Labouring bodies: Big Tail Elephants in 1990s Guangzhou

Big Tail Elephant Working Group (daweixiang gongzuo zu, hereafter BTE) is synonymous with the city of Guangzhou and the surrounding Pearl River Delta. Formed in 1991, the group is most closely associated with the artists Chen Shaoxiong (1962–2016), Liang Juhui (1959–2006), Lin Yilin (1964–) and Xu Tan (1957–). This article re-examines BTE artists’ practice from 1991 to 1994 and argues that the artist’s performing body provides the critical lens through which to understand BTE artists’ work during this time. Acknowledging that the experience of BTE’s work was primarily physical, embodied and performative allows for an important reconsideration of not only their works but also the predominant ways in which the global capitalist ‘turn’ in the 1990’s China has been discussed in art historical writing. This article argues that BTE artists were primarily interested in urban forms for what they signified about commercialization as a form of a new political rationality after 1989 and suggests that BTE artists were ultimately concerned with commodification’s transformation of society and of ideas of cultural value.

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Planning discourses, local state commitment, and the making of a new state space (NSS) for China: Evidence from regional strategic development plans in the Pearl River Delta

Urban Studies ◽

10.1177/0042098016665954 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 54 (14) ◽

pp. 3281-3298 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Yi Sun ◽

Roger CK Chan

Keyword(s):

Pearl River Delta ◽

River Delta ◽

Pearl River ◽

City Region ◽

Strategic Development ◽

The Pearl River Delta ◽

State Administration ◽

Development Plans ◽

The Pearl River ◽

The City

Grounded in the interpretive tradition, this paper applies the theory of New State Space (NSS) to China’s city regionalism. We argue that in the NSS effort in China, planning discourses enable a regulatory framework to be applied at the level of city region. City regionalism corresponds to the conceptualisation of NSS in two dimensions. First, the rise of the city region gives rise to a new territorial form of state administration. Second, the city region is made to be the most appropriate scale encapsulating capital–labour relationship (CLR). This study uses NSS to examine the regional strategic development plans (RSDPs) of the Pearl River Delta Region and presents two primary arguments based on an interpretation of the Outline of the Plan for the Reform and Development of the Pearl River Delta (2008–2020) (OPRDPRD) and the preliminary actions of various levels of government based on it. First, RSDPs serve as effective regulatory tools that not only enable new state administration articulating regulatory responsibility throughout the various levels of governmental hierarchy, but also elaborate the CLR in the interest of regional based industrial development, infrastructure construction, and formulation of social policies. Second, the city region has become a site for political rhetoric and related actions whereby regulatory order is unfolding in order to itself effect an economic restructuring and political reshuffle. Creating a city region is ‘planning ideological’ and solving problems is difficult because of the asymmetric jurisdictional power relations between municipalities.

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