While several studies have depicted and analysed the urban and social transformation of Beijing's historical districts in the last two decades, Harriet Evans's Beijing from Below stands out, as it gives the reader the feeling of being fully immersed in the lives of the residents of Dashalar, a neighbourhood known for its overcrowding and for the material deprivation of its inhabitants.
The book is based on life stories of six local households that share certain commonalities of experiences such as both a strong emotional attachment to Dashalar and a loss of reference points due to the successive urban transformations that have significantly altered their social and political status, and their living conditions. This tension is finely detailed through the seven chapters that make up the book. Key themes linked to the precarity and scarcity of their lives are critically exposed and analysed in the broader context of Chinese society, using interludes between each chapter to explore anthropological questions. By selecting the different but complementary family stories of a street vendor, a garbage collector, a public lavatory cleaner, an illiterate housewife, a pedicab driver, a prostitute and a photographer-restaurateur, the author focuses her research on “underclass” citizens who “never appeared as people who count” (p. 224). The perspective of narrating the life stories of disadvantaged and marginalized citizens based on excerpts from interviews conducted by Evans is crucial for our understanding of history. First, it allows us to distance ourselves from the official narrative of the capital city's metamorphosis based on local archives and produced by elites and experts. Second, by unveiling tensions and frictions between the subaltern people and the others, it also sheds light on the structural power geometry, which unravels the complexity of such a multiple and multi-layered history.
As an anthropologist, I really appreciated Evans's approach of combining ethnographic methods (first seeking a personal contact in the area, building a relationship based on trust, immersion, participative observation, interviews) and oral history in order to gather data alongside official local archives. The reflection linking anthropology and history methodologies is not new, but it finds a relevant illustration in Beijing from below. This results in an insightful exploration of how Dashalar inhabitants developed modalities of agency in a bid to survive and take part in society as individuals or social subjects in the recent decades, which have been characterized by radical spatial, economic and social change. By focusing on people born between the 1930s and 1990s, the author narrates life stories of women and men linked by their attachments to Dashalar in many ways and for different reasons, including the evolution of their relationship with the author between 2004 – when she was first introduced to the area by a local friend photographer – and 2017.
The first chapter sets the scene for the research by presenting the physical, spatial, social and cultural dimensions of the neighbourhood. It highlights the three main phases of Dashalar's transformation: the creation of a new centre for business and tourism in the 1980s, the regeneration city plan transforming the old and dilapidated housing in the 2000s, and the Dashalar project in the 2010s. The next six chapters explore significant issues of Chinese society through key family representatives and aim to show how these representatives use the past to explain the difficult conditions they face and to claim ethical recognition as social subjects. Dominant themes addressed in the book relate to the politics of belonging and the boundaries of identity (us/them, civilized/uncivilized, high-/low-quality citizen), the virtuous family rights and duty for oneself and in the eyes of others, the construction of gender at multiple scales (family, kinship, neighbourhood, community, society), the construction of the dispossessed and marginalized category by crossing several dimensions (place of origin, social class, land property, education, employment, migration trajectory) and the modes of action developed according to people's norms and values for a desired or real social mobility. Evans describes these subalterns’ struggle to claim their dignity in a hostile and violent (built and social) environment. Their agency is a search for recognition as human beings that implies respect, consideration and justice. The life stories Evans tells thus provide a better understanding of the different kinds of recognition sought by Dashalar's residents based on their social position as well as their cultural and economic capital.
Evans's efforts to articulate the subaltern memories with the spectacular transformation of Beijing's urban and social fabric is more than necessary at a sensitive time marked by a still-in-progress government strategy of demolition and relocation (chaiquan), with or without monetary compensation. By narrating ordinary lifestyles or everyday actions undertaken by subaltern underclass citizens to pursue their lives amidst precarity and scarcity in a neighbourhood subjected to gentrification, she sheds light on the phenomenon of the urban poor disappearing from official history. In doing so, she pinpoints issues of “heritage-ization” that create tensions between nostalgia for a past (“taste of the old Beijing”) that has been preserved and kept alive by the presence of local residents, and social engineering mechanisms working alongside urban transformation, tourism and a state programme of cleansing. Therefore, the book will be of great value to anyone interested in Chinese urbanization, memory studies, public history, civilizing processes, use of cultural heritage, politics of identities and agency of the urban poor.
