The Discourse of Place: An Ethnographic Study in Tai’an, a Non-Metropolitan City in Contemporary China

Place constitutes a fundamental physical and psychological connection between individuals and the world and serves as a necessary condition for the formation of identity. However, knowledge about place is never neutral. Embedded in intersecting power relations, such knowledge both reflects and reproduces processes of exclusion. Investigating how knowledge of place is produced and sustained, therefore, not only contributes to understanding the operation of social relations within specific contexts, but also reveals how place functions as a critical site for negotiation, inequality, and the construction of subjectivity. This research examines these issues through an ethnographic case study of Tai’an, a non-metropolitan city in China that nonetheless represents the everyday living environment of a large proportion of the population. Drawing on ethnographic methods and informed by a Foucauldian power–knowledge framework, the study investigates how knowledge of Tai’an is produced and maintained in contemporary China. The findings demonstrate that the discourse of Tai’an is not dominated by a single power holder, but rather emerges from ongoing negotiation and compromise among multiple actors operating under asymmetrical discursive conditions. While local government prioritises bureaucratic and politically defined tasks, and cultural sectors remain structurally dependent on official governance frameworks, residents engage with place through strategies of silence, selective disengagement, and everyday practices that re-appropriate local spaces for lived experience. Together, these dynamics have generated a widespread sense of displacement among residents, as their lived experiences and attachments to place increasingly diverge from official narratives. This research contributes methodologically by illustrating how ethnographic research can be conducted in contemporary China despite increasing constraints on data access, through sustained fieldwork and reflexive analysis. It also contributes theoretically and philosophically by conceptualising place as a dynamic, non-neutral product of power relations and everyday practices, offering insights into the relationship among place, power, and subjectivity.

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University of Galway

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CC-BY-NC-ND

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University of Galway Theses (PhD Theses)