Still under construction, but please look around and leave comments, etc....
Wang Jing's photos of demolished markets
Wang Jing’s 2017 series is, to my mind, the most eloquent expression in image or written word of the lived history that Remains of the Everyday attempts to acknowledge. Wang Jing’s photos deserve to be seen in higher quality resolution, but he made the series available on the internet in low resolution a couple of years ago. Below are several photos from the 2017 series as well as some from his 2012 series documenting life and work in migrant recycling enclaves. A link to the webpage still showing the full 2017 series is here. I urge you to see the whole series.
For the 2017 series, Wang Jing brought with him large framed prints of photos he had taken at the sites five years earlier when they had been bustling with activity. In many cases he also brought along the recyclers he had captured in those photos and had them hold the old image while standing in the now abandoned space that had once been where they had lived and worked.
A neo-liberal narrative of the last 30 years of migrant recycling would tell a story of rural migrants’ triumph due to their entrepreneurial moxy. In that story millions of migrants outcompeted an inefficient state-owned waste management system and turned urban residents’ trash into cash to help their rural families survive, some doing well enough to build big houses, buy cars, even get rich. And there is a related feel-good story about China’s liberalizing its regulations as the state’s draconian household registration controls becoming less punitive in the early 2000s. But that narrative of rural self-improvement through urban labor and capitalist prosperity bringing less harsh state control is based on a systematic erasure of repeated state-supported economic violence that has changed is various ways over the years, but has in no way abated.
For migrant recyclers incidents like the Beijing government's mass forced eviction of about 1 million migrants from their housing in 2017 was hardly special. Migrant recyclers spent most of the last 30 years having their communities harassed and summarily bulldozed over and over again. The cumulative economic losses were tremendous. The main cause for these relentless evictions was the constantly rising land rents of the city as it expanded, and the self-interest of urban landholders and officials at all level of urban government. Scrap markets are a great way to collect quick land rents during transitions between agricultural land use and middle class suburbanization, or a great way a company can continue to collect rents on land between construction projects (a visual essay documenting recycling markets and land use changes through Google Earth shots is coming soon).
Wang Jing’s photo’s for me capture this erasure and get at how profoundly it shapes PRC society today. The growth of post-reform capitalism in China has, for migrants in the cities, involved decades of coordinated exploitation and violence by the state in concert with capitalist interests. The repeated confiscation of rural migrant assets, enforced by threats of violence, is an everyday experience that generally goes ignored and unrecorded. Leaving little textual record, the potential to ever have this cumulative history of exploitation acknowledged is doubtful—the idea of apology or compensation is out of the question. This erasure creates a profound rift between rural migrants’ experiences and how urban residents understand rural people and their own national economy. Along with so much else Wang Jing’s images impart, they remind us that this erasure is enabled, enforced and perhaps conveyed most profoundly by the expunging of migrant spaces--and the memory of migrant spaces--from the urban landscape.