ABSTRACT
The urban case of Beijing Asuwei shows how resource-rich urban communities can learn from each other, and how localized claims and grievances can transcend the local level and produce policy effects at higher political levels. This is the third in a line of resistance movements against operating or planned incinerator projects by urban residential communities in Beijing. Since these communities had close contacts with each other and various phases of their struggles overlapped, the Asuwei case has to be understood in the light of this broader development. The following section, which also provides the background for the Dagong village case outlined in Chapter Five, thus briefly introduces Beijing municipal waste policies and related contention before turning to the case of Asuwei. The Asuwei residents’ linkages with other contentious communities and intermediaries are outlined in the context of the unfolding events, followed by an analysis of the role of these ties for the Asuwei struggle. I refer to the three cases of local contention against incinerator projects staged by urban communities in Beijing as ‘homeowner’ resistance, both because this is a common term used in the literature when referring to social contention by China’s urban residential communities (Cai 2005; Cai and Sheng 2013; Chung 2015; Wang et al. 2013), and because the term yezhu (业主, ‘homeowner’) was a central term used for self-reference by the contentious community members under study.
