Xuefei Ren

This project comparatively examines how cities in China and India have become strategic terrains for the remaking of citizen rights. The first part of the book draws upon historical analyses to examine the emergence and consolidation of territorial forms of governance in China and associational forms of governance in India from the late nineteenth century to the present. In the second part, the project demonstrates how the inherited forms of governance continue to shape the trajectories of citizens’ struggles today, based on ethnographic fieldwork on slum clearance and redevelopment in Guangzhou and Mumbai, land acquisition and protests in Guangdong and West Bengal, and anti-air pollution campaigns in Beijing and Delhi.