Alan Smart

Local Citizenship: Welfare Reform Urban/Rural Status, and Exclusion in China

After 1949 Chinas welfare system developed on the basis of a status division between urban and rural residents. Urban and rural societies were profoundly influenced by the respective organization of their welfare systems, which shared the feature of being fixed to specific places (rural) or enterprises (urban). Reform of core institutions is constrained by path dependency. Knowledge of those constraints, however, can aid efforts to shape new paths. In this paper we examine how institutional legacies of urban – rural status differentiation continue to structure economic and welfare reform. Chinas reform process has been characterized by an unusual degree of decentralization and local experimentation. As a result, the nature of change is not easily seen by examining only laws and policies related to welfare. Instead, broader changes in the economy and the loosening of controls on mobility have interacted with the locality/enterprise welfare systems to generate diverse local outcomes. After an overview of the welfare institutions and the reform process, we draw on field research in industrializing rural areas in Guangdong to describe a pattern we label ‘local citizenship’ where welfare benefits are elaborated for the locally born while excluding migrants.

Financialization and the Role of Real Estate in Hong Kong's Regime of Accumulation.

Abstract The greater dominance of finance in the global economic system is widely considered to have increased instability and created difficulties in constructing modes of regulation that could stabilize post-Fordist regimes of accumulation. Heightened competition and the discipline of global finance restrict the use of Fordist strategies that expand social wages to balance production and consumption. Robert Boyer suggested a model for a possible stable finance-led growth regime. His hypothesis is that once there are sufficient stocks of property in a nation, expenditures that are based on capital gains, dividends, interest, and pensions can compensate for diminished wage-based demand. We contend that the neglect of real estate is a serious limitation, since housing wealth is more significant than other forms of equity for most citizens, and thus that it fails to capture the impact of the perceptions and choices of ordinary citizens. We then argue that features of a finance-led regime of accumulation and a property-based mode of regulation appeared in Hong Kong relatively early. A case study of Hong Kong is used to extend Boyer’s discussion, as well as to diagnose Hong Kong’s experience for its lessons on the impact of such developments.

Anthropological Takes on (Im)Mobility

In this introduction, we outline the general conceptual framework that ties the various contributions to this special issue together. We argue for the importance of anthropology to “take on” mobility and discuss the advantages of the ethnographic approach in doing so. What is the analytical purchase of mobility as one of the root metaphors in contemporary anthropological theorizing? What are the (dis)advantages of looking at the current human condition through the lens of mobility? There is a great risk that the fast-growing field of mobility studies neglects different interpretations of what is going on, or that only patterns that fit the mobilities paradigm will be considered, or that only extremes of (hyper)mobility or (im)mobility will be given attention. The ethnographic sensibilities of fieldworkers who learn about mobility while studying other processes and issues, and who can situate movement in the multiple contexts between which people move, can both extend the utility of the mobilities approach, and insist on attention to other dynamics that might not be considered if the focus is first and last on (im)mobility as such. In this special issue, we do not want to discuss human mobility as a brute fact but rather analyze how mobilities, as sociocultural constructs, are experienced and imagined.

Time-space Punctuation: Hong Kong's Border Regime and Limits on Mobility

Chinese people seem to be increasingly on the move, as this special issue emphasizes, among the diaspora, and especially among residents of the People’s Republic of China after it re-opened to the capitalist world after 1979. We argue, however, that an emphasis on mobility can be misleading unless we also pay close attention to factors that inhibit movement. Foremost among the inhibiting factors are international borders. The notion of a “world without borders” is only realized by the world’s elites. For ordinary people, borders are substantial or even insuperable barriers. One of the most powerful metaphors for globalization has been David Harvey’s idea of “time-space compression,” in which the speeding up of economic and social processes by transportation and communication technologies has in effect shrunk the globe. As with all metaphors, it both offers important insights and is potentially misleading. The world is not shrinking in any uniform manner. Compression is uneven for different kinds of actors, objects and ideas. In this article, we set out the concept of time-space punctuation. We offer this approach as a complement to time-space compression, not as a substitute. Even a combination of both metaphors distracts attention from other representational approaches to globalization, such as accounting, visibility or fi ltering.1 Punctuation conventionally identifi es arbitrary symbols that break up the fl ow of speech. Here we extend this idea to other arenas. The world is punctuated by barriers, the most important of which are national borders. For some people and things, borders act as periods, full stops denying legal entry. For others, they are like semi-colons, requiring visas and work permits. For the global elite, by reason of their citizenship status or their assets, borders are like commas, slightly slowing movement at various checkpoints, particularly if they have access to VIP lanes or private jet facilities at ports of entry. The metaphor can be extended. In these post-9/11 days, certain people move around the world with the equivalent of asterisks attached to them, having been placed on “no-fl y” or other watch lists. Others,

Obligation and control. Employment of kin in capitalist labour management in China

The A. discusses a theoretical perspective which helps to make sens of the forms of labour relations found in Hong Kong factories in China. Following that, he explores in detail a case study of a factory where kinship ties were extensively used in recruitment. He concentrates upon one particular strategy of the Chinese capitalism: the recruitment of kin as workers within the enterprise.

Sharp edges, fuzzy categories and transborder networks: managing and housing new arrivals in Hong Kong

The sharp edges of inclusion or exclusion from citizenship are in contrast with the complex webs of transnational networks and interactions. The return of colonial Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty posed great challenges for citizenship categories. The definition of the right of abode in the Basic Law, Hong Kongs constitution, resulted in very large numbers of people who could claim this right, as many as 1.67 million. These numbers reflect the complex history of social relationships across the Hong Kong/China border. Despite high levels of socio-economic integration, the border still sharply restricts movement from China to Hong Kong, and this combination of integration and separation generates a complex dynamic, reflected in part in the right of abode controversy. The Hong Kong administration has overturned a court ruling in order to preserve restrictions on migration into Hong Kong by those accorded the right of abode, setting off intense public debate. Those mainlanders who do manage to enter Hong Kong face a variety of challenges, the most crucial of which is obtaining affordable accommodation in a city with among the highest housing costs in the world. New arrivals are excluded from eligibility for public housing, which accounts for over half of Hong Kongs housing stock, while private housing is among the worlds most expensive.

Agents of Eviction: The Squatter Control and Clearance Division of Hong Kong’s Housing Department

More is known about the policies that produce forced evictions and their consequences than about the agencies whose responsibility it is to conduct them. Understanding the nature of forced evictions requires greater comprehension of responsible agencies since the ways in which they implement policies may be a crucial intervening variable influencing the outcomes. In this paper, I use documentary and ethnographic research to describe the Squatter Control and Clearance Division of the Hong Kong Housing Department. Responsible both for evicting squatters and for controlling squatter areas that are permitted to remain for the time being, officers must respond to the conflicts and challenges of their twin, partially conflicting, mandates. Examination of changes in squatter control and clearance practices since 1954 is followed by a brief case study of the most recent squatter clearance that occurred in July 2001.

Critical perspectives on multispecies ethnography

In a wide variety of disciplines, from English to Biology, attention to human– animal relations is challenging traditional definitions of the intellectual division of labour between the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences (Maturana and Varela, 1992). In anthropology, in some ways, the trend towards research that focuses on ‘‘multi-species ethnography’’ or the ‘‘anthropology of life’’ or ‘‘post-humanism’’ is creating new opportunities for thinking about the biological/social divisions within our own discipline. ‘‘Bringing the animals (and plants and microbes and tools)’’ back in is enlivening debates in diverse fields in anthropology and among cognate disciplines. This theme issue not only introduces some of these fields of research, but also attempts to take a critical perspective on the explosion of research on human–animal relations. What assumptions are being made that require deeper critical analysis? What are the political implications of attempting to develop ideas such as ‘‘more than human publics’’ or applying ideas of the cosmopolitan to multi-species analysis? (Blue and Rock, 2010; Latour, 2008). How should this kind of research modify our framing of the discipline of anthropology, our research practices, and our cooperation with scholars in other fields? Post-humanist approaches bring back a materialist perspective, but often through radically distinct kinds of materialisms that offer challenges to the assumptions underlying Marxist anthropological traditions. This set of papers addresses these questions in a variety of different ways which will hopefully stimulate debate about how to study post/humanity in the 21st century. Even the question of what to call this new, or revived, field of inquiry has yet to be settled. We have chosen to adopt the recently emerging emphasis on ‘‘multispecies ethnography’’ as part of the effort to destabilize the anthropocentrism that persists in the label of ‘‘human–animal relations’’ (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010). Multispecies ethnography acknowledges that interactions between different non-human species is not necessarily mediated (only) through their interaction

Impeded self-help: toleration and the proscription of housing consolidation in Hong Kong's squatter areas

Abstract This article develops the literature on housing consolidation in squatter areas by examining a case where the improvement of squatter dwellings has been consistently proscribed, rather than encouraged, since 1954. Hong Kong devotes significant resources to patrolling and monitoring irregular settlements to ensure that residents do not expand or improve the quality of building materials of their dwellings. I first review what is known about the conditions under which squatter housing is improved. I then suggest an explanation for this unusual situation in the context of the history of squatting and its control in postwar Hong Kong. I then use recent ethnographic fieldwork to provide an account of the way in which the proscription of squatter housing improvement is implemented on the ground.

Mad Cows, Regional Governance, and Urban Sprawl Path Dependence and Unintended Consequences in the Calgary Region

History matters. Inspired by evolutionary approaches in economics and, more recently, economic geography, the authors present, through the lens of a slaughterhouse development on the citys fringe, a historical model of urban development in the metropolitan region of Calgary, Canada. Their analysis shows how an unanticipated system shock conditioned by strong historical differences in the political and economic aspirations of adjacent urban and rural jurisdictions manifested at multiple temporal and spatial scales. Their narrative explores the intertwined evolutionary trajectories of five key system elements whose pathways converged in 2004, resulting in unintended, and from a regional environmental perspective, undesirable, consequences.