Re-Territorialization and Social Resistance in the Remaking of Dafen Village, Shenzhen, China

After exhibited in Shanghai EXPO2010, Dafen Oil Painting Village has been advocated as an innovative “best practice” of governing that has transformed urban villages with low-skilled labors and chaotic landscape into a cultural cluster.  Many scholars have noted that, in China, couples of famous cultural clusters have emerged and prospered in places with a near vacuum of governance, such as villages or remote suburbs, only to drastically change upon the extension of state governance. Nevertheless, there seems to be a marginalization of scholarly attention to the trade-painting community of Dafen Village, perhaps due to the common critiques on authenticity of trade-painting industry and thus, negligence of everyday life of trade-painting workers and their struggles.

What concerns us is the changing landscape of social relations when a particular area is demarcated as a special cluster subject to the state’s regulation in name of objectifying the imagined economy. Instead of debating the nature of trade-painting industry, we argue that the remaking of Dafen Village into a cultural cluster is a project of re-territorialization, driven by the state with a market mindset. The fabrication of the cultural cluster thesis into the settlement of the trade-painting community entitles the state to try new logic and new forms of inclusion and exclusion. More specifically, we are concerned about the differentiated treatment given to different social groups through calculated policies and the corresponding social struggles of various social groups for their rights. Particular attention is given to two major calculated rules: spatial planning for land use regulation and differentiated welfare access rights. Through the study, we attempt to offer a critical yet nuanced perspective toward the heterogeneous society and changeable alignments or blurred boundaries between the state and society in the dialectic process of re-territorialization and counter-territorialization.