Nordia Geographical Publications Volume 46:1 Life’s work in the city without ground Cross-border family politics between Shenzhen and Hong Kong Jonathan Burrow ACADEMIC DISSERTATION to be presented with the permission of the Doctoral Training Committee for Human Sciences of the University of Oulu Graduate School (UniOGS), for public discussion in the lecture hall L10, on the 21st of June, 2017, at 12 noon. Nordia Geographical Publications Volume 46:1 Life’s work in the city without ground Cross-border family politics between Shenzhen and Hong Kong Jonathan Burrow Nordia Geographical Publications Publications of The Geographical Society of Northern Finland and The Geography Research Unit, University of Oulu Address: Geography Research Unit P.O. Box 3000 FIN-90014 University of Oulu FINLAND [email protected] Editor: Tiina Lankila Layout editor: Teijo Klemettilä Cover image: View of Shenzhen River and Skyline from the Lok Ma Chau Control Point in Hong Kong. All photos by the author, unless otherwise stated Author Photo: Vilja Pursiainen / Kaskas Media Nordia Geographical Publications ISBN 978-952-62-1595-2 ISSN 1238-2086 Juvenes Print Oulu 2017 Life’s work in the city without ground Cross-border family politics between Shenzhen and Hong Kong Contents Abstract vii Supervisors ix Acknowledgements xi 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Cities without ground 6 1.2 Feeling rules 12 1.3 Entailment 21 1.4 Encounters 27 2 The continuous field 33 2.1 We did research 35 2.1.1 Seeking suitably stable sites and subjects 42 2.2 Love stories 45 2.2.1 Meeting people 48 2.3 The sensory place-event 54 2.3.1 Multi-person multi-language place-events 56 2.3.2 Reconstructing events 58 3 We serve you in every stage of your life 61 3.1 Pausing at the border 63 3.2 Mobility as fix 68 3.3 Gridlock 77 4 Foundational events 79 4.1 Speculative encounters 80 4.1.1 Furtive encounters 84 4.2 Legacies of graduated sovereignty 87 4.2.1 Reduced to genealogy 91 4.3 Between ascription and becoming 95 5 Time is money, efficiency is life 97 5.1 “I used to go fishing here” 98 5.1.1 Mobility as fix 105 5.1.2 “But we are not very flexible” 108 5.2 Fortune seekers 110 5.2.1 Enchanted objects 113 5.3 Feeling the friction of globalisation 118 v 6 You are a Shenzhener once you come here 121 6.1 Escape to Hong Kong 122 6.2 Wearing out of the subject 128 6.2.1 “But they are not like me…” 132 6.3 Without history 138 7 Topological homes 141 7.1 Mobile homes 142 7.2 Love 148 7.3 Political families 150 8 Practising tolerance 155 8.1 Spaces of encounter 157 8.2 Failures of tolerance 164 8.3 Entailment 169 9 Conclusion 175 9.1 Dreams on the road to Kowloon 179 9.2 Feeling the friction of borders 184 9.3 Accounting for the future 187 Literature cited 191 Appendix 1 – Interview grid Appendix 2 – Research agreement Appendix 3 – Archive of cases vi Abstract Life’s work in the city without ground: cross-border family politics between Shenzhen and Hong Kong Burrow, Jonathan, Geography Research Unit, University of Oulu, 2017 Keywords: family, citizenship, globalisation, borders, inequality, mobility, gender, sensory ethnography, colonialism How do we evaluate our life’s work, the reflexive understanding of our role in the reproduction of society, in the city without ground? How is space produced between two metropolises constituted of air-conditioned passageways, concourses and tunnels that aim to disorientate the traveller with capital? To involve the reader in these questions, this sensory ethnography takes the reader on a journey across a series of reconstructed sites, from a study-centre classroom with a view of the border fence to immigration control points separating Hong Kong from Shenzhen and barricades erected by protesters on the occupied streets of Hong Kong Island. At each of these sites, the reader joins the author in interpreting multiple examples of the cross-border family’s strategies for dealing productively with the friction produced by territorial, economic and embodied borders. Over the dissertation’s course, these draw a “counter-topography” (Katz 2001) that highlights the productive and violent frictions created by individual and collective interventions in existing systems of assigning citizenship through genealogical inheritance. The aim of this dissertation is to bring the family back into scholarly studies of borders and global inequality – not as a tool for defining binary gendered systems of inheritance, but as a flexible pragmatic regime in which we learn to become tolerant of difference and work strategically together. It argues that families are a critical factor in the reproduction of borders. Family, state and enterprise regimes learn from and depend on each other. Over our lifetimes, these regimes use inherited logics of gender and sexual reproduction to shape our life’s work. This dissertation argues that members of cross-border families are experts in strategically engaging with inequality. Because of this, they can offer scholars and policymakers strategic advice on how their policies are pragmatically used as tools for individual and family development. The dissertation develops its conclusions by addressing three interrelated questions: How is the Hong Kong–Shenzhen border reproduced in the lives of its practitioners, what does this mean for how borders address global inequality, and what is the role of space in the performance of cross-border family politics? It addresses these questions by observing the tension between the dreams of individuals and the inherited possibilities assigned to them by immigration departments and family wealth through property ownership. Border control, the city, family or the workplace do not constitute a singular experience, but are instead constructed uniquely for each traveller based on internal and external inheritances. Within each experience of border crossing, this dissertation finds a tension of authenticity, resolved through emotional labour – the vii presentation of an outward expression of feeling contrary to a deeply held personal feeling (Hochschild 1983). The intimate event of family formation – the act of love – is what those who justify inherited borders of gender, nationality and property ownership propose liberates its participants through rewarding emotional labour. However, this simultaneously entails the next generation in the very genealogical structures they propose such events evade (Povinelli 2006). These emotional frictions hold this system of inequality together while producing valuable heat for participants that justify their complicity in the reproduction of borders. Families and other intimate relations, act topologically, twisting, turning and folding through topographical spatial structures to simultaneously support and extract value from them. Feelings matter. It is through our learnt structures of feeling that we consciously and subconsciously respond to and develop new spaces through encounters with difference. This study finds that our current order is critically dependent on the transmutation of emotional “tolerances” for the genealogical “order of things” across generations (Brown 2006). Borders and mobility, this dissertation proposes, are not universally evil; rather, they are co-constructed as integral “genres” of ideas based on historical experience that produce a multiplicity of violence and sovereignty. If we take the time to listen to those who love across distance, they can draw guides for us to make the best use of the friction produced by the discursive, material and economic interdependence of families, states and enterprises. viii Supervisors Professor Anssi Paasi Geography Research Unit University of Oulu, Finland Docent Lauren Martin Department of Geography Durham University, United Kingdom Pre-examiners Professor Tim Oakes Department of Geography University of Colorado at Boulder, USA Professor Reece Jones Department of Geography University of Hawaii, USA Official opponents Docent Outi Luova Centre for East Asian Studies University of Turku, Finland Assistant Professor Jussi P. Laine Karelian Institute University of Eastern Finland, Finland ix For Angelica and Rosemary x Acknowledgements In this dissertation (yes I use the term “dissertation” rather than “thesis,” in honour of a forgotten translation decision) I make an extensive argument for recognising the ethnographic “we.” In the opening pages of Chapter 2, I argue that ethnography by definition is co-constructed and we should not relegate those we do research with to a brief mention in the preface or acknowledgements. With this is mind I would like to acknowledge my debt to the “we.” Reminding the reader of the irony that I am the one licenced to tell this story, and that I tell the story through a familiar ethnographic trope of arrival and departure. I first arrived in Shenzhen in January 2005, on my way home from six months as an English teacher in northern China. I remember my travelling companion and I intended to spend an afternoon shopping in LoWu but found ourselves by accident at passport control unable to find a way back. My interest in borders and families evolved from a brief overnight field trip to Tijuana Mexico when studying abroad in Los Angeles in late 2006. During the evening lecture, one of our guides described how a significant percentage of the city’s population worked across the border in San Diego. This image made me reflect on the anxiety my fellow, mostly white private college students, and I felt crossing the border that morning. Particularly the concern they showed for myself and other non-US citizens in the group. They feared the two of us might not have been able to return to California. With this in mind, I tried to imagine the daily emotional experience of Tijuana- based workers who cross the border each morning and afternoon. What would their colleagues and families think? How would they process the emotions of going between shiny downtown San Diego and dusty Tijuana? These questions stuck with me, and in early 2009, as a master’s student in Applied Anthropology at Macquarie University I had a chance to answer them.