Beijing from Below: Stories of Marginal Lives in the Capital’s Center by Harriet Evans (review)

The spectacular transformation of Beijing over the past forty years has been noted, duly analyzed, poignantly critiqued, and cautiously admired by academics, journalists, tourists, and locals alike. Indeed, it is near impossible not to be impressed, whether positively and/or negatively, by the speed of the change across the capital city. The brutal efficiency of the city’s demolition and redevelopment of its historic neighborhoods, in particular, has exposed what superficial renovations and forced evictions cannot fully remove: namely, the memories and longings of the city’s residents, from migrant workers to long-time Beijingers.

These memories and longings, in turn, have been the subject of numerous academic books, films, and journalistic reportage, among them the well-received narrative film Shower (dir. Zhang Yang, 1999), the documentaries Meishi Jie (dir. Ou Ning, 2006) and When the Bough Breaks (dir. Ji Dan, 2012), scholarly studies of migrant villages (Zhang 2001) and migrant cultural production (Sun 2014), and a memoir of “old Beijing” from the perspective of a long-term American resident (Meyer 2008). It is within this relatively crowded field that Harriet Evans’s Beijing from Below: Stories of Marginal Lives in the Capital’s Center (2020) makes a welcome entrance because of her ability to combine the strengths of oral history and ethnography into a compelling, and convincing, analysis of socioeconomic precarity, temporality and history, party-state authority, and gendered and ethical living in contemporary China.

Beijing from Below focuses on six individuals and their close relatives in the Beijing neighborhood of Dashalar, mere blocks south of Tiananmen Square. Dashalar has been subjected to the same city-wide “demolition and relocation” (chaiqian) projects that have cascaded across much of Beijing’s central districts as the city, and the country, prepared for and then sought to capitalize on its growing prominence in international affairs, beginning in the early 2000s. The emphasis in this book is on some of the poorest of Beijing’s residents, loosely categorized as the “urban poor,” who have largely fallen out of consideration by government officials and scholarly researchers as attention shifted to the so-called problem of rural-to-urban migrant workers. Through multiple interviews over a seven-year span (from 2007 to 2014), combined with thoughtful and pointed self-reflexive interventions regarding her own positionality as a foreign researcher, Beijing from Below presents an unromanticized depiction of a place that is physically at the center of the capital but whose residents are socially, economically, and politically marginalized in almost every other regard.

The project, Evans explains in the introduction, was motivated by “a desire to understand how nonelite, working-class people in Beijing have accommodated the relentless pace and scale of change in their everyday lives in recent decades” (p. 3). Beijing from Below explores the history of the city from the perspective of the marginalized and the subaltern who, ironically, have been written out of official histories but are simultaneously celebrated as the true and authentic “old Beijing” that is repackaged for heritage tourism. To do so, Evans draws upon the insights and methods of oral history and ethnography in order to delve into experiences beyond the official archive. The narratives presented in the book offer what Gail Hershatter, in her work on rural women’s memories of 1950s China, has called a “good-enough story” (2011), which is partial and subject to reinterpretation and thus challenges the very possibility of a singular or linear historical narrative. Indeed, the way in which Dashalar residents recalled their past to Evans is in itself indicative of how these individuals perceived their own marginality within the Chinese state. As Evans writes, “Their memories were articulated in a language that rarely echoed either the terms or the temporalities of official discourse . . . . However, silence about the party-state in local people’s narratives...