This paper explores China’s “plaza dance craze” (guangchangwure) as a practice of “vernacular urban modernity,” through which urban public space is claimed, produced, and experimented with by ordinary urban residents. Resulting from fieldwork carried out in two small cities in southwest China’s Guizhou Province between 2011 and 2014, the paper considers the contrast between the social space produced by plaza dance, on the one hand, and the projects of local government to redesign and redevelop Guizhou’s urban spaces as ethnically-themed built environments for the purposes of promoting tourism development, on the other. We argue that plaza dancers offer themselves as an alternative, embodied way of displaying the city on their own terms. This is significant in a context where the transformation of China’s cities, and the plethora of public leisure spaces that have been added to the built environment over the past decade, has emphasised a highly visual display of order, tidiness, and “civilised modernity” evoking aspirational middle-class lifestyles. In deliberate response to the ideals of urban planners and leaders, plaza dancers insist on defining for themselves what urban modernity in China is supposed to look, feel, and sound like.
