Jun Zhang
City University of Hong Kong, Asian & International Studies, Faculty Member
- PhD, Anthropologyedit
In Driving toward Modernity, Jun Zhang ethnographically explores the entanglement between the rise of the automotive regime and emergence of the middle class in South China. Focusing on the Pearl River Delta, one of the nation's... more
In Driving toward Modernity, Jun Zhang ethnographically explores the entanglement between the rise of the automotive regime and emergence of the middle class in South China. Focusing on the Pearl River Delta, one of the nation's wealthiest regions, Zhang shows how private cars have shaped everyday middle-class sociality, solidarity, and subjectivity, and how the automotive regime has helped make the new middle classes of the PRC. By carefully analyzing how physical and social mobility intertwines, Driving toward Modernity paints a nuanced picture of modern Chinese life, comprising the continuity and rupture as well as the structure and agency of China's great transformation.
(http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140101961680)
(http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140101961680)
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The surge in cesarean section (CS) deliveries in China over the past several decades has led to significant international discussion, yet critical social science inquiry remains limited. Drawing on insights from sociological and... more
The surge in cesarean section (CS) deliveries in China over the past several decades has led to significant international discussion, yet critical social science inquiry remains limited. Drawing on insights from sociological and anthropological studies of childbirth, this article moves away from the premise that having a CS is a matter of individual choice. Instead, we treat childbirth as ground zero of a set of complex negotiations between multiple actors, and we show how the biopolitical and politico-economic reconfiguration of the process of childbirth governance from the 1990s onwards has contributed to a dramatic increase in cesarean deliveries. Combining ethnographic materials from China’s rural and urban areas with an analysis of documents and quantitative data, we argue that the surge in CS rates in post-1990s China is part of a larger globalized process of the technocratic medicalization of birth, which has had a profound impact on the normative procedures and conditions shaping the process of childbirth, including the methods and forms of knowledge guiding childbirth management. This has contributed to the increasing normalization of a highly medicalized and interventionist model of childbirth, which has in turn facilitated the routinization of cesarean procedures.
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This article outlines China's pandemic governance as an ever-changing assemblage of old and new techniques, material forms, and organizational structures over the course of three years. It zooms in on the ways in which the party-state... more
This article outlines China's pandemic governance as an ever-changing assemblage of old and new techniques, material forms, and organizational structures over the course of three years. It zooms in on the ways in which the party-state drew on and (re)combined previous experiences of handling infectious diseases, the constantly renewed technique of mass mobilization, and the seemingly high-tech and yet labor-intense digital technologies that had already permeated everyday lives in the different stages of designing and enforcing pandemic restriction measures. These changing governing practices are essential to contextualize the voices documented in this Currents collection.
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As sustainability has become a keyword for urban mobility, cycling and bicycles are often perceived as an inherently progressive force for a more environmentally friendly and equitable society. This article joins the growing... more
As sustainability has become a keyword for urban mobility, cycling and
bicycles are often perceived as an inherently progressive force for a
more environmentally friendly and equitable society. This article joins
the growing scholarship that critically examines bicycle mobility as a
socio-technical system with complex effects on urban lives. Drawing on long-term fieldwork on mobilities in the urban areas of the Pearl River Delta area in South China, this ethnography of the platform-based, bicycle-sharing programs unpacks the complex politico-economic, spatial- infrastructural, and social entanglement that has shaped this reincarnated form of pedalled mobility when China has moved away from a kingdom of bicycles to a country of cars in the past two decades. I argue that dockless bicycle-sharing programs emerged a capitalist technological fix for a socio-spatial condition produced by the process of urban transformation. Shaped by marketing strategies common in the sharing economy, bicycle-sharing companies capitalize on an ambiguous perception of public space. Yet this individualized form of mobility reproduces rather than disrupts the existing social hierarchy. This study sheds light on the importance of a socio-technical critique of the assemblage of infrastructure, capital, and technology to produce more sustainable forms of urban mobilities.
bicycles are often perceived as an inherently progressive force for a
more environmentally friendly and equitable society. This article joins
the growing scholarship that critically examines bicycle mobility as a
socio-technical system with complex effects on urban lives. Drawing on long-term fieldwork on mobilities in the urban areas of the Pearl River Delta area in South China, this ethnography of the platform-based, bicycle-sharing programs unpacks the complex politico-economic, spatial- infrastructural, and social entanglement that has shaped this reincarnated form of pedalled mobility when China has moved away from a kingdom of bicycles to a country of cars in the past two decades. I argue that dockless bicycle-sharing programs emerged a capitalist technological fix for a socio-spatial condition produced by the process of urban transformation. Shaped by marketing strategies common in the sharing economy, bicycle-sharing companies capitalize on an ambiguous perception of public space. Yet this individualized form of mobility reproduces rather than disrupts the existing social hierarchy. This study sheds light on the importance of a socio-technical critique of the assemblage of infrastructure, capital, and technology to produce more sustainable forms of urban mobilities.
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Older citizens engaging in casual choral singing in public parks-a form of "social nonmovement"-can serve as a locus to show how cultural and spatial strategies of state governance become entangled, not without friction, in a Chinese... more
Older citizens engaging in casual choral singing in public parks-a form of "social nonmovement"-can serve as a locus to show how cultural and spatial strategies of state governance become entangled, not without friction, in a Chinese city. Marginalized by the new urban economy, the choral singing participants appropriate an older socialist form of state-orchestrated public culturewhich has shaped their bodily habitus during the earlier stages of their lives-for fun and socialization. In turn, the central government appropriates this leisure form of choral singing to re-animate Party public culture as a means to secure political legitimacy and promote a harmonious society. Such state-orchestrated public culture, with its implicit spatial order, justifies mass gatherings in public spaces and legitimizes the choral participants' claim of
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How do information and communication technologies (ICTs), which seemingly bring people to a boundless world, contribute to the reproduction of the imagined community of a nation? Challenging the conventional approach that sees ICTs as... more
How do information and communication technologies (ICTs), which seemingly bring people to a boundless world, contribute to the reproduction of the imagined community of a nation? Challenging the conventional approach that sees ICTs as merely the channel through which nationalism or activism is expressed or mobilised, this article draws on anthropological and historical studies of technology to develop a conceptual mapping of the important factors that configure specific nation-bounded, ICT-centric socio-technical imaginaries. Taking as the entry point technological nationalism in the context of the Sino-American trade war in recent years and based on long-term fieldwork in the Pearl River Delta region, this ethnographic study explores how ICTs have become the lens through which educated professionals imagine China?s transition from sweat-shop modernity toward techno-modernity. This socio-technical imaginary is shaped by larger forces including the state discourse, political economy, material culture, and the platformised lifestyle, and mediated through work experience and consumer choices. Nationalism driven by this ICT-centric imaginary is subjected to state manipulation for the reproduction of political legitimacy. This study sheds light on larger conceptual questions on how ordinary citizens experience and make sense of ICTs and how such meaning-making processes sustain, challenge and reconfigure political processes.
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In the protest movement in Hong Kong in 2019, the growing influence of Mainland China was perceived to be responsible for the erosion of freedom of speech, skyrocketing housing prices, the dwindling of welfare resources, and other social... more
In the protest movement in Hong Kong in 2019, the growing influence of Mainland China was perceived to be responsible for the erosion of freedom of speech, skyrocketing housing prices, the dwindling of welfare resources, and other social issues. I suggest that assigning guilt to Mainland China for all of the frustrations of Hong Kong's residents reproduces the mystique of the power of the authoritarian regime and takes attention away from the structural violence in daily life that has led to conflict, confrontation , fragmentation, and discrimination. This article traces the historical trajectory of Hong Kong's colonial and post-handover governance and political economy to contextualize the structural violence in everyday lives. It then shows how the blame of such structural violence is put on immigrants from Mainland China, the victims of such violence.
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Late December 2019, when I booked train tickets for my trip to Mainland China ... I had not expected to have all those plans go down the drain in no time. ...I was not particularly alert or alarmed about COVID-19, even though I had also... more
Late December 2019, when I booked train tickets for my trip to Mainland China ... I had not expected to have all those plans go down the drain in no time. ...I was not particularly alert or alarmed about COVID-19, even though I had also lived through the SARS outbreak. ...Discord and divisions, which ran deep in society, found a quick excuse — as means to protect the public in times of crisis — to surface. ...As technocrats are determined to stop the virus and win the war at whatever cost, are we reproducing, at the cost of imagining a different future, the human-against-nature modernist ideology that many urban scholars have long criticized?
https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ciso.12264
https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ciso.12264
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In what ways are lifestyles in urbanising Thailand, increasingly oriented towards shopping mall’s related to the threat to the wildlife and struggles for subsistence in distant Lao hinterlands? Our article answers this question by looking... more
In what ways are lifestyles in urbanising Thailand, increasingly oriented towards shopping mall’s related to the threat to the wildlife and struggles for subsistence in distant Lao hinterlands? Our article answers this question by looking at the workings of electricity as the key infrastructure that connects these seemingly unrelated events and practices. We argue that the circulation of electricity flows along uneven channels, shift inginjury and environmental harm across international borders. This circuit is perpetuating inequality and environmental injustice in the Lower Mekong. To demonstrate this claim, we analyse the electricity sector at numerous scales and locations–the urban scale in Bangkok, the country scale of Thailand and then Laos and the local community scale in Laos. We then discuss by what means various material and social processes and actors at these different scales form this circuit. Looking at circuits of power allows us to link the story of electricity consumption with that of production, with an emphasis on their extraterritoriality, multiplicity and boundaries. Our findings illustrate the effects of this circuit on spaces far from a thought-of urban area. Furthermore, we demonstrate the ways in which these effects have produced inequality and injustice across borders
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In the early twentieth-century China, the imperial court collapsed and modern cities emerged. How did a new form of governance become materialized, conceivable, and understandable? This article presents a case study of street building... more
In the early twentieth-century China, the imperial court collapsed and modern cities emerged. How did a new form of governance become materialized, conceivable, and understandable? This article presents a case study of street building Canton (present-day Guangzhou) in the 1920s and 1930s. Drawing on discussions of material power, infrastructures, and governmentality, it attends to the role of material artifacts in creating the modern Chinese city. In particular, it illustrates the entangled emergence and development of modern streets and urban governance, a new form of governance essential to fashioning the Chinese nation-state and Chinese modernity. The unstable, evolving process of creating a new built environment provided specific, material reference points for various stakeholders to imagine and think about the modern city as governable space. This case analysis suggests an alternative perspective to urban history in China, and contributes to the broader discussion on the symbiotic relationship between urban politics and infrastructure.
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Cities have expanded both territorially and demographically at an unprecedented speed during the recent intense process of urbanization in China. This article investigates the material, discursive, and social dimensions of an... more
Cities have expanded both territorially and demographically at an unprecedented speed during the recent intense process of urbanization in China. This article investigates the material, discursive, and social dimensions of an infrastructural process that has been interwoven with the discourse and practice of urban development in the city of Guangzhou since the 1990s. It takes a 2007 public hearing concerning the short supply
of taxis on workdays as an entry point into the politics of urban infrastructure, threading together long-term changes in urban forms, the ritual dimensions of the public hearing, and taxi drivers’ downward mobility. The issue at the heart of this public hearing is a pattern of traffic flow caused by intense urbanization in the late Reform period that has led to important structural tensions in everyday life. Yet, under the official ideology of urban development, these structural tensions are de-humanized and rendered a mere technical issue of supply and shortage. In present-day China, infrastructural projects are regarded as technological solutions to a wide range of social and political issues in the process of urbanization; yet their material results often simply make these issues invisible instead. [Infrastructure; Urbanization; Taxi; Class; Mobility; China]
of taxis on workdays as an entry point into the politics of urban infrastructure, threading together long-term changes in urban forms, the ritual dimensions of the public hearing, and taxi drivers’ downward mobility. The issue at the heart of this public hearing is a pattern of traffic flow caused by intense urbanization in the late Reform period that has led to important structural tensions in everyday life. Yet, under the official ideology of urban development, these structural tensions are de-humanized and rendered a mere technical issue of supply and shortage. In present-day China, infrastructural projects are regarded as technological solutions to a wide range of social and political issues in the process of urbanization; yet their material results often simply make these issues invisible instead. [Infrastructure; Urbanization; Taxi; Class; Mobility; China]
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This article offers a glimpse into the mutually constructive process of the marking of class, family, and state in a new material world. Relying on a decade of field research, I illustrate that a middle-class lifestyle in China,... more
This article offers a glimpse into the mutually constructive process of the marking of class, family, and state in a new material world. Relying on a decade of field research, I illustrate that a middle-class lifestyle in China, increasingly associated with a car, is deeply embedded in, and in turn reproduces, the multigenerational familial relationship contoured by state reproductive policies and the new political economy. Built upon the notions and practices of care and emotions, family values are at the core of the ethical conduct of being properly middle class. Yet, familial practices, unintentionally, resonate with the state agenda that seeks to reassert traditional values as a way to deal with an aging population and to establish its soft power on the global stage. The refocus on family is not to deny the phenomenon of individualization, but rather to emphasize that it is merely part of the complex processes and assemblages in China’s own trajectory toward modernity.
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This article examines how the narratives of qilou (arcaded buildings) have changed through three very different moments over a period of almost a century. As a result, what public discourse once perceived as a new, modern form now serves... more
This article examines how the narratives of qilou (arcaded buildings) have changed through three very different moments over a period of almost a century. As a result, what public discourse once perceived as a new, modern form now serves as a symbol of traditional local culture. The metamorphosis of the qilou narratives in response to different visions, social circumstances and practices provides a good entry point for understanding the contestations and dynamics that have shaped priorities in seeing and thinking about urban space in South China. By relating subjective experiences with the physical environments, the case of qilou challenges the predominant framework of nation-state as an anchor for understanding contemporary China, and points to the significance of regional dynamics within and beyond international borders.
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China has undergone a dramatic process of urban transformation since the beginning of its reform and opening up. In 1978, two years after the death of Mao Zedong, China's urban population remained at levels close to 20 percent. By 2020,... more
China has undergone a dramatic process of urban transformation since the beginning of its reform and opening up. In 1978, two years after the death of Mao Zedong, China's urban population remained at levels close to 20 percent. By 2020, more than 60 percent of the population was living in the city and this included a large floating population of several hundred million migrants constantly moving between the country and the city. Recent anthropological research on urban life in China during this period has highlighted the breathtaking pace of urban transformation, focusing on processes of spatialization of class and the emergence of new patterns of spatial mobility and social stratification. While the rural–urban divide remains a defining feature of Chinese society today, anthropologists have questioned earlier visions of a static, territorial opposition between the rural and the urban, showing how attention to the tensions and contradictions shaping evolving rural–urban divisions and entanglements is the key to an in-depth understanding of contemporary forces of urbanization.
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This chapter explores new expectations of marriage from the parents’ perspectives, revealing parental concerns, anxieties, and frustrations about the marriage market in a changing urban environment. Some of our evidence comes from... more
This chapter explores new expectations of marriage from the parents’ perspectives, revealing parental concerns, anxieties, and frustrations about the marriage market in a changing urban environment. Some of our evidence comes from secondary sources and census figures, but most comes from hundreds of hours of fieldwork in the matchmaking corner of Shanghai’s People’s Park from September 2007 through June 2008, with follow-up interviews conducted in 2009. Our fieldwork reveals that parental matchmaking is less a residue or revival of traditional practices and more a response to contemporary demographic and economic pressures and to the parents’ strong connections to the socialist past, albeit re-articulated through the language of market. A focus on parental matchmaking therefore enables us to explore how marriage practices have been influenced by such forces as the intense inter-generational ties created by the one-child policy, the uncertainties of market-oriented economic reforms, ongoing contestation over gender paradigms, and the ideological legacies of a socialist and revolutionary past.
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We draw on and further develop Karl Polanyi's conceptualization of two different kinds of freedom: “personal freedom” and “social freedom.” We use this dialectical approach to make sense of contemporary Chinese moral debates on 996 work... more
We draw on and further develop Karl Polanyi's conceptualization of two different kinds of freedom: “personal freedom” and “social freedom.” We use this dialectical approach to make sense of contemporary Chinese moral debates on 996 work schedules as seen through the lens of two different occupational communities.