In the Wake of Resettlement: Reconfigurations of Space, Order, and Sociality in Northern China's Grassland Villages

Abstract

In recent years, Bygone Village, an organic village with nearly a century of history in the grasslands of northern China, received a demolition notice under the national policy of village consolidation and relocation. Within two years, the old village where generations had lived was demolished, and residents were moved into a government-planned new administrative village nearby. Situated within a region that has historically existed as a space of transition between pastoral and agricultural economies and between successive state formations, Bygone Village's experience reveals not an exceptional rupture but the latest episode in a long pattern of unsettled relationships between institutions and the communities that persist within them. This study takes the relocation as its entry point, asking how social rupture in village life occurred and persisted through a state-led spatial reorganization, and how the state attempted to reconstruct order within it. The analytical backbone of this argument is supplied not by the relocation event itself but by the history that precedes it. Situated at the edge of the Mongolian plateau, the Bashang Grasslands have long been a zone of demographic and economic churning, where pastoral and agricultural worlds mixed, Mongolian and Han communities coexisted, and successive regimes each attempted to fix what has remained inherently fluid, none successfully. Running through these historical layers is a structural dynamic: the relationship between state and local was never a stable hierarchy but a recurring oscillation between centralization and decentralization, in which each retreat of state authority left behind unsettled institutions, unresolved claims, and communities that had learned to navigate the gaps. It is this accumulated history of perpetual transition and recurring state withdrawal that the relocation activates. The grievances that surface in the funeral, the informal logics that persist through the election, and the unfinished order that characterizes the new village are not products of the demolition alone; they are the latest form taken by a transitional condition that has defined this place across its entire modern history. Through the tracking of two core events, a funeral representing the informal sphere and a village committee election representing the formal sphere, this study reaches three sets of conclusions. First, village consolidation and relocation did not create contradictions out of nowhere but changed the conditions of their visibility, forcing into the open the half-hidden tensions accumulated over decades among cadres and villagers, among neighbors, and within families. The demolition activated what history had deposited, turning grievances that had long been managed through the pressure mechanisms of the acquaintance community into public confrontations and moral trials. Second, the funeral did not repair the fractures produced by relocation but provided a temporary moral framework that all participants were required to observe. Within this framework, contradictions were suspended rather than resolved; multiple moral evaluation systems operated simultaneously, so that a person's failure in one system did not erase the weight accumulated in another. At the same time, ritual practice began to inscribe the first layers of historical memory onto the physical space of the new village, allowing it to begin becoming a place with history. Third, the state's attempt to rebuild grassroots governance through spatial reorganization and electoral standardization provided villagers with a limited but real space for accountability, yet formal procedures did not replace informal logic. At the center of this dynamic was an intermediate layer of grassroots cadres whose authority derived simultaneously from institutional authorization and from the personal relationships and moral prestige they had accumulated locally over time. It was precisely this two-way embeddedness that made them the most capable actors in the gaps left by institutional change, and the primary site where formal rules and informal logic were continuously entangled. This study argues that what appears after rupture is neither disorder nor the immediate establishment of a new order, but a sustained transitional condition in which unofficial ritual practice and state institutions operate simultaneously at different rhythms, jointly shaping a kind of order that remains unfinished. This condition mirrors the defining historical character of the region itself: a place that has persisted as a space of transition across successive political regimes, and where the incompleteness of both state rebuilding and everyday practice is not a failure of the process but its normal form.