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Paper short abstract

Revisits are well suited to study both change and the changing experience of change. The zero-covid policy and real estate crisis have caused obvious transformations. Yet inhabitants of Shenzhen experience stagnation, and their optimism has given way to critiques of the future.

Paper long abstract

In China the effects of the zero-covid policy intersect with the country’s dramatic real estate crisis. These issues have unleashed changes that were striking amid my revisit to the field after years of absence. Changes are manifest in the subdivided administrative layout – smaller governance units bearing new names – and social and material environment – new residential neighbourhoods but also halted construction sites. However, I also encountered critical discourse about these transformations that denies the existence of change. Among the inhabitants of an urbanized village of Shenzhen, the prevailing mood has shifted from optimism during my earlier field work to pessimism, and from muted scepticism to outspoken resentment. This paper reflects on the extent to which their erstwhile optimism influenced my earlier writings on their long-term temporal outlook and resulting scalar strategies, which made participation in top-down imposed urban renewal acceptable. Should this analysis be revised or updated in the light of urbanization’s unfulfilled promises, which generates a sense of break with the future and betrayal by the government? The temporal outlook which now prevails prevents from acting upon the future. People are not only dispossessed of their holdings, they are deprived of hopefulness. They ironize about the fakeness and criticize the defects of urban renewal policies, which the government still presents as the desired future. They feel the plans consist in mere renaming and actually amount to stagnation, even regression. Revisits to the field are well suited to study both change and the changing experience of change.