Beijing from below: Stories of marginal lives in the capital’s center

Abstract

Harriet Evans offers a voice to few of numberless individuals affected by relocation in exchange for modern flats and monetary compensation in Beijing. She did this by telling the stories of six people she recorded from 2004 to capture something of the intensity, pace, and reach of the changes then engulfing Beijing from 1949 through the Mao years, the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, and Neoliberalism with a Chinese accent.