Content area
Full Text
Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System from Origins to Reform, by David Bray. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. 277 pp. US$60 (Hardcover). ISBN 0-8047-5038-6
China, past and present, is a country of diverse cultural and economic conditions and whose governing and social institutions are marked by distinctive spatial and place-based characteristics. Even so, China studies in general has not adopted geographical approaches, and, with some important exceptions, has remained a relatively conservative arena of geographical enquiry concerned largely with observation of patterned spatial phenomena and a limited number of theoretical spatial studies. This book, by David Bray, makes a contribution to the evolving theoretical literature by taking as its subject the urban social institution of the danwei (work unit) and analysing its dynamic formation from perspectives concerning governmentality, derived from Michel Foucault.
Ideas concerning governmentality have gained scholarly significance over the past twenty years or so because they raise important and uncommonly observed questions about power relations between structures of governance, their implementation, and everyday life. There is likely no more important arena of enquiry for the study of societal formation. When the structures of governance at stake represent the institutions of a particularly powerful state apparatus, the articulation of power relations between state and society arguably becomes more acute. While research using a governmentality perspective has overwhelmingly focused on European and US or "Western" contexts, Bray demonstrates its appropriateness for research on China. While Bray is not the first to use this theoretical material for research on urban...