Disaster Citizenship and Solidarity of Informal Groups: A Case Study in Disaster-Affected Villages in Eastern China

This article explores how disaster-affected people respond to state-led disaster governance through the analytical concepts of solidarity and disaster citizenship. This form of governance consists of two aspects: 1) modernisation, involving resettlement for urbanisation and economic recovery as well as modern technology and infrastructure for risk prevention; and 2) moral state, manifested in the state’s demonstration of compassion and its demand of gratitude. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in two flood-affected villages, I examine villagers’ responses to the state’s governing of public opinion, resettlement and recovery. The study reveals that villagers contested the government’s control of public opinion by forming communal opinions, resisted resettlement and remade places out of state-designed space for reconstruction in informal groups such as neighbourhoods and kin. Besides existing social ties, villagers built their solidarity with a shared sense of socioeconomic justice rooted in a long tradition of state-society interactions. Their solidarity was enhanced but also undermined by state-led disaster governance. Nonetheless, villagers reinforced and redefined their claims to entitlement and negotiated their autonomy. This article concludes that social practices and experiences of the villagers embody disaster citizenship in rural China through solidarity of informal groups negotiating post-disaster life on their own terms.