China’s recent urban reforms have produced new social tensions, giving rise to a nascent form of urban public—an informal, non-centralized network of lawyers, legal experts, and intellectuals using litigation and legal activism to defend the rights of citizens—based on the notion of weiquan (“rights protection”). Anthropologist Li Zhang (University of California, Davis) examines the widespread urban land disputes using two high-profile cases in different Chinese cities. Important questions raised by this new wave of spatial contestation focus on urban activism, popular politics, and the formation of new publics, as well as re-conceptualizing state reform in post-socialist China.
Discussant: Emily Curtin, PhD Student in Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center
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Li Zhang
Li Zhang is Professor and Chair of Anthropology, and former Director of the East Asian Studies Program at the University of California at Davis. She is a Guggenheim Fellow (2008) and the Incoming President of the Society for East Asian Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. Her research explores the multifaceted consequences of market reforms in post-Mao China. She is the author of two award-winning books, Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China’s Floating Population (Stanford, 2001, Robert E. Park Book Award) and In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis (Cornell, 2010, Francis L. Hsu Book Prize and Robert E. Park Book Award). Her current research project explores the “inner revolution” brought by the market transition with a focus on an emergent mass psychotherapy movement in Chinese cities.