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Stephan Feuchtwang is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics. His main area of research has been China. He has published books on Chinese popular religion, feng-shui, and (with Wang Mingming) a book on local leadership: Grassroots Charisma in southern Fujian and northern Taiwan. More recently he published the result of comparative research on the transmission of great events of state violence in China, Taiwan and Germany, resulting in a book: After the Event. Another of his topics of research is place in urban and rural landscapes, on which he published as editor and contributor, Making Place: State projects, globalisation and local responses in China. Most recently he has been engaged in coordinating six researchers in four cities in China studying officials and residents in inner and outer city areas on the subject of community development, the planning of urban spaces and the increasing segregation of housing types and tenures. This was part of a large EC-funded project 2011-2015 on sustainable urbanisation in China.
In 2009 the State Council approved the city’s urban-rural master plan, which includes housing projects that can integrate rural-urban migrants with the urban-registered population, in line with the plan to increase China’s urban population and its domestic consumer market. Minxin Jiayuan (MX) was the first of 21 planned public-rental housing projects in Chongqing to be built. This essay discusses the system of governance and ‘self-management’ that obtains in this complex and others.
