Introduction: Teahouses as pawns or players

The teahouses of Chengdu, China have a long history of local geo-cultural relevance. “Each individual example of Chengdu’s numerous teahouses acts as a ‘microcosm of society,’ and therefore ‘provides an ideal window for observing social, cultural, and political transformations’ which were so indicative of China” (Wang, 2018: 24, quoted in Simpson, 2017: 170). Not only were they windows to observe these transformations, they were also stages upon which these transformations were enacted. Given the tumultuous past century for China, it is valuable to investigate the way that both the state and the market approached Chengdu’s teahouses to impose top-down ambitions, and the consequences of this for locals.

One overarching question is whether the teahouses should be viewed as pawns for top-down forces to impose their agendas on the populace or whether they should be interpreted as sites of bottom-up contestation in the face of those agendas. Conversations around ‘right to the city’ (Harvey 2008) maintain that the city should strive to be a co-created space that is resistant to being overrun by commodification/capitalist intentions. This essay will evaluate the extent to which teahouses were sites of local, bottom-up contestation in the face of the political changes of the past century, the economic transition to a market economy, and Chengdu’s contemporary urban development aspirations.

Reviewing the right to the city in a Chinese context

Even though the bulk of the right to the city argument, according to Harvey (2008), is concerned with profit-led spatial change, specifically around urbanization as the method for absorbing excess capital (25), he offers a more humanistic take on the definition as well:

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. (23) 

The role of collective agency in its ability to change the city (and, therefore, urban inhabitants) is particularly complicated when we consider the Chinese context. During the cultural revolution, the state-led, urban-to-rural dynamic of the ‘Down to the Countryside’ movement was initially set up to redistribute excess urban population after the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward, and then to ‘educate’ urban youth in the countryside (Deitrich, 1998: 199). This had a large influence on reshaping the process of urbanization. When Deng Xiaoping’s Economic Reformation began to reverse the effects by activating market principles that were friendly to friendly to competition at the level of small-scale entrepreneurialism, it:

brought a “floating population” of rural migrant workers to Chengdu, and city residents who had retreated to the private sphere during the Cultural Revolution era returned to public life to encounter the members of this new migrant population, such that “the teahouse once again became the most important place for socialization, no matter of what age, gender, occupation, or level of education.” (Wang, 2018: 152, cited in Simpson, 2017: 174)

The collective change to the city was largely brought about at the state level and lived out at the local level.

Post-reformation and into the 21st century, Chengdu’s position as a beneficiary of the central state’s Develop the West policy (PRC State Council, 2016) has only brought the city closer in line with Harvey’s (2008) circuits of capital principles. Intensifying competition with nearby industrial hub Chongqing is speeding up the pace of life and the rate of urbanization. “Chengdu’s government is one of a number of players to join the drive to recreate the city as a hub of innovation, but at what cost to its identity?” (Bullivant, 2013). A consequent feature of this is that increased amounts of people and land are being functionally gerrymandered into Chengdu’s city limits in order to sustain the grounding of capital in the urban form. “Approximately 900,000 villagers in Chengdu alone have been resettled to urban-style settlements in order to release space for new arable land and to justify continued urbanization closer to the city” (Zeuthen 2018). This can be seen as activating what Lefebvre saw as the “obliterating step by step [of] the distinctions between town and country through the production of integrated spaces across national territory,” (Harvey, 2008, referring to Lefebvre, 2003).

These top-down initiatives dissolve the boundary between the rural and the urban citizen, ‘urbanizing’ them all as a way to pursue larger cities for larger GDPs. This form of economic development is not unique to Chengdu. However, the consequences of this practice are intensifying on the ground as Chengdu receives even more development focus and investment as China’s western urban hub. 

In light of this evidence, the right to change the city seems to both historically and contemporarily be in the hands of state planners adhering to top-down ambitions, with individuals shuffled around to achieve development goals as they see fit. This results in the “process of profit-driven urbanization and its relentless commodification and re-commodification of urban spaces” (Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer, 2009: 176). Evidence of this process can be seen in the land-use change: rural land being rewritten as urban territory in Chengdu (Wang, Yang and Guo, 2021). At the local level, teahouses increase in number and type right alongside Chengdu’s development trajectory to address this profit potential (Wang, 2019). That said, some dispute that globalized neoliberalism is solely responsible. “China’s ‘landed urbanization owes its political origins more to domestic state power reshuffling than to the intrusion of the global neoliberal agenda’” (Lin, 2014, cited in Miao, 2019: 513), which, based on historical evidence, appears true. Regardless of how much of Chengdu’s urbanization can be attributed to Harvey’s (2008) brand of neoliberal influence, what becomes a much more interesting question in light of this intensive and top-down rate of urban change is who has the right to keep the city the same?

Ideological appropriation of local urban culture: change and contestation

If there is one thing the Chinese state (in all of its permutations during the past century) was not short on, it was change. Ideological swings inevitably resulted in consequences that were felt on the ground—looking particularly at teahouses as sites of resistance to various regimes. “The teahouses were a major arena and a reflection of the relationship between the state and society” (Wang, 2020). We see how “In 1911, when the Qing Dynasty fell following a nationwide strike, the spark came from the Heming teahouse, when Sichuanese rioted against the government’s cooperation with an English railroad company” (Matuszak, 2014). To this day, Heming teahouses is still in operation as one of Chengdu’s most famous. During the Nationalist era, teahouse politics were a source of intense tension between the government and the people. Teahouse goers would discuss their discontent with social and political affairs, which led the Nationalist party to mandate posters reading ‘Do not discuss national affairs’ be hung in teahouses, stoking resentment even further over the suppression of free speech (Wang, 2012). In the Maoist period, teahouses were practically eradicated because of the perception that they were bad influences on the populace, encouraging laziness and vice (Wang, 2018: 209). Contestation was more challenging because there were so few teahouses left to contest in. Nevertheless, the very persistence of this public culture could be interpreted as its own form of resistance, given how once the Economic Reform opened up the economy, the habits of Chengdu’s local population reared back in full force, raising the number of teahouses higher than ever before. Lastly, in 1989, in the aftershock conflicts from Tiananmen Square, there was a lethal conflict between students and police in Chengdu in a largely-forgotten riot (Lim, 2014), and all teahouses were closed in Chengdu.

A century’s worth of contesting dominant ideologies in the teahouses of Chengdu seems like sufficient evidence that these were indeed instances of bottom-up resistance in public space, fueled by adherence to local urban culture. The state is aware of the potential of the teahouses to be sites of resistance, given that teahouses were shuttered during both the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen conflicts. So, if anything, it might be something of a surprise that teahouses have been able to proliferate to such an extent. However, teahouses aren’t only sites of resistance. They can be and have been co-opted by state agendas to disseminate propaganda and influence culture. In Sorensen and Sagaris’ (2010) analysis of public participation and right to the city, they propose that although placing priority on local involvement is seen as beneficial because of its ability to generate public support among residents, this raises the problematic “that participation masks fundamentally unequal power relationships” (299).

The unequal power relationship between the state ideology and the local participation is especially relevant in a context like China’s. Historically, the Mao-era CCP had ambitions to strong-arm culture through “tightly controlled popular entertainment” (Wang, 2018: 212) which resulted in harsh tamp downs on teahouses’ popular performances, replacing it with socialist entertainment. However, "the government was unable to control [popular entertainment] completely and had to compromise and allow some of these entertainers to perform (Wang, 2018: 211).” Therefore, they kept small parts of teahouse culture they either felt they could mobilize for furthering ideological ambitions, or that were too embedded to uproot. More contemporarily, “the emergence of a fast-growing market economy in the PRC had led to a huge increase in consumer-oriented and profit-oriented cultural expression. This phenomenon furthered the increase in and wider use of public spaces and hence urban culture” (Hockx and Strauss, 2005: 526). Even so, market influence did not eliminate the state’s influence over daily culture. “China’s new political culture has become tethered through state involvement to local business culture and local consumer patterns” (Wang, 2018: 217). The state utilizing local urban culture and public spaces speaks to how the dominant powers have the capacity to appropriate what theoretically is under the domain of the local for the purposes of legitimation. This continued influence over local urban culture raises the question of whether teahouses are sustainably capable of contesting the dominant socio-political priorities if those interests can come in and take over the space as they have multiple times in China’s recent history. Sorensen and Sagaris' (2010) correctly assess that “A key problem is that many ‘participation’ processes are state-run and…the fundamental discourse remains that of the state, not that of the communities it seeks to engage” (299). If this power to co-opt local culture is within their grasp, it calls into question who actually stands to benefit from the public spaces of Chengdu’s teahouses.

Nevertheless, there is another, less obvious form of praxis when exercising locals' ‘right to the city’: “The tenacious inertia of everyday life practice allowed people from the lower rung of society to resist change and frustrate the efforts of the state to regulate public space and implement modernizing agendas” (Liu and Wang, 2018: 264). Inertia as resistance: its passivity likely makes it fly under the radar of researchers seeking out more agentive forms of bottom-up urban participation and contestation. But it is no less legitimate in its effectiveness when it comes to maintaining the local culture of the people who are often solely understood as being imposed upon by forces larger than themselves.

Function over form: adaptation to changing urban contexts.

“Actually, cultural practices and social customs were not abandoned easily or entirely. Careful observation reveals that many strands of the older public culture persisted in social life [during the Cultural Revolution], underscoring culture’s enduring nature” (Wang, 2018: 208). Maintaining local identity is a quietly powerful form of urban resistance when it comes to superimposed national ambitions. This is as true in the face of neoliberal globalization as it was during the Maoist clampdowns. The teahouses’ very nature as longstanding parts of public life “could not be tolerated as part of the socialist narrative and revolutionary discourse, which dictated that the teahouse was incompatible with China’s economic development and Chengdu’s hoped-for transformation into a modern, industrial city” (Wang, 2018: 210). The effort to become that modern, industrial city meant that local culture was subsumed by national culture. Or in this case, national and neoliberal ambitions.

There is much debate concerning whether mass urbanization leads toward a world of homogenized cities or whether cities can hold onto the traits that make them unique (Mocca, 2022: 1). This becomes particularly relevant especially when looked through the lens of symbolic displacement, “refer[ing] to the sense of subordination, discomfort and unease with trying to stay-put while the visible and sensed changes of the physical and social fabric of the neighbourhood and its symbolic order shifted dramatically as rapid gentrification took place” (Atkinson, 2015: 382). To an extent, a certain segment of Chengdu’s contemporary teahouses has been gentrified. Their adaptation to different (read: richer) clientele means upscale design tendencies, more expensive menus, and even music choices changed the experience of going to a teahouse to bring it more in line with catering to a global city’s homogenized audience (Simpson, 2017: 173). It has also guaranteed their persistence. This puts an age-old debate before us: what is more important, form or function? Is there a sense of symbolic displacement if the teahouses still address the same social purpose? Does their physical adaptation to a global city’s market of consumers delegitimize their role? When we take into consideration that, by and large, it has not been through the elimination of less expensive and traditional-style teahouses, but rather the addition of these new-style ones, we see they continue to provide a forum for upholding local culture and harbor the potential for resistance by giving people space to discuss affairs. As Wang (2020) sums it up:

Both prosperous and low-end teahouses promoted the development of the public sphere, and the middle class, often more educated and desirous of intellectual arenas, became a major factor. Thus, what we are considering is the overall democratization of business ownership, types of patrons, and intellectual pursuits—what we should acknowledge as a stronger public sphere that was forming in the teahouse.

Perhaps, more than cultural inertia, the longstanding lifestyle and role of the teahouses sustain a cultural legacy. This legacy adapts but stays inherently the same in function, allowing teahouses to continue to serve multiple urban needs, to multiple urban audiences. In this way, they are not threatened by the capitalist imperative of profit-making; they have leaned into it and proliferated as the city has grown into its new neoliberal and globalized role. Political priorities even seem to be turning in favor of legitimizing local cultural elements like the teahouses. As the state seeks out new forms of moral legitimation for its regime, “the Communist Party has to draw upon the customary aspirations of ordinary life to find a justification for its rule” (Madsen, 2014: 59).

Conclusion: The right to the [same] city

When the fate of the city is directed by top-down imposition of ideology, market forces, and urbanization of capital, it is a subversive and contesting act to seek out and sustain ‘sameness’ at the local level. “The perseverance of local culture and the existence of such a ‘geo-culture’ are not a result of ‘more leeway’ given by the government but of the resistance exerted by locals from their local cultures” (Wang, 2018: 218). With each Chengdu resident that goes to take their tea, they are—knowingly or not—enacting an affirmation of urban identity, and upholding the memory of a space whose legacy includes a significant amount of challenge directed towards dominant ideologues. Change is a given in urban China, and urban participants, to some extent, are resigned to it. This is evidenced by how “urban contestations are often centered on the speed and manner of changes rather than the changes per se (such as on the compensation for demolition instead of on the demolition decision itself)” (Shin, 2015, cited in Miao, 2019: 516). In striving to achieve "the urgent political priority of constructing cities that correspond to human social needs rather than to the capitalist imperative of profit-making" (Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer, 2009: 176), the teahouses are an opportunity to step off the treadmill of urban modernization and sit awhile in a space of continuity. 

“Critical approaches to urban studies are concerned with: examin[ing] the changing balance of social forces, power relations, sociospatial inequalities and political-institutional arrangements that shape, and are in turn shaped by, the evolution of capitalist urbanization (Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer, 2009: 179). Chengdu’s capitalist urbanization (with Chinese characteristics) certainly sees a complicated entanglement of political-institutional arrangements. This paper has focused specifically on political consequences for the institution of local public spaces—namely, the teahouse. We can conclude by saying that it is truly a contest between bottom-up resistance and top-down appropriation: it is a tug-of-war between who (or what) has the right to change the space, keep the space, or deny access to the space. But deeper than the contest is the memory of what role teahouses have historically served in the urban sphere. Place memory is political; the potential for resistance is there, latent, and inherent in the space.

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