Tong Lam: China’s Forgotten Gated Communities

In post-socialist China, gated communities have become symbols of affluence and even conspicuous consumption for the country’s rising middle class amid the so-called “economic miracle.” However, there also exists many less visible neighborhoods with mostly low-income migrant workers from the countryside that are physically being gated off in the name of urban beautification and social management. Focusing on one such gated community in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou (also known as Canton), this talk uses the distressed landscapes of urban ruination to unravel the complicated politics of dispossession and resistance. I argue that behind images of stunning contrast is not a simple narrative of binary opposition between the state and its victims. Instead, it is a story of how local corruption, global capital, displaced socialist logic, and reinvented tradition collide and collude in an impossible urban renewal project in a strange authoritarian-cum-neoliberal setting. In addition to telling a story of contemporary China’s rapid urban transformation, I will use images to discuss the role of visual arts in generating insights for scholarship and vice versa, and to reflect on the ongoing controversies surrounding the aesthetic and political problems of “ruin porn.”

Bio:  

Tong Lam is a historian and visual artist. His research interests include modern and contemporary China, technoscience, media and spectacle, cities, colonialism, and nationalism. As a visual artist, he uses photographic and cinematographic techniques to document China's hysterical growth, and to analyze the debris of history in industrial and post-industrial societies. He is the author of A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900-1949 (2011), and the photo-essay book Abandoned Futures (2013). He received his PhD in History from the University of Chicago and is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto.