A History of Dispossession: Governmentality and the Politics of Property in Nanjing, 1927 - 1979

This dissertation aims to provide a history of dispossession in China from 1927 to 1979. It discusses the ways the property politics in the Nationalist and Socialist regimes have shaped the urban development of a Chinese city, Nanjing. Drawing upon the insights of Michel Foucault's governmentality studies, this dissertation tries to make sense of the shifts in relations between knowledge, power, and subjectivity in China's management of urban property, urban spaces, and urban population.The studied period from 1927 to 1979 marked the transition from sovereignty to governmentality in China. In western liberal societies, this transition was characterized by the limitation of state power and the increasing protection of individual rights. Curiously, in China, the growth and expansion of governmentality was accompanied by massive property dispossession. To examine the co-evolution of modern statehood and modern subjectivity in China, I have identified four dispossession practices adopted or invented during the studied period: eminent domain, slum clearance, socialist transformation, and communization. By studying these practices and the logic that informs them, this dissertation seeks to understand the significant shifts in how logic and objects of government are understood and acted upon, due to changing political rationality in modern China. It argues that the Chinese governmentality and the psychological, biological, sociological, and economic processes that constitute them are property-related. The control of real property has been considered by both the Nationalist Government and the Socialist Government as prerequisite to the production of governable subjects and governable spaces. This dissertation analyzes this property-based governmentality in terms of: (1) how reality of modern China was translated into governmental thoughts leading to the state monopoly of real property, and how these thoughts were rationalized; (2) how thoughts about governing real property were turned into practices, and what technologies and techniques of governments were adopted or invented to achieve these goals; (3) how the government of real property had at the same time rendered the Chinese population governable; and (4) the production of new governable spaces out of dispossession.This dissertation concludes that the Nationalist and the Socialist regimes have different political rationalities, which produced two kinds of property politics respectively: "biopolitics" and "biographic politics." The first, "biopolitics," concerns the politicization of biological life. Under "biopolitics," the objective for property-government is to produce a sanitary urban environment so as to maintain the biological welfare of the population. The second one, "biographic politics," concerns the socio-political biography of individuals. Under "biographic politics," the objective for property-government is to remove property privileges from the people with particular biographies in the perspective of the state. Corresponding to this shift, city planning and property redistribution were employed in the two political regimes, respectively, as the main technologies of government to manage urban property, urban spaces, and the urban population