The Disordered Home: The Demolition And Gaming-resistance Of An Urban Village

Using the demolition of Liulangzhuang in Beijing as a case, this study aimsto answer why villagers’ collective action resisting the relocation policy at thebeginning changed to individual“Yizheng(gaming-resistance)” trying to getmore money in the end. By applying the concept of “poverty-liminality”，thisstudy intends to understand the individual, disordered, separated, andself-interested Yizheng behavior. On the one hand, the author focuses on howstate power functions in the demolition process, and on the other hand analyzesvillagers’ thoughts and behaviors. The author argues that by using penetrativeand despotic power, the state destroys the structure and order in the village, andexecutes its policy by threatens villagers to leave. Under the irresistible powerof the state, the village community collapse and villagers quickly abandoncollectives, and pick up individual Yizheng instead.Liulangzhuang turns from a natural village to an urban village duringChina’s urbanization process. The village structure, living order and values havedeeply changed, and the “collective-cognition” decreased. With migrant workersflooding into the village, a co-dependent system formed between originalvillagers and migrant workers, being the former providing cheap rooms and thelater paying rent. Since the system in the village is not stable, the authorfollowers Turner’s concept of liminality and uses “qusi-liminality” to describethe status in the village. The unstable village is seen by the sate as disease andshould be demolished, however it means home for villagers and harbor formigrants, so that they do not want to move. In the beginning of demolition, thestate uses High-Modernism and collective ideology to legitimate the demolitionproject and the villagers use corruption rumors to question the legitimacy of thestate. Several collective actions were conducted in the beginning yet soonvanished when villagers realized the strong power of the state. Using the methodof demolishing public facility, threatening and separating villagers, the statemanages to break the order in the village and put the village in“poverty-liminality”. Under these circumstances, instead of challenging thegovernment’s fundamental policy, the villagers use all kinds of methods to askfor more compensation. Due to the broken order of the village, daily norms and values has little power in controlling villager’s actions, so there are manyunreasonable actions during this time. Cherishing the hope of speeding up thedemolition process, the state alsotoleratsthese behaviors.The existing western theories could not fully explain the resistingbehaviors of the Liulangzhuang villagers, nor could the empirical studies ofChina farmers’ resistances cover their really way of resisting. Using the theoryof liminality and the concept of Yizheng, the author tries to provide a new wayof looking at China’s famers resisting behavior.