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

Re-orientations : East Asian popular cultures in contemporary Vietnam

Vietnamese-Australians live in Australia, a large island continent. The physical contrast between Vietnam and Australia is remarked upon by many Vietnamese in their migration stories. Whereas Vietnam is remembered as an interlinked sensual and social world, Australia is often viewed as a harsh, spacious, empty, dry continent. Australia is located in a regional Asian context, but this location has always been culturally and politically problematic, as it historically attempted to define itself as a "white" European nation in the Southern Hemisphere (Ang, 2000, p. xiii; McNamara & Coughlan, 1997, p. 1). During the Gold Rush period in the late 1800s, when there was widespread opposition to Chinese labor, Australia implemented a "White Australia" policy, although there were historically a significant number of Australians of Asian background. This exclusionary immigration policy was effectively overturned in the 1970s with the acceptance of a large number of refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in 1975. Vietnamese-Australians live predominantly in urban areas with over three quarters living in Sydney and Melbourne, the two largest cities. Within these two cities they are also highly concentrated in ethnically diverse suburbs, most living in areas with more than 1,000 residents born in Vietnam (Viviani, 1996, p. 49). However, Jupp (Jupp et al., 1990; Jupp, 1993) has argued that these areas are also zones of transition, with much movement in and out