Walking Alternative Beijing: Independent Culture, Public Sentiments, and Everyday Utopia

Abstract

This thesis analyzes different genres of independent culture and their spatial manifestations in Beijing, China. Through the lens of cultural geography, it examines an alternative urban cartography by mapping vital cultural sites across Beijing: screening venues, livehouses, and independent bookstores. Beyond static locations, the thesis also investigates citywalk, a spatial practice that has gained popularity on Chinese social media since the pandemic. The central research questions are: How do these cultural sanctuaries persist under conditions of precarity? And how does citywalk, as popular culture, simultaneously make these spaces more visible while exposing tensions between cultural autonomy and co-optation? Building on theoretical frameworks from Habermas, Raymond Williams, and Fredric Jameson, this thesis explores utopian desires embedded in public sentiments and their entanglement with consumerism, state regulation, and the risks of sentimentality. Through participant observation and a theoretical approach regarding the public sentiments, the thesis argues that Beijing’s alternative cultural spaces are constituted not despite but through their precarity, generating forms of affective attachment and collective practice that are at once fragile and politically significant.