Abstract
The forced eviction campaign in the wake of a fire in Daxing District in Beijing in November 2017 provides some evidence signalling a shift from a technocratic-utilitarian model to a more assertive, image-conscious and totalist model of spatial control and population governance. Yet, although it was not possible for anyone to mount effective legal or political resistance to the campaign, protests in its wake suggest that faced with even harsher forms of control, citizens might solidarize in novel ways, articulating their legal rights and shared political identity as Chinese citizens across social barriers.
In November 2017, a large fire in the peri-urban township of Xihongmen in Daxing District on the Beijing outskirts caused 19 deaths. 1 Following the blaze, the municipal government announced an eviction and demolition campaign, ostensibly, to address the problem of dangerous illegal structures that had led to the fire. However, urban government departments on several occasions also spoke of ridding the city of its ‘low-end population’ (低端人口), a phrase that refers to generally poorer, less well-educated (registered) rural residents and (unregistered) rural migrant workers. 2
The eviction campaign was carried out with swiftness and violence by eviction enforcement squads that included but were not limited to the police. Tens of thousands of township inhabitants were reportedly evicted in a matter of days. 3 The media organizations and social media users reporting on the campaign captured images of the belongings left behind by people who had been forced to move out – eloquent testimony to their experience of rupture, displacement, and dispossession. Narratives of individuals detailed how they had been thrown out and also showed how in many cases not only their homes but also their workplaces had been destroyed.
The case of the Daxing evictions raises the question of how land and built environments are shaped by the changing relations between the party-state and its people in Xi Jinping’s ‘New Era’. This study, which attempts to provide some initial answers, relies on a variety of sources, including a large body of literature on Chinese urbanization, especially since the 1990s, and news and social media reports at the height of public attention in the immediate aftermath of the Daxing fire, as well as follow-up media reports offering insights into different perspectives on the campaign, with overseas and social media reports focusing on the impact of the campaign on evictees and official reports emphasizing new policies and pilot projects portrayed as serving rural–urban integration. The author also visited the site of Xinjian Village in August 2018 and conducted anonymized semi-structured conversations with a Daxing evictee activist and a journalist who had investigated the evictions at the time they occurred in July and August 2018. Additionally, the author drew on her understanding of evictions in downtown as well as rural/suburban Beijing through field visits to three sites and numerous conversations with evictee activists in Beijing and elsewhere from 2005 onwards, including a case study of an urban village demolition and relocation in a coastal eastern city in 2009. 4
On this basis, the article offers two arguments. On the one hand, the Daxing case and accompanying policies indicate a shift in the governance of land and urban and peri-urban spaces and of the people inhabiting these spaces. This shift is discussed in the next two sections on reform-era developmentalism and Xi-era spatial ordering. On the other hand, as discussed in a further section on civic and evictee advocacy, the Daxing case can also serve as an important prism through which to understand how citizens affected by oppressive practices manage to remain resilient and – in some instances – resist in the Xi era. The Daxing case thus marks a rare moment when advocates from different spheres of China’s segregated society came together to find a shared language of citizenship; when marginalized communities in the rural–urban ‘in between’ space the party-state has assigned them rose up and asserted what I suggest is a Chinese version of the idea of the ‘right to the city’. Even though these advocates were not successful in preventing the party-state from realizing its totalist spatial ambitions, the disruptive persistence of their efforts is an enduring aspect of governance in the New Era.
Reform-era authoritarian developmentalism
Although in some ways unique, the Daxing evictions are a product of the factors that have shaped the Chinese process of ‘urban development’ since the beginning of the reform and opening era, as an aspect of authoritarian developmentalism, here understood as the promotion of economic growth to enhance performance legitimacy. 5
The expansion of cities and the migration of people from the countryside into cities have been central to China’s economic success. 6 Urban property development has contributed greatly to GDP growth and to the generation of government revenue. 7 Bifurcated land tenure and ‘population management’ systems have been a necessary condition of such development. They have ensured party-state control over the most essential resources required for urbanization, while at the same time incentivizing property development by business entities.
The law prescribes that urban land is state-owned, whereas rural and suburban land is owned by collectives. There is no private ownership of land, but there are private usufruct or use rights. These use rights, limited to specified terms of time, as well as to types of permissible land use, can be held by private individuals (urban land-use rights) or by rural households (rural land contract management and rural residential land-use rights). Property developers generally acquire urban land-use rights from the urban government which represents the state as the statutory owner of urban land, 8 after the urban government has either ‘resumed’ possession of the urban land it already owns, or expropriated collective owners of the rural/peri-urban land to be used. Current occupants are evicted to ‘clear’ the land for construction. In the course of this process, the state usually expropriates the owners of any buildings that may be on the land, 9 which are demolished to make way for development.
According to the legal rules governing takings, the state can take land only if this would serve the public interest, if there is compensation and/or resettlement of former owners or tenants in state housing, and if procedural requirements are fulfilled; additionally, land-use quota restrictions are in part designed to preserve land considered to be rural. In reality, virtually every property development project is expected to lead to economic growth and thus deemed to be serving a public interest purpose, however tenuous an interpretation of public interest this may be. 10 The rules governing process and compensation are frequently flaunted, as many case studies have documented and as public statistics about complaints and litigation over evictions also suggest; one common technique of avoiding some of these rules is by claiming that the structures to be destroyed are illegal, as was done in the case of the Daxing evictions.
The fact that changes in land use in the process of urbanization are premised on converting rural into urban land by government decision entrenches the party-state’s control over how land is used by whom, and differential compensation standards, following separate sets of rules governing urban and rural takings, further enhance the importance of a general distinction between the rural and the urban. 11 This distinction, in turn, has served to legitimize land-use changes as a process in the course of which the destruction of rural buildings and displacement of its occupants can be portrayed as progress to reach a higher level of development, even where rurality is a fiction, because the built-on land has been already integrated into the cityscape. 12 Suggesting that urbanization equates to improvement, the distinction thus further entrenches the notion that the rural is inferior, allowing for a definition of development in civilizational as well as in growth terms – a point that became especially important in the Daxing evictions, as discussed later on.
Based on metrics heavily dominated by GDP growth, which are reflected in official performance assessment indicators, evictions and demolitions have long been considered justifiable in utilitarian terms. As captured in the documentary Bulldozers, Paving Stones and Power: The Chinese Mayor, the fact that officials’ performance is assessed by their ability to implement vast demolitions, relocate residents, and initiate and supervise reconstruction shapes their attitude towards evictions. 13 Official language tends to frame evictions as bargains and eviction conflicts as a matter of cost–benefit analysis, underplaying the coercive setting in which they ‘negotiate’ with evictees, with the latter generally having no legal power to refuse to move. 14 An evictee’s reluctance to accept the demolition and relocation agreement offered is therefore easily interpreted as evidence of unreasonable greed. Evictee protest can be dismissed as ‘selfish’, even when it takes the form of suicide, as in the 2010 case of Tang Fuzhen. 15 The official perspective thus reduces conflicts arising in these contexts to conflicts of economic interest (利益), centred on land understood as a resource, even though cases such as that of Tang point to far more complex experiences of dispossession, dislocation, and non-material grievance. Since officials are authorized to make decisions about proper land use, the accuracy of the utilitarian calculus they apply can never be called into question; indeed, as has been widely documented, attempts to challenge government decisions in this context can lead to suppression and retaliation.
The perceived or real successes of urban development can be seen as part of a narrative of development under strong governments as ‘benevolent dictators’. 16 In Ronald Gilson and Curtis Milhaupt’s view, such benevolent dictators benefit from the advantages of their political systems which concentrate power and suppress dissent, because they can design and implement growth strategies more effectively than democratic countries which usually have to deal with legal and political challenges to their decisions. Benevolent dictatorships can thus make up for weaknesses in their systems, such as weak rule of law, entailing weak protection of contractual and property rights, which are conventionally regarded as key to economic development. 17 A particularly important aspect of China’s growth strategy was that ‘the Party embedded high-powered incentives for growth within its own organizational structures’. 18
The theory of benevolent dictatorship crucially rests on the claim that the regime is promoting economic advantage of some sort. The slogans accompanying evictions typically exhort people to submit to a utilitarian logic, according to which it may be necessary to sacrifice individual interest for the greater good. This utilitarian perspective requires that the policies and measures used in urban development contexts be assessed in impersonal terms, assuming that every person’s interests count equally. The majority’s supposed interests are prioritized over those individuals who are required to make sacrifices, to be sure, but not because the members of the majority are considered superior per se.
However, a utilitarian developmentalist justification has also informed the official discourse of ‘population quality’, which has facilitated discriminatory attitudes. Many official and semi-official studies concern themselves with the question of how to raise the quality of the rural population (提高农民素质), 19 and organized government programmes were supposed to teach new urban dwellers from the countryside how to be civilized urban people. 20 The exclusion of rural migrant workers and their children from crucial public services such as education is indirectly also justified by their ‘low quality’, even though it is part of the developmentalist logic that the presence of low-quality people in cities must be accepted as a necessary feature of urban life. Conversely, within limits, the developmentalist party-state tolerates the democratic disorder of spaces created on the fringes of urbanization, even though these spaces are transient and the accommodation they offer is precarious. As Carlo Inverardi-Ferri has observed, there are ‘two different levels of urbanisation’, namely, ‘a process mediated by the state that operates inside the administrative boundaries of the city’ and ‘an unofficial [process] which goes beyond these boundaries’. 21
Together, the rules classifying types of land and types of citizens shaped the reality of party-state-driven urbanization in the two or three decades from the beginning of the urbanization process in the late 1980s until the end of the Hu–Wen era. A frequently used term was ‘gaming’ (博弈), which seemed to stand for the notion that competing or conflicting interests must be addressed through negotiated outcomes, taking rules into account (up to a point). Despite the problems inherent in its utilitarian perspective, the fact that the party-state was willing to negotiate with evictees at all in order to ‘persuade’ them to move out was relevant because it tended to slow down the eviction process and allow evictees some opportunities to defend themselves.
As the reform and opening era evolved, the party-state increasingly considered public international law norms such as the rights and principles articulated around the concept of housing rights, in particular the right not to be forcibly evicted, 22 in an effort to address evictees’ wrongs. Relevant legislation, including the provisions of the Constitution changed in 2004, 23 of the 2007 Property Law, 24 and of laws and regulations specifically governing land administration and evictions (takings), was drafted to incorporate protective rules such as the limitations on what constitutes lawful takings, the requirement to provide compensation and resettlement arrangements, public consultations, and the regulation of the eviction process. For example, the 2011 Regulation on Expropriation of Buildings on State-owned Land and Compensation required a public consultation process and expressly prohibited government agencies from ‘relocating through violence, threats or other illegal means such as suspension of water, heat, gas, power supply and road access in violation of the regulations’. 25 Proposals for the revision of laws regulating forced evictions in the Hu–Wen era, indeed, called (apparently without irony) for ‘harmonious demolition and relocation’. 26
The implementation of protective legal rules, such as they were, remained extremely flawed, and the repression of attempts to defend evictees’ human rights further exacerbated these flaws. Many nevertheless argued that gradually, at least in and around larger cities, and partly as a result of a wider process of promoting rule of or by law, eviction processes became less uncivilized and more lawful towards the end of the reform and opening era. 27
As discussed in the following section, the party-state’s attitude was to change in the context of the Daxing evictions and the wider campaign for rural–urban integration of which it was a part.
Autocratic spatial ordering and social cleansing in the Xi era
The evictions in Daxing District largely affected land situated at an unofficial level of urbanization, in Inverardi-Ferri’s terms, but at least partly played out in a ‘village enclave’ or ‘urban village’ (城中村), that is on land classified as rural, but enclosed by land classified as urban. This land had lost whatever rural character it might once have possessed and was now used to provide cheap housing in the urban periphery of Beijing. For example, Xinjian Village in Daxing District, Beijing, the part of Daxing where the fire had broken out, had originally been established in the 1950s, when villagers from Beijing’s northern Changping District were resettled. Through a number of developmental phases, including in the early 2000s the establishment of a factory on ‘rural’ land owned by shares, Xinjian Village had become part of a new-built peri-urban landscape. 28 It was visually set apart from its environment by an ornate gate leading from the main road into what appeared to be a main alley of the village and at least partly surrounded by a wall. Like in other urban village enclaves, it combined residential buildings, small ground-level shops, and street stalls selling food and other items to be found in the residential areas of any large Chinese city. During the author’s visit to what remained of Xinjian Village in August 2018, the immediately adjacent land was apparently built on at the time of the evictions, and some of the land in the wider environs was used agriculturally. 29
The Daxing residents affected by the November 2017 and subsequent evictions included members of landowning suburban collectives and tenants – typically young migrants from other regions working in Beijing. As one Daxing evictee explained, another group consisted of second-time evictees, that is, people who had been resettled to high-rise apartments following an earlier eviction. 30 All these groups were part of urban Beijing, just as the land they lived on, despite legal fictions that might designate them as rural. The status of these inhabitants within the city reflected patterns of segregation shaped by law.
Within days after the fire in Xinjian Village, many Daxing residents found notices requesting them to evacuate within time limits as short as one to three days. In many cases, evictions were purportedly justified on grounds of alleged fire hazards or other violations of building regulations. 31 In some documented cases, the eviction notice consisted in an undated handwritten document.
On 25 November, this notice went up: ‘Tenants: please clear out by 26 November before 5 p.m. or there will be consequences’. 32
By invoking fire safety, the campaign avoided the application of some of the domestic legal rules against violent evictions, although prima facie conduct such as the wanton destruction of personal property alleged in reports would still constitute crimes under Chinese law. The campaign, as reported, also violated obligations articulated by UN treaty bodies to refrain from illegal forced evictions, 33 because it involved ‘permanent or temporary removal [of residents] against their will’ from their homes ‘without the provision of, and access to, appropriate forms of legal or other protection’, such as, at a minimum, the opportunity to salvage possessions and resettlement by the state. 34
As the low-end population discourse mentioned earlier well illustrates, these wider rights violations were carried out against citizens whose low social status, explicitly relied on to ‘justify’ the campaign, made them especially vulnerable. In the effort to clear the space as effectively as possible, the government sought to pit landlords against tenants. For example, Mr Zhang, speaking to the US-based Radio Free Asia station, explained that his landlord in the Xinjian Village areas of Daxing District was told that if landlords expelled their migrant worker tenants – including Mr Zhang – the government would compensate them with payments of RMB 100,000 per expelled household, otherwise they would only get RMB 80,000 per household. 35 Radio Free Asia’s report, which details the economic burden this caused to Mr Zhang, adds that the migrant worker evictees, on the other hand, were to receive no compensation at all, because they were mere temporary tenants. 36
In the space of a few days, urban villages such as Xinjian Village were changed from bustling neighbourhoods into zones of total destruction, where not a single building was left standing. Former residents’ personal items were buried under the rubble left behind by demolition teams who continued their work until the entire area was virtually flattened. The cab driver who, in August 2018, took this author to Xinjian Village said that there was ‘nothing there, nothing to see’. 37 On approach, it turned out that the ornamental gate at the roadside entrance to what was once the village was still standing, still bearing the name of the village. A new, high wall surrounded the area and both sides of the curving lane that must once have been the village’s main road, but now seemed to lead nowhere. Underneath the gate, there were three mobile stalls selling street food and cheap everyday items, perhaps for a clientele of demolition and/or construction workers on the site. A hole in the wall a few metres down the road allowed a glimpse onto the wide, uneven, empty expanse of rubble, partly covered by protective green plastic netting, which was all that was left of the razed buildings.
By classifying the buildings as fire hazards, the authorities had created a pretext for circumventing the rules and practices of ‘harmonious’ demolition and relocation of the Hu–Wen era. However, fire or building hazards could not justify any changes to the ownership status of the rural land affected. Indeed, there is no indication of the area’s transformation into state-owned urban land. But conveniently, another legal reason emerged to justify its use for commercially valuable purposes. As news reports published from May 2018 onwards indicate, the land of Xinjian Village and other areas in Daxing District had become part of a pilot project known as ‘Marketization of Rural Collectively Owned Commercial Construction Land’ which, in turn, was based upon a decision made in the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CCCPC) in November 2013, one year into Xi Jinping taking office as General Secretary. Part of the decision in section 11 stated: (11) Establishing a unified urban construction land market. The rural collectively operated construction land shall be allowed to be transferred, leased, and owned by shares, entering the [real estate] market at the same price as the state-owned land, on condition that planning and land-use management requirements are complied with. We will narrow the scope of land acquisition, standardize land acquisition procedures, and make the procedures for land-expropriated farmers affected by land expropriation more rational and better standardized and safeguarded. We will expand the scope of compensated-for uses of state-owned land and reduce the allocation of non-public interest land for non-public-interest [uses]. We shall establish a land value-added income distribution mechanism that takes into account the state, collectives, and individuals and increases personal incomes in a rational manner, and we will improve the secondary market for leasing, transferring and mortgaging land.
38
The declared intent of the decision of the Central Committee was to ‘deepen reform’, and section 6 suggested that the decision aimed to ‘unify’ mechanisms for rural and urban development. A state media news article published in January 2019 appeared to celebrate the pilot project as having led to the emergence of rural collectives as a new supplier of construction land, alongside the state. 39
The rhetoric of unified development, equality of land prices, and equivalent status (of the state and rural collectives as supplier) would suggest that the reforms of the pilot project aimed to allow the rural population to benefit more from property development by no longer making urbanization contingent upon urban government expropriation of rural collectives, thus addressing longstanding concerns about iniquities towards people classified as rural. A commentator in February 2019 claims, for example, that the ‘transformation and reconstruction’ of urban villages under current policies in Beijing ‘shows that the government’s aim is to improve rural householders’ living conditions so that they can assume and enjoy the same living style as urban households’. 40 Another commentator specifically extolled the possibility of rural collective members selling rural construction land that has ‘entered the urban market’ as an advantage of the reforms. 41
The reality on the ground at least of the pilot project sites located in Daxing, however, indicates something far more different. First, as detailed earlier on, the actual transfer of the land in question into the (nationwide) market for construction land succeeded the comprehensive eviction of all residents, including members of land-owning collectives, tenants, and relocated expropriatees, for fire and building safety reasons, and the destruction of all properties on the land, apparently without taking stock of what was to be destroyed, negotiating compensation of owners, and resettling residents, or even the opportunity to salvage personal possessions (‘moveable property’ in legal terms). In effect, the eviction campaign thus served a familiar purpose – the clearing of valuable land by the demolition of (privately) owned buildings and dislocation of their occupants.
Reports state that members of rural collectives, such as Mr Zhang’s landlord mentioned earlier, were offered compensation of RMB 80,000 to RMB 100,000 per household depending on their willingness to cooperate. Tellingly, this standard lump sum compensation offered for each household is not calculated on the basis of the value of the buildings destroyed or, indeed, any land-use rights that may have been lost or transferred. Nor is there any indication that the members of landowning rural collectives would receive any further benefits based on their status as collective members. While the 2013 CCCPC decision speaks of transfer and lease of rural construction land, there is no evidence of Xinjian Village or its individual villagers engaging in any such transactions. 42 At the time of writing, the village land remains vacant and it is not clear whether it has entered the urban construction land market, or what this would entail for individual members of rural collectives or owners of buildings destroyed. Moreover, the eviction was based on the implementation of a non-justiciable party decision. In the absence of explicit, formal expropriation decisions, residents and building owners in Xinjian Village were unable to challenge their evictions by relying on the provisions of the Constitution, Property Law, and further laws and regulations applicable to ‘normal’ eviction cases, making legal (let alone political) accountability even harder to achieve.
Second, it was soon evident that the Daxing evictions were part of a campaign to address not so much problems with building safety as the challenges evicted residents posed to a government intent on transforming the city in line with ambitious plans for population management. The authorities’ agenda was soon exposed, when copies of official documents using the expression ‘low-end’ began to circulate. One report, for instance, contained an official document that discussed the importance of ‘preventing a large number of low-end migrants entering the city from outside’. 43 A white-on-red banner on a wall, also posted online, read ‘Everyone has responsibility for cleaning out the low end’, leaving it open to readers to determine what or who low end stood for. 44 Another official document, apparently from Shijingshan District in western Beijing, spoke of ‘cleansing out and rectifying the low-end population concentrated in 480 building blocks’. 45
As noted earlier, demolition and relocation campaigns elsewhere have also tended to disregard the plight of evicted migrant worker tenants considered to be the ‘lowest of the low’; their frequent moves from one demolished ‘village’ to another to-be-demolished one has been accepted by many as a constant feature of migrant worker life in big Chinese cities. Such mobility has added to their social vulnerability and exploitability, often euphemized as migrant workers’ contribution to and sacrifice for the building of the nation. 46 In these contexts, intersectional discrimination – being discriminated against on multiple and mutually reinforcing grounds – has been a longstanding problem. 47
What stood in some contrast with the long-familiar rhetoric of ‘raising the quality of the rural population’, however, was the declared intent of ‘cleansing’ and expelling these population segments. However hypocritical the discourse about raising the population quality might be, it generally stopped short of suggesting that these ‘low-quality’ elements should be simply driven out of the cities where their lives were centred. Instead the discourse preferred to dwell on the need to elevate them to higher educational, civilizational and moral levels.
Official discourse in the wake of Xi Jinping’s New Era has shifted concern from the quality of citizens to concerns, on the one hand, with a new spatial ordering, and on the other hand, with policies of social cleansing, both with the purpose of creating a new capital that would fit the New Era. As Bingqin Li points out, in 2014 Xi Jinping had declared that Beijing should: adhere to and strengthen the core functions of the capital as a national political centre, cultural centre, international exchange centre and science and technology innovation centre, thoroughly implement the strategies of Humanistic Beijing, and Technology Beijing and Green Beijing and strive to build Beijing into a world-class harmonious and liveable city.
48
That the authorities’ intention was to drive out specific kinds of residents deemed ‘sub-standard’ was well evidenced, as scholar Zhang Lifan noted, by the absence of arrangements for re-housing the Daxing evictees.
49
Zhang attributes this to the municipal administrator, Cai Qi, who aimed to reduce Beijing’s burgeoning population to under 23 million by 2020:
50
Perhaps the fire propitiated the realization of this plan … If this were about increasing safety, they ought to have made arrangements for resettling the tenants and Beijing residents more safely, but [clearly there were no such arrangements]. These past years, the centre has kept talking about how they wanted to reduce the non-capital-city functions [of Beijing], leaving only four central functions of the capital, namely: its function as a political centre, cultural centre, centre of international exchange, and science and technology innovation centre … This is basically an imperial-era ‘emperor city’ idea; all those who are related to the emperor’s activities can stay, but all the others must go.
51
It is this apparent intent of social cleansing, connected to a newly assertive political rhetoric of party-state governance, that set off wider public discussion and criticism.
Asserting citizenship, claiming the right to the city
The evictees of Daxing were quick to dismiss the authorities’ rhetoric of safety and to heap scorn on the language of cleansing the low-end population. Their comments, reported by international media, also pointed to the forced redistribution of valuable land underpinning the eviction campaign as – in the words of one resident-homeowner – ‘it seems that Beijing City can only live by selling land’. 52
Evictees as well as sympathizers and independent commentators were especially critical of the civilizational rhetoric deployed by the government to justify its policy, pointing out that such rhetoric departed from the established patterns and practices of development because it aimed to cleanse the city of its low-end population. 53
A few immediately affected evictees and their sympathizers and supporters raised remarkably similar points, clearly objecting to being denigrated. An evicted shop owner speaking to Reuters remarked bitterly that ‘in 2008 it was “Beijing welcomes you” but now in 2017, “Beijing hates you and chases you away”’. A woman added, simply, ‘Why are you treating us like this? It’s not as though we were foreigners. We’re Chinese too!’
54
A sympathetic vendor who had frequented the neighbourhood for many years made similar observations but gave a more explicitly political dimension: I’m really against that expression. If we’re low-end, does that mean you’re high-end? Low-end, high-end, we’re all people. Everybody deserves respect. That rich and strong nation – that’s theirs. The Chinese people have stood up – that’s they who’ve stood up. We’re just crawling on the ground, crawling and not daring to raise our heads.
55
Visual advocacy was also used to great effect. Images of vast areas of destroyed houses, strewn with personal property, and dispossessed and in some cases seemingly destitute former residents, thrown out of their homes in Beijing’s freezing temperatures, were circulated by evictees and citizen journalists. They did not fail to make an emotional impact. The artist-activist Hua Yong, for example, spent days producing video footage, including interviews with evictees to document the aftermath of the fire and eviction and demolition processes, and pictures documenting official uses of the expression low-end population. 56 Some of his footage also documented the police guarding the demolished areas, reinforcing the impression of what one foreign reporter likened to a war zone. 57
Cartoons further developed these themes. For example, one cartoon circulated via Twitter and other social media showed a fierce-looking worker wearing a red armband with the word ‘management’ (管), wielding a shovel at a dozen or so frightened-looking low-end figures huddled together. A speech bubble reads, ‘You must leave for the sake of social stability’, and a text underneath the low-end people reads ‘People [presenting] a high risk to public safety’. 58
Middle-class Beijingers, reacting with shock at images and film footage such as those produced by Hua Yong, spoke to relatively free news media outlets such as the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, voicing their concern and sense of injustice. Widely read social media figures joined in, including – somewhat ironically – the outspoken property tycoon Ren Zhiqiang, whose endorsement of a broad definition of public interest in earlier years seemed much aligned with the reform-era party-state’s vision. Ren commented that the forced removal of migrant workers from Beijing was a ‘deluded’ way of addressing Beijing’s urbanization challenges. 59
These comments were echoed and articulated in carefully constructed arguments by academics and public intellectuals. A group of over a hundred public intellectuals signed an open letter criticizing the eviction campaign and calling for its suspension, as well as for arrangements offering shelter to the evictees, accountability of those responsible for dangerous illegal constructions, lawful demolition of illegal structures, and cessation of the official use of the term low-end population. The government’s actions and rhetoric in the context of the Daxing evictions, the letter argued, were against the spirit of the rule of law: The hardship they experience saddens us as their fellow Chinese citizens, and we believe that any person with empathy will feel for them and be sad for them. These labourers are our relatives from the countryside; they are people like us. They are just barely coping in Beijing, here to make a living, to send their children to school and realize their families’ hopes. They have made contributions to Beijing and deserve respect and good treatment.
60
Echoing the evictees’ argument ‘We’re Chinese citizens, too’, the open letter clearly invokes the normatively ambitious discourse of gongmin (公民), the ‘public person’ associated with intellectuals of the late-imperial era such as Kang Youwei and political figures such as Sun Yat-sen, as well as with the European enlightenment, 61 in juxtaposition with renmin (人民), the concept of ‘the people’. Whereas renmin is a collective term preferred in Leninist and Maoist rhetoric, gongmin denotes an individual citizen whose relationship with the state is defined by rights. 62 By invoking the concept of gongmin, the authors of the open letter not only express solidarity with the evictees, but also with a liberal political theory encompassing equal individual rights that should be protected against abuses of public power.
Constitutional scholar He Weifang took this argument further by asking sardonically how the status of ‘high-end population’ might be assessed – by official position, or income, or educational achievement – hinting at a sense that no person, regardless of his/her current standing with regard to any of these criteria, is effectively protected against abuse and that everyone’s situation is therefore precarious. He also pointed out that the government had no legal authority to expel these migrant residents: the government had violated the rights of physical integrity and property without any authorization from the legislature, and the government was in violation of the ‘central ethical values’ it was so assiduously propagating. 63
Public discussion continued despite government efforts to suppress it. On 10 December 2017, International Human Rights Day, evictees took to the streets unfurling banners and chanting slogans including ‘Violent expulsion violates human rights!’ 64 By this time, however, less than three weeks after the campaign had triggered protests, the expression low-end population had already been filtered out of the government-controlled Internet as a ‘sensitive’ word; and the ‘grass-roots’ activist who had been most important in investigating and exposing the eviction campaign, Hua Yong, had fled the city to avoid being detained. 65
Responses to evictions in large urban centres such as Beijing have long led to systematic and large-scale attempts on the part of evictee resisters to coordinate responses. 66 However, with the exception of human rights defenders specifically focused – for example, in their work as lawyers – on the plight of evictee resisters, wider public attention was generally restricted to rare, individual cases, such as the suicide protest of evictee Tang Fuzhen in 2010. In the wake of the Daxing evictions, this changed, as much larger segments of Beijing’s ordinary middle classes and public intellectuals who had previously shown no or little interest in the problem of evictions came forward to express concern and solidarity.
In the context of these wider responses to the Daxing evictions, Chinese citizens have articulated the ideas that have elsewhere been discussed as a right to the city. In the words of Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre, the idea of the right to the city meant protecting people from being ‘thrown out of society and civilization into some space which has been produced solely for the purpose of discrimination’, a statement that captures the predicament of many Chinese evictees. 67 Adopted and reinterpreted by the global human rights movement, the phrase right to the city has come to be used as a term to oppose hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion in cities, especially in cities with great socio-economic disparity and burgeoning migrant populations. The point being made is that one’s residence status, citizenship, or provenance ought not to exclude certain residents from holding the right to the city, or from rights vis-a-vis the city of their residence. This point is validated by the United Cities and Local Governments Committee on Social Inclusion, Participatory Democracy and Human Rights, which affirms its commitment to ‘principles of socio-spatial justice and full participation’ and seeks to promote ‘a new social contract at city level’. 68
Understood in this way, the right to the city is intrinsically connected to a model of liberal-democratic governance which is now more clearly opposed than at any other point in post-Mao China. In calling for (greater) respect and inclusion of the evicted Daxing residents, their fellow citizens seemed to be articulating a civic ideal denied not only to these evictees, but also to Chinese citizens more widely, as well as a shared anxiety about the precarity of their rights as Chinese citizens.
Conclusion
This article has argued that the Daxing eviction campaign provides some evidence signalling a shift from a technocratic-utilitarian model of governance to a more assertive, image-conscious and totalist model, and that such a shift is in line with a more assertively practised and propagated form of party-statehood in Xi Jinping’s New Era, to which the image of Beijing as the nation’s capital is so important that it must be specially controlled. The Daxing eviction model exacerbates the marginalization of low-end people in peri-urban, nominally rural spaces, and it reflects a system seemingly less interested than before in protecting the equal rights of citizens than the Chinese party-state in the post-Mao reform era. If correct, this analysis would have further implications for the developmental model China is propagating as part of its ‘China solution’, because pro-party legal scholarship has begun to emphasize the party’s ‘dual mission’ for the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, as well as the ‘shared future of humankind’ (人类命运共同体). 69
From the perspective of the party-state, the Daxing eviction campaign may have worked fairly well. Compared with the tactics of slow ‘managed decline’ that can be observed in more open societies, it is evident that the Beijing government was facing far weaker resistance, because neither the legal system nor civil society presented meaningful obstacles. The campaign also suggests that migrant workers’ low status played an important role not only in justifying the evictions and demolitions as a cleansing effort, but also in weakening resistance.
Yet as this article has also tried to show, protests in the wake of the campaign also suggest that the new rhetoric of social cleansing could produce unintended longer-term consequences. Like a few other demolition incidents that had captured the public imagination, 70 the Daxing evictions sent a signal that citizens could – or might – yet solidarize across social barriers, even in the highly repressive climate of the Xi leadership, and perhaps all the more forcefully, because they see how they, too, might eventually be treated with similar disregard for their rights.