Representing the imagined city: Place and the politics of difference during Guangzhou’s 2010 language conflict

Abstract In this article we investigate local citizens’ place politics and discourses of place identity during the 2010 language conflict in Guangzhou, China. Drawing on geographical scholarship on the relational construction of place and the progressive politics of difference, we conceptualize place as an assemblage of trans-local connections and disparate trajectories which constitute the radical hybridity of any particular place. In concretizing a relational rethinking of place into a local politics of difference, we suggest that Doreen Massey’s thesis of a global sense of place provides an important epistemological basis for destabilizing the normative local/non-local boundary in order to realize a relational constitution of place-based cultural identity and subjectivity. Based on a social and political campaign against state-led hegemonic language standardization, the 2010 language conflict in Guangzhou is a socially and culturally constructed process in which the Guangzhou locals’ imagination and representation of place and identity are reproduced within a local geometry of social relations involving the state language policy, the local community and the city’s migrant population. Both exclusionary and progressive discourses of place identities have been articulated in this process of re-negotiation and re-imagination of place-based identities. This paper acknowledges that some place-bounded politics may demonstrate a counter-hegemonic dimension and are therefore not inherently regressive. But we also contend that any place politics needs to ask which elements are to be welcomed and which can be excluded in a fluid regime of politics within specific networks of social relations. The cultural boundary of insiders/outsiders must be constantly re-negotiated and rendered relational with the attentiveness to ethical responsibility towards otherness.