Short Biography

Isabel Heger-Laube is a sinologist with an interdisciplinary footing in social anthropology, sociology, and psychology. She obtained her M.A. from the University of Vienna in 2013 and has just defended her dissertation at Freie Universität Berlin, where she worked as a research associate from 2014-2020. For her research on social change, narrative meaning making, and identity formation in various contexts of contemporary China, she has conducted fieldwork in Shanghai and suburban Tianjin. From 2021-2023, she co-led a research project on ageing without family caregivers at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. As a research fellow in the project “Social worlds: China’s cities as spaces of worldmaking,” she will be working on a book manuscript based on her PhD thesis on the role of state-led rural urbanization in the narratives of China’s landless peasants.

Project

Making meaning of China’s state-led rural urbanization: A reconstruction from the narratives of China’s landless peasants

As part and parcel of China’s (state-sponsored) compressed modernization, processes of state-led rural urbanization through land expropriation and rural-to-urban relocation have been transforming rural Chinese people’s lives in unprecedented ways. This has led to different, often disruptive outcomes for the affected populations, as well as diverging narratives about the role of the state’s measures for them. To provide a so-far missing, much-needed complementary perspective to existing research, the aim of this project is to reconstruct the role of state-led rural urbanization from the subjective, reflexive, and retrospective narratives of the subjects produced in the course of the state’s urbanization agenda, China’s “landless peasants”—a “transitory category” designating a heterogeneous group of people united by their rural roots as well as their experiences of being urbanized.

Taking the narrative as a window into individuals’ constructions of social reality, identity, and meaning, I am following a “narrative-aware” grounded theory methodology to examine the “big” and “small” stories of the landless peasants of Huaming model town (Dongli district, Tianjin), collected in semi-narrative interviews and during participant observation about a decade after relocation. Understanding what role people themselves ascribe to urbanization in their lives, I argue, is not only valuable in its own right, or relevant for further deconstructing narrative tendencies surrounding the subject, but also, it can add a new piece to the puzzle of why landless peasants have not, as often hypothesized, become a threat to China’s social and/or political stability.