Taxis, Traffic, and Thoroughfares: The Politics of Transportation Infrastructure in China's Rapid Urbanization in the Reform Era

Abstract

Cities have expanded both territorially and demographically at an unprecedented speed during the recent intense process of urbanization in China. This article investigates the material, discursive, and social dimensions of an infrastructural process that has been interwoven with the discourse and practice of urban development in the city of Guangzhou since the 1990s. It takes a 2007 public hearing concerning the short supply of taxis on workdays as an entry point into the politics of urban infrastructure, threading together long-term changes in urban forms, the ritual dimensions of the public hearing, and taxi drivers' downward mobility. The issue at the heart of this public hearing is a pattern of traffic flow caused by intense urbanization in the late Reform period that has led to important structural tensions in everyday life. Yet, under the official ideology of urban development, these structural tensions are de-humanized and rendered a mere technical issue of supply and shortage. In present-day China, infrastructural projects are regarded as technological solutions to a wide range of social and political issues in the process of urbanization; yet their material results often simply make these issues invisible instead.