Enclosing Citizens: The Sealed Management of Beijing’s Upside-Down Villages

Speaker: Jane Hayward (King's College London)

On Beijing’s outskirts are hundreds of urban villages – where land classified as rural has been surrounded by urban expansion. Villagers, having lost their farmland, build cheap, poor quality housing to rent to rural migrants. In media and official statements these villages are presented as hotbeds of criminal activity and threats to local stability. Inhabitants are subjected to various forms of discipline and control, perhaps most controversially the local state’s governance program known as 'sealed management', at its height from 2010-13. Under this programme, urban villages were walled-off, enclosed with security gates and placed under police surveillance.

Drawing on recent scholarship on Chinese governance through boundary-making and differentiated citizenship, Jane will present her argument that sealed management constitutes a dual strategy, both to control local villager populations during the social upheaval of urban transformations and to ‘upgrade’ the migrant labour force.

These form part of municipal plans to transform Beijing into a world city – a project that entails the exclusion of those failing to meet the necessary quality threshold. Sealed management should thus be understood as one of many ongoing strategies of population control and management currently being implemented in Beijing in the interests of international capital accumulation.

Jane Hayward is a research fellow at the Government Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a teaching fellow at the Lau China Institute, King’s College London. She researches China’s agrarian question and related urban transformations in the context of China’s internationalisation.