“Everybody’s Donghu”: Artistic Resistance and the Reclaiming of Public Space in China

Introduction

The new dynamics of the production of China’s urban space are highlighted by the changing role of participants who intervene in producing and controlling processes of urban transformation and development (He & Lin, 2015). As noted by Pan (2014), the mass demolition of the urban built environment in China is often subsumed into the discourse of national modernization, thus making conflicts between the government and local residents invisible. In this paper, our central concern is with how residents reinvent a public space and produce “counterspace” in the process of urban transformation. Through analyzing this process, we hope to understand how practices of resistance developed in Western democratic countries are transfigured to suit local conditions in China, and specifically what a Chinese 21st-century approach looks like in terms of resisting spatial manifestations of neoliberal economic change. In a more general sense, the analysis can inform us about the role of aesthetic modes of resistance in this kind of conflict.

This article thus analyzes the organization of an art project, Everybody’s Donghu. In 2010, the architect Li and his friends initiated this project not long after urban developers, the Overseas Chinese Town Company (OCT), planned to transform the Donghu area of Wuhan in China, a scenic urban lake area with fisheries, into a commercial space for relaxation and entertainment. Part of the transformation included filling in the fisheries. The art project was held in 2010, 2012, and 2014 with the aim of intervening in this commercial transformation process, primarily by displaying artwork in the Donghu area, to challenge the urban plan of OCT and the government. The primary aim of this project was to highlight the claims to the city by its residents and the project’s participants, who live in the city and include various identities ranging from students and artists to professionals. It is noteworthy that the actual residents of the Donghu area and its villages, and the architect Li and the rest of the participants were mutually exclusive groups, who responded to the transformation of the area in different ways. The villagers themselves did not actively resist OCT’s development project and instead sought compensation through a more conventional process of negotiating with the local government and developers, as described later on in this paper. Meanwhile, the key objection of the project’s participants—who nevertheless were mostly residents of the city of Wuhan—was the transformation of an unregulated, easily accessible scenic space into an exclusive area with a large theme park and extravagantly expensive private property, such as high-end condominiums and villas designed for wealthy people. Donghu is considered by many of the participants as a space filled with significance to individual memories, lifestyles, and history. Other concerns included the associated increase in surveillance cameras in the area, as well as the pollution and negative environmental effect of the development. The project, which was not officially sanctioned or affiliated with any external groups, government, or nongovernmental organizations, involved the social action of occupying and appropriating space through artistic, spatial, and technological practices, by visiting Donghu, temporarily living there or creating themed forms of art pertinent to Donghu, and sending photos of or writings about their artistic works to the project organizers for publication on the project’s website.

Before the development of the central area of the Donghu space, it featured a fishery for the villagers who could use it to cultivate fish for a living and visitors could visit to go fishing, pass time, and enjoy the scenery. One Donghu activist recalled, “we can take off our shoes, swim and enjoy the smell of summer and the sound of the lake. The whole place is so big and we can run around.” Throughout the project artists and participants would occupy areas of the Donghu site, using the space to perform or display artwork. Sometimes this occupation would include areas which were under construction work at that time. Ultimately the Donghu area was redeveloped with the construction of a modern and refurbished area with four- and five-star hotels, the “Happy Valley” theme park, and numerous private villas.

Broadly speaking, the occupation of the Donghu area can be related to various occupation movements around the world. As Medina (2018) points out, contemporary occupation movements in, for instance, Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, or St. Paul’s Cathedral, demonstrate the possibility of denaturalizing the dispossession of spaces and interrogate contemporary public spaces. However, the Donghu occupation and its distinctive features in format and size was shaped by the restrictive conditions imposed by the Chinese authorities. As the initiator Mr. Li comments, “it is a form of occupation in disguise.” In contrast to the Occupy Movement, for instance, or the collective nature of the Umbrella Movement, the occupation in this case tends to be based on the actions of individuals or small groups, each with their own diverse strategies, such as walking or hiking in the restricted area, playing in the space directly opposite the transformed area or creating artistic works. These strategies tend to be mundane and not particularly distinctive from the daily, although they all conform to the basic principle of entering and spending time in the space, and acting in it to seek personal autonomy and freedom. The participants thus create a personal space by using their own bodies as a means to resist. In an authoritarian context where protest is regarded as an outright act of defiance, it is thus interesting to see how forms of resistance become visible to the public. In order to understand these questions, we first discuss what contextualizes and shapes protest tactics in China. We later move to explore how the project participants challenged the concept of “big lake” centered on the urban transformation by providing alternative discourse, and attempting to mobilize the local residents for resistance. Then we discuss how the participants conducted practices of resistance through temporarily appropriating public space as well as producing “counterspace,” and expanded the influence of the project through the Internet.

Contextualizing Protest Tactics in China

According to Perry and Selden (2010), prior to the 1990s a more confrontational and direct approach was adopted to challenge authorities, while indirect and nonviolent resistance from individuals became the norm after the 1990s. The 1989 Tiananmen Square protest that ended with a bloody and violent governmental suppression has been a significant driver for this change, constituting a threat to potential protests thereafter.

As Cai (2010) has argued, protest groups in China often lack an organizational base and can be temporary, without connection to other similar issues. It is thus not surprising to find that political demonstrations or protests on the streets, such as, for instance, the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong or the Arab Spring protests, rarely happen in China. According to Wei (2014), government rules strictly regulate collective action on street. In this sense, not only can unsanctioned street collective actions be at risk of being accused of committing the crime of interrupting social order, but also the means of gaining the approval for such gatherings of people from the government can be extremely difficult. Under these unfavorable circumstances, the activists in China have developed particular means and ways to continue their urban contention. Protest tactics in China, in Wei’s (2014) words, have changed toward the deployment of artistic practices in the social movements, for instance, poem writing in the factory workers’ movement, or occupying male toilets in the feminist movement. The requirement of novelty in protest tactics (Taylor & van Dyke, 2004) can further explain the new approaches being used by social movements in China. From a local perspective, the restricted political structure results in the innovation of protest tactics rather than the mass political demonstration often used in democratic societies, since direct political confrontation can be highly risky. From a global perspective, this innovation is consistent with global changes in protest tactics: while protest tactics such as demonstrations or gatherings are legal in most Western countries (Zhao, 2006), activists need to invent new tactics in the form of micropolitical practices, such as by making use of rock music, graffiti, or street dance, to sustain the influence of social movements as well as reenergizing them.

In particular, ephemeral artistic practices in street action following the principle of flash mobs are encouraged in China since it is easier for those protesters to escape arrest (Wang, 2012). Within such a social context it is understandable that artistic practices became the dominant approach in the “Everybody’s Donghu” project.

The artistic modes of resistance in China can be comparable to those in other authoritarian contexts. Ryan (2019), for instance, provides us with examples of performative modes of resistance exemplified in the case of the Tahrir Square occupation in Turkey. In his discussion, one example is the resistance artist who performs standing still, where he “casts molds of his own body in lead and places them into public space” (p. 7). Accordingly, the body that is thrown into space becomes its own site of the political. These forms of standing men aim to disrupt and reconstruct how an observer perceives his surroundings, thus amplifying the relationality of the body to its environment and generating wider sense of resistance. To some extent, the forms of resistance to spatial manifestations of neoliberal economic change in China, which are limited and less open under the restrictive social control in place, have shown their specificity with a similarity to how the artist in Tahrir Square used his own body as a means for occupying space and disrupting its original relationship with the surroundings. In the Donghu case, artists occasionally deployed bodily strategies such as walking or hiking to intrude the public space and renounce their contentions. Another noticeable strategy of body use, in Donghu’s case, is when artists played or performed for free directly outside the commodified theme park, in effect to produce “counterspace” in response to the original space under transformation. The regenerated space in parallel to the original one has thus become meaningful as a site of contestation and resistance. Generally speaking, understanding the political aesthetics behind these performances enables us to recognize the distinctive practices in China, or in a more general sense, authoritarian contexts.

The changes in social movements can not only be seen in how art contributes to micropolitical practices, but also that the media, especially new media, plays an increasing role in urban contention in China (Sun, 2008; Zeng, Huang, & Liu, 2013; Zhou & Qi, 2014). In Sun Wei’s (2008) discussion, new social movements aim at pursuing both emancipatory politics that liberate a nation from the traditional system, and life politics that connote increasing individual autonomy within the established system, although the pursuit of emancipatory politics is hardly actualized in China. By examining the issue of the “Chongqing nail household” ¹ in the process of demolition, she analyzes how mass media including the Internet mobilizes social movements with the aim of pursuing individual freedom in China, in this case, through successfully pressuring the government. In fact, activist actions often struggle to meet the definition of “social movement” in China since movement politics are rarely sustained (Zhu & Ho, 2008). Zeng et al. (2013) explain how restrictive regulations prevent social networks or core groups, who can lead collective actions, from forming. However, the Internet can facilitate new means of social mobilization through strengthening networks of participants or initiating collective social actions. For instance, Harwit (2016) points out that the Chinese social media platform WeChat can mobilize small-scale social actions through channeling online discourse into small and cohesive collections of like-minded individuals. In this article, the Donghu case further shows how the Internet can not only mobilize protest but also create a produced space thus expanding the influence of resistance.

In this paper, we attempt to discover what roles artistic modes of resistance play in Chinese society primarily through the occupying and appropriating of the Donghu area. To solve these questions, we have to first understand how public space is imagined by the different parties in the Donghu case, that is, the government/developers and the residents (including both the villagers and the participants for the project). The data is supported by interviewing seven active participants in 2013 and 2017 respectively, as well as researching archive information online in 2017, especially the Douban group and the Donghu website, in order to gain a fuller picture of the artistic practices as well as the attached meanings.

Imagining Public Space

As Harvey (2008) points out, it is through changing ourselves and exercising collective power that we can reshape the process of urbanization. In fact, what activists in urban social movements seek is to “reshape the city in a different image from that put forward by the developers, who are backed by finance, corporate capital and an increasingly entrepreneurially minded local state apparatus” (Harvey, 2008, p. 33). While China has been experiencing persistent control, a third space of negotiation (Huang, 1993; Perry, 1994) has emerged from the interactive process constituted by complicated relations between differentiated intentions, power, and interests (Chamberlain, 1998). In the Donghu case, this space of negotiation is constructed through occupying and appropriating the public space by the artists.

Temporary Appropriation of Urban Space

The Donghu project was met with a series of interventions and suppressions throughout its run. In the early stage, not only were the media reports of the Donghu transformation suppressed by the developers, but the Donghu project also brought the struggle over space to the attention of the developers, inducing intervention from them. During the first period in 2010, the appeal for participation, which was advertised on the Douban website, was deleted by force shortly after appearing. According to my interviewee, he received threatening calls from the developers, asking him to stop participating in the activity; this also happened to the organizer in the second period, who received threats from the developers of possible consequences. While occasional interventions existed, the deployment of artistic practices performed in public space still became a means to sustain the resistance to the developers and enable its visibility to the public.

Being highly regulated and organized, urban space can often exclude the residents’ desires and needs (for instance, Franck & Stevens, 2007; Hill, 1998). As Marini (2013) notes, creative practices and temporal actions can challenge predefined spaces and suggest alternative ways of experiencing. In the case of Donghu, people were mostly stopped from entering the area undergoing transformation by signposts or barriers. Nevertheless, as the organizer Mr. Li argued, the crucial part of the project was to produce artistic works at the site since the project was a nonstraightforward form of “occupation.” Although diverse, two prominent ways of approaching this project were either to create site-specific artistic works with material form or to walk or play in the area, that is, to adopt a fluid form. It is worth mentioning that the means of walking is still regarded as producing artwork since the photographs would be taken and published on the website. The project participants either produced artworks alone or in a group. A typical approach to the production of artwork was that they located themselves in the Donghu area and made use of video, drawing, or props to express their ideas and thoughts.

One prominent theme arising from the Donghu occupation is related to the strong environmentalist perspective of the artists. Since the beginning of the project, one of the main concerns, besides the privatization of the area, was its potential for polluting the lake. This perspective is revealed in many of the works, either in the sole performative and creative activities, or in the interactive activities with the public. For instance, one participant conducted a performance using a laser pen to shine onto the lake to appeal for the appreciation of the fish in Donghu, which may suffer not only from the effect of pollution but also the shrinking lake. Another project “Toilet” was produced and implied that the new transformed commercial area would result in a huge number of toilets thus causing environmental pollution, through appropriating the meaning of “dirty” connoted in “toilet.” In another project, “Bury,” the participants took belongings from the transformed commercial part to the area where houses were going to be torn down and buried them in holes. By representing the urban space through the artworks, the original meaning of the represented area, which is about transformation, was replaced by new meanings connoting bad influence and being symbolically demolished. Some of the participants created occasions that required more interactions. For instance, one student invited visitors to Happy Valley theme park to write “Happiness” (欢乐) on the floor using water from Donghu, while another participant sent leaflets to the tourists with wishes for Donghu.

The participants also became creative in contesting the process of commercialization along with the urban transformation. For instance, one of them recorded the free activities that made people happy such as fishing, cycling, or taking photos in front of the entrance of Happy Valley theme park, and created his own fun by mocking it (giving the entrance the middle finger). Route making by walking inside the restricted area, and supposedly “forbidden” area under transformation, became a frequently occurring artistic practice for the participants, not only encouraging creative responses of resistance to the Donghu transformation through “intruding” into this territory but also generating critical reflections toward it. In de Certeau’s work (1984), everyday practices such as walking can be invoked in the practices of resistance (Frers & Meier, 2017). To be more specific, as de Certeau puts it, “the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered” (1984, p. 97). With the practice of walking as an engagement with the surroundings, “walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it ‘speaks’” (1984, p. 99). In this sense, walking empowers pedestrians in the way that can claim their own space and can also become a tactic to resist the dominant authority-controlled space through the routes determined by them. One participant Mr. Dong wrote in his project “Hiking in the Donghu” diary:

The above quote shows how the activists produced a space of their own through designing routes and practicing them. As de Certeau notes, “their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together” (1984, p. 97). The agentic self is not only reflected on the paths chosen by the participants, no matter how difficult they can be, but is also manifested from their responses to the changes of the city. For instance, the ironic description on the new buildings as “giant transformer,” in contrast to the previously “interesting” area, demonstrates an alternative interpretation from the city residents that is antagonistic to the public discourse of modernization from the developers/government. Within this alternative discourse (Gleiss, 2015), the Donghu area that is under modernization loses its characteristics, becoming deserted and leaving the marginalized behind, who suffer from the enforcement of regeneration. Lechte (1995) comments that the distribution of urban walkers constitutes “the aleatory, ‘noise’ dimension of the city [. . .] its life blood” (p. 105). In this case, the fact that the activists chose to walk an unpopular route creates “noise,” which carries order (Attali, 1985), and establishes an alternative relation with the city landscape, revealing the negative sides of the transformation. Another participant Mr. Liu wrote in the second period of the project in 2012:

In the summer of 2010, friends and I hiked besides the Donghu coast. Two years later, new changes occurred: a bus ran through it and villages became part of the city. People and the “developers” both found it easier to arrive. I took the bus to visit the lake again and found that the lake was further from me than before.

In the future, the Donghu fishery is going to be a five-star hotel: restricted entrance, expensive hotels and “the shabby style is not allowed”; it will become particularly difficult to enter. I decided to live one night in the Donghu fishery, and was going to appreciate the lake view. It was free and would cost me nothing. . ..

In this quote, constantly reappearing images of Donghu from the past, the present, and the future are rearranged into a multi-layered story. As the memorable can become a path to dream about a place, subjectivity is “linked to the absence that structures it as existence and makes it ‘be there’, Dasein” (de Certeau, 1984, p. 109). The being-there actions can only happen in spatial practice, that is, the ways of moving into something different. By temporarily appropriating and claiming the spaces through walking through, the participant interpreted the same place with a different meaning, for instance, the five-star hotel as an intruder in the current free zone.

Meanwhile, other activities such as temporary camping or squatting in the restricted area also served as a strategy to occupy the space. One participant built a temporary camp and stayed there alone for one night while another temporarily squatted in an abandoned cabin and named it as “The Grand Hotel in the center of Donghu” for people who can come to experience the transformation process. Occasionally, the activities were organized involving adjusting the physical frame or changing the appearance of the Donghu area. Mr. Gong, for instance, moved the coast line by digging a piece of mud from it. Another participant vandalized the walls by drawing graffiti on them and moving architectural waste into the artificial park. Some of these activities can have a strong sense of mocking. Mr. Ge drank filtered water from Donghu and then drew a 1.1 meters long personal coast line by urinating. On the whole, through hiking, playing, or mocking in the movement, the participants attempted to reclaim the space through moving through or occupying it, reimagining the space through performing it, and reframing the space through changing it. More importantly, those activities had to be acted out. Thus direct action and being bodily in the space are more important than discursive behaviors. Just as Ryan (2019) says, using their own body can disrupt the established order, whereby personal space is created, which allows the individuals to feel their presence, a sense of freedom, and personal autonomy.

Producing “Counterspace”

While the city inhabitants began to appropriate the space for their own use, they started to redefine and produce their own space (Atlay, 2007). Mr. Tao, for instance, demonstrated his particular skills in playing by jumping into the water while riding a Motocross Bicycle (BMX), in a space that exists just besides the Happy Valley theme park. In Mr. Tao’s perspective, boycotting Happy Valley and producing a “counterspace” against it became his ways to resist the transformation. In fact, he believed that the Donghu project itself should be enjoyable while being inspiring.

I went to Donghu to perform. Then some media came and it became the top news online. But I didn’t really organize it for the next year. I don’t want it to become an art festival or celebration [. . .] From last year, I started to emphasize the environmental meanings behind this event: it is originated from an artistic project, which is used to protest against OCT. They now know this.

Our slogan is that our happiness doesn’t need (the theme park) Happy Valley. I will never pay to go in.

The above quote shows how urban space is practiced in the Donghu project. The spatial practices denote not only the spatial structure, but also how people perceive and perform within it, leading to its transition or extension (Wang, 2009). Not very far from Happy Valley, the BMX area is represented on the map simply as Lingbomen, constituting a conceptualized space. Practiced with fun and play through performance, the regenerated space in reality can be regarded as a space full of activity and directly lived through its new meanings regarding the protest. In a sense, the temporary occupation of the space, in parallel to the theme park, serves as a contesting site, becoming both a meaningful “counterspace” through reemphasizing the initial reasons for organizing the BMX activity, that is, being against the Donghu transformation, and a space for negotiating with the possibility of artistic ideas being commercialized.

In summary, the activists made their agency clear through creating artistic works often satirizing the process of the Donghu transformation, occupying space or producing “counterspace” by means of walking or playing, thus redefining the meanings of the Donghu space. It is noticeable that the main organizers received threatening calls from the developers and government officials, and then employed informal organization as well as encouraging the spontaneous activist actions to effectively avoid the potential interventions. The emphasis on weakening the function of formal organization in the Donghu project is thus in line with Wang’s (2012) observation that the best way to stage flash mobs is to proceed with actions before the arrival of officials who intervene in them so that risks can be reduced in the Chinese context. In a sense, participants who performed in the Donghu area momentarily reclaimed and produced a space with their alternative expressions, and thus empowered themselves to some degree.

Representing Space through Technological Use

The use of technology can expand the influence, record the influence of resistance, provide different accesses to the events that have happened, and more importantly, can “transport the acts of resistance to other places” (Frers & Meier, 2017, p. 8). Not only can the compounds of the media forms exceed the individual or group narratives but also the excess information can offer opportunities to be reinterpreted. In the Donghu case, the Internet was first the primary means of organizing the Donghu project, not only functioning to expanding its influence but also to provide some insight into the interaction between new technological means and physical space. Similarly “flash mobs” organized online act as a way of mobilizing people who are not physically close to each other and can facilitate the move from cyberspace to urban space (Molnár, 2014), once the organizer has posted event information on the Douban website to invite people to participate in it. Meanwhile, the well-maintained Donghu website records activities by date, including artistic works and the workshops organized for public discussions, all of which were formed into an archive and became a publicly accessible database of the Donghu project.

OPEN IN VIEWER

2010 Donghu project.

On the website, the production of a new map that consists of details of the artistic practices in the Donghu project became a representation of space. As seen from the image “2010 Donghu project,” the Donghu area is embodied in the form of a map with small red balloons and a list of artistic works; each balloon represents one artistic work created in that particular location and viewers can click on them to further see the details of that work on another webpage. In this way, new “inhabitants,” that is, the project participants, replaced the residents in the Donghu area; its natural landscape and buildings are transformed into lines and artistic works. Moreover, the website with its red balloons and webpage that needs a balloon to be clicked to view creates a developing relationship with viewers, which invites them to explore and reimagine the Donghu area, leading to a reflection on the plan of transformation.

As Wang (2009) says, rather than being regarded as a completely dominated space, representations of space can also become a way of contesting a site since the rebels also need to master abstractness as well as a way of representing knowledge and perception. In this case, the newly created map that identifies what has happened in the Donghu project intervenes in the original social relations embedded in the map designed by the urban planners, which becomes a meaningful alternative way to represent the Donghu area. The produced space thus not only serves as a tool of thought and action,” but also “a means of control, and hence of domination” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 126), which deeply involves in the physical interactions thus generating new meanings and interpretations. Indeed, the Donghu project failed to stop the city transformation. It nevertheless serves as a typical example of artistic protests in China whose impacts are felt beyond the regional level. Not only did the early stage of this project appear in the national level media, but the project in progress was discussed by artists in the art institutions or conferences in Beijing, Nanjing, or other areas, and was also included in the “Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China” digital project created in Hong Kong and made into a relevant video in a MOOC (massive open online course) for teaching purposes. The artists who were active in the project and gained fame elsewhere would also lead people to look at this project, who became more aware of those spatial conflicts in urban transformation. More importantly, the Donghu website became a site for accessing the deployed tactics and strategies as a reference for potential protests. However, there still remain problems such as the circulation was relatively circumscribed to art professionals or students, which demonstrates one limitation of such art projects.

Conclusion

By presenting the case of “Everybody’s Donghu,” this paper discusses the practices of resistance to urban transformation in China. As Mr. Deng, who is one of the project participants as well as a founder of a youth autonomous space, said, the present system does everything in its power to prevent people from effectively expressing themselves in public places, even avenues and parks in China. While it is risky to lead a street protest, the possibilities of peaceful acts of resistance are explored. The deployment of art has thus become a useful means or tactic in these activities, not only reducing the threat from authoritarian representatives, but also opening the possibilities to conduct individual resistance and increase individual awareness in terms of gaining the freedom of speech and the right to reshape cities.

Different practices of resistance against a dominant order often employ diverse aesthetics and modes of operation, and can alter the meanings of a place (Frers & Meier, 2017). These redefined places are then included into the activists’ messages (Routledge, 1997). In the case of the Donghu transformation, the meanings of the Donghu area, a contested site for different groups, have thus been altered. Mr. Li, the organizer of the Donghu project, believed that it was a failure in terms of ceasing the urban transformation. Indeed, not only does this sense of failure come from failing to stop the whole Donghu transformation plan, but also from failing to mobilize the villagers to fight against the demolition, which reveals the limits of resistance in China in terms of reaching a large group of people. In what is both an authoritarian and economically booming context such as China, the deployment of art in movements can easily be perceived as being rather elite or as leading to an organization mainly consisting of artists as a distinct group separate from the people who directly suffer from the consequences of the protested activity, unless those artists can match their aims with those of the affected people or help them to reemphasize their subjectivity. However, art can provoke the creativity of people, hence the spatial consciousness of a wider community to imagine the public space. In this scenario, when art encounters the political, it becomes a means for action. While art may lack the ability to directly change the status quo, it can provide a space of negotiation against the operations of those economic, cultural, and political aspects, which can become one of the most effective forms of action in the contexts under restricted political control. In the Donghu case, by temporarily appropriating public space or producing “counterspace,” the activists empowered themselves to challenge the political participation constrained by the privilege of capital and the dominated institutional relations. More importantly, the Donghu project, together with the use of the Internet, provides an alternative discourse to the official discourse of national modernization. While the Donghu protest becomes meaningful by being constantly mentioned with other types of artistic protest, ² it gives participants experience of tactics in activities without an organizational base and highlights the meanings of resistance on an individual level and loosely collective level in particular. In China, those actions can be the seed for actual political protest.