Title: Removing Houses, Relocating Graves: Governing Life and Death in a Chinese Urban Village

Speaker: Zheng Yushuang (Department of Anthropology, CUHK)

Date: 6 November 2020

Time: 1:00-2:30 pm

Zoom Meeting Info

Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/92651551623

Meeting ID: 926 5155 1623

Passcode: 169158

Abstract:

The talk is based on the second chapter of my M.Phil. thesis “Refiguring Rural-Urban Relations: Death, Relatedness and Landscape in a Chinese Urban Village.”

The initiation of funeral reform in 1950s China implied a widening gap between the urban and rural. The official discourses of the Chinese Communist Party emphasize a temporal and spatial hierarchy in promoting its funeral reform: large and medium sized cities first, and the rural places follow; cadre leaders and party members first, and the public follow. Such hierarchy suggests the party’s logic of governing the dead and the living and shows how the regime has based its ruling hegemony and legitimacy on creating a modernized, urbanized and civilized funeral scene. In the talk, I will present this complicated and pluralistic funeral scene since after 1949 with a particular focus on the funeral governance and management in an urban village that lies to the southwest of Hangzhou city. In addition, I will also delineate a brief history of grave clearance and relocation occurred in Hangzhou since the 1950s to situate the funeral development of this urban village within the historical, political and social context.

Bio:

Zheng Yushuang is a current Mphil student at the Department of Anthropology, CUHK. Her research interests include urban-rural relations and state governing in Republican China and PRC.