displaced villager, female, aged 66, N60)

As shown, displaced villagers and urbanites tend to interpret the relative gains and losses in urbanisation from different perspectives. Their different perspectives lead to an ironic situation in which both groups feel deprived by urbanisation and marketisation. On the one hand, displaced villagers receive a one-off compensation and sometimes multiple housing units and are envied by urbanites. However, they continue to be subject to a different welfare system, and at the same time lack a sustainable means of living except relying on rental incomes from the housing units they received as compensation. As such, they complain that the one-off income does not solve the problems of their long-standing economic disadvantage. On the other hand, the sense of deprivation can be stronger from the urbanites’ perspective, as they used to occupy a more favourable social status in socialist work units but have experienced rapid downwards social mobility. These urbanites become homeowners, tenants or relocated urban residents who have access to relatively limited housing opportunities compared with displaced villagers. As the dominance over development revenues by governments and developers and the purchasing power of better-off urban residents have been justified by state authorities and market logics, the seemingly new rich composed of displaced villagers have become the target of moral questioning. While both displaced villagers and laid-off urban workers bear the cost of development in China’s modernisation campaign, they resent each other, as the language of ‘class’ and structural inequalities is largely missing in official discourses.

The same people in the same neighbourhood? Suzhi and the civilised lifestyle

According to social identity theory, threats to the distinctiveness of the ingroup lead to prejudice against the outgroup. The group distinctiveness that urbanites emphasise is their urban and ‘civilised’ way of life. Maintaining a civilised living environment is part of the party-state-endorsed code of public morality (Pow, 2007). Selected cities, neighbourhoods and government institutions are awarded the ofﬁcial title of ‘civilised city’ (wenming chengshi), ‘civilised residential quarter’ (wenming xiaoqu) or ‘civilised unit’ (wenming danwei). Like rural migrants in urban neighbourhoods, displaced villagers are also seen by urbanites as a menace to the urban way of life due to their supposed ‘unruly’ ways and ‘uncivilised’ conduct.

In general, urbanites in our study use performative and moral criteria, judging negatively the villagers’ ways of speaking and behaving. They take a dim view of villagers’ social behaviours in the neighbourhood such as making a noise, using uncouth language, leaving their front doors open, littering, growing vegetables on the lawn in communal gardens, occupying communal space such as corridors, etc. Such behaviours of reconstructing communal space in resettled neighbourhoods can be seen as peasants’ adaptation to the new environment, which enable them to achieve a sense of normalcy (Zhang et al., 2018). However, as ‘civilised’ urbanites who have been educated via various government campaigns and public education, they assume their ‘civilised’ way of living as normative and themselves as being socially and morally superior:

The use of parking space is free; anyone can use it. Some residents arrogate to themselves the use of a particular parking space. Peasants are peasants. They quarrel [over parking space]. Urbanites are different; their suzhi are different [superior]’. (Urbanite, female, aged 48, homemaker, tenant, N7)

I myself am the son of peasants. But peasants are indeed inferior in suzhi. I have complained many times. This is a residential neighbourhood, a place for living. Those young adults gather together in the playground, drinking, chasing about, making a terrible noise … Moving into this neighbourhood opens my eyes to the suzhi of peasants in the rural–urban fringe. Rudeness! Rudeness! (Urbanite, male, aged 61, senior secondary school education, retired and former laid-off worker, relocated resident, N132)

Additionally, villagers’ ‘uncivilised’ conduct in neighbourhood life is deemed to be a result of inferior suzhi. The expression‘peasants are peasants’ substantiates the idea of peasants as a culturally distinct and alien ‘other’, and leaves little room for change and individual variation. In urbanites’ eyes, although displaced villagers have moved into urban neighbourhoods and have become new urbanites, they are uncivilised and inferior in suzhi because of their rural origins, and they cannot overcome their peasant ‘backwardness’. Jacka (2005) argues that suzhi has been mapped onto the geography of social and economic differentiation between the rural hinterland and urban areas. In this study, we observe that the suzhi discourse also constitutes the core of the moral spatial order at the city scale or even neighbourhood scale. As displaced villagers concentrate in relocation neighbourhoods in the rural–urban fringe, such places are stigmatised and inferiorised. Thus, inner-city neighbourhoods are perceived to be superior to neighbourhoods in the rural–urban fringe, and commodity housing is seen as superior to relocation housing.

While urbanites’ prejudice against peasants using the suzhi discourse reflects their dislike for proximity to a different way of life, for some villagers the suzhi discourse enables them to justify their ability to govern the neighbourhood. This is well demonstrated by the case of Mr Liu, who is a member of the Chinese Communist Party as well as the director of the neighbourhood residents’ committee under the leadership of the street office and the Party branch. While Mr Liu himself is a villager, he considers peasants of low quality. His usage of the term ‘suzhi di’ is not related to the uncivilised conduct emphasised by urbanites, but refers to peasants’ lack of knowledge of policies and regulations, as well as their insubordinate behaviour such as refusing to pay management fees. Mr Liu also highlights his Party and community spirit in serving the public, which enables him to distance himself from the low quality of non-Party members so as to justify his leadership in the neighbourhood:

Peasants are indeed of low quality [suzhi]! They are uneducated and do not understand policies, laws and regulations. For example, some peasants are unreasonable and refuse to pay management fees. Look at the commodity housing neighbourhoods. They are all homeowners, they do not gossip or gang up and they pay the management fees on time. Here, some individuals of low suzhi rouse the masses. Hundreds of residents refuse to pay management fees … Some residents misunderstand me and arrogate bad motives to me: ‘Why does he take the trouble if he cannot profit?’ They don’t understand me. My realm of thought is entirely different from theirs. No wages for this job. It’s the heart; it’s Party spirit. (Displaced villager, male, aged 61, primary school education, N120)

Stories from different sides shed light on different processes of meaning-making. While urbanites complained about displaced villagers’ social behaviours in urban neighbourhoods and regarded such ‘uncivilised’ behaviours as group traits of rural people, grassroots leaders among displaced villagers focused on other aspects of suzhi, such as paying management fees. Admittedly, they all point to the importance of following norms and regulations in urban neighbourhoods, but they have different understandings and focus on different aspects of norms and regulations that should be respected and promoted in their shared residential areas.

More importantly, neither urban residents nor displaced villagers buy the discourses commonly used by the other in praising ingroup identity and stigmatising other groups. From the perspective of displaced villagers, it was the good rural traditions that were contaminated and ruined in the process of urbanisation. They sometimes claimed that their living environment would be much more pleasant and orderly if there were no ‘outsiders’. Some displaced villagers suggested that gathering and having fun at night was not a rural tradition but had its roots in the urban ‘corrupting’ consumption culture. A similar example was that both displaced villagers and urban residents have tried to attribute the increasing occurrence of vandalism and stealing to ‘other’ groups: displaced villagers are suspected by urbanites, whereas newcomers, including urban residents and migrant workers, are accused by displaced villagers of moving into this locality with ‘risk’ factors. Both narratives may become more prevalent when there is no solid evidence.

Furthermore, some new group boundaries may arise in this ‘othering’ process. Among displaced villagers, indigenous villagers tried to distance themselves from non-indigenous villagers. One indigenous villager complained to the interviewer about the low quality of non-indigenous villagers: ‘Residents of our neighbourhood are of low quality. Those contracted farmers [non-indigenous villagers] are dirty. We locals [indigenous villagers] are fine.’ Like Mr Liu, they borrowed the term suzhi frequently used by urbanites to show the differences within the group of displaced villagers.

The complicated grouping and ‘othering’ processes that China’s urbanisation illustrates shed light on the multiple dimensions and fluidity of the suzhi discourse (between urban and rural, the governing and the governed, indigenous and non-indigenous, etc.) that social groups mobilise to add to their own positive group image at the expense of the reputation of other groups. As a result, more ingroup divisions may arise for some to distance themselves from the others in the same social group. However, such division and re-grouping processes may not alter but may reinforce the stereotype of the ‘backwardness’ of peasants, by blaming a subgroup for the stigma.

Breaking boundaries? Revisiting the contact hypothesis

As residents of urban and rural origins live together in the newly urbanised residential areas, contact and interaction between social groups are not uncommon, even for those who consider themselves to be newcomers and are reluctant to interact with ‘locals’. Mrs He moved to Yinchuan from Shizuishan, a coal resources-based industrial city in the north of Yinchuan, in 2010. Her husband works in one of the largest state-owned enterprises in Ningxia. Before they moved to Yinchuan, they were provided with danwei (work unit) housing, a place of employment and residence, where their colleagues were also their neighbours. Unlike Mrs He’s previous environment, her new home is surrounded by relocation neighbourhoods. She feels anxious about interacting with displaced villagers, a group she is not familiar with. Such intergroup anxiety has led her to avoid them. Mrs He perceives herself as an outsider or intruder, not only because the land that the neighbourhoods are built on originally belonged to the village, but also because urbanites are outnumbered by displaced villagers in this area. Despite her anxiety, she felt secure in her sense of superiority over displaced villagers in terms of suzhi:

There are many relocation neighbourhoods around. We, newcomers, are willing to live in commodity housing rather than relocation housing. That place belongs to them. We outsiders, like intruders, are excluded by them [displaced villagers]. It is only my personal feeling; it may not be true in reality. The number of locals [displaced villagers] is large; the overall suzhi is low. Residents of commodity housing are better. (Urbanite, female, aged 42, senior secondary school education, worker in a private company, homeowner, N156)

As a newcomer, Mrs He felt lonely when moving into the neighbourhood and withdrew into herself. Before long, she started attending dance classes for health reasons. Guangchangwu (square dancing) gained widespread popularity among middle-aged women in the 2010s. Dozens of dancers constitute a dance group; they gather in public spaces such as squares or parks, dancing to popular music, usually early in the morning or late in the evening. Several experienced dancers lead the dance group by teaching other members. Mrs He was a good dancer and soon became a leader of the dance group she had joined. Later, members of the local neighbourhood dance group found Mrs He a good dancer and invited her to join them and teach them. Mrs He agreed. Because of her role as the dance leader, many neighbours got to know her. Dancing has thus brought her into contact with neighbours from different backgrounds, including displaced villagers:

Because of dancing, I know many residents. When I moved into this neighbourhood, I knew nobody and felt uncomfortable. Later I found many neighbours from Shizuishan and felt close to them. Also, many people got to know me by dancing. Sometimes, I did not know that person, but he/she knew me and said hello to me. I felt embarrassed and immediately greeted him/her. (Urbanite, female, aged 42, senior secondary school education, worker in a private company, homeowner, N156)

The infrequent, short and casual quality of some intergroup contact situations does little to foster meaningful relationships and positive attitude change. In Mrs He’s case, contact based on square dancing has not been close enough to generate intimate relationships such as friendships. Mrs He even does not realise that some dancers in the neighbourhood are displaced villagers. Her intergroup anxiety and attitudes remain intact. Similar situations happen to other urbanites. One middle-aged resident who plays cards in the square has no idea that some of the players are displaced villagers.

Some other urban residents are more integrated into local affairs such as working in property management companies, and have a lot of chances to interact with displaced villagers. Mrs Wu, a former laid-off worker from a state-owned enterprise in Shizuishan, moved into the neighbourhood in 2004. Since 2005, she has been working in a property management company in the neighbourhood. As the director supervising about 20 staff members, Mrs Wu receives RMB3000 from the company as well as a monthly pension of RMB2000 from the government. Her income is handsome in the local area. From the perspective of Mrs Wu, the wage income cannot be compared with the compensation given to displaced villagers. The claim that urban workers are worse off than displaced villagers reveals her feelings of deprivation as a response to the rapid process of economic transformation and social change. The prejudice Mrs Wu holds towards displaced villagers is related to her social identification with wage-earners and linked with the perceived loss of privilege formerly ascribed to urbanites:

Wu: ‘If I quit the job, my pension is only monthly RMB 2000; the quality of life will decline. Prices have rocketed nowadays. The state has kept raising the pensions for retired staff in state-owned enterprises. If not, how poor we are!’

Interviewer: ‘How about displaced villagers?’

Wu: ‘Displaced villagers are baofahu. They got at least RMB500,000 when their lands were sold, and some got RMB800,000, even RMB 1,000,000. They are much better than retirees. For example, if they were compensated with four flats, they gave two flats to the children, lived in one flat and could still rent one out. They are landlords. It is true. I think the peasants have a better life than wage-earners. They have a lot of money.’

Interviewer: ‘Maybe some of them are in poor circumstances? If they are so rich, they won’t work as guards or cleaners.’

Wu: ‘Those guards are rich. They work to earn some extra spending money. They do not draw on their savings.’ (Urbanite, female, aged 58, senior secondary school education, director of the neighbourhood management company and former laid-off worker, homeowner, N143)

As a manager of a service provider, Mrs Wu has a great deal of contact with neighbourhood residents from different backgrounds, including displaced villagers. Also, many of her colleagues in the company are displaced villagers, who are employed in junior positions as either security guards or cleaners. Encounters with displaced villagers in the workplace have not made Mrs Wu reflect on or transform her perception, however. Her view of displaced villagers as parvenus has not changed. She believes that her colleagues choose to work to earn ‘some extra spending money’ – an explanation consistent with the stereotypical representation of displaced villagers as parvenus.

From another perspective, social segregation remains, although spatial segregation has been gradually broken down to some extent. Both Mrs He and Mrs Wu live in Harvest Garden, an estate composed of both relocation housing and commodity housing. This estate has a total of 36 blocks of residential buildings and 1860 units, and the construction of the estate was completed in five sections. The first section was constructed to resettle displaced villagers (338 households) and the remaining four sections were sold on the market. Commodity housing residents are mainly urban residents. Many are workers from Shizuishan like Mrs He and Mrs Wu. The developer spatially separated the two types of housing with a fence (Figure 1). As a result, relocated housing residents and commodity housing residents have different entrances to the same neighbourhood.

Figure 1.

Spatial segregation.

Spatial segregation, symbolised by a fence between commodity and resettlement housing zones, has been undermined but usually in the form of ‘one-way’ invasion. In the fieldwork, we observed relocation housing residents frequently breaking the spatial boundaries by cutting through the damaged fence (Figure 1b). They drop into the commodity housing zone to play cards, walk the baby, sit in the shade or simply to walk through the neighbourhood. However, it is very rare for commodity housing residents to cross the boundary. One reason for this lies in the disparity between the two zones in physical environment. There are more green spaces, public seating areas and public plazas in the commodity housing zone than in the relocation housing zone. Although relocation housing residents can easily break the spatial boundaries to share the public space and activities, it is very hard to traverse the social boundaries. Displaced villagers hope to be treated as equal urban citizens, but are often avoided or ignored by other social groups who live or work with them.

The above cases exemplify how prejudice persists even when people come into contact with outgroup members. The reason for this is that the contact situations in reality seldom meet Allport’s (1954) optimum conditions. First and foremost, there is a lack of institutional support for the equal citizenship and social integration of residents of rural origin. Under the slogan of prioritising economic development, the party-state and local governments have been reluctant to promote social norms favouring egalitarianism unless that social differentiation has challenged social stability. Without social or institutional support, intergroup interaction in the neighbourhood cannot be translated into an opportunity to foster more favourable attitudes and to reduce people’s prejudice. Secondly, labour markets have become more segregated due to the differences in human capital between residents of urban and rural origins. Although the workplace brings together urbanites and displaced villagers, the more educated urbanites are more likely to be in positions of power and influence, and the less educated villagers in positions of low power and voice, as is the case of Mrs Wu as the manager of the company and displaced villagers in the junior positions. The existing status hierarchy between urbanites and villagers, the villagers being in the subordinate role, makes it difficult to change the existing prejudiced beliefs. Thirdly, in many cases, as in the example of Mrs He, neighbourly contact does not have sufficient closeness to permit the development of meaningful relationships such as cross-group friendship. In sum, without the institutional support of equal citizenship, equal-status contact and co-operative and meaningful interactions in daily life, it is difficult through social contact to create intergroup understanding and trust and alter social stereotypes.

Conclusion

This article has addressed the lack of research in urban studies on difference and prejudice in non-western cities by investigating contemporary prejudice against displaced villagers in China. Using original empirical materials collected in newly built urban neighbourhoods in Yinchuan, the research demonstrates that media discourses about chaiqian baofahu and suzhi that stigmatise displaced villagers are being actively reproduced in everyday life. We argue that prejudice against displaced villagers emerges as the outcome of historical, political, economic and social forces. First, the prejudice originates in the disdain for peasantry in modern China, when the elite discourses on modernity transformed the rural population into an inferior ‘other’. The political processes of classification of urban and rural residents by the Communist state contribute to the ideological frameworks in which the two groups are valued and treated differently in society. In the pursuit of industrialised modernity, the negative representation arose of China’s rural population as a backward and unenlightened group. Due to these deeply embedded knowledge structures where the associations between the peasantry and various (mostly negative) stereotypes were established, people display preconceived, routine and prejudiced orientations to groups with a rural background, including rural migrants and displaced villagers.

Second, in the discussion of the discourse about baofahu, we emphasise the role of socio-economic change in shaping relations between urbanites and displaced villagers. The rapid socio-economic change and economic inequality have created anxiety about deprivation. The urbanites, especially those who were laid off during the reform of state-owned enterprises, have a ready comparison to hand – their villager neighbours relocated to the same urban neighbourhood – and thus feel aggrieved about their loss of superiority. Echoing relative deprivation theory, the feelings of deprivation from unfavourable comparisons with displaced villagers invoke urban workers’ prejudice. Interestingly, both groups are victims in the turbulent social change but they both harbour feelings of injustice. While laid-off workers highlight housing inequality, displaced villagers emphasise salary and social security. Both sides express their antagonisms against each other about who has the right to make claims on the state.

Third, urbanites’ prejudice against displaced villagers can also be viewed as a response to maintain a positive ingroup identity – in this case, of an urban and ‘civilised’ way of life. The suzhi discourse, which is used to draw distinctions between urbanites and peasants, is also being mobilised in relation to displaced villagers who are now officially urbanites. For urbanites, the ‘uncivilised’ conduct of displaced villagers in neighbourhood life is caused by their inferior suzhi; the prejudice against displaced villagers using the suzhi discourse enforces the superiority of the urban lifestyle. The suzhi discourse has been mobilised by villagers themselves, too. For elite villagers, the suzhi discourse enables them to distance themselves from the ‘low quality’ of villagers in general, and by so doing justify their leadership in the neighbourhood. For indigenous villagers, the suzhi discourse allows them to distance themselves from non-indigenous villagers. Such expressions of prejudice justify and reinforce the hierarchical structure of urban–rural relationships.

Our study also reveals that intergroup contact in urban neighbourhoods in China may not reduce prejudice against displaced villagers, and finds the less than ideal conditions as suggested by the contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954).³ As was shown, prejudice against peasantry is deeply entrenched in the complex historical, economic and political processes in the country. Although the city has come to peasants in China’s modernisation and urbanisation campaigns, there has been a lack of social institutional support of equal citizenship. Urbanisation and relocation may have undermined spatial segregation and brought together different social groups to live and work together, but social segregation and stereotypes are not easily altered. Also, given the increasing segregation in labour markets and the lack of social and cultural interactions of any depth, rapid social changes may undermine the foundations of trust, cooperation and mutual understanding, and add new complications to moral landscapes on the urban–rural boundary. When the resource allocation between urban and rural residents is unequal, and society is dominated by prejudiced values, it is difficult to change intergroup attitudes through intergroup contact. Social transformation, such as granting equal citizenship to rural residents, may be the first step in challenging and reducing prejudice and promoting social cohesion.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This study was supported by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (CUHK14609219), and the Worldwide Universities Network.

ORCID iD

Huimin Du

Notes

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