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Changing governmentalities of neighborhood governance in China: a genealogical exploration

This paper addresses the fundamental question about the ‘becoming’ of the landscape of China’s neighborhood governance. Based on a governmentality framework, it carries out a genealogical review on the neighborhood governance in the Feudal dynasties, Maoist era and post-Maoist era and summarizes the connection between the historical and current governmental rationalities, government technologies and the formation of subjectivities. The conclusion indicates that spatial practice and social norm have always been regarded by Chinese governors as the main approaches to legitimize and consolidate their regimes at the neighborhood level, although different governments used different technologies to design and organize neighborhoods. The rationality of segmenting urban space into administrative unit was inherited by the Maoist government to design enclosed ‘Dan-wei’ compounds and used by the current government to demarcate the boundary of ‘She-qu’ neighborhood as well as implement ‘Wang-ge’ management. The Feudal rituals and Socialist norms on the other hand, shaped hierarchy-respecting and collective subjectivities and to a large extent regulated Chinese people’s behaviors and facilitated the government’s practices. This paper concludes by pointing out that as the fragmenting Chinese society and hybrid government technologies shape diverse, multifaceted and ambiguous subjects, the government will confront more challenges on neighborhood governance.