The Resilient Bond With Zhujiajiao: (Re)making Community in a Chinese Tourism Town

Introduction

Despite the widely acknowledged ambiguities in its definition and theorisation, the notion of community demonstrates ongoing relevance in public, academic, and political discourse in this global age (Delanty, 2010; Phillipson, 2007; Studdert, 2006). Community remains a vital field of inquiry, particularly in relation to its value in providing a variety of lenses through which to explore the dynamic interplay between individuals and society without overlooking the collective level of social life (Amit and Rapport, 2002). Social scientists have thus produced substantive studies of community life and wider social changes over different historical periods and at various global sites. Notably, places that have undergone drastic local transformations, such as urbanisation (Lewis, 2016; Pow, 2007), migration (Chavez, 2005), deindustrialisation (Mckenzie, 2012; Mollona, 2009), or natural disasters (Mulligan, 2015), have drawn enormous attention. In much scholarly debate, the development of tourism is argued to have diverse impacts upon local residents and their communities (Sherlock, 2002; Ying and Zhou, 2007). Importantly, infrastructure refurbishment along with increasing numbers of tourists and other tourist-oriented activities may transform how residents make sense of their community (Kim et al., 2013). This article aims to unravel the continued appeal of community through exploring the accounts of residents living in a Chinese tourism town – Zhujiajiao – where people’s interpretations and experiences of community have been irrevocably reshaped due to the development of tourism and fast-paced urbanisation.

In the Chinese context, community (shequ) began to be used by the first generation of sociologists during the 1930s under the major influence of community studies in the USA. During this period, community was viewed as the epitome of broader society, and key elements in researching Chinese communities included people, the places where they live, and the form of their life and culture (Bray, 2006). Having disappeared from public and academic discourse when the discipline of sociology was abolished by the Communist Party in the 1950s, the term community has re-captured public attention as a central component of official discourse since the 1980s. Specifically, ‘community’ was adopted by the government to play a key administrative role at the grass roots level through policy programmes such as ‘community construction’ and ‘community service’ (Shieh and Friedmann, 2008). As a result, Western literature about community in contemporary China has been mainly about strategies of urban governance (Bray, 2006; Lin and Kuo, 2013) or the power dynamic between community members and the state (Heberer and Göbel, 2011; Tang, 2015). However, this article suggests that the concept of community requires more nuanced understandings beyond viewing it as a form of self-governance or governmental intervention.

Although the vocabulary of community did not frequently appear in residents’ accounts, there is a strong sense of attachment to Zhujiajiao and a desire to maintain the similarity among them. Our participants often highlighted their ‘authenticity’ as Zhujiajiao locals and expressed pride in their collective home. Therefore, we seek to bring to light how individuals in Zhujiajiao actively (re)construct bounded collectivities through negotiating various resources that uphold their sense of community. We argue that, in Zhujiajiao, community is maintained and recreated through residents’ interpretation and mobilisation of shared memories, local relationships, and material connections with places, which are informed by both traditional cultural values and also the rapid socio-economic transformations associated with tourism. By illustrating the complicated and sometimes ambivalent experience of living in a tourism town, this article also intends to contribute to local policy and tourism planning, especially in terms of promoting sustainable region-based tourism in historical towns and benefitting local communities and cultures (State Council of People’s Republic of China, 2018).

Rethinking community

It could be fair to say that sociologists’ criticisms of ‘community’ are as great as their interest in this notion. As Bell and Newby (1978: 21) suggest, the concept of community has been the concern of sociologists for more than 200 years, yet a satisfactory definition appears as remote as ever. Until now, community remains an elusive and contested notion while manifesting its contemporary relevance to a variety of social groups around the world (Gu and Ryan, 2008; Jensen, 2004; Mulligan, 2015; Sherlock, 2002). Traditionally, community was often interpreted in relation to homogeneous and stable groups of people or objectively defined residential areas (Dench et al., 2006). Throughout post-Second World War community studies, one of the central themes has been that a strong attachment to place not only generates dense social networks but also upholds a strong sense of collective identity (Macdonald et al., 2005). Due to the ever-deepening level of globalisation and increasing mobility, it has been argued that people’s experience of community has been greatly distorted (Phillipson, 2007). Researchers focusing on British working-class neighbourhoods, for example, have noted a prevailing discourse of community fragmentation and feelings of loss among long-standing local residents (Dench et al., 2006; Mollona, 2009). Nevertheless, ‘community continues to manifest itself in the details of everyday life’ (Blokland, 2017: 8), probably deriving from what Delanty (2010: x) notes as ‘a worldwide search for roots, identity and aspirations for belonging’ in this increasingly unstable, mobile and risky era.

Contemporary community studies have adopted a variety of approaches to (re)conceptualising community: interpreting it as being defined through daily interactions (Chavez, 2005), an ongoing process of communication (Delanty, 2010), regenerated through collective narratives of the past (Lewis, 2016), an alternative form of governance (Jensen, 2004), or made through mundane and ordinary local activities (Neal and Walters, 2008). In the context of this article, we seek to engage with the recent rethinking of community as being primarily about everyday practices and social relationships (Studdert and Walkerdine, 2016a, 2016b; Wills, 2016). Rather than being a ‘thing’, community is ‘a primary, interdependent sociality rather than the imagined, aspirational, bounded or selective community’ (Neal et al., 2019: 72). According to Studdert and Walkerdine (2016a), central to such an approach is the foregrounding of relationality and sociality as ‘the primary building block of the meanings-in-common that create and sustain our being-ness’ (p. 617). They propose an investigative analytic that pays more attention to how community works than to what constitutes a ‘good’ community. This is also the perspective powerfully advocated by Blokland (2017), who observes that ‘we perform community through daily urban practices, through these practices we develop shared experiences and shared symbols’ (p. 29).

At the same time, understanding community as relationships and practices allows us to closely examine reconfigured social ties in different localities under rapid socio-economic changes. For example, Edwards’ (2000) ethnography of Bacup, a post-industrial northern English town, finds that the town provides an indispensable role in providing residents with ‘roots’ even though the relationships between community, belonging, and kinship have largely been reshaped. Roots contribute to connecting individuals to their relational and spatial pasts by offering a reliable feeling of security and continuity. More recently, Lewis (2016) illustrates that narratives of the past among older residents of East Manchester ‘operate as a medium through which urban forms of social relatedness are enacted today’ and ‘enable individuals to stress a sense of commonality between themselves’ (p. 924). In a paradoxical way, disrupted community and place-based relationships can be regenerated through sharing memories and feelings of loss. These studies convincingly demonstrate the significance of place to contemporary communities despite increased uncertainties in everyday lives (see also Bennett, 2014; Degnen, 2016). They also shed light on repositioning community in social relationships that are multidimensional and constantly remade through ‘located and embodied performance and practice’ (Wills, 2016: 644).

Interpreting community as relational practices in this way fits with the conceptualisation of Chinese communities as webs of social relations (Fei, 1992). These personal networks are individual-centred, interrelated circles produced by one’s social influence, and underpinned by mutual familiarity. In Fei (1992) Xiaotong’s classical work From the Soil, he explains that

Our pattern is not like distinct bundles of straws. Rather, it is like the circles that appear on the surface of a lake when a rock is thrown into it. Everyone stands at the center of the circles produced by his or her own social influence. Everyone’s circles are interrelated. One touches different circles at different times and places. (pp. 62–63)

Therefore, Fei’s theorisation of Chinese community is in line with the emphasis on relationality and sociality in much of the work cited above. That is, community is constantly reproduced through place-based and face-to-face everyday interactions; it is ‘a condition of thick – but always plural, hybrid, interrelational – sociality’ (Neal et al., 2019: 82). Nevertheless, such a traditional scene of rural community in China, underpinned by Confucian ethics and a strong sense of localism, have been profoundly reshaped by the process of industrialisation, urbanisation and in the context of Zhujiajiao, tourism. Similar to disrupted social ties in many Western post-industrial communities, people’s experiences in both urban and rural communities in contemporary China have undergone significant changes (Fleischer, 2007; Liu et al., 2010).

More importantly, ‘community’ in the contemporary Chinese context often designates a mode of grass-roots governance led by Residential Committees instead of being associated with social groupings (Tang, 2015). In academic and political discourse, community is generally interpreted as a form of state administration that invokes ‘a wide but specific repertoire of governmental interventions’ (Bray, 2006: 546). As a result, the processes during which residents interpret, construct, and live with communities have remained an under-researched area despite substantive studies of Chinese community. Meanwhile, existing studies of tourism communities have mainly focused on the power relations among different stakeholders, considering the intense government involvement in tourism planning and management in China (e.g. Wu et al., 2017; Ying and Zhou, 2007). Most studies are limited to a general description or categorisation of local communities’ reactions, rather than critically exploring community identity and place construction under the impact of tourism. One of the exceptions is Gu and Ryan’s (2008) study of place attachment and identity among hutong residents in Beijing. But, in general, few studies have unpacked the diverse social, cultural, and historical baggage carried by local residents, whose community life has been significantly shaped by tourism-related development.

In this article, we intend to investigate how local residents have played a central role in recreating Zhujiajiao community in a social context where ‘community’ is often interpreted as a basic unit of administrative organisation. It therefore makes a theoretical contribution to the analytical importance of relationality and sociality in the recent rethinking of community from a Chinese perspective. By doing so, this article also contributes to extending the current debate around Chinese tourism communities through positioning community members as active agents rather than passive objects of state governance. This is also a particularly salient issue given the sparse attention paid to the complex meanings of community in the existing literature. If, as Ryan et al. (2011: 761) suggest, ‘the impacts that tourism has on communities are highly localised in time and place’, it is of vital importance to reposition residents’ community practices and relationships at the centre of analysis.

The research setting and methods

This article draws on data gathered during a larger study that looks more broadly at how long-term residents’ and entrepreneurial newcomers’ sense of community in Zhujiajiao has shifted in light of rapid tourism development. It seeks to explore how ‘original’ residents and newcomers practise community (differently) in their everyday lives, and the various strategies they use to sustain, negotiate, and reconfigure community identities under the dramatic transformations brought by tourism. More broadly, it attempts to shed light on academic and public debates around community and tourism development in similar areas across the world. In this article, we only tackle the issue of community as articulated by long-term residents.

To achieve these goals, we adopted an interpretivist, or constructivist, stance that allowed us to engage with Zhujiajiao residents as active agents. Rather than examining the configuration of community with existing categories or scales, we regard our role as being to construct ‘responsible knowledge’ of community together with participants (cf. Skeggs, 1997). This means treating participants’ narratives and experiences as valid resources for generating knowledge (Gray, 2003). Participants’ accounts were therefore ascribed epistemological privilege in this research, but we were also careful to remain self-reflexive and critical throughout the research (England, 1994).

Considering our position that the construction of community is significantly linked to the physical, social, and historical features of a place, we provide a brief description of Zhujiajiao. Zhujiajiao water town is a township in Qingpu District of Shanghai. While similar ancient water towns are not rare in the peri-Shanghai area, the popularity of Zhujiajiao as a tourist site is enhanced by its proximity to the dense population of Shanghai and a variety of transportation networks (Figure 1). From 2004 onwards, the Qingpu Government, as the primary investor in Shanghai Zhujiajiao Investment and Development, took the major responsibility for tourism planning and management in the town (Huang et al., 2007). In the same year, Zhujiajiao ancient town was officially approved as a highest-level national tourism site and was selected as one of the ‘Characteristic Towns in China’ in 2016. Such rapid development and the national and international recognition of Zhujiajiao are the reasons why we chose it as the fieldwork site for this study.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Location of Zhujiajiao.

With over 1700 years of history, Zhujiajiao has a number of distinguishing features that make up its picturesqueness and unique natural and cultural heritage. Historically, it was a central market for the retail and distribution of material goods. The past prosperity of Zhujiajiao benefitted significantly from several rivers and canals crisscrossing the town, especially Caogang River. Until now, 36 ancient stone bridges can still be found, among which Fangsheng Bridge (over Caogang River) is the largest five-arch stone bridge in Southeast China. Along the rivers, the famous North Street, recently developed Xijing Street and seven more long streets provide a tour of local food and customs as well as a sense of antiquity and idyll. These streets were also lined with a variety of ancient structures, including the widely known Kezhi Garden. These attractive parts of Zhujiajiao are not only landmarks among tourists but were also crucial points of reference for community construction among residents during our interviews.

The fieldwork was mainly conducted in the summer of 2017, during which we interviewed 37 long-term residents and 30 immigrant tourism entrepreneurs and employees. We also conducted several days of participant observation at various spots across Zhujiajiao. Among the local residents, 34 interviewees were born and bred in Zhujiajiao and three women had settled in the town at a young age through marriage. But these three women all clearly identified themselves as ‘locals’ (bendiren), potentially due to the enduring influence of patrilocal traditions in China (Stacey, 1983). Interviewees’ ages ranged from 25 to 76 years, with the majority over 45. While middle-aged and elderly interviewees were generally educated to middle- or secondary-school level, most of those under 30 had a bachelor’s degree. Interviews were semi-structured with open-ended questions. Specifically, we invited local residents to talk about the past of Zhujiajiao, their views of local tourism development, plans for future life along with other everyday experience of living in Zhujiajiao. Many of the questions were designed not to use the term ‘community’ directly, since the term might be unfamiliar to some participants or evoke their suspicion that we were associated with the local authority. However, the strong attachment to Zhujiajiao and community sensibility could still be discovered from participants’ narratives.

All the interviews were conducted in Chinese (Mandarin or Zhujiajiao dialect) and fully recorded. After transcribing all the interviews into Mandarin, we translated selected quotations into English for analysis, including those used in this article. Subsequently, we applied thematic analysis to each transcript to identify both common views and distinct cases. These grouped data were then subjected to further examination in order to achieve a deeper understanding of participants’ accounts. Gradually, some recurring themes started to emerge. In the following section, we move on to analyse the complicated and dynamic ways through which local residents work on and live with their community on an everyday level.

Shared memories and narratives of the past

Among Zhujiajiao’s residents, having affective and vivid memories of the locality constitutes an essential part of maintaining a strong identification with the community. Having witnessed and experienced successive waves of transformation in the surrounding neighbourhood, shared narratives of the past serve to uphold coherent selfhood and a resilient sensibility of relating to Zhujiajiao. In this sense, remembering is a crucial way by which people can forge a sense of belonging (May, 2017). The value of their geographical location is particularly salient for those who articulated that they were ‘born and bred’ in Zhujiajiao. Our findings reveal that community is partly reproduced by emphasising a sense of connection to the history of the town, particularly through sharing memories of previous local lives and retelling how the physical environment has changed over time.

Many participants could detail embodied knowledge of the physical surroundings during their childhood. WW’s (25) story provides a convincing example in this respect. While the bond of many older residents with the community was based on their lifelong residence in Zhujiajiao, WW represented a group of younger generation Zhujiajiao locals, who expressed a deep attachment to their hometown. As WW (25) affectionately recalled,

We kids just played in the lanes and alleys, because everyone lived near each other. You know, the lanes were very narrow. So … we just popped in and out of each other’s houses. It’s just so convenient […] I remember one of our neighbours living opposite to us. He worked in the Shanghai Volkswagen company and earned a good salary. He often brought pork, beef or watermelons to us. And I often dropped into their house to play with his son. It felt good.

WW’s narrative vividly illustrates how local landscapes and material structures inform individuals’ community sensibility. While all the narrow lanes, old houses, and watermelons might usually be something laid down in the memory, they were all inscribed with special meanings when WW reflected upon his social identity as a Zhujiajiao local. Although the development of tourism has brought marked changes to the architectural structure of Zhujiajiao, residents’ previous experiences of living in this place help to sustain an enduring identification with the community. Rather than becoming largely irrelevant, place is central to people’s sense of community and implicated in webs of relationships through its function as ‘sensuous, embodied and emotional geography’ (May, 2013: 138). Later in the interview, WW told us that he had worked in central Shanghai for a while before returning to Zhujiajiao as a policeman: ‘My previous job was good. I enjoyed it. But I just wanted to come back. I knew I would come back sooner or later […] Only Zhujiajiao feels like home’. Therefore, a temporary dislocation from Zhujiajiao actually reinforced WW’s emotional bond with the community. For WW, it is precisely through building a relationship with Zhujiajiao that he comes to form a sense of coherent selfhood.

WW’s narrative illustrates that Zhujiajiao residents’ reconstruction of community remains closely bound up with memories of the place. As many participants stressed, their understandings of community and collective identity were circumscribed within the geographical territory of Zhujiajiao. Among a variety of local landmarks, Caogang River was frequently drawn upon in participants’ accounts of past experiences in Zhujiajiao, which was seen as an ‘inalienable gift’ that has been passed on to them (cf. Bennett, 2014). Caogang River appeared to be a key element of residents’ personal and social memories, linking them with their past selves and also increasing community solidarity. Many participants shifted the personal pronoun of their stories from ‘I’ to ‘we’ when talking about the river:

Mrs. Shao (48): Yeah, we all swam in Caogang River when we were little. It was a natural pool! We also caught fish and shrimps.

Baozhen (60): We swam in the river and played beside it. We also drank the water there. The river used to be so clear and clean. Older boys jumped into the river from Fangsheng Bridge and we girls looked on. It was great fun.

Therefore, shared memories of Caogang River provide stable resources for defining Zhujiajiao community. Although many residents complained about the water pollution in the river caused by tourism-related activities, their common joyful memories of it were impressive. By emphasising similar embodied relationships with the river, many residents regenerated Zhujiajiao as a cohesive community in their accounts. Meanwhile, participants’ stories that started with ‘we’ also shed light on Fei’s (1992) observation of a traditional Chinese community, where ‘each person’s “present” contains not only the projection of his or her own past but also that of the whole group’s past’ (p. 55). In Lewis’ (2016) study of residents living in East Manchester, she similarly finds that ‘narratives of the past operate as a medium through which urban forms of social relatedness are enacted today’ (p. 924). Our research in Zhujiajiao also shows that, rather than being a passive form of nostalgia, remembering and retelling are productive social practices that continue to be central to the way in which people make sense of their present community.

During the interviews, we were frequently told stories about neighbourhood transitions and changing local landscapes brought by tourism and broader economic development. For many local residents, it is precisely their ability to recount how the place has changed over historical periods that enables them to maintain and remake Zhujiajiao community. For example, when describing their experiences of growing up in Zhujiajiao, many participants enjoyed teaching us about the past of Kezhi Garden, which is now one of the town’s landmarks. Mr Yang (55) recalled, ‘Kezhi Garden used to belong to the Ma family, a local landlord. After the Liberation War, it became our Zhujiajiao middle school, and then, after the Opening Reform, an attraction when developing the tourism industry’. Here, Kezhi Garden works as an example of what Meusburger et al. (2011) call ‘mnemonic devices’, which keep elements of local culture in storage, and are also a crucial medium through which residents’ personal life histories can be narrated and traced. As Dashi (50) said,

We locals all know this. We used to study in Kezhi Garden, the Ma Family’s Garden. That used to be Zhujiajiao middle school. When I was at school, I needed to walk across half the town to Fangsheng Bridge. I’d cross the bridge and then that was Xijing Street, the newly developed tourism zone now. It meant I passed every famous spot. You know, I walked across the whole of Zhujiajiao town. I know everything here.

By detailing the historical transitions of Kezhi Garden, Dashi was able to highlight his embodied knowledge about and deep emotional connection with the place. While tourism development has reformed Zhujiajiao community to a certain degree, residents like Dashi indicated a sense of pride at having experienced these dramatic changes. Dashi’s lived memories of Kezhi Garden were mobilised as identity-forming resources that were handed down from the past self to the present self, in relation to other local residents and within the community’s history. The long duration of their residence enabled these middle-aged and older residents to articulate their ‘experience of authenticity’ (Jones, 2010), which serves to enhance a collective reinterpretation of the community.

Social interactions and relational practices

Despite their fond memories of the past, Zhujiajiao residents tended to orient such narratives towards the present and evoking the future. Most of our participants reacted positively to the waves of change occurring in their hometown, especially in relation to improved living standards and local infrastructure development. Hence, we suggest that their account of the past is better seen as an ‘action of communing’ that serves to uphold mutual similarity during the process of doing Zhujiajiao community (Studdert and Walkerdine, 2016b). Notably, many participants described frequent neighbourhood interactions in their mundane community lives. For example, Mr Lu (76) said,

We … actually our life is quite fulfilling. Like, we go to the park early in the morning and then go back home for breakfast. After that, we go to the public library to listen to traditional storytelling […] We also dance. There’s a dancing club. So we organise dancing sometimes, just to relax. There’s also a reading group organised by the Residential Committee, and we participate in that too.

Mr Lu has lived and worked in Zhujiajiao throughout his lifetime and firmly stated that ‘I wouldn’t go anywhere else’. During the interview, he told us enthusiastically about former ways of life in Zhujiajiao and could even detail many people’s biographies and their family networks. For Mr Lu, the idea of community is constantly animated through the intersection of memory, people, and places rather than a form of imaginary. Moreover, some of the social organisations and leisure groups, despite being organised by the Residential Committees, serve to facilitate place-based relationships beyond their institutional function. It is in such social sites of everyday encounters that the feeling of togetherness emerges and maintenance of community occurs. Similarly, Mr Guan (52) said, ‘I won’t leave Zhujiajiao to my son’s place. We have everything here, you know, different dancing groups and also Tai Chi in the park. It’s just two minutes’ walk from my home. I can fully enjoy myself’. Zhujiajiao residents’ relational construction of community is in line with the emphasis on practices in conceptualisations of conviviality (Neal et al., 2019) and the prioritisation of relationality and sociality as a vital approach to community (Blokland, 2017). The feeling that ‘Zhujiajiao community works’ is not merely about emotional attachment to the past or imagined connectedness but is embedded in the present and reinforced through mundane practices of sociality and conviviality. While these local relationships could be fragile or contingent upon changing levels of involvement in the organisations where they were formed, many of our participants constantly stressed their daily effort in sustaining the community and the satisfaction they achieved during this process.

The value of place-based, face-to-face interactions is not restricted to the elderly population but is also expressed by younger participants as well. For example, Bao (25) told us,

As long as you live in Zhujiajiao, gradually you’ll make many friends […] Like me, if I walk to Xijing Street that we just passed, I’ll probably need to say hello to everyone. Both streets could have been walked through in 20 minutes, but it’ll take me two hours.

Although some social ties have been destroyed as a result of the increasing outmigration of local people, many young people have actively developed new networks of relations with entrepreneurial newcomers driven by the economic opportunities offered by this tourism town. Amit and Rapport (2002) have argued that studies of community have witnessed a ‘mutual shift from an emphasis on actual social relations and groupings to symbolically demarcated categories of identity’ (p. 45), and thus propose that more attention should be paid to the everyday practices of community. Our analysis supports their argument by demonstrating how a tourism community, characterised by drastic local development and fractured social ties, maintains its continuing appeal to residents through the doing of relationships. The processes of adopting, experiencing, and making relational connections in everyday lives are imprinted onto the practices of community construction and recreation. Bao’s narrative also illustrates the setting of traditional Chinese society, where people highly value their familiarity with a place, with each other, and with the whole community (Yang, 2001). Thus, conventional customs and local values also play an integral role in supporting people to maintain mutual familiarity and thick attachment to their community, albeit having been reworked in the contemporary context. Social interactions in community-making need to be understood as a stock of diverse personal relations, some of which are rather fragile and flexible while others may be more reliable and stable.

While we have addressed the social aspect of community as relational practices, narratives of Zhujiajiao also denote a symbolic boundary (Cohen, 1985). At times, existing social relations are adopted as counter-resources to elaborate upon the distinctiveness of Zhujiajiao’s community. As Qiuwen (52) put it, ‘Zhujiajiao locals are different from those retail tenants from the outside. They aren’t honest or trustworthy, you know, those rich but arrogant tenants. Our Zhujiajiao people won’t be like that however rich we are’. And Laolu (70) differentiated Zhujiajiao from Shanghai downtown: ‘Shanghainese don’t even talk to their neighbours, you know. Unlike Zhujiajiao, where your friends are everywhere. You can drink tea and chat with your neighbour after dinner’. Most of our participants place enormous importance on their geographical location and cultural environment, which provides a space of security and conviviality (Bauman, 2001). Such narratives are partly shaped by the imaginary of what a ‘good community’ should mean and look like, but they are also situated in everyday realities. The local development brought by tourism seems to have boosted residents’ sense of pride or even superiority over newcomers to the town and have enhanced community solidarity. Although some residents highlighted neighbourhood transitions affected by tourism, the sense of similarity between them is simultaneously reaffirmed by drawing on relational boundaries.

Material connections between people and community

In Zhujiajiao, long-term residents work on and live with community through a range of place-based memories and social relationships. But community does not stand alone as an obscure or intangible notion: it is also implicated in the connections between people and material resources offered by Zhujiajiao. As we have explored, participants’ narratives of the past are often framed within the local environment and in relation to specific material objects. Furthermore, participants also described their relationships with Zhujiajiao in a pragmatic way and interpreted community in terms of financial concerns, especially housing. We suggest that such material connections between people and the locality are a particularly salient issue in understanding Zhujiajiao community. Traditionally, attachment to the land is seen as the origin of Chinese culture, shaped by the long history of agricultural economy (Yang, 2001). Land was what people relied on in every aspect of their lives, and thus connoted a sense of safety, comfort, protection and, most importantly, the symbolic meaning of home. Alongside the process of modernisation, rapid urban development, and the rise of a commercial housing market, such a cultural glorification of the land has gradually evolved into a proliferating belief in the importance of owning one’s own apartment (Wang and Murie, 1999). The dramatically rising price of housing in large cities like Shanghai has also transformed home ownership into a form of financial investment and a signifier of one’s superior social position (Fleischer, 2007).

The pivotal social, cultural, and economic meanings of housing and the land were seldom questioned by participants. Many of them appeared to regard it as a matter of fact that, as long as they own housing in Zhujiajiao, they undoubtedly belong to this tourism town. Qiuwen (52) commented, ‘Of course I’ll continue to live here. I bought my apartment here and my home is here. Where else should I live?’ Jiang (29) similarly replied, ‘Now my apartment is here, I won’t think of going to other places unless there’s a perfect opportunity. Otherwise, why should I leave my home in Zhujiajiao?’ What emerges from these comments seems to be a chain of equivalences between the ownership of an apartment, home, and community. While previous studies on housing in the Chinese context have interpreted home ownership as denoting a private space away from state control (Pow, 2007) or an individualised, middle-class lifestyle (Fleischer, 2007), our participants’ accounts reveal more than that. The notion of community is viewed as an extension of home among private housing owners in Zhujiajiao; in turn, having one’s own apartment is treated as an indispensable material resource that buttresses these residents’ attachment to the local community.

In other cases, interviewees who formerly lived in the peripheral areas of Zhujiajiao had benefitted from the expansion of the town and the subsequent property rights redistribution. Rather than becoming landless farmers disadvantaged by urban sprawl (Liu et al., 2010), the development of tourism in Zhujiajiao means that these residents may have opportunities to become the ‘privileged rentier class’ through renting out their compensated housing (He et al., 2009). A number of participants, who had been compensated with two or three apartments/houses due to land use transformation, indicated that the rising price of rental properties in the peri-Zhujiajiao area was the key factor recreating their bond with the town. Therefore, the extent to which people are able to develop and make use of material connections with Zhujiajiao can be uneven and unequal. Such practices are not only anchored in the temporal and relational dynamics of everyday life but also shaped by structural constraints and institutional power.

Nonetheless, for many participants, the possession of material connections with Zhujiajiao often needs to coexist with other relationships in order to generate and sustain a sense of community. It is crucial to unravel how ‘the material’ is actually perceived and lived out by local residents. For example, Mrs Yao (64) appeared to be very satisfied with her current life in Zhujiajiao and wished to continue being a part of the community. During the interview, she complained about the crowds of tourists and environmental pollution brought by tourism, but also displayed great loyalty to Zhujiajiao:

My daughter’s family live in the Qingpu district, and they’ve bought an apartment. I myself own three compensation apartments here. I don’t need to worry about my daughter, I have my own apartment, and I have time to hang out with friends. I feel very happy indeed.

As can be seen, owning three apartments due to land reallocation in Zhujiajiao is a key factor in Mrs Yao’s attachment to the community. However, it is about more than just the housing. For Mrs Yao, her daughter’s stable life phase and her personal network also contribute significantly to feelings of satisfaction. Mrs Yao’s articulation of her daughter deserves particular attention because, in contemporary China, good parents are constructed as morally responsible for supporting their adult children in a range of aspects (Li, 2014). This perception is rooted in Confucian teachings about family harmony and integration and still has purchase in present-day China (Cao, 2018). As a result, a few older residents stated that they might leave Zhujiajiao to look after their grandchildren or move to live near their adult children. Thus, the degree to which people value and draw on their material connections with the community may shift over time and across the life-course. People’s connections with the community are constantly made and remade and this is always a dynamic process constitutive of relationships (Wills, 2016). Zhujiajiao community, which has experienced waves of tourism-related development, demonstrates how the interplay between different relationships have both sustained and transformed the idea of community.

Conclusion

This article has explored local residents’ (re)constructions of community under the profound changes wrought by tourism development in Zhujiajiao. Following the recent call to relocate community in relationships and practices (Neal et al., 2019; Studdert and Walkerdine, 2016a, 2016b; Wills, 2016), the article shows that, from a Chinese perspective, people may maintain a resilient bond with their community in spite of dramatic local redevelopment. While highlighting the historical and relational aspects, our research into community-making narratives and practices in Zhujiajiao also pay close attention to the material dimension of community. During the process of remaking community, residents justify, negotiate, and make use of a variety of relationships that bring memory, social ties, and material places together. These are perceived as central to the ways in which people feel a continuing attachment to Zhujiajiao, while supporting them to cope with increasing uncertainties in their daily lives. Such processes are not completely subjective but are enmeshed in material realities and cultural discourse.

While repeated studies have approached community in contemporary China as a form of urban governance or authoritative control, this research has shown that community does more than that. As we have explored, Zhujiajiao residents emphasise the importance and particular value of community, although its meaning is multifaceted and contingent. In this way, this article makes an original contribution to the existing literature by suggesting that Zhujiajiao community is maintained and recreated through residents’ engagement with personal memories and collective pasts, everyday sociality and conviviality, and the materiality of the locality. These practices provide reliable resources that residents can draw upon to experience mutual similarities and cohesiveness, which resemble social connections in other global sites such as Dodworth (Degnen, 2016) or California (Chavez, 2005). Therefore, this article calls for renewed attention to community in contemporary China in order to explore how and why this notion still matters to people in the context of growing individualisation, everyday risk, and personal mobility on a global level (Amit and Rapport, 2002).

Furthermore, our research provides a nuanced account of the meaning of community from a Chinese perspective, thus contributing to the ongoing project of reconceptualising community as being primarily built through relationality and sociality (Studdert and Walkerdine, 2016b). If community is enacted and constantly reproduced through everyday social encounters and inter-personal relationships (Studdert, 2006), it is of vital importance to investigate the specific social and cultural contexts within which a community resides. The analysis shows that Zhujiajiao residents exhibited a limited sense of nostalgia compared to much of the literature on communities undergoing drastic local reconstruction and development (e.g. Lewis, 2016; Mckenzie, 2012). Rather than expressing ‘a yearning for the past, a sense of loss in the face of change’ (Bonnett and Alexander, 2013: 392), most people in this study felt satisfied with the present and envisaged the future with (even more) positive views. We have discussed that such a perspective is closely linked to people’s material connection with the community. For residents who have benefitted from the expansion of Zhujiajiao as a tourism town and the subsequent housing relocation, additional financial income further reinforces their identification of the place as ‘home’ and their attachment to the community. However, our analysis also shows that access to shared memories, social networks, and material resources is unequal, and they may compete or overlap with each other depending on individual differences. Therefore, the community of a specific tourist destination should be understood as something to be experienced, lived out, and practised; it is a dynamic and open-ended process of being and making.

Since community identification and place attachment affect residents’ attitudes to tourism (Gu and Ryan, 2008), the findings of this study also have important policy implications and provide a renewed perspective for thinking about the well-being of the host community in other global tourist destinations. To a large extent, Zhujiajiao remains a place-based, or what Mulligan (2015) call a ‘grounded’ community. Specifically, long-term residents draw on collective values and cultural traditions to (re)produce their sense of community. Their intense reliance upon housing and intimate networks also upholds the collective community identity against profound tourism-driven transformations. In the Chinese context, where a ‘top-down’ pattern of tourism development is common, understanding how residents interpret and negotiate local transformations can offer valuable insights into how to develop sustainable tourism and engage with local communities.