Beijing from Below: Stories of Marginal Lives in the Capital's Center

"I’ve always been concerned with the need for us to resist thinking of all of China as a single entity. When people say, ‘How do people in China feel about x?’ you have to say, ‘Are we talking about Han Chinese or members of other ethnicities? Are we talking about people in the countryside or people in the cities?’ But this book shows that, even within a single city, there can be a dramatic difference in experiences and modes of life. Harriet Evans is a historian who has consistently worked the borderlands between history and ethnography. She uses a lot of the techniques and asks a lot of the questions that we’re more used to finding people ask when they’re studying villages in China, than when they’re studying a city. She deals with this ironically marginalized population living at the very centre of Beijing, near the Forbidden City. She’s spent a long period of time getting to know the people, gaining their trust and talking to them. She’s a historian of gender so there’s a lot of concern in the book with the different experiences of men and women and members of different generations as well. It’s like a work of ethnographic journalism, almost, that gives you a feel for the lived experience and differences among individuals. But it’s also a community study of this section of Beijing and what it’s gone through. The main figures in her book are people who have never really had a moment when their lives dramatically improved—in the way that the Revolution was supposed to have dramatically improved their lives after liberation. Their lives also didn’t dramatically improve when the reform period happened, and money began to be made in China. They were continually on the margins. One of the things that’s powerful about this book is that the major standout events in a political, top-down history of Beijing aren’t necessarily the things that are the key marking points in these people’s lives. It’s a very ground’s eye view of the Mao years and the period after that, which gets you to rethink a lot of your assumptions about the shape of China during the last 70 years. Yes, the alleyways. Then one of the issues, which happens in other cities as well, is that when there’s a move to gentrify or to rebuild, do people view it as an improvement or a destruction of the fabric of what was meaningful about their life? They’re relocated to ostensibly better conditions, but away from the rhythms of the life they’ve known. Another thing I like about this book is that when I do things like this, recommending books, I don’t want to suggest a book that only people who are academics in a particular field will be able to read. This is an example of a book by a sophisticated scholar that is also an engaging read. There are quite a lot of them. Evans worked closely with a local photographer, Zhao Tielin, while researching the book. He died before it was completed, and Evans dedicates the book to the people of the community as a whole and him in particular."