A lot of my friends have asked me about my future career path and what I'll be doing next year when I return to the States. My dream right now is to enroll in a PhD program in geography or political science, which means I'll be spending the next 6 years in school. Most of my friends reply, "But that's such a long time!" and express their own hatred for school. They tell me that they couldn't imagine wanting to go back to school for that long.
My general response is, first, if 6 more years of schooling allows me to continue doing research in China and about China, and possibly even get a job later, then I'll be thrilled. Secondly, enrolling in a PhD program means free schooling and a modest stipend (universities fund their PhD students in exchange for Teaching Assistantships), and I really can't argue against getting paid to do research in China. These are the economic benefits of more schooling.
My more recent experiences, such as writing my senior honors thesis, presenting my paper in Sydney, and doing research for the Fulbright has inspired me to go into academia. I believe that publishing articles has value in promoting a greater understanding of social and political problems, and I hope one day to contribute to the field. Furthermore, I want to be a teacher. It's important to spread knowledge about how political decisions affect lives. I hope one day to motivate students to be as excited as I am about geography, politics, and China. A PhD will allow these aspirations to become a possibility. I published a note on my Facebook with one of my personal statements that talks about my research and these aspirations.
Anyway, I finally finished up all of my graduate school applications last week. Here is the final list, in order of top choice first (my final decision will in reality depend on funding):
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (political science)
Cornell University (political science)
University of Colorado-Boulder (geography)
University of Washington-Seattle (geography)
University of Hawaii-Manoa (geography)
University of California-San Diego (international affairs)
For each school, I had to write a statement of purpose explaining why I wanted to study geography, political science, or international affairs. Although each essay was different, I compiled an essay here if you guys are interested in exactly why on earth I would want to study geopolitics (space, government, place-based identity and all that good stuff) for the next 6 years. Note: this is an excerpt from one of my essays; I did not include the full statement here.
As an applicant to the PhD program [at X University], I intend to pursue research focused on comparative politics in Asia, specifically the role of power and social status in the regulation of space. For my dissertation, I plan to explore the relationship among socio-economic spatial segregation, urban housing redevelopment, and grassroots political movements in China. My purpose for pursuing a PhD in government is to learn how to combine the application of political theory with quantitative and qualitative measures to better understand state-societal relationships. My career goal is to become a university professor of political science in order to conduct research on contemporary Chinese political development and teach others about the way power politics affect the negotiation of social spaces.
I am interested in researching the effect of urban redevelopment and spatial divisions on the transformation of political activism and local governance in China. During the economic and political reforms of the 1980s, income, rather than the work unit (danwei), began to determine residence, which resulted in the popularization of new, private residential compounds. According to political scientist Luigi Tomba, the semi-privatization of housing in China has resulted in socio-segregated zoning policies: "Both official rhetoric and popular discourses justify a different arrangement of social spaces, by placing those with better suzhi [inner-quality] on a higher step of the civilization ladder."[1] Suzhi (素质) literally means "element quality," but it is best translated as inner-quality, character, qualification, disposition, fiber of your being, basic essence, and constitution.
Tomba argues that socio-segregation based on residents' level of suzhi determines how communities are governed: the "high-suzhi", or the economic elites, are cared for by private housing management companies, practice self-responsibility, and exercise political autonomy through participation in homeowners' organizations. The "low-suzhi", on the other hand, depend on government-controlled Resident Committees (RCs) for welfare services, such as subsidized health insurance, unemployment, and social security.[2]
Official rhetoric supports this social hierarchy and intra-urban social, spatial, and political differentiation: "The active classification undertaken through the 'gating' of urban spaces and the resulting flexible governance patterns does not reduce the Chinese state to a simple tool of global capital. It facilitates, rather than compromises, the state’s legitimacy as administrator of a national entity."[3] Tomba therefore argues that socio-spatial segregation and flexible governance patterns contribute to social stability and prolong the political legitimacy of the Communist party in an increasingly privatized market economy. Elizabeth Perry also maintains that China's political leadership has successfully created divisions among different social groups in order to prolong and extend political control.[4] Benjamin Read analyzes the diminishing role of RCs in wealthy communities and emerging democratic processes of homeowners' committees in gated communities to argue that private ownership helps promote political freedom.[5]
While much of the extant literature on housing reform concentrates on the political movements of homeowners, [6] I hope to pursue research in low-income communities without homeowner committees. To conduct research for my dissertation, I will combine a Geographic Information System (GIS) analysis of urban development and zoning patterns in Chinese cities with ethnographic field studies to analyze socio-economic spatial segregation, citizen behavior, and the role of local government. My study will endeavor to explore how the rearrangement of urban spatial patterns may reflect a change in the state-societal relationship in China. Questions I hope to examine include: How are major transformations in China's urban zoning patterns related to patterns of citizen behavior and local governance? How does socio-spatial separation influence the role of state control and political legitimacy in the "low-suzhi" urban society? Obtaining a PhD in government will allow me to more deeply research this role of power and social status in the regulation of space on a national and regional level.
This year I am in Nanjing, China on a research grant from the Fulbright US Student Program to examine the influence of urban redevelopment on local Nanjingese socio-spatial divisions and concepts of identity. In addition to auditing sociology classes at Nanjing University, exploring Chinese scholarly literature on cultural preservation, and interviewing government officials and preservation activists, I am conducting an ethnographic case study and living in Old Nanjing, home to some of Nanjing's oldest housing structures and poorest residents.
My ethnography involves participant observation, interviews, and mapping in an endeavor to examine whether or not socio-economic spatial divisions affect local Nanjingese cultural identity, social behaviors, and political governance. For example, during interviews with Resident Committee (RC) officials in Old Nanjing, I have personally witnessed the phenomenon of political flexibility according to the income level of a neighborhood (that is, Tomba's theory on governance based on residents' consumption ability). The RC structure in Old Nanjing requires additional RC responsibilities for the "economically backward" residents that need closer governance. The RC structure is completely different from that of the wealthy districts in Nanjing, which allow for more political autonomy.
During interviews with Old Nanjing residents, I have discovered notable shame in the dilapidated houses of their low-income community and insistence that I take my research to an official site of national cultural heritage. These preliminary findings suggest that the local residents have a sense that their homes and way of life are devalued on a broad, institutional level of society and may have internalized national government ideas and standards for which places contain value. I look forward to synthesizing my findings over the next several months to present a more comprehensive ethnography on Old Nanjing.
I am motivated by my Fulbright research to pursue graduate study in political science in order to further analyze the relationship between urban spatial change and social divisions in recent efforts to maintain political stability in China. I am convinced that learning how to use the tools of political theories and research methodologies in graduate school to expand what I have already observed at the local level in Nanjing will be beneficial to understanding urban governance and citizen behavior on a larger scale.
By using mixed-method approaches incorporating GIS with ethnography to examine political phenomena in the context of spatial analysis, I hope to contribute to the growing field of research on Chinese local government and political legitimacy. By doing so, I will prepare myself for a career as a university professor in order to research and teach others about the way social status affects political spaces.
A special thanks to Melissa Rock, Meg Rithmire, Jim Tynen, Bobby O'Brien, Lesley Graybeal, Zach Smith, Crystal Shen, Sue Todhunter, Grace Muller, Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga, and Liz Gerke for helping me with my application essays this semester. I couldn't have done it without you!
[1] Luigi Tomba, "Of Quality, Harmony, and Community: Civilization and the Middle Class in Urban China," Positions: East Asia cultures critique 17 (2009): 597, accessed September 30, 2011, doi: 10.1215/10679847-2009-016.
[2] Tomba, "Of Quality, Harmony, and Community," 599.
[3] Tomba, "Of Quality, Harmony, and Community," 599.
[4] Elizabeth J. Perry, "Studying Chinese Politics: Farewell to Revolution?," The China Journal 57 (2007): 4.
[5] Benjamin L. Read, "Democratizing the Neighbourhood? New Private Housing and Home-Owner Self-Organization in Urban China," The China Journal 49 (2003): 33.
[6] Yongshun Cai, "Civil Resistance and Rule of Law in China: The Defense of Homeowners' Rights," in Grassroots Political Reform in Contemporary China, ed. Elizabeth J. Perry et al. (Boston: Harvard University, 2007), 176.
Chinese word of the day (I had a special request to do my Chinese name):
田然－ tian2 ran2- literally, "field of nature or nature", aka Sarah Tynen
Chinese word of the day (I had a special request to do my Chinese name):
田然－ tian2 ran2- literally, "field of nature or nature", aka Sarah Tynen
No comments:
Post a Comment