Becoming Part of the City? Place Identity and Inter-group Boundaries in Urbanizing China

Abstract

Based upon 121 interviews conducted from 2017-2018 in Chongqing, one of China’s largest and fastest-growing megacities, this dissertation investigates how different populations of urban residents subjectively understand place identity and social belonging. I examine three types of city-dwellers: those born in the city with urban hukou, those who have migrated there from the countryside, and those who have experienced in-situ urbanization via dispossession. While many studies on each of these three populations exist, few consider all three together despite their shared urban environment and impact upon one another. I suggest this gap exists because China scholars have tended to reproduce a conventional division of scholarly labor between sociological literatures on migrant incorporation and urban development that have remained relatively siloed from one another. Additionally, many studies tend to reproduce the state’s legal-administrative categories for defining who counts as an “urbanite” or a “migrant,” etc. for the purposes of research rather than inductively examining how these categories are defined by ordinary people themselves. Drawing upon literatures on place identity and the cultural sociology of boundaries, I depart from the aforementioned trends by asking the following questions: Who counts as “urban” or “rural”; “local” and “non-local?; a “Chongqing-er”/ “non-Chongqing-er”? How do different types of city-dwellers view and relate to one another in an ever-changing Chongqing? I inductively explore how people define the social meaning of place identity categories in a context of constant demographic, geographic, and policy change. I find ample variation among my interviewees’ subjective definitions of rural/urban and local/non-local place identity categories. There was considerable disagreement on the nature of place identity, such as whether it was viewed as flexible or fixed at birth; the criteria used to classify people; and the social status meaning of each category. However, a notable commonality was that people’s cultural definitions of place identity (ie. rural/urban, local/nonlocal, Chongqing-er/non-Chongqing-er) generally differed from those defined by hukou status or official geography alone. I also find evidence of considerable inter-group cleavages despite Chongqing having a reputation for greater progress in rural-urban integration policy reform. It appears that progress towards cultural integration has appeared lagged behind the speed of policy reform even in a case like Chongqing. To better understand why my interviewees draw symbolic and social boundaries against one another the way that they do, each empirical chapter also explores different emergent narratives through which the urban born, migrant, and in-situ urbanized respondents portray their role in Chongqing’s recent development history. This dissertation aims to help stakeholders interested in improving urban-rural social integration gain a better understanding of the ways in which divisions currently lie. This project also seeks to deepen our understanding of the barriers to rural-urban integration in China’s rapidly-growing cities while bridging and extending literatures on migrant incorporation, urban development, and cultural sociology more broadly.