Guangzhou, my hometown
I go this place every time I’m back ~ Canton Tower
I was born in Guangzhou (廣州，广州). I lived there until the age of 12 then migrated to Australia with my parents. But the majority of my families are still in Guangzhou, I go visit whenever I can, even just for a couple of days.
I am obvious being bias here: to me, this is the most beautiful and interesting city in the world. It’s exciting, yet complex. It’s a typical Chinese city on surface yet, multidimensional and sophisticated in its own rights. One thing is for sure, it has changed a lot, so dramatically that every time when I’m back I find something new, and interesting.
I’ve become so in love with city that I started writing about it, which became my PhD research and thesis and, my book, Digital Media in Urban China Locating Guangzhou.
Guangzhou inspires me since early days of my research - my Honours thesis (2009, Monash University) draws on Guangzhou’s experience with the SARS outbreak (interesting I’m writing this blog now under the cloud of the COVID19 outbreak). I was there holiday, having witnessed the beginning of the outbreak, when it was still the mysterious disease due to the Chinese government’s information cover-up. The virus changed the dynamic of the city, it temporarily threatened the lives and practices of Guangzhou people - we loved Yum Cha (yes, that’s our local cuisine) - and you could only go to yum cha houses (茶樓) to experience it. It wasn’t possible, just like how we are not not allowed to go for dining and all other social activities.
A pandemic seems to change the spatiality of a city from within, suspending or even permanently suppressing the production of the everyday, personal social spaces, which constitute the mega-spatial experience of an urban city. Just like how the virus first attack smaller cell then gradually, affecting our whole body.
Guangzhouers also soon realized a rather unusual aspect of the city planning due to the SARS outbreak - the Number 8 People’s Hospital, which specialized in contagious disease handled the first few SARS cases and subsequently became the hotspot of the outbreak, was situated so centrally in the city. Of course, no one ever planned to build a contagious disease-specialized hospital at the center of the city, it was more like the ‘center’ had shifted due to the never ending expansion of the city. I don’t think we still consider the area of the No.8 Hospital as ‘center’ during the CONVID19 outbreak in 2020.
The meaning of Guangzhou seem to have transforming as the geo-adminstrative territory of the city expands. A city is not just some politically or socially produced space, it is fundamentally a ‘place’ that is defined by the land mass, geographic landscape, climate, and ultimately, people who live in those places. City is the place of space - it has the ability of ground the spaces and the power relations, structures and dynamics that produce and maintain different spaces. There will be no spaces without places, and hence no cities without places. City in fact refers to the transformation of place - through the processes of industrialization - led urbanization. Any project of modernization needs to produce new meanings, functions, and representation of local places. Yet, no matter how power and forceful this arbitrary process, it can never entirely remove or, dilute the relevance and significance of local subjectivity. This is because, as Manuel Castellswrites: people lives at local places, of course they need to defend it and want to write the history of the place in their own way. Human is place-boned, there will be no human (society, civilization, ways of life) without place.
Guangzhou is there, both structurally produced and locally defined. The intertwining between these two processes are historical and continuous. You can find more about this idea and a sample of my early writing on Guangzhou from this article and the following workings:
Wang, W.Y. (2019). ‘Mapping Cantonese: The pro-Cantonese protest and Sina Weibo in Guangzhou’ in Brunn, S., and Kehrein, R. (Eds). Handbook of the Changing World Language Map. Springer’s. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73400-2_100-1.
Wang, W. Y. (2017). Re-imagining Guangzhou on Sina Weibo - developing a geographic approach of Chinese social media. In M. Kent, K. Ellis, & J. Xu, (Eds.). In Chinese Social Media Today: Critical Perspective (pp. 209-220). New York London: Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351661836/chapters/10.4324/9781315160214-20.
Wang, W. Y. (2016). ‘Opinion leader and the making of a city’. In Griffiths, M.O. and Barbour, K. (Eds.) Making publics, making places. (163-177). Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.20851/j.ctt1t304qd.15.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A098854d07f5bc068922674b725b81abe.
Wang, W. Y. (2015). Remaking Guangzhou Geo-identity and Place-making on Sina Weibo. Media International Australia, 156 August, pp. 29-38, https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X1515600105