Urbanization on the Chinese Frontier: The Political Stakes of “Progress”
AAG CFP: Chicago 2015
In China’s national minority populated frontier regions, development in general, and urbanization in particular, is often viewed through one of two lenses: positively, as a process that allows for material and social development that contributes to increasing living standards and opportunities; or cynically, as a calculated state strategy to weaken ethno-national identities, spread contemporary Han culture to minority regions, and lock minorities into an urban world that structurally disadvantages them. Paradoxically, the city potentially could allow for any and all of these possibilities.
Because the city invokes such a complex web of factors potentially positive and negative, it is apt to ask what is at stake in frontier urbanization: On whose terms is urbanization enacted? What does it mean to benefit from urbanization? Will urbanization really bring the homogenization both desired and feared by different stakeholders?
This paper panel seeks to analyze these questions and their greater social, political, and geo-political repercussions in China’s urbanizing border regions.
I am hoping to draw together perspectives based around different theoretical and methodological approaches, for instance but not limited to:
· Cross-ethnic research
· Studies on migrants
· Ethnographic research
· Demographic analysis
· Discourse analysis
· Household or workplace surveys
· Theoretical problems of studying the Chinese city
· Theory concerning minority affairs and classification
Please send paper abstracts to Andrew Grant at angrant@ucla.edu through October 31st.