Dissertation
The warp and weft of life: heritage and working-class nostalgia in a Chinese textile town
On Tuesday 30 June 2026 Xiao Luo successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.
- Author
- X. Luo
- Date
- 30 June 2026
- Links
- Leiden Repository
This dissertation investigates the relationship between industrial heritage and working-class identity in Fangzhi Cheng, a former textile town in the eastern suburbs of Xi'an, China. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with three generations of textile workers, it traces the community's history from the socialist construction of six state-owned factories during the First Five-Year Plan (1953–1957) through the mass layoffs and factory closures that followed the economic reforms of the 1990s, examining how former workers continue to inhabit and shape a landscape transformed beyond recognition.
The central theoretical contribution lies in the deployment of nostalgia as an analytical framework for understanding the tensions between class identity and heritage politics. This study distinguishes between "bureaucratic nostalgia," the state's selective presentation of the industrial past to attract middle-class tourism and consumption, and "social nostalgia," the collective, multilayered, and contradictory yearnings of workers across generations. It argues that official heritage policy in China systematically excludes the voices and memories of the working-class communities who created the industrial spaces now valorized for their aesthetic and economic potential, functioning as a form of neoliberal urban governance that reproduces class inequality under the guise of cultural preservation.
Former textile workers, however, are not passive victims of this process. They resist through memory and through the intergenerational transmission of working-class habitus and guanxi, both reconceptualized here as embodied forms of industrial heritage. The former captures the persistence of collective values and dispositions forged in the factory; the latter denotes the social networks and reciprocal ties that outlive it. In doing so, this dissertation expands the definition of industrial heritage beyond physical artifacts and built environments, arguing that heritage is embodied, practiced, and transmitted through the everyday lives of working-class people. As China's rapid urbanization continues to reshape old industrial communities, this study calls for a more inclusive and critical approach to heritage, one that recognizes working-class communities not as objects of conservation, but as its most essential and living carriers.
Supervisors:
• Prof.dr. F.N. Pieke
• Prof.dr. M.F. Herzfeld