Isabel Heger-Laube, fellow in the project Social Worlds: China's Cities as Spaces of Worldmaking, will hold a lecture on "China's landless peasants and the role of state-led rural urbanization: Narratives and meaning making in Huaming model town" at the University of Würzburg on January 22nd, 18:00 s.t. in room 17 (Philosophiegebäude).

Abstract

In contemporary China processes of state-led rural urbanization through land expropriation and rural-to-urban relocation have been transforming the Chinese countryside and rural Chinese people’s lives in unprecedented ways. Concerning the role of these transformations for the affected population—China's "landless peasants"—divergent narratives, ranging from "utopian" to "dystopian," have been constructed. Isabel Heger-Laube's doctoral research has aimed to reconstruct the role of state-led rural urbanization from landless peasants' own narratives, for which she conducted fieldwork in Huaming model town in Tianjin's Dongli district between 2016 and 2018. In her talk, she will provide insights into her informants' processes of meaning making, showing how they not only put into perspective objective assessments but also persistent presumptions about the broader societal and political implications of the state’s actions.