On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China

Professor Margaret Hillenbrand will talk about her new book On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China. This will then be followed by a Q&A session.

On the evening of November 18th, 2017, a blaze broke out in a two-storey building in Xinjian urban village, located just outside Beijing’s Sixth Ring Road. At least 19 people, including 8 children, died in the flames. Yet in the days that followed locals had no chance to mourn: before the gutted building was even fully soused, the local authorities had issued a comprehensive eviction order for Xinjian.

Using fire safety as its rationale, the city government condemned the entire settlement, and its inhabitants, perhaps as many as 250,000 of them, were forced to evacuate their homes. Xinjian had emblematized inequality and exclusion well before the fire, and its residents long counted among contemporary China’s most precarious people. What kind of change, then, might the evictions mark? Or to put this another way, what does it mean to be officially banished from a place of already de facto exile?

In this talk, Professor Margaret Hillenbrand suggests that the evictions provoke questions about the limits of inequality, exclusion, and insecure work as meaningful descriptors of social conditions in our times. These limits have prompted Saskia Sassen to argue that we are now witnessing “the emergence of new logics of expulsion” in the global political economy.

In this talk, she explores the logic of expulsion in contemporary China, its capacity to foment both solidarity and social strife, and its relationship with cultural forms. In particular, Professor Hillenbrand will look at how people living under precarity in China today use culture as a space to vent feelings of rage, resentment, distrust, and disdain that are taboo under the diktats of so-called harmonious society.

About the speaker

Margaret Hillenbrand is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. Her research focusses on literary and visual studies in twentieth-century China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, especially cultures of secrecy and protest. 

Her books include Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China (Duke University Press, 2020), and On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia University Press, 2023), from which this talk is drawn.

Chair: Professor Steve Tsang, Director, SOAS China Institute

Registration

This event is open to the public and free to attend, however registration is required. 

Please note that this seminar is taking place on campus and will not be recorded or live-streamed.

Organiser

• SOAS China Institute

Contact

• Email: sci@soas.ac.uk