ABSTRACT
“Start here, make a difference”: this slogan advertised the Shenzhen University Games in 2011 and participated in the construction of a broader narrative of the city as a place of new beginnings. Based on fieldwork carried out in an old village that has been absorbed in the urban sprawl of Shenzhen, this chapter examines the striking parallel between the foundational statements that are visible in the village’s ancestral hall and the posters that were everywhere on the city’s walls. Both the city slogan and the lineage slogan are drawn from a specific genre in Chinese written culture, the duilian – parallel couplets with a propitiatory quality. Yet, in spite of their similarities in form and content, the slogans differ in the ideologies and logics of practice they express and enact.
