Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2014. x, 225 pp. (Figures.) US$75.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8014-5282-6; US$22.95, paper, ISBN 978-0-8014-7935-9.
Any visitor who stays in mainland China for a while might wonder about the country’s seeming stability. Ordinary Chinese rarely conceal their grievances about increasing inequality, corruption, and the near death of society as we imagine it. Media reports about peasants’ struggles against land expropriation as well as workers’ protests against labour exploitation have dramatically increased over recent decades. Nevertheless, these class-specific incidents are isolated while everyday conflicts remain “contained,” relatively peacefully, in local neighbourhoods.
The Government Next Door is a significant contribution to interrogating this puzzle. With a sophisticated eye to neighbourhood politics, the book shows how political legitimacy is cultivated and grounded among local residents with various interests and status. Neighbourhoods, the primary research sites of this book, serve as “a window on the flexibility and variations that characterize governmental practices in present-day China” (5). They are places where social structure, ideology, and policy focus are elaborated and concretized through grassroots governances and everyday interactions.
Luigi Tomba analyzes China’s changing political practices and rationalities by focusing on two types of neighbourhoods. One is a working-class neighbourhood in Shenyang, the one-time cradle of socialist industrialism in northeast China, while the other is a gated community for newly emerging middle classes in Beijing. Despite their disparate condition under the nation’s market-driven reforms, impoverished workers in Shanyang and wealthy homeowners in Beijing share in common the fact that their residential areas are no longer subject to old socialist governance of urban space. Urban workers, the one-time representatives of the socialist project, have been plunged into dispossession; their neighbourhoods have been shifted to moribund slums amidst the breakdown of the work-unit system. Middle-class professionals in newly-built gated communities insist on their autonomy from state interference while struggling to maintain their property rights and privatized space. Nevertheless, Luigi Tomba argues that the two parties’ relationships with the state have been not so much weakened as reconfigured. Laid-off workers in Shenyang’s public housing compounds are subject to state intervention and required to raise their “quality” (suzhi) in exchange for access to residual welfare and assistance. Salaried middle-class residents in Beijing’s commercial apartment complexes seek social stability and enhance their entrepreneurial consumer identity, which is beneficial to both the state and the market.
Consensus is a primary concept of this book, which provides a clear-cut analysis of the two classes’ contentious but close relationship with state governance. The concept guides us to “a space where bargaining between state and society and within society is made possible through formalized institutions, routinized practices, and discursive boundaries” (169). Neither indicative of political support nor the outcome of good governance, consensus opens a space for bargaining and contestation, in which social actors (are engineered to) accept certain hegemonic values and practices even though they do not entirely approve of the rule of the party-state. Emphasis on social order, evolutionary ideas of development, and aspirations for “modern” citizens and communities permeate a series of discursive activities such as public media, community activism, marketing strategies, and personal interactions, thus producing legitimacy for daily practices of government. The strength of this concept is that it goes beyond the dichotomy of acceptance and resistance. Luigi Tomba tries to capture the tension of state-society relations by asserting that consensus is not forced by the authoritarian regime but constructed through endless negotiations and contestations.
Chapters of this book introduce governing strategies of neighbourhood politics in Shenyang and Beijing: social clustering, micro-governing, social engineering, containing contention, and exemplarism. Each technique acts upon territory, one’s position, housing policy, activism, and one’s conduct, providing a kaleidoscopic topography of neighbourhood governance. Although the summary of each technique is kindly provided in the conclusion, I suggest that the reader not miss the vivid ethnographic descriptions and in-depth analyses in each chapter. What I found most illuminating among the various strategies described in the book was the section in chapter 3 on social engineering, which explains why the new propertied middle class never separate their love for market interests from their approval of state power. This chapter traces the formation of the “salaried middle class” as one of the foundations of the neighbourhood consensus. It delves into a selective redistribution of public assets (especially of housing) for professionals in public sectors and shows how such coordinated policy making helped to associate their interests with those of the state.
I am certain that this book will be discussed enthusiastically by scholars who engage in urban space, class politics, and governmentality in contemporary China. To stimulate this discussion, I want to conclude my review with a few remarks.
First, the analysis of neighbourhood consensus would face compelling complexity if it also includes urban village enclaves (chengzhongcun) other than working-class public housing compounds and middle-class gated communities. Full of migrants whose ties to the state are fragile and who are mostly excluded from the provision of public services, these peripheral enclaves prompt us to question how “the boundaries of a ‘consensual arena’ of interaction between state and society” (20) are to be set when local state agents struggle with a gap between the will to govern and the inability to govern.
Second, the working-class politics in Shenyang’s neighbourhood might be more dynamic and contentious than the author describes. As I argued in my book The Specter of “The People” (Cornell University Press, 2013), impoverished workers in northeast China invoke the claim of “the people,” i.e., the very language with which the party-state had once identified. This contingent claim not only legitimizes their “rightful” dependence on state paternalism, which Luigi Tomba particularly focuses on in his book, but also prevents these workers from being reduced to nameless, ahistorical “urban poor.” Neighbourhood politics are often caught in the oscillating tension between “the people” as a class and “the people” as a nation.
Finally, what kind of politics does the analysis of consensus lead us to imagine? The author writes, “What is interesting is not how much impact conflicts in such consensual arenas have on democratization or the substantial reform of China’s political system but rather how they contribute to reconfiguring the practices of power and authority” (171). Although I side with his opposition to evolutionary ideas of democracy, I still wonder if consensus cannot but remain as “policing,” borrowing Jacques Rancière’s terms, as a governing process of creating community consent, or if it has the potential to expand the realm of “the political” by invoking new forms of political imagination.
Mun Young Cho
Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea
pp. 626-628