Tunnels of power: The cultural politics of the Beijing subway
By: Li, Cheng and Liu, Yanjun
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Material type: 
BookPublisher: Modern Asian Studies Description: 58(3), May, 2024: p.840-864.Subject(s): Beijing subway, Biopolitics of infrastructure, Power and citizenship, Cultural politics,China
In:
Modern Asian StudiesSummary: This article investigates the cultural politics of the Beijing subway. Drawing on diverse sources, we trace the evolution of the subway over the last half-century to reveal that it transcends its fluctuating, time-specific practicalities to serve as a potent conduit through which the Chinese state consistently shapes subjecthood. The article begins with the subway’s Cold War inception as a military enterprise, spotlighting its deliberate concealment to safeguard the echelons of power and obscure both international and domestic tensions. The second section delves into the subway’s rebirth in the wake of China’s opening-up reform and rapid economic rise, as it transforms into a mobile gallery of political aesthetics that extols China’s cultural heritage and triumphs, cultivating national pride under siege from unleashed market and social forces. The final section dissects the subway’s orchestration of undesirable passengers, sculpting a socioeconomic hierarchy in the city’s commuting system. As a multifaceted prism, the Beijing subway encapsulates a range of covert and overt, pragmatic and aesthetic, and inclusive and exclusive elements in the cultural politics of Chinese infrastructure at large; and it illustrates the sustained centrality of state power in shaping individual subjectivities and defining the cultural and representational significance of Chinese infrastructure, albeit amid growing contestation.- Reproduced
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-asian-studies/article/tunnels-of-power-the-cultural-politics-of-the-beijing-subway/00D44FB5618FE53BC50B820AADE7ADDB
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Articles
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Indian Institute of Public Administration | 58(3), May, 2024: p.840-864 | Available | AR135390 |
This article investigates the cultural politics of the Beijing subway. Drawing on diverse sources, we trace the evolution of the subway over the last half-century to reveal that it transcends its fluctuating, time-specific practicalities to serve as a potent conduit through which the Chinese state consistently shapes subjecthood. The article begins with the subway’s Cold War inception as a military enterprise, spotlighting its deliberate concealment to safeguard the echelons of power and obscure both international and domestic tensions. The second section delves into the subway’s rebirth in the wake of China’s opening-up reform and rapid economic rise, as it transforms into a mobile gallery of political aesthetics that extols China’s cultural heritage and triumphs, cultivating national pride under siege from unleashed market and social forces. The final section dissects the subway’s orchestration of undesirable passengers, sculpting a socioeconomic hierarchy in the city’s commuting system. As a multifaceted prism, the Beijing subway encapsulates a range of covert and overt, pragmatic and aesthetic, and inclusive and exclusive elements in the cultural politics of Chinese infrastructure at large; and it illustrates the sustained centrality of state power in shaping individual subjectivities and defining the cultural and representational significance of Chinese infrastructure, albeit amid growing contestation.- Reproduced
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-asian-studies/article/tunnels-of-power-the-cultural-politics-of-the-beijing-subway/00D44FB5618FE53BC50B820AADE7ADDB
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