Mobilising Against Insecurity,Engaging in Local Civic Life: The Collective Action of Chinese and South-East Asian Inhabitants in a Paris Suburb

Abstract

Based on a social action research, this article discusses the collective action taken by inhabitants of Chinese and South-East Asian origin in a north-eastern suburb of Paris: targeted by violent attacks, these residents occupied the public space at the base of their residences and demanded the intervention of public authorities. In recounting the different steps of the mobilisation, this article demonstrates how an ethnocentric dynamic was created around security issues and how an ethno-spatial minority was formed within the neighbourhood and the city. It also shows in what conditions this ethno-security action transforms itself into an associative and citizen commitment within the neighbourhood and the city and modifies the perceptions of the actors, their capacity for action and their relations with the neighbourhood and with politics. At the intersection of several fields of research, including the sociology of migration, urban sociology and political sociology, the article shows how ordinary inhabitants of Chinese and South-East Asian origin participate in their neighbourhood's local civic life.

In 2017, the mayor of La Courneuve inaugurated his project, “Ville-Monde” (world-city), an initiative intended to celebrate the diversity and cultural richness of this inner suburb of Paris with more than 40,000 residents bringing together more than 100 nationalities. This political project of “living together” reflected the population changes extant since the 1990s in this working-class and immigrant-populated suburb, which is characterised by its superdiversity (Tasan-Kok et al., 2014; Vertovec, 2007). Initially attracting migrants from countries in Southern Europe such as Italy, Spain, and Portugal, there followed migrations from former French colonies in North and sub-Saharan Africa. More recently, La Courneuve has received an influx of migrants with Asian origins from countries such as China, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. This latest wave is more culturally distant from France. The diversity of the residents’ origins in La Courneuve is accompanied by heterogeneity in housing conditions and proprietorship ranging from ownership, private rental, and social housing, which results from urban renovation and social diversity policies. Such ethnic diversity reveals a new challenge for the city regarding how to help so many nationalities and different cultures co-habit in a French context marked by a state republicanism, which is officially “colour-blind” and does not recognise any ethnic or cultural community (Brubaker, 1992; Chuang et al., 2020; Escafré-Dublet and Lelévrier, 2019; Léonard, 2014). Illustrating this challenge, on the night of 13 July 2016, youths from one social housing complex used fireworks to attack a building where the majority of the residents were Chinese families. Chinese men organised a counterattack in response. This led to a fear that urban conflicts based on rivalries between ethnic minorities would intensify, as the attacking youths were perceived by both the Chinese residents and the French authorities as being “North African” and “Black,” even though the French colour-blind doctrine prevented them from being openly identified by their ethnicity. In the official and media discourse, the term “jeunes des cités” (youth from social housing projects) is used as a colour-blind smokescreen to identify these young delinquents both socially and ethnically (Fassin, 2006; Wacquant, 2014).

The growing diversity of population and living conditions in this poor suburb on the edge of Paris highlights questions relating to co-habitation, the definition and usage of urban spaces, neighbourhood relations and relationships and regarding the political engagement of the different ethnic communities. Evidently, this leads to further interrogations such as what unites and links or divides and separates inhabitants with different ethnic origins and social trajectories who live together in a neighbourhood or a city (Eric and Wong, 2003). Are we witnessing the creation of closed ethnic communities, withdrawn into themselves and a territorial, social, and cultural fragmentation as certain people lament? Must we fear and prevent community actions which, by their ethnocentric and separatist logic, necessarily exclude other population groups and communities?

The object of this article is to deconstruct these claims and to shed new light on these questions based on the study of the collective action of a group of Chinese and South-East Asian inhabitants in a neighbourhood in the centre of La Courneuve. Targeted by violent attacks, these inhabitants occupied the public space at the base of their residences and demanded more security from public authorities. By discussing the different steps and spaces of the mobilisation (Aguirre et al., 2008), this article demonstrates how a community dynamic was created around security issues and how an ethno-spatial minority was formed at the heart of the neighbourhood and the city. This study will show the way this initial ethnocentric process transformed itself into an associative and citizen commitment, altering the perceptions of those mobilised, their capacity for action, and their relations with the neighbourhood and with local politics (Chan, 2021; Hamidi and Trenta, 2020; Kalandides and Vaiou, 2012). While this analysis focuses on the inhabitants of Chinese and South-East Asian origins, precluding the perceptions of other ethnic groupings, it nevertheless helps to shed light on the city's political and associative ecosystem which favoured this mobilisation. At the intersection of several fields of research, including the sociology of migrations, urban sociology and political sociology, this article attempts to illuminate how inhabitants of Chinese and South-East Asian origins in La Courneuve participated, through their collective action, in local civic life and in the transformation of their neighbourhood.

In recent years, the field of study on Chinese immigration has seen the publication of a variety of research focusing on the new waves of Chinese migrants, on the relationship between these xin yimin (新移民, new migrants) and Chinese investment around the world (Bouhali and Chuang, 2019), as well as on the challenges these new Chinese migrants pose to the host societies in terms of the production of urban space, social integration, and cultural identity (Hatziprokopiou and Nicola, 2012; Yeh, 2014; Zhou and Liu, 2016). In contrast to the stereotype of a discrete and low-profile ethnic community, recent research has shown these new migrants’ agency and capacity for mobilising a rich repertoire of resources. At the same time, new challenges have appeared, among which is the issue of security for Chinese migrants (Tran and Chuang, 2020) as well as the surging of anti-Chinese discourses in their host societies. Several works on the mobilisation of Chinese immigrants over security in France (Chuang and Merle, 2020; Chuang and Trémont: 2013; Trémon, 2013) and in other countries (Ramirez and Chan, 2018) have documented how Chinese entrepreneurs and workers have become the targets of violence and physical attacks in blooming Chinese marketplaces. In Santiago, Chile, Ramirez and Chan observed both the rising insecurity faced by Chinese entrepreneurs and the actions they undertook to solve the problem. If the insecurity shared by Chinese migrants reinforced ethno-racial borders with the local inhabitants, a form of “conviviality” or inclusion was sought, notably by the recruitment of local security guards to look after the Chinese shops. Research in France traces the first forms of mobilisation by Chinese immigrants to the early 2010s in Paris with their demonstrations in Belleville in 2010 and 2011 and then in the wholesale trading district in the Parisian suburb, Aubervilliers with the creation of associations of Chinese wholesalers, negotiations with the public authorities for the reinforcement of the policing and the installation of a network of video surveillance cameras in the period 2010–2013. Research shows that the turning point took place in the summer of 2016, not only because of the incident in La Courneuve noted above, but more significantly with the death of Zhang Chaolin in August 2016, who was the victim of a violent attack by several young people in Aubervilliers. The murder of Zhang Chaolin revealed the intensity and seriousness of the aggression suffered by people with Chinese and Asian backgrounds working and living in the Parisian suburbs. “Prejudice kills” became the slogan of a group of Franco-Chinese associations that called for “security for all” and alerted the French authorities and society to this public problem.

Whether examining the Paris region or Santiago, Chile, these recent research papers discuss attacks on Chinese immigrants and the collective dynamics of protest and negotiation with public authorities to which they lead. They also focus on Chinese commercial neighbourhoods where Chinese shopkeepers and entrepreneurs are the principal engines of economy and could be described as socio-economic elites who are already partly organised through professional or diaspora organisations and associations with connections to the political actors at their local or national level or with those of their country of origin through, for example, Chinese diplomatic representatives and official diaspora organisations.

This article seeks to alter the focus towards the less visible activities (Du et al., 2021), played out on a neighbourhood scale (Authier et al., 2007) and carried out by a category of under-researched actors who receive less academic attention than the entrepreneurs of the Chinese diaspora (Du, 2020): ordinary inhabitants. Facing shared insecurity and violent attacks, how did the residents, whether owners or renters, newly arrived or established for more than three decades, Chinese migrants or former political refugees from Cambodia and Vietnam, mobilise and defend themselves in the neighbourhood? Without previous militant or associative experience, and lacking economic and political connections, how did these ordinary inhabitants interpret the situation and manage to find common ground and plan collective action? These questions focus attention on the experiences shared by the inhabitants and the judgements they made, as well as their capacity to act together and make common cause, be it about defining and publicising their shared problems, and the actions necessary to resolve them, such as making demands in the political arena (Cefaï, 2007; Thireau, 2013, 2020). Even if the demands about security came first, this study will show that by examining the social and urban dimensions of insecurity as well as issues of education and inequality, these inhabitants responded in their way to the local political mantra of “living together.”

By describing what ordinary people do together and what they do to each other, by showing how they are entangled in interactional and institutional intrigues, a pragmatic sociological approach provides new insights and methodological tools to the study of collective action and regimes of engagement. This approach aims at reconstructing situations without anticipating or prejudging what will happen, and by looking at and listening to the staging, the narratives and the arguments of ordinary citizens, it contributes to producing a new comprehension that differs from official or dominant versions which prevail in the media and among the public on social problems and social groups (Cefaï et al., 2019; Luhtakallio and Thévenot, 2018; Thévenot, 2006). This bottom-up and pragmatic approach also focuses attention to the temporality of the action, in particular to the events and processes which could trigger an action or serve as a framework to interpret and mobilise, and to the concrete interactions between different categories of actors which took place during these events (Sun, 2000; Ying, 2001).

The heuristic value of this pragmatic approach centred on a moment of crisis and conflict resides first in the renewed perception or knowledge it offers on people who are ordinarily invisible, subject to racial stereotypes and process of othering (altérisation in French), or only represented by their cultural and socio-economic elites. Whereas, in the United States, the field of research on Asian Americans is well established (Wong, 2017), and important quantitative surveys and qualitative studies on interracial politics and the civic and political participation of Asian Americans have been produced (Kim et al., 2001; Lee, 2002; Stoll and Wong, 2007), France's official colour-blind republican doctrine makes such studies sensitive and difficult to conduct. Pioneering work on immigrants and their descendants such as the Trajectories and Origins Survey conducted by the French National Institute on Demographic Studies (INED) has included samples of immigrants and descendants from South-East Asia (first and second waves: 2008–2009 and 2019–2020) and from China (second wave: 2019–2020) and started providing data and analysis on this population group on issues such as discrimination, political opinions, and behaviour (https://teo.site.ined.fr/en/). Furthermore, this pragmatic approach, based on a dynamic perspective and focusing on events and processes (Sun, 2000), offers a methodological tool for comprehending the inhabitants’ civic participation and engagement in local civic life. Taking action, making demands, adopting an active voice, creating an organisation, and choosing representatives are moments when collectives are built, when concrete choices are made about objectives, targets, demands, strategies, and rhetorical frameworks, and when challenges are posed to the actors’ capacities to enlarge the problems they face, to universalise their cause and to build coalitions around public concerns (Levine, 2022). The collective action of Chinese and South-East Asian residents thus offers a rare opportunity to study the dynamics of action and of civic participation of these ordinary inhabitants at a local level (Putnam, 2000), the intra- and inter-group evolving relations as well as the interactions with local authorities.

The elements of the study presented in this article are the fruit of a social action research project which took place from autumn 2016 to winter 2017, with an association called Citizens’ Dialogues and mandated by the Prefecture of Seine-Saint-Denis to research and then propose actions to prevent “delinquency affecting the Asian community” in three communes of Seine-Saint-Denis (Aubervilliers, La Courneuve, and Pantin). Differing from more conventional sociological investigations, this social action research aimed at participating with public authorities, associative representatives and mobilised inhabitants in a problem-solving experiment. This position provided the research team with unique access for our fieldwork. We were able to observe in situ the meetings organised by the French public authorities, both state and municipal, with associations and ordinary inhabitants. We also had privileged access to various state and municipal officials in different departments, such as police commissioners and rank and file officers, social workers, and urban planners. We also focused much of our time meeting with the Chinese and Asian associations and ordinary inhabitants in the areas they live and mobilise for. During over a dozen visits to La Courneuve, we directly observed on winter nights from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. how Chinese and South-East Asian inhabitants, mostly men, stood outside in front of their residences in order to prevent any attack. The research team had rich and intense collective discussions (sometimes recorded and sometimes informal) with the president and members of the residents’ association in the facility provided by the municipality. These discussions covered a wide range of topics: the violent physical attacks they were suffering from, their experience of racism, their view of the city, the police and the justice system, as well as the residents’ strategical objectives for their next actions. While the language of communication was mostly French, my knowledge of Chinese and my experience of living and working in China for almost ten years made it possible, during the discussions, to share common references and to better understand our Chinese interlocutors. Being part of this problem-solving experiment, while sometimes acting as a sort of intermediate between the officials and the inhabitants, was not a smooth ride, and included both ambiguity and tensions. For example, there was a natural suspicion as to who we were standing with, the Prefecture who mandated us or the community whom we were getting close to. From the beginning, the mandate given by the Prefecture was unclear. Were we supposed to write a research report making a diagnosis on the security situation of Asian residents, or make policy or social action recommendations or merely help the Prefecture to identify “reliable” Chinese associations? While meeting with several Chinese or Asian residents and associative representatives, we were sometimes received with scepticism, sometimes with honours as if we were officials but with time, we were probably mostly seen as another channel of communication and dialogue with French officialdom playing the role of intermediates who could relay messages or highlight points neglected or passed over by officials. Our own subjectivity and relationship to the fieldwork evolved with time. At the beginning of our research, we often felt powerless or outraged by the number of problems the city and its inhabitants were facing. Examples included the postcode prejudice of territorial discrimination and stigmatisation, the lack of public and social service, and difficult times listening to sometimes very crude and hopeless statements regarding inter-minority relations and racialising arguments from our Chinese and South-East Asian interlocutors. With time, we discovered other facets of our interlocutors, their capacity to identify structural and socio-political causes as the roots of what was before interpreted as a cultural or even racial conflict, and their empathy and compassion towards underprivileged families from other ethnic minorities dealing with poverty, exclusion and racism. We came to feel a profound respect and even admiration for the people, Chinese and non-Chinese, who shared their experiences, their suffering, and their daily struggles with us. Hence, in its methodological aspect, this research also resembles and finds sources of inspiration in the sociological intervention developed by Alain Touraine and others (Rui and Cousin, 2010; Shen, 2007; Touraine, 1978; Ying, 2001). It faced similar difficulties, especially the fact that the two levels of action and analysis are intertwined during the research process. At first, it enables the researcher to get closer to the actors and to comprehend in a pragmatic way their logics of action. In the second phase of analysis, it requires distancing oneself from strategic and action-oriented issues.

To give the history of this collective action, we will first set the scene by looking at the urban space in this downtown neighbourhood of La Courneuve: how constrained residential strategies met with housing and social diversity policy, contributing to increasing Chinese ethnic concentration in the neighbourhood and reinforcing the gap between spatial proximity and cultural and social distancing. Dialoguing with the notion of “ethnoburb,” we will focus on the judgements Chinese and South-East Asian inhabitants make on their neighbourhood and on the city they moved in. In the second section, we will trace their mobilisation against insecurity, examining the formation of an ethno-spatial Asian minority, and describing the occupation of the urban space and the creation of a residents’ association. This will lead us to explore the micro-foundations of this mobilisation, especially its ethnocentric dimension: the shared insecurity, the experiences of racism in the public space and with institutions, as well as a strong sense of injustice. Finally, through the observation of interactions with the municipality, the police and other associations, the regimes of engagement of these ordinary inhabitants in their neighbourhood's local civic life will be highlighted, demonstrating a transformation of the relationship to their neighbourhood, to public institutions and to politics. The Chinese and South-East Asian ordinary inhabitants evolved from victims of violence and racism to engaged homeowners and citizens, interrogating the social and political dimensions of territorial inequality and engaging in education and social inclusion.

Residential Mobility and the Policies of Urban Renovation: An Ethnoburb on the Outskirts of Paris With a Strong Chinese Presence

While the formation of the most ancient “Chinese districts” in Paris such as the 13^th arrondissement, the multicultural neighbourhood of Belleville where Chinese shopkeepers and workers settled in the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century, or the more recent Chinese wholesale trade areas in Aubervilliers has been documented (Chuang, 2018; Guillon and Taboada-Léonetti, 1986), new Chinese migrants’ residential strategies and housing conditions have received less attention, with the notable exception of Juan Du's remarkable research. Du studied the ethnic housing market in the Paris region and conducted fieldwork on the housing conditions of Chinese workers, who were all in rented accommodation, in the Paris suburb Seine-Saint-Denis (Du, 2018). In this section, we will focus on the housing conditions of the Chinese and South-East Asian inhabitants we met at La Courneuve. By cross-referencing our observations and the accounts of the inhabitants, with geographical studies on real estate acquisitions by foreigners, we will highlight the recent urban transformation of La Courneuve and show how some neighbourhoods have today become “ethnoburbs” with a strong concentration of Chinese homeowners in private residences next to social housing estates.

Sunday night, 9 pm, La Courneuve. We are welcomed by a member of the residents’ association, a young Chinese man of about thirty years of age, who arrived in France when he was a teenager and speaks perfect French. We cross the public space in front of the residences with him, greeting different men of Asian origin who, in twos and threes, are stationed at the different entrances or are patrolling. The architecture of the buildings is strange: while the principal entrances of the two buildings face the square across from a school, numerous recesses make it possible to pass between the buildings, areas ripe for attacks, as our interlocutor points out. He points to the low-income housing complex (Habitation à loyer modéré, HLM), built on one side of the square, almost directly across from the two private residences which are principally inhabited by Asian families. The ethnic and social frontier pointed out by the members of the association seems to find here an almost perfect spatial materialisation. Our guide then leads us to the facility at the base of one of the buildings. A room with shelves, tables, and chairs. Several people of Chinese origin play cards while children amuse themselves. (Field notes, 2016, La Courneuve, 18 December)

During the most recent census of La Courneuve in 2015, Chinese nationality came in second behind French nationality in this cosmopolitan district, indicating the scale of those of Chinese origins established in the district since the 1990s. The criterion of nationality is not sufficient to describe the diversity of the origins of the inhabitants of the city since some of them have, in fact, acquired French nationality through naturalisation, while others were born in France, but it nevertheless gives a clue on a new settlement trend in the city.

This Chinese presence in La Courneuve is both surprising and invisible. The Chinese neighbourhoods of the 13^th arrondissement, the Arts-et-Metiers and Belleville neighbourhoods in Paris, and the Chinese wholesale district in Aubervilliers are well known as the “Chinese districts” in the Paris region and the Chinese presence is highly visible with restaurants and shops and Chinese characters in the urban space. However, La Courneuve is known as one of the last “red suburbs” of the Paris region with the mayor and the majority of the council being communist. It is also famous for its large concentration of HLM, and the widespread poverty and difficulties faced by its inhabitants. Since the 1990s, like other north-eastern Parisian suburbs, the city has received a large influx of Chinese. At the departmental level, Chinese inhabitants today represent 4.9 per cent of the population (Observatory of Social Data of Seine-Saint-Denis). This relatively recent phenomenon of Chinese people settling in Seine-Saint-Denis leads us to examine the residential strategies of these families and individuals. It also invites us to look at the policies of urban renovation favouring these territorial settlements. While the objective of social diversity is officially “colour-blind,” since its aim is to attract middle- and upper-class people to underprivileged areas, one of the results, which up to now has been understudied, is the acquisition of private property by foreign-born populations with diverse origins and migration patterns which, reinforces the “superdiversity” of these suburbs (Escafré-Dublet and Lelévrier, 2019).

In their study of the acquisition of property by foreigners from 1996 to 2010 in several departments in the Paris region including Seine-Saint-Denis, Didier Desponds, and Pierre Bergel shed light on the process of settlement, concentration, and spread of different groups of immigrant populations (Turkish, Indian, and Chinese) in the Paris region. They point to the establishment of Chinese households in the communes in north-eastern Paris, near Chinese neighbourhoods such as Belleville and the commercial wholesale zone of Aubervilliers (Desponds and Bergel, 2013, see in particular Map 2 and Map 3). The contribution of their research lies in the attention given to the residential strategies of foreign populations, particularly the Chinese, through the acquisition of real estate, which constitutes an “economic bet” and leads to the possibility of putting down local roots.

Our qualitative research amongst Chinese and South-East Asian inhabitants of La Courneuve confirms the quantitative data produced by Desponds and Bergel, notably on the residential strategies of the Chinese populations recently settled in the city, and on the effects of this agglomeration process on a neighbourhood scale. We observe two parallel demographic movements in the Paris region in the years 1990 to 2000: firstly, the multiplication of Chinese businesses in the north-eastern Paris region (10^th, 11^th, 19^th, and 20^th arrondissements and nearby suburbs, particularly the establishment of wholesale businesses in the city of Aubervilliers); next the enrichment of a layer of the Chinese population, notably workers who were formerly undocumented and have regularised their status and become homeowners in several communes in Seine-Saint-Denis. This layer of the population settles primarily in the communes of north-eastern Paris, where the price of real estate is accessible for the families of workers and employees.

Even for those who have not purchased but who rent, for example he rents 80 m² here for 1000 euros with all his family, whereas in Paris it would be two to three times more expensive. Will they try to fit five people in 40 m²? It is not possible. We must stay near Paris to work. Those of us who purchased [an apartment in La Courneuve], it is because we didn’t have the means [to go to other suburbs of the Paris region], otherwise we wouldn’t still be here, but we took out a mortgage for twenty years. And if we resell, we will lose money in relation to our loans. (Chinese resident, 18 December 2016)

The residential strategies of Chinese households installed in La Courneuve are the result of a situation with strict constraints: on the one hand, as a result of the gentrification of working-class neighbourhoods in north-eastern Paris, the rise of real estate prices pushes these populations outside the capital; on the other hand, the professional obligations of these workers, whether white or blue collar, constrain them to remain close to Paris. Renting or buying in La Courneuve thus becomes one of the few possible choices for these families, to the detriment of other factors, such as quality of life and safety.

You know, I used to live in Belleville [Chinese neighbourhood in north-eastern Paris], I didn’t know about La Courneuve. If I had to give a grade [about safety], one would say 90 [out of 100] in France, one would say 85 in Belleville, and in La Courneuve I thought it couldn’t be worse than 70, but once I arrived here it isn’t even 50.

I am tired, why move? I don’t know if I try to sell, would I find a purchaser? And where will I go next? I wouldn’t have anything afterwards. I don’t know where I can move to with all my family. (Chinese resident, 18 December 2016)

Another issue arises when new property owners have purchased in areas such as La Courneuve as they may not achieve the socially ascending residential mobility which would be extant if they had purchased in less deprived areas. If, before purchasing a home, the attainment of a self-owned property was seen as a project of social mobility for these families, after several years of living in La Courneuve the feeling which dominates is that of living in a “cage” with no possibility for future mobility.

The arrival of these Chinese families in La Courneuve from 1990 to 2000 led to a phenomenon of spatial concentration on the neighbourhood level. Rather than a strategy of ethnic grouping, denied by the Chinese inhabitants who emphasise, on the contrary, that they did not know each other and had few contacts with their neighbours before their mobilisation against insecurity, our research demonstrates that moving to La Courneuve was the result on the one hand of the socio-economic household characteristics that we have just described (in particular, the goal of acquiring real estate) and on the other hand the possibility of private housing, reinforced by the programs of urban renovation and the activities of real estate agents. Thus, the phenomenon of concentration described by Desponds and Bergel is played out not only at the city level but also within the cities themselves, on the neighbourhood scale, contributing to reinforcing the visibility of a Chinese presence, or rather, on a larger scale, an Asian one.

The residential neighbourhood where our research took place consists of two residences built in the 1980s in an attempt at social diversity. Nowadays, a majority of the inhabitants, owners of their apartments, come from China, South-East Asia (Cambodia and Laos) or South Asia (India). “Families from China and South-East Asia represent 50 per cent of the inhabitants of the residences. If one includes Indians as Asians, then we must be at 80 per cent,” explains an elderly Chinese resident. In the two private condominiums, there are more than 500 Chinese families from recent immigration waves, of whom the majority were attracted by advantageous real estate prices. Some of the inhabitants, former political refugees from South-East Asia (Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, a significant proportion of the Cambodian refugees being of Chinese origin) who arrived in France at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s have lived there for a long time, often several decades. Adjacent to the two private condominiums is a third building, HLM housing complex with more than 600 inhabitants, many of them having migrated from sub-Saharan Africa. Between these complexes is a large square with a primary school attended by the children of all the residents. One inhabitant, a Chinese Cambodian, who arrived in France as a political refugee at the end of the 1970s and became a corporate trainer, talks about the “good old days” with nostalgia:

I have lived here for thirty years. When we bought here there was nothing, there was not even the HLM. We bought pre-construction. La Courneuve was a kind of plain, the countryside. The problems began around the year 2000. The people who come here [the residents of the HLM] are the excrement of Paris. They can’t live in Paris and no one knows where to put them.

Thirty years ago, La Courneuve was not like this. The elementary school was much better, there were children from all over the world and my children were able to succeed in their studies. Today it has become a ghetto. We dream about leaving. As soon as we can afford it, we will leave. (Chinese-Cambodian resident, 18 December 2016)

At the end of the 1990s, studying the arrival of Chinese populations in the suburbs of Los Angeles in the United States, the geographer Wei Li created the notion, both empirical and analytical, of the “ethnoburb,” contracting the words “ethnic” and “suburb” to designate new dynamics of establishment and concentration, as distinct from ethnic enclaves (e.g. Chinatowns). Residential and commercial spaces, multi-ethnic, in which a minority is significantly overrepresented without being a majority, these ethnoburbs form open systems, connected to transnational networks and “entryways” for new migrants (Li, 1998). The dynamics of establishment and concentration by nationality, studied in the Paris region by Desponds and Bergel for the Chinese, Turkish and Indian populations, are similar to the make-up of ethnoburbs. However, the feeling shared by the residents from China and South-East Asia is that of living in a “ghetto,” or in a deprived neighbourhood, with no nearby shops or public services. This calls for a more nuanced response to the hypothesis of a residential “entryway” favouring upward mobility and invites field observation of the creation of ethno-spatial minorities and investigation into interethnic cohabiting (Chuang and Merle, 2021). Are we witnessing the constitution of “enclaves” and the formation of an ethno-spatial Chinese minority in La Courneuve? As other works have demonstrated, it is the insecurity shared by the residents of Chinese and Asian origin which contributes to this formation (Ramirez and Chan, 2018).

Organising Against Insecurity and Racism: A Constructed Ethno-Spatial Minority Taking Action

In September 2015, in response to multiple attacks against them in the previous months, and years, the Chinese and Asian residents of the neighbourhood of downtown La Courneuve took the initiative to go down to the base of their residences every evening:

In the beginning we just went down, someone wrote [a message] in Chinese so the information would not be lost, then the concierge [of the residences] looked for more people. Me, I didn’t know that in one weekend there were twelve attacks. In 2015, in September, it was a peak which had never been reached before. We were totally fed-up. In the beginning they [the residents] said that if something was happening, that we had to go down right away. But during the time it takes to go down, it is too late. So, we said we will create an association downstairs, […], we had to have a presence. Like that, it discourages the aggressors.

Until November we met outdoors in the cold. There were women with their children, starting at 7:30 pm they were there, and we arrived after work, around 7.30–8.00 pm. I stay a while and when I see there are lots of people I go inside to eat, then I return. In January it was minus 5°C (23°F), minus 7°C (19 °F). (President of the residents’ association, 18 December 2016)

From 7:30 p.m. to midnight, between twenty and thirty people of Chinese or South-East Asian origins, principally adult men of all ages, including elderly men, sometimes accompanied by their spouses and children, occupied the space in front of their residences, on the square in front of the primary school, or walked in groups in the different passages and recesses of their residences. The event which triggered this was an accumulation of violent attacks in one weekend which led to the spontaneous mobilisation of the inhabitants. As explained by one of the residents, it was a crowd effect – several dozen men, potentially facing a group of about ten youngsters – to dissuade the attackers and prevent violent robberies or break-ins which were taking place in, or near, the residences.

The experiences of violent attacks shared by the inhabitants shed light on ethnic targeting. Men and women were targeted because they were identified as “Chinese” or “Asian.” As the police commissioner of La Courneuve explained “doing [assaulting] a Chinese” had become the gateway to delinquency for minors and for youths in the city. Several factors help to explain the increase in thefts targeting the Chinese population. One is the practice of giving money, particularly during wedding celebrations, another factor was the hesitancy of Chinese residents to lodge complaints when attacked due to the language barriers or their administrative handicaps such as being undocumented. Another factor was their mistrust of public institutions due to an accumulation of prior negative experiences with public officials. These factors combined contributed to the perception that the Chinese were “easy targets,” in particular for youths starting their “career” as delinquents.

The residents highlighted the increasing violence of these attacks, as “gratuitous provocation,” which was demonstrated by the hospitalisation of some of the victims. As noted in the introduction, a serious attack took place elsewhere in La Courneuve on 13 July 2016. A building principally inhabited by people of Chinese origin became the target of firework attacks by neighbourhood youths, resulting in the exasperation and mobilisation of the residents of the building. Additionally, public authorities were concerned about the risk of patrols by Asian inhabitants and feared confrontations between different ethnic groups (Interview with officials at the Prefecture, October 2016).

The insecurity in the neighbourhood and in the city generally was interpreted by the residents through an ethno-racial prism, contrasting with the “colour-blind” discourses of French officials and of other Chinese association's representatives who were more acquainted and accustomed to the French republican doctrine:

The aggressors, yes, they are North Africans and Blacks. We know one or two of them. Those we know now have stopped [attacking us]. We have already lodged complaints several times. The problem is that they know youths through middle and high schools from other cités [social housing estate, referring in French to residential areas in underprivileged suburbs characterised by the concentration of social housing, poverty, marginality, and juvenile delinquency]. They give them information. One telephones from the tramway stop: “Hello, you take care of them.”

We said to ourselves “What are you playing at? We are coming down now.” They realised we [the Chinese and Asian] are more numerous than they are. Generally, there are a dozen of them. They saw there were fifty of us. We are standing there like that, passive, we are not looking [for conflict]. (Chinese inhabitant, 18 December 2016)

This ethno-racial interpretation of urban relationships is reinforced by another factor: the date of arrival in the area and inclusion in the neighbourhood. Having arrived for the most part in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the inhabitants of Chinese origin are considered outsiders in their neighbourhood and in their city:

They take us for blédards [slang, deriving from the Arabic word “bled” (village), designating here in a pejorative manner immigrants who are not sufficiently integrated] because we are the most recent arrivals, that we don’t know the neighbourhood codes, the language. (Chinese resident, meeting at the City Hall, November 2016)

However, in this city centre neighbourhood in La Courneuve, like in other neighbourhoods, the inhabitants from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia have been present for many years, sometimes for almost three decades. Despite this, they also suffer from insecurity and violence because of their ethnic origins, and some consider themselves to be “collateral victims” of the recent arrival in the city of Chinese immigrants and suffer the same type of stigmatisation, as one resident originally from Vietnam stated (resident originating from Vietnam, meeting at the City Hall, November 2016).

Added to this insecurity are common negative experiences when dealing with the police while lodging complaints.

The problem is, when people are attacked, we wait a long time [at the police station], we are badly received, we are considered to be strangers. People say to themselves “OK, I didn’t lose much” [and don’t lodge a complaint]. Us [the association], we encourage people to lodge a complaint, it is a civic gesture, it enables the State to see [what's going on] but in people's heads, it is like “I lost my bag which was not worth anything, there was only ten euros in it, I am not going to lose three hours, and in addition, they [the police] will humiliate me.” (President of the association, 18 December 2016)

Even though they have been the victims of racism, the residents sometimes face the same discriminatory stereotypes about “Chinese” or “Asians” from the police who record their complaints and who criticise women for “wearing jewellery,” or for transporting cash, even when that is not the case. In addition to attacks and the lack of empathy or their humiliating treatment at the hands of the police, the residents emphasise their daily experiences of public insults and racist mockery.

In the morning when I take the metro, the youths keep calling us “Chink, Chink [Chinetoque in French].” What is the point of calling us this? Who are the Chinetoques? It becomes a problem to take the metro and to be harassed like this. (Resident of Chinese-Cambodian origin, 18 December 2016).

Thirty years ago, in the factory they said “the yellow one”; [in reference to] me, at school in Belleville, they called me “Chinetoque” and my daughter suffers the same today. The Chinetoque. For them, none of the Chinese speak French. For me, it was the same in the metro with the youths. One must speak French, and the more we raise our tone of voice, the more they are afraid. (Resident of Chinese origin, 18 December 2016)

The use of racist expressions is not limited to other minority groups. The residents denounce its long history and the tolerance of French society for anti-Chinese, or anti-Asian racism, as illustrated by the daily acceptance of discriminatory stereotypes in the media and in public speech. In another discussion, another resident draws a sort of hierarchy of tolerance towards racist terms used for different minority groups. What is used against the Chinese would not be tolerated for other groups, he says:

Racism against the Chinese occurs daily. If I say “you the North African” that wounds him. And if I say it to a Jew, then I will go to jail. In the media, the ads, TV series, it is normal [the anti-Chinese racism]. (Resident of Chinese-Cambodian origin, 18 December 2016)

The daily and trivialised racism feels even more unjust given that the long history of Chinese immigration to France. The experience of forced exile of the political refugees fleeing the genocide in Cambodia goes back to the time of the French protectorate and to the fact that some of the Khmer Rouge leaders received their ideological training in France.

The first [Chinese] immigrants arrived for the First World War. My wife's grandfather, he was here in the 1920s, then he went home, and now his granddaughter is here. At the time the recruitment took place in Shandong, then in Wenzhou, her grandfather was part of those people. There is a documentary film on them [The Chinese workers from World War I], apparently it is good. There are those who died, out of 100,000 people, fewer than 20,000 died, I think. Many came home, but some of them couldn’t go home because their contract was not honoured.

[…] There are people who don’t even know why we are here. Him, he is from Cambodia, he lived through Pol Pot's genocide. In fact, it is the problems that we face that bring us together. (President of the association, 18 December 2016)

Contrary to accepted notions about the existence of a “Chinese community” or an “Asian” one, we see here that it is the shared “suffering,” which contributes to creating links between these neighbours who sometimes have very different immigration journeys and who do not always speak the same language (“we don’t even speak Chinese amongst ourselves”). The violence they all face, in the same place, the neighbourhood, contributes to the forming of a collective identity and to highlighting the various forms of discrimination they experience as Chinese or Asians, in different areas of French social life. In particular, the tolerance in French society for racism against Asians is a key factor in forming a collective Asian identity.

It is in this sense that we can identify the creation of a minority, which is defined as a group which “based on physical or cultural characteristics, is treated differently in society and which considers itself as an object of collective discrimination” (Wirth, 1945; Jounin et al., 2008). This is exemplified by one resident who stated: “Now we have understood that it is better to suffer as part of the herd rather than alone.” However, the physical presence every evening at the foot of the residences or in the facility on the ground floor and the relationships created with neighbours, make it possible to “no longer suffer alone” but “as part of the herd” to join together, thus reinforcing the collective conscience of belonging to a minority and of community mobilisation.

Unlike the negative aspects, this collective identity integrates positive elements around the “values” shared and defined as “Chinese” or “Asian.” An example of this is the Confucian culture shared by the Chinese, the Cambodians of Chinese origin and the Vietnamese which gives a central place to the moral education for which families are responsible and social harmony, such as the work ethic, or even physical security, perceived as guaranteed in China by a police state.

In China, theft is shameful. Even if there is a lot of it, violence is much rarer. Violence like that is very serious in China. Whereas in France it is less the case. (Chinese inhabitant, 18 December 2016)

The formation of this minority can be called “ethno-spatial” to the extent that it is on a micro-local scale that differences are constructed and claimed. The HLM facing the private Chinese and Asian residences becomes a symbolic foil, a spatial incarnation of cultural differences. However, if these “others” of the HLM are described as “uncivilised” because of their cultural origin, it is also the result of an impoverished and segregated neighbourhood.

We are facing uncivilised people. Sometimes stones are thrown by the people across the way, they throw things.

There, people throw garbage out the window. It can be people who have been here for a generation, but because of their parents they don’t have a scale to measure themselves [against], to compare themselves [to]. The same family which throws things out the window, the next day if you put them in a building in a chicer neighbourhood, do you think they will still do that? And afterwards they talk to us about respect and tolerance. (Resident of Chinese-Cambodian origin, 18 December 2016)

In the process of formation of this ethno-spatial minority, the occupation of public spaces by Asian residents and the framing of the problem in terms of cultural differences contributed to the reinforcement of ethno-racial boundaries and the symbolic opposition between two groups of inhabitants. At the same time, however, the mobilisation of Chinese and South-East Asian residents is not limited to occupation and patrolling. It also led to another action: the constitution of an association of neighbourhood residents, offering an institutional and legitimate framework for the inhabitants’ demands for security and favouring the identification by the public authorities of representatives of this common cause. The way this association was created, and the characteristics of its members reveal an openness and the potential overcoming of the ethno-spatial minority.

Given that it was I who had spoken, as a result, they said “go on, you create the association.” I am the president although that was not my goal at all. (President of the association, 18 December 2016)

He is a good translator, the interface if you wish. There are not only Asians in the association. The other day we held a party, it makes people understand what we are doing. (Member of the association, 18 December 2016)

Among the other residents, certain people have lived in the neighbourhood for more than thirty years. A civil servant who works in the office of the City Hall and a specialised educator came to support the residents of Asian origin, judging that it was “intolerable that these people are being massacred” and regretting the fact that racism against them had arisen. Such people bring their knowledge of how institutions and public authorities work, their competencies, and they contribute to increasing the association's capacities. This expertise is combined with the competencies of the president of the association who perfectly speaks the dialect of Wenzhou (from where many neighbourhood inhabitants originate), Mandarin, which he learnt in primary school until he came to France at the age of thirteen and French, which he learnt in school in France and speaks without an accent. He is the linguistic and cultural “interface” between the residents of Chinese and Asian origin and the other inhabitants. In addition, he takes the security requests of the Chinese residents to the public authorities while maintaining the codes of republican language about integration.

In the landscape of Franco-Chinese associations of the Paris region, this residents’ association (whose official name we chose to leave anonymous, as well as the neighbourhood's name) stands out both from the traditional Chinese associations dominated by the economic elites of the diaspora (such as the tongxianghui 同乡会, associations which group Chinese migrants according to their place of origin, and the associations which group Chinese merchants by their sector of activity) or those with close links to the Chinese embassy (notably the Association of Chinese residents from abroad, linked to the Bureau of Chinese Abroad, an institution that is part of the political–administrative network in mainland China, responsible for Chinese diasporas in the world). It also stands out from the Franco-Chinese associations for cultural exchange and access to rights, run by cultural elites such as the Association of Young Chinese of France, or the association Chinois de France-Français de Chine (French Chinese–Chinese French). In comparison with the husongdui 护送对, security organisations which patrol in certain neighbourhoods in the city of Aubervilliers at the edge of Paris, which are close to militias, raising concern amongst public authorities (Chuang and Merle, 2021), this association combines local anchorage in the neighbourhood and ethnic and cultural, if not social, diversity.

These characteristics have effects on the collective forms of action and interactions with the public authorities. Through the intermediary of the residents’ association, the security and community dynamics which we have analysed in this section in fact transform themselves to take on new urban, social, and educational issues. As we will see, this process also contributes to transforming the relationship with other population groups in the neighbourhood, as well as with the local government and public authorities.

Engaging in Local Civic Life: Beyond the Ethno-Racial Frontiers and Towards Neighbourhood Inclusion

After the first phase of activities to delineate their territory as described above, the mobilisation of the residents entered a second phase characterised by meetings and exchanges with public authorities. The City Hall organised several meetings to integrate the inhabitants into discussions concerning security measures at the City Hall in November 2016 and January 2017 and in the neighbourhood in June and July 2017. Going beyond a mere dialogue between representatives of the Chinese residents and the municipality, these meetings constituted an arena in which representatives from institutions and associations with sometimes different missions were present. These included the city government, with its delegate, the representatives of the different municipal services (particularly for security but also those for youth and citizenship), the state through the representative of the prefect in La Courneuve, and the police through their recently appointed commissioner. On the side of the residents and the associations, it is worth noting the presence of various Franco-Chinese associations amongst which was the residents’ association discussed in this article, and associations which mediate to provide access to rights for those in the city (Association Pierre Ducerf) or in the Paris region. Other non-Chinese associations which work for inclusion were also present, including those offering socio-linguistic cultural classes to the newly arrived immigrants and those working with the youth of the city. For Gilles Poux, the communist mayor of the city since 1996, the purpose of these meetings was to respond to the challenge of social cohesion in this multi-ethnic city:

The fact that we are starting to have amongst you, interlocutors with whom we can speak, because we were in a situation where we had very few relations with certain [ethnic] communities as was the case with yours, we had to be in an emergency so we could start to work together. But I have problems with other communities. We have to encourage other values. At the local government level, we are strongly engaged […] over the question of the specificities of the city. With 36% foreigners, more than 100 nationalities, there is a risk of a complete breakdown of the social link [in the sense of social cohesion] regarding Asians, but also Pakistanis, etc. If we don’t work on these links, we are heading towards a society which does not work well, with sequential fragilisation. We must rein in this breakdown of society, make common cause and link people together. (Gilles Poux, mayor of La Courneuve, November 2016)

The appeals from the mayor to “live together” and to promote intercultural dialogue often arouse scepticism or lack of comprehension amongst the residents of Chinese origin. It did not prevent both sides from organising several joint actions in order to further include the residents. Firstly, the city made the facility at the base of one of the buildings available to the association, resulting in increased social relations amongst the inhabitants of the neighbourhood. As a result of requests from the residents’ association, French classes were offered in the evenings to newcomers of Chinese origin.

Unlike other municipalities such as Aubervilliers where the appearance of men of Chinese origin patrolling the streets raised concerns amongst public authorities, and where cooperation with them was rather complicated, the diversity at the heart of the association as well as their activities, a simple dissuasive presence at the base of the buildings, were seen by the municipality as a reassuring element.

Meeting downstairs, it creates a social link. In a situation where each person faces a mountain alone, the fact of opening a facility, of creating an association, of working together with other associations, […] will contribute to change [the] social reality. (Gilles Poux, mayor of La Courneuve, November 2016)

Next, in order to “change the negative perception” regarding “Asians” and to promote social inclusion in the city, for the first time a Chinese New Year's party was organised at the City Hall in February 2017. The exhibition at the entrance of the City Hall, put together by the residents’ association and financed by the city, presented both the Chinese spring festival and also the history of immigrants of Asian origin to France. This included the fact which was not well known but was recently rediscovered that Chinese workers came to France during World War I. The buffet of Asian food offered to the residents of La Courneuve was prepared and served by women of Chinese and North African origin, from the residents’ association and the association offering socio-linguistic classes, thus celebrating cultural diversity in the city. This symbolic action showed the official acknowledgement by the city of the presence of these new residents of Chinese origin and their inclusion in the community of citizens of the city. This is in stark contrast to the processions and festivals organised in Paris and also in Aubervilliers: it is less a celebration of Chinese culture or of economic and diplomatic links between France and China, but rather a presentation of the history of Chinese or Asian immigrants and their common destiny with other (immigrant) inhabitants of the city.

During the meetings held at the City Hall, the question of security was at the centre of the discussions, which are sometimes quite stormy. Facing the clinical analysis of the police commissioner who tended to lump the attacks on Chinese and Asian populations together with the general juvenile delinquency against all residents, the representatives of the population of Chinese origin put highlighted the specific ethnic targeting they face. They perceived the commissioner's opinion as disguising both the violence and their status as victims. The representative of the police and the Chinese population nonetheless agreed with both noting a laxity in the justice system towards the delinquent minors. Certain residents demanded that recidivist delinquents be “banished.” In response to this very draconian solution, the mayor presented a more social vision, underlining the need to prevent juvenile delinquency before it starts and to use financial and human resources to undertake this work, as well as using judicial measures against young adolescents who committed minor crimes.

While they held different institutional and political positions, the participants agreed that both the police and the municipality had a lack of financial and human resources to solve the problem. The death of Zhang Chaolin in August 2016 in Aubervilliers and the mobilisation of the residents of Chinese origin contributed to making security a priority for the State in the Seine-Saint-Denis Department from late 2016 and throughout 2017. The increase in police personnel led to the return of police patrols on the streets while the gradual installation of video cameras was hoped to act as a deterrent against violent street crime.

Either we tell ourselves there is nothing to be done, or we try to move the lines. For example, that the police commissioner has been given additional resources. Yesterday I was coming back to City Hall at seven in the evening and I had the pleasure of seeing four police officers on foot, I say, it is a pleasure because it has been two, three years that I hadn’t seen a police officer on the sidewalk. And it is because the police commissioner had a bonus [in terms of personnel] which is going to be reinforced so he can put […] police officers back in the field. It is a dissuasive element, an element for those who want to live normally in the public sphere. (Gilles Poux, mayor of La Courneuve, November 2016)

This speech highlights the coalition of interests which was created between the Chinese inhabitants and the municipality against the central government which they viewed as having abandoned these neighbourhoods. The mayor and the police commissioner also called on the new interlocutors, made up of the representatives of the residents’ association, to cooperate more by passing on information and serving as relays amongst the inhabitants. The violence against Chinese and Asian inhabitants was not eradicated by the reinforcement of police officers and the return of police patrols in the streets, nor by the gradual installation of video cameras. Figures presented by the police commissioner showing a relative decrease in violent attacks on the city's inhabitants, in general, and on Chinese nationals, in particular, were strongly contested during a meeting. The Chinese associations’ representatives presented recent examples of physical aggression as well as the fact that the aggressors had changed their location from one neighbourhood to another. They also challenged the narrative held by officials and Franco-Chinese cultural elites that the ordinary Chinese inhabitants were targeted because they lived in closed communities and were not integrated enough: “There is no Chinese communitarianism, we didn’t know each other before, we didn’t know our neighbours before mobilising against violence.” (President of the residents’ association, November 2016).

During the meetings between the representatives of the association and the public authorities, the problem of interethnic relations and coexistence progressively turned towards other social issues, such as juvenile delinquency and the dismissal of the corporations that managed the HLMs. While the attacks were a catalyst for the creation of the association, what became evident from the accounts of the residents when discussing the reasons for their mobilisation was their disappointment about how these neighbourhoods functioned, and they highlighted their experiences with the public sector and their dissatisfaction with the management of low-income housing. The president of the association denounced the laissez-faire attitude of France Habitat, which managed the HLM in his neighbourhood: “There is ignorance and general inefficiency. We are like wild cattle. They let us survive alone.” An employee of the mayor's cabinet agreed, stating: “I shouldn’t say this as a civil servant, but here no one takes care of us. It is thanks to their [the association's] efforts that things are happening.” (Meeting at the association's facility, July 2017).

Now it is no longer the residents of the HLM who are accused of being uncivilised but the management of France Habitat, which manages the HLM. According to the association's representatives and to the concierge of their residences, nothing is done to help new renters although they particularly need assistance, in a context where the “rotation of renters is spectacular.” Another subject of collective discussion and action became a source of concern for the association's members. The parking areas below the condominiums had become lawless places and had been closed and their renovation had been delayed. “Walking diagnoses” had been carried out with the residents in the framework of a new project for urban renewal, but the inhabitants were no longer willing to settle for a mere consultation and demanded an ongoing dialogue. As co-owners of the spaces, they wanted access to all the information throughout all phases of the process and wanted to participate in planning the project. The ethnocentric mobilisation thus expanded on two levels. Firstly, leading to the active participation in the association of French residents with no Chinese or Asian origin and, secondly, the transition from questions of security to the questions of the rights of owners and renters in relation to the building managers and those responsible for urban renovation.

The problem of juvenile delinquency also took on another dimension touching on the question of education.

Why are young adolescents hanging out in the street every night? In China you never see that. Parents take care of their children and prevent them from hanging out with bad company. It is because they are not loved that they become delinquents. If their parents don’t have time to take care of them, we should find a way to save them. (Resident of Chinese origin, July 2017)

With these words, instead of explaining the reasons for neighbourhood conflict via ethno-racial or cultural differences, the residents changed their view in part to relate the cause of delinquency to a lack of support linked to the socio-economic difficulties of parents. This new angle enabled the inhabitants to change their strategy of self-defence to one of dialogue and exchange.

In July 2017, one year after the fireworks attack against a building in a different neighbourhood principally inhabited by families of Chinese origin, the members of the association decided to expand the functions of the association. With the support of the City Hall, in addition to French classes for Chinese residents, they opened a visual arts class for all children of the neighbourhood, including non-Chinese children who live in the HLM next door. One of the members of the board of the association described this step as a means to prevent delinquency:

If their parents are too overwhelmed to educate them, we can in part take responsibility to help these youths. But one must start early. For those who are in middle school and are starting to enter gang culture, it is already too late. We can start with the very little ones. (Resident of Chinese origin, July 2017)

The cultural enrichment offered to all the children of the neighbourhood also aims, through these conversations and common practices, to fight against prejudice and racist stereotypes about and within each community.

Civic education must start at the youngest age. If a child in primary school says that someone eats dog, it is someone in their circle [who said that], even though they are themselves victims of racism. How can someone who is a victim of racism be racist towards others? (Resident of Chinese-Cambodian origin, July 2017)

Having become active in their neighbourhood, the residents of the association thus hope to change the image of the Chinese and Asians. In the same way, by working with the youth of the neighbourhood, they hope that preventing delinquency will change their negative views and its associated racism.

We aren’t going to be able to manage if we say it is society's fault. All the youths, even if it isn’t true, it is also a negative image for them later [on]. When he attacked that person, that person saw your face, I lose confidence in all the people like you, maybe it will take a lifetime to regain this confidence, which thus confirms this mix-up, thus they don’t know that it is their image they have destroyed, even if they don’t consider themselves a community. (Resident of Chinese-Cambodian origin, July 2017)

Recognising the socio-economic constraints of the parents who live in the HLM, the Chinese and South-East Asian members of the association gradually abandoned vocabulary which designated juvenile delinquents only by their origin. On the contrary, the discussions with public authorities and the association's mediation softened the ethno-racial affiliation and encouraged the Chinese residents to improve their relationship with the other inhabitants of the neighbourhood.

Another idea that comes out of the collective discussion is the desire to improve the appearance of the buildings. At the same collective meeting held by the residents’ association which included the concierge who was of Brazilian origin and the two French members of the executive committee, they proposed the idea of painting a fresco on part of their residential buildings and inviting each resident to paint something. They also suggested a fun project for children and parents relating to sorting waste. “We want people to be proud and happy to live here,” emphasised the concierge with a smile. As a consequence, the ethno-racial prism softened and was replaced by a focus on living together in the residential complex and the neighbourhood. If this local commitment with an educational and social dimension by the residents is associated with joint actions of City Hall and other associations and contributes to transforming the perceptions of the residents of Chinese and South-East Asian origin, the question of its long-term effect on interethnic relations in the neighbourhood and in the city remains to be seen and will require further research.

In the same way, the exchanges, and joint projects, developed with the municipal team, the representatives of the Prefecture, and police officials, have helped create a coalition of interests, but they do not completely abolish a certain wariness towards politics on the part of the inhabitants, and a reticence to become more involved in the political game, unlike the other Franco-Chinese associations mentioned in this article. Citing the Chinese expression, “men are afraid of fame, as pigs are afraid of becoming fat” (人怕出名猪怕肥, Ren pa chuming, zhu pa fei), the president of the residents’ association expressed a desire shared by many of the residents to limit their activities to their local environment, on the neighbourhood scale, and not to become involved in the games of political representation between France and China. More recently, during the first phase of quarantine in France due to the COVID-19 epidemic in the spring–summer of 2020, when the whole country was sorely lacking in masks, members of the association paid for masks from China out of their own pockets and asked the concierge of their building to distribute them to all the elderly people in the neighbourhood. Unlike a number of Franco-Chinese associations that have widely publicised similar actions, they asked the concierge to remain discreet about the origin of the masks and their own role.

Conclusion

This article analyses the collective action led by Chinese and South-East Asian inhabitants of a working-class neighbourhood in La Courneuve, in the Paris region. Through the study of the problems of violence and anti-Asian racism in this working-class neighbourhood, it reveals new intersectional mechanisms of segregation which have not been greatly studied: social and ethno-racial inequalities and spatial segregation.

By retracing the history of the arrival of the Chinese population in this working-class and immigrant-populated suburb, this article shows the relationship between private housing favoured by policies for social diversity and the increasing demand for housing by Chinese migrants. Arriving in France in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, these residents of modest means are gradually being pushed out of Paris by housing prices. Some of them acquired private property in the city of La Courneuve, where property prices are affordable for these blue and white-collar employees. However, the attainment of private property, a symbol of ascending social mobility, created the phenomenon of spatial concentration of these families of Chinese origin, leading to difficulties living amongst other population groups.

Contrary to essentialising and racist discourses which present Chinese or Asian populations as living in closed communities and self-segregating, this article shows that it was the thefts and violent attacks to which the residents, seen as “Chinese” or “Asian” were subjected to, that created the links and the ethno-centred collective action amongst them, whereas previously they had had few community interactions. This structural and multi-faceted situation is the principal cause of the formation of an ethno-spatial minority at the heart of the neighbourhood. The causes of this collective ethno-centred action do not lie in the existence of an “ethnic community,” which had previously existed but find their roots in prejudices towards these populations, notably the assumed “wealth” of these “Chinese” and their vulnerability linked to linguistic and other handicaps. These prejudices are not solely monopolised by young delinquents, but rather, are wildly shared by a large section of French society, including members of the police and political officials.

Paradoxically, collective action by the residents of Chinese and South-East Asian origin does not create “communitarianism” and a closed mentality. The occupation of public spaces and the patrolling of the neighbourhood in the evening by residents of Chinese and Asian origin certainly contributed to making this ethno-spatial minority visible, and the initial perceptions of the residents of Chinese and Asian origin insisting on the cultural difference between them and the other inhabitants of the HLM reinforce the ethno-racial boundaries. But at the same time, the creation of a neighbourhood residents’ association provided an opening and the potential to bring together people beyond the limits of the ethno-spatial minority. Other non-Chinese and non-Asian French residents participated in the meetings to support the Chinese residents and were involved in the creation of the neighbourhood residents’ association, though they did not hold leadership positions. The meetings with the public authorities, City Hall, and the state via the delegate of the prefect at La Courneuve, as well as the police commissioner, contributed to the inclusion of this group of residents at the heart of the political and associative ecosystem of the city. While many residents joined the mobilisation on ethno-centred grounds, the experience of mobilisation made it possible for them to engage in local civic life and become involved in urban struggles and even to establish links with other minorities, also discriminated against for racial reasons, in particular through joint association activities.

For the public authorities, especially City Hall and the police, the identification of privileged interlocutors, that is to say, the “representatives of an [ethnic] community,” formalised interactions and favoured the recognition of the legitimacy of this association. Demands for security by the Chinese and South-East Asian populations found a positive reaction, resulting in the creation of a coalition of interests which exercises pressure on the state which has been accused of abandoning these neighbourhoods. The validation of the Chinese presence in La Courneuve became part of the “world-city” project of the mayor, a response still in its infancy and highly challenging given the more than 100 nationalities living together in the city and the high concentration of people who are economically and socially underprivileged.

Through meetings with the representatives of the association and the municipality, the initial approach, while ethno-centred and based on security, was enriched by inclusive social elements. With the support of City Hall, the residents used the facility at the base of their residences, transforming their evening preventive patrols into more convivial social moments. French classes for newcomers aimed to improve the inclusion of the residents, while visual art classes open to all children in the neighbourhood participated in constructing networks between different ethnic groups and reducing mutual racial prejudices. The interpretation of the problems and violence in the neighbourhood was transformed during these communal activities. The delinquents’ ethnic origin was no longer blamed as the source of their behaviour, but rather the socio-economic difficulties of certain families left to struggle alone by the various administrative bodies in charge of their housing and their social and economic well-being. Faced with juvenile delinquency and racism, education was identified by the residents involved in their neighbourhood as a real bulwark which led to the beginning of new, more inclusive forms of participation in local civic life.