Agenda

20 Nov 2025 16:00

Understanding China Through the Lens of Everyday Street Life...

Online lecture series

Ryanne Flock (Würzburg University)
Understanding China through the lens of everyday street life and how dealing with peddlers translated into efforts of state-building

Peddlers calling out through streets and alleys, promoting and praising their goods offered from mobile carts – for a long time, these scenes shaped the sound- and cityscape of pre-modern China. However, against the backdrop of the country’s power struggles in a nationalist-imperialist environment, new ideas for strengthening and reorganising society gained momentum in the early 1900s, bringing street vending under the scrutiny of eager reformers. In this presentation, I will show how nationalist thinking informed governmental strategies of reordering urban public space and how notions of “civilised behaviour” continue to play a key role in shaping street vending policies today. After a brief introduction into the historical background, I will focus on the first decades of “reforming and opening up” the People’s Republic and explain the local governments' ideological basis of modernising citizens through the regulation of space and bringing peddling out of sight. For the early 2000s, I will highlight the governance strategies of managing the continuous influx of flexible street vendors while also presenting an ideal version of public space in the context of redeveloping first-tier cities. Lastly, I will shed light on the peddlers’ perspective, how they deal with exclusionary policies and adapt to an ever more digitalised and gentrified urban environment.

Ryanne Flock studied China Studies, Sociology and Economics at both Free University and Humboldt University Berlin. Subsequently, she worked as a researcher at the DFG project “Megacities-Megachallenge. Informal Dynamics of Global Change” at the Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, PRC, followed by a position as lecturer and coordinator of the master's program Modern East Asian Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt/Main, Germany. In 2021, she joined the BMBF-project "Social Worlds: China's Cities as Spaces of Worldmaking" at Würzburg University. Her research focuses on contemporary Chinese societies and their reciprocity with space, including questions of rural to urban migration and poverty, spatial governance and digitalization, marginalization practices and discourses, Chinese modernization and urban history, neighbourhood development, housing and social theory. Her newest book deals with the social production of public space in Guangzhou, highlighting the appropriations and negotiations between the local state and rural “vagrants”.

This event is part of the Online Lecture Series Ways of State-Building in Contemporary China, organised by Michela Bonato (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) and Giulia Cabras (Freie Universität Berlin); scientific referee: Prof. Luiza Anna Bialasiewicz (Ca' Foscari University of Venice).

Lingua

L'evento si terrà in inglese

Organizzatore

Centro SELISI, Department of Economics, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Freie Universität Berlin, and co-funded by the European Union’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions - Project 101106116 — IMAT (In)visibility of Multilingualism in Amdo Tibet

Link

http://urly.it/31cj_t

Allegati

Locandina 2624 KB
Programma generale ciclo incontri 2583 KB

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