Brutal Ephemerality

How do you build a hopeful future when your present is designed to be temporary? Brutal Ephemerality reveals that the sprawling urban villages on the edge of megacities such as Beijing aren’t slums that grew by accident. Instead, urban villages are intentionally kept in a state of uncertainty, allowing the city to have a ready supply of cheap land and flexible labor to fuel its rapid growth. Yang Zhan proposes the concept of “migrant venturers” (chuangdàngzhe) and argues that “venturing” (chuangdàng) represents a distinct survival strategy of mobility, risk-taking, and opportunity seeking, rather than rooting oneself in a specific place or profession. This strategy is an active practice of “future-making”—an effort to project a meaningful future from an uncertain present. Brutal Ephemerality demonstrates how time is not a neutral backdrop, but the central arena for political struggle, ethical practice, and imaginative creation among marginalized groups. Zhan shows how hope and suffering are paradoxically intertwined, and how the very struggle for a better life can, itself, become a source of harm.