Abstract
China’s rapid urbanization in the last three decades draws scholarly attention to the country’s great cities. On one hand, scholars in urban studies and geography have examined the great cities to conceptualize the current urban process. By adopting paradigms of modernization, globalization, and state entrepreneurialism (the neoliberal or developmental state), they provide broad overviews of the cities’ postsocialist transformation. On the other hand, scholars in Chinese history and cultural studies have produced the rich, growing literature of Chinese urban history in the imperial and Republican periods (prior to 1949) by analyzing historical sources.
Yet, there is a noticeable gap between these two distinct fields of scholarship; in particular, scholars trained in the social sciences seek to adopt (or modify) “Western” theories rather than explore the historical roots of current transformation or consult the historical literature. The distinct fields of scholarship correspond to the different images of the Chinese city: the traditional city either as the imperial administrative center or the prosperous market town integrated into the regional trade network (that formed a rural–urban continuum 1 ), and the contemporary city increasingly integrated into the global trade.
Two of the four books under review here discuss historical Chinese cities: Jianfei Zhu’s book on imperial Beijing and Charles Musgrove’s book on Republican-era Nanking. The other two examine contemporary Chinese cities: Qin Shao’s book on rebuilding Shanghai and Gregory Bracken’s edited volume on the transformation of Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong. Each of these books differs from others in the subject matter and in research methodology, and they all contribute—albeit in varying degrees—to our understanding of the making of Chinese urban forms in the imperial, Republican, and contemporary periods.
Unlike other cities that formed a rural–urban continuum, China’s former imperial capital was the sacred symbol of a transregional polity. Its mighty walls and gate towers were urban symbols that marked a distinct urban space from the surrounding countryside. It is an administrative center where the imperial family and bureaucrats lived and worked. Many books have been written about the last imperial capital Beijing—its social and cultural history and its city planning and architecture. 2 Jianfei Zhu’s Chinese Spatial Strategies differs from these books by presenting an imaginary diagram of the imperial power and boldly comparing it with the power structure of the modern European state.
Zhu attempts to “study Beijing in historical reality and to explore the issue of a Chinese approach to spatial design . . . to search and to argue for a generic approach to design and disposition rooted in Chinese culture and mind” (p. 2). This spatial design is in fact the essentialist construct of an imaginary state power. Zhu illustrates the “architecture” of the Chinese imperial power as a neat diagram that projects the concentric layers of the capital’s walled enclosure onto a vertical scale—equaling horizontal depth with vertical height. The center in the invisible depth of the imperial compound is then imaginatively transformed into the pinnacle of a pyramidal power structure, where the Chinese emperor stands surveying the imperial bureaucracy and beyond. Zhu compares this vantage position with the panoptic power of the modern European state, as interpreted by Michel Foucault. 3 This formal comparison begs these questions: Does it correspond to a social and political analogy between the Chinese imperial power and the modern European state? Can history be reduced to a few formal diagrams? Where are those stories, characters, and processes that do not fit into the diagram?
Zhu supports his formalist argument by searching for a philosophical foundation. He argues that an age similar to the Age of Reason in early modern Europe already arrived in the Chinese antiquity, namely, the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 BCE). He reinterprets the legalist philosophy of Han Fei and the military strategy of Sun Zi to demonstrate that “the similarities between Sun Zi and [Carl von] Clausewitz, and between Han Fei and [Jeremy] Bentham (with Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Foucault) were no mere pure coincidence in ideas” (p. 182). Zhu then leaps from these formal similarities to a historical argument that “the essential political transformation lies in the repudiation of feudal policy” (p. 184). Thus, feudalism ended in China much earlier than in Europe. Again, this bold claim is based on reading philosophical texts rather than analyzing social historical data.
Zhu makes a historical argument that legalism constitutes the philosophic basis of the centralized state power, which first took form in the Qin Dynasty. The Ming and Qing Dynasties (1368-1644, 1644-1911) saw a process of perfection and consolidation of the same framework of power as the Qin state. This perfection manifested in the spatial design of Beijing and the Forbidden City in particular.
Reflecting his academic background in architecture, Zhu constructs the imperial power of the Ming and Qing Dynasties like a timeless monumental edifice. He claims that in writing this book, “An awareness of historical evolution and change from early Ming to late Qing is combined with a social and synchronic framework of analysis. The natural ‘suppression’ of time into space in the case of imperial Beijing itself lends a guide” (p. 2). Zhu’s “synchronic analysis” reiterates the timeless construct of imperial China. But rather than characterizing it as a stagnant feudalist empire, Zhu compares it with the modern European state structured along the lines of reason and progress. There are many gaps in Zhu’s analyses and arguments that—along with his excessive use of passive-voice sentences—leave readers amazed as well as puzzled.
Zhu assumes that the Forbidden City was the emperor’s permanent base, and it had remained the pinnacle of the power pyramid. But as Charles Musgrove shows in the conclusion chapter of China’s Contested Capital, the emperor was a mobile entity and the imperial power traveled with the emperor between multiple capitals and palaces (including Nanjing in the Ming Dynasty and Shenyang, Chengde, and the Summer Palace in the Qing Dynasty). Beijing remained the empire’s bureaucratic and ritual center, to which the emperor always returned.
After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, the Republic of China was born, but it was fragmented by warlord rulers. Its nominal capital remained in Beijing until it moved to Nanjing in 1927. Musgrove’s book details the process of building a model capital of modern China in the Nanjing decade (1927-1937), when the Nationalist Party or Guomingdang (GMD) sought to reunify China and create a new revolutionary nationhood. The book’s six chapters examine the historical background, city planning, architectural designs, state rituals, and street protests of the new capital.
Chapter 1 shows that Nanjing was a new capital born of factional and regional conflicts. To legitimate the new capital, the GMD reconstructed the myth of Sun Yat-sen as the founding father of the new republic. Sun served as its first provisional president in Nanjing in 1912, and his image was highly featured in the inauguration ceremony of the Nationalist Government in Nanjing in April 1927. Yet, the debate over where to locate a permanent capital erupted in the following year when Beijing was taken over by General Yan Xishan, a warlord in alliance with the GMD. Musgrove details the arguments for the choice of Beijing or Nanjing as the capital: these arguments demonstrated that the boundary and scope of modern China was so fluid that the location of its geopolitical center was open to debate. The debate betrayed the rivalry between Chiang Kai-shek (the GMD leader) and Yan Xishan, between the South (as the revolutionary base) and the North (that included Mongolia and Manchuria). The debate came to a close with a ceremony in which the rival military leaders paid respect to the remains of Sun (who died in Beijing in 1925) in their temporary resting place in Beijing.
In the next year, the remains were moved to the newly completed Sun Mausoleum, located next to the tomb of the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty in Nanjing. This was to fulfill the will of Sun, whose earliest revolutionary slogan was “Overthrowing the Manchu and restoring the Chinese rule.” Chapter 4 examines the design of the mausoleum and the elaborate state funeral of June 1929. The masses were asked to watch but they could not participate in the ritual, which included hundreds of student, merchant, worker, and peasant representatives. Musgrove highlights that the GMD attempted to make this representative participation meaningful “by invoking sacred elements from the imperial past, when sovereignty rested with the emperor and his officials, who were charged with the Heavenly Mandate of looking after the wellbeing of the people” (p. 151). It seems that the traditional worship of ancestry that had been shared by the state and families survived in modern China.
In contrast to the cult of Sun Yat-sen, other state rituals promoted by the GMD, as discussed in Chapter 5, were less successful, probably because these rituals signaled a break rather than continuity with the imperial past. For example, the GMD promulgated a new national/solar calendar to replace the traditional/lunar calendar, prohibited Nanjing residents from observing the lunar New Year, and banned “superstitious things that promote wastes.” This “revolutionary effort” to “rationalize” Chinese society and culture proved to be unpopular and was widely resisted.
The GMD-led government nonetheless succeeded in mobilizing the masses to participate in a series of state festivals. Musgrove documents the formal details of the rituals and shows how they helped to build up the centralized state power. Similar to these rituals, “scientific” city planning and architecture designs, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, were adopted in building the capital as the symbol of power. Musgrove’s study of planning Nanjing as a modern capital greatly contributes to our understanding of Chinese modern architecture and urbanism by highlighting the visions and designs of the first generation of modern Chinese architects and planners, whose joint work with the technocrats indeed anticipated China’s contemporary urbanization.
The vision of the new capital was a “magnificent, glorious, artistic, and disciplined metropolis.” It would exceed, in Mayor He Minhun’s vision: “London, Paris, and New York to become the singular great metropolis of the world” (p. 60). Yet, the capital would be essentially Chinese; it was to be built by and for the Chinese. The architects and planners advocated a revolutionary agenda in Chinese architecture that matched the GMD’s revolutionary ideology, but they were in fact trained in the United States, and foreign experts were hired as consultants for planning the new capital. This betrayed the transnational character of the nationalist project.
Musgrove discusses the planning of the administrative center in great detail. It was to be built outside old Nanjing (a different approach from the Communist Party’s rebuilding old Beijing into the socialist capital in the 1950s) and next to the Sun Mausoleum. Architectural proposals for the center were highly influenced by monumental spaces in Washington and Paris, as the architects trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition tried to combine Chinese motifs (such as curing roofs) with Western-style grandeur. But the center was never built, and Nanjing remained “a capital without a capitol.” New government buildings got built ahead of the “capitol plan”; they reflected an attempt to create a new form of rational discipline and an architectural style that was both Chinese and international. But the new buildings were all separated from streets by surrounding outer walls; this contradicted the formal discipline of openness and reason and reinvented the space of imperial-era government complexes.
A key element in building the new capital was to plan and build modern roads. To fix old Nanjing’s narrow streets, the planners proposed a grid of primary and secondary roads. This marked a clear departure from imperial city planning in which walls rather than roads defined districts and neighborhoods. The Municipal Government was only able to get one trunk road built; it was Sun Yat-sen Road that cut through Nanjing’s old urban quarters. The Haussmann-style modernization project entailed widening some existing streets and demolishing old buildings. And it met popular resistance:
Nearly the entire year from June 1927 to June 1928 was spent in a tug-of-war between the Municipal Government trying to enforce condemnation of buildings along major roadways and resident owners demanding fair compensation. Residents repeatedly petitioned to the central government to prevent the Municipal Government from carrying out its threats to tear down their houses. (p. 82)
Such disputes and petitioning are seen again in the urban renewals of China’s great cities today, as detailed in Qin Shao’s Shanghai Gone.
Shao makes a noteworthy contribution to the field of contemporary Chinese urbanization by drawing our attention to what lies behind the macro urban process and the human cost of rebuilding old Shanghai. Based on extensive interviews and fieldwork, Shao meticulously reconstructs the personal and family histories of local residents negatively affected by the urban process. The book consists of five chapters, each of which is an exhaustive case study of neighborhood relocation and resistance.
The postsocialist transformation of Shanghai involved the displacement of local residents from the old urban core that had taken form in the treaty-port era and had declined into slums in the socialist era. Shao characterizes this gentrification of old neighborhoods (mainly consisting of the lilong or alleyway houses) as “domicide” or “murder of home,” as it causes the eviction of the residents and the destruction of their home. The “murderer” is an alliance of local bureaucrats and overseas developers that has dominated the urban process; for example, Shao criticizes Vincent Lo, a developer from Hong Kong: “Lo has been rewarded because of his business success, which in part has been achieved by being in bed with corrupt Chinese officials and robbing people . . . of their home” (p. 141). Shao’s voice emerges from her narratives as representing the local (underprivileged) against the “global” elite; her case studies of the local neighborhoods offer a new perspective into the globalization paradigm.
The book’s second case study (i.e., Chapter 2) detailed the displacement of two families by Lo’s signature redevelopment Xintiandi (c. 1998-2001), which was widely reported in the media and scholarly literature as a successful urban conservation and renewal project. 4 A Muslim family who had owned their home since the 1920s was told in 1998 that their home “must be demolished according to the needs of city development.” They rejected the compensation deal and became one of the earliest examples of holdouts or “nail households.” After some fruitless negotiation, the family was forced out of their home. They later sued the local government and developer without success. They felt more wronged when they found out that their house was renovated and leased to a restaurant rather than being demolished as stated in the relocation notice. The other family whose story is documented in Chapter 2 had connections to high-level GMD officials who had fled Shanghai before the communist takeover, and they also lost their home to the developer. Both families owned their private property; they lost it during the Cultural Revolution, recovered it in the early reform era, and lost it again only about a decade later. Shao points out the government had consistently ignored private property rights since it took power. Such residents are rare, as most other relocated residents did not own their homes. Their resistances are isolated examples in the state-led relocation projects and do not form a broad social movement.
Without success in lawsuits against the government and developers, these residents would press their demand for justice by petitioning to higher authorities. The book’s first case studies (Chapter 1) detailed a “diehard petitioner” who was among the first victims of relocation. Shao points out that petitioning is not unique of China as it also takes place in Western democracies, but since the 1990s, there has been an unprecedented nationwide “petition movement” that involves more than ten million petitioners annually. Shao concludes that “the epidemic of institutional corruption in China has created a dysfunctional petition system which left both the government and the petitioners frustrated but dependent on it and on each other” (p. 87).
The third case study shows that the residents of the East Eight Lots in central Shanghai were displaced to the city’s margins so that the rich developer, with the help of the district government, could get even richer by building profitable luxury high-rises. But the case in fact presents a much more complex picture than the simple victimization of the displaced residents. Following some unsuccessful resistances and lawsuits, the remaining holdouts of the neighborhood formed a “legal study forum” in the fashion of the Communist Party’s study groups in mobilizing the masses for political campaigns. They initiated a “cultural resistance” of singing revolutionary songs and raising national flags on their holdout properties. These resistances produced mixed results: some residents continued to fight/petition for justice while others achieved “surprising gains.” Three years after her home was destroyed, Shen Ting with overseas connections convinced the district government to pay her family 2.63 million yuan, ten times more than its initial offer. By comparison, Mr. C was even a bigger winner. After he was displaced by force to a suburban apartment, he refused to sign any paperwork and distanced himself from the group of holdouts of which he had been the leader. He changed his strategy and quietly pressed the district government to solve his issue without embarrassing them, especially prior to the opening of the World Expo 2010. The government finally agreed to purchase a three million yuan apartment in central Shanghai for Mr. C, while allowing him to keep the suburban apartment. His new downtown apartment is larger than his former home and with a great view.
Shao’s fourth case study details the story of another shrewd property owner who had become an amateur lawyer and operated a private consultant business to help other residents to negotiate with the government for better compensation deals.
These fascinating case studies illustrate Shao’s insightful observation:
Far from being merely passive victims of the reform, they have become entrepreneurs. They have chased—by holding out and other means—the moving target of the property market and refused to settle for less than the maximum . . . [They] employ Maoist repertoires tactically to protest against official corruption and achieve potential upward mobility for themselves. (p. 22)
Indeed, images and words were borrowed from the communist revolutionary legacy in the new struggle and interest conflict between different social groups, between the “weak” (roushi qunti) and the powerful. The Maoist ideals of Party leadership and class struggle evolved into new cultural manifestations.
The contrasting images of the domicide victim and the shrewd entrepreneur presented in the book in fact call into question Shao’s wholesale criticism of the government and developers, which probably indicates the lack of distance between the author/researcher and her subjects. Shao seems to be closely associated with the victims in interviewing them and reconstructing their poignant stories (not only of current displacements but also of earlier experiences in the Maoist and prerevolutionary eras). Oral history usually aims to reconstruct a period relatively distanced from the interview time. By contrast, Shao’s interviewees (and Shao herself, it seems) are still emotionally involved in the stories of their recent experience. Moreover, Shao only provides stories from the victims, as her attempts to interview officials and developers were denied. Such is the limit of scholarly investigation into current urban process of corruption and protest. This limit, however, does not diminish the book’s invaluable contribution to our understanding of the urban transformation.
While Shao’s Shanghai Gone sheds insights into one crucial aspect of Chinese urbanization, Aspects of Urbanization of China edited by Gregory Bracken “examines some of the aspects this urbanization in China” from “a distinctly architectural-urbanistic point of view.” The editor introduces this collective project as a multidisciplinary endeavor but he also sounds candidly apologetic:
these chapters all represent different levels of academic expertise and this has been a deliberate decision on the part of the editor. Any perception of unevenness that may result is regretted, but please try to be indulgent: the value of these different perspectives should, hopefully, outweigh any disjunction between the levels of ability in expressing them. (p. 17)
This unevenness probably results from some chapters being reports of the contributors’ ongoing research projects. For example, Non Arkaraprasertkul’s chapter recaps the history of the residential neighborhoods of old Shanghai and their current renewal and preservation and concludes: “The existing scholarships on the lilong (alleyway) neighborhood today cannot help us to penetrate the reality of urban life in present-day Shanghai. There is an urgent need to expand research on China” (p. 157-58). This sounds like the conclusion of a literature review (or a preliminary study in the author’s own words) that anticipates further investigation.
The book consists of an introduction plus eight chapters divided into three parts, each with two or three chapters. In Part 1 “Global Ambitions,” Leslie Sklair’s chapter on “architecture iconicity” surveys transnational social spaces built by star architects across the globe, with two references to building projects in Shenzhen and Shanghai. He stresses that the postcolonial understanding of iconic architecture helps to explain why the struggle between modernism and traditional culture is almost always resolved in the interest of capitalist consumerism. Shanghai Expo 2010, discussed in the following chapter, further illustrates the interplay between modernism, postcolonialism, and consumerist culture. The last chapter of Part 1 recaps Guangzhou’s history of foreign trade from the Qing Dynasty to the contemporary period and discusses the impact of recent global financial crises on the city’s economic development.
Part 2 “Cultural Expression” consists of three chapters analyzing filmic and literary representations of urbanism. Ana Pellitero discusses the rural–urban inequality of contemporary China by contrast with the rural–urban continuum of imperial China—as constructed by scholars such as G. William Skinner—and calls our attention to the “New Documentary Movement” in contemporary cinema projects that expose rural poverty within the city. Tsung-yi Huang considers the “old mansions” of Mong Kok (Hong Kong’s dense commercial quarter) to represent “rurality” and shows that their transformation into the typical home of the city’s (lower-class) residents exemplifies the global city as a heterogeneous assemblage. The last chapter of Part 2 revisits the theme of Shanghai nostalgia through a re-reading of Wang Anyi’s award-winning novel Song of Everlasting Sorrow. 5
Part 3 “Architectural Expressions” includes Arkaraprasertkul’s chapter on Shanghai’s lilong housing, mentioned above, and Jonathan Solomon’s chapter on Hong Kong’s shopping malls. Solomon’s comparative study of two “podium shopping malls as global villages” demonstrates their extremely different degrees of integrating the local urban life.
Shanghai Gone and Aspects of Urbanization of China are very different books, but their front covers feature similar images: half-demolished old buildings against the rising skyline of new high-rises in Shanghai. These unsettling images display the rapid speed of change and imply the radical redistribution of wealth. Yet we probably need some distance from the current era of change to reconstruct it as a historical process.
Images and stories of capitalist urbanization documented in Shao’s and Bracken’s books further contrasts with the different images of the Chinese capital reconstructed in Zhu’s Chinese Spatial Strategies and Musgrove’s China’s Contested Capital. The latter two books are also different from each other: Zhu’s synchronic imagination of imperial Beijing and Musgrove’s historical studies of modern Nanjing.
The four books may not completely fill the gap between the scholarly literatures of historical and contemporary Chinese cities, but they certainly enrich our knowledge of Chinese urban history and current urban change and would serve well a broad interdisciplinary readership. In particular, Musgrove’s study of modern Nanjing serves as an important link between the scholarships of imperial urbanism and contemporary urbanization by offering a compelling story of building a contested capital and its fluid space; Shao’s investigation of displaced Shanghai residents yields equally compelling stories that relate the residents’ contemporary grievance to their earlier family history in the early twentieth century. These two books merit special commendation.