Remaking China S Great Cities

China’s rapid urbanization has restructured the great socialist cities Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou into mega cities that embrace global capitalism. This book focuses on the urban transformations of these three cities: Beijing is the nation’s political and cultural capital; Shanghai is the economic and financial powerhouse; and Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong Province and the regional center of south China. All are historical cities with rich imperial, colonial, and regional heritages, and all have been drastically transformed in the last six decades. This book examines the cities’ continuous urban legacies since 1949 in relation to state governance, economic reforms, and cultural production. By adopting local historical perspectives, it offers more nuanced accounts of the current urban change than the modernization/globalization paradigm and conceptualizes the change in the context of the cities’ socialist, colonial, and imperial legacies. Specifically, Samuel Y. Liang offers an overview of the urban planning and territorial expansion of the great cities since 1949; explores the production and consumption of urban housing, its spatial forms, media representations, and socio-political implications; and examines the state-led redevelopment of old urban cores and residential neighborhoods, and the urban conservation movement. Remaking China’s Great Cities will be of great interest to students and scholars working across a range of fields including Chinese studies, Chinese culture and society, urban studies and architecture.

In China today skyscrapers tower over ancient temples, freeways deliver lines of cars and tour buses to imperial palaces, cinema houses compete with old theaters featuring Peking Opera. The disparity evidenced in the contemporary Chinese cityscape can be traced to the early decades of the twentieth century, when government elites sought to transform cities into a new world that would be at once modern and distinctly Chinese. Remaking the Chinese City aims to capture the full diversity of recent Chinese urbanism by examining the modernist transformations of China's cities in the first half of the twentieth century. Collecting in one place some of the most interesting and exciting new work on Chinese urban history, this volume presents thirteen essays discussing ten Chinese cities: the commercial and industrial center of Shanghai; the old capital, Beijing; the southern coastal city of Canton; the interior's Chengdu; the tourist city of Hangzhou; the utopian "New Capital" built in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation; the treaty port of Tianjin; the Nationalists' capital in Nanjing; and temporary wartime capitals of Wuhan and Chongqing. Unlike past treatments of early twentieth-century China, which characterize the period as one of failure and decay, the contributors to this volume describe an exciting world in constant and fundamental change. During this time, the Chinese city was remade to accommodate parks and police, paved roads and public spaces. Rickshaws, trolleys, and buses allowed the growth of new downtowns. Department stores, theaters, newspapers, and modern advertising nourished a new urban identity. Sanitary regulations and traffic laws were enforced, and modern media and transport permitted unprecedented freedoms. Yet despite their fondness for things Western and modern, early urban planners envisioned cities that would lead the Chinese nation and preserve Chinese tradition. The very desire for modernity led to the construction of a visible and accessible national past and the imagining of a distinctive national future. In their investigation of the national capitals of the period, the essays show how cities were reshaped to represent and serve the nation. To promote tourism, traditions were invented and recycled for the pleasure and edification of new middle-class and foreign consumers of culture. Abundantly illustrated with maps and photographs, Remaking the Chinese City presents the best and most current scholarship on modern Chinese cities. Its thoroughness and detailed scholarship will appeal to the specialist, while its clarity and scope will engage the general reader. Contributors: Michael Tsin on Canton, Ruth Rogaski and Brett Sheehan on Tianjin, David Buck on Changchun, Kristin Stapleton on Chengdu, Liping Wang on Hangzhou, Madeleine Dong on Beijing, Charles Musgrove on Nanjing, Stephen MacKinnon on Wuhan, Lee MacIsaac on Chongqing, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom and David Strand with concluding essays.

This book provides an institutional interpretation of state-facilitated gentrification in Chengdu, an emerging central city of China. It generalizes the three aspects of institutional changes in the cultural, economic and social spheres that have thus far directed the operation of gentrification in the transitional economy: the creative destruction of consumption spaces, the spatial production of excess, and the unequal redistribution of spatial resources to low-income residents. The interactions of state and society, are examined in navigating the institutional changes and forming the Chinese distinctions of gentrification. The author argues that these three aspects of institutional changes characterize gentrification in Chengdu as a transformative force of development led by the state and capitalists and championed by middle-class consumers. This gentrification mode periodically catalyzes new spaces and collective cultures, which then necessitate the stimulation of new consumption behaviors and the formation of new consumer classes, at the expense of the spatial demands for the even larger number of low-income residents. However, in the context of China's unique state–society relations, some low-income groups may also ride the wave of social transformation. The author suggests that this type of gentrification integrates into not the essence of uneven geographical development in a capitalist society, but China’s unique model of urbanization and development, which is often state-driven, innovative and even involuted so as to sustain continuous growth. Though the research is focused on urban China, this book also contributes to methodological issues on gentrification research on a global scale. It is skeptical both of the structural explanation and of the revelation of unsorted differences; instead, it aims to generate midrange regularities of gentrification in Chinese cities. Institutional change is treated as an intermediary that, on the one hand, responds to the global trends and, on the other hand, adapts to local preconditions. Mixed methods, including statistical and spatial analysis, institutional analysis, and an extensive ethnographic study, are used to investigate gentrification from a structural perspective, a historical perspective, and as a grounded process within the locality.

Since the 1990s, the urban landscape of China has witnessed revolutionary changes that are unrivalled in any country of the world throughout history. Rapid urbanization, facilitated by the modern planning mechanism for growth, provides a feast for property developers. Yet, associated urban problems such as housing affordability, traffic congestion, energy consumption, and environmental deterioration are aggravated. This book takes a historic approach to investigate the planning philosophy, urban form and life of the past. Through a detailed study of urban development from early times through the imperial period with a focus on the Tang-Song dynasties, this book attempts to articulate the good qualities of urban landscapes from the past that still have instructive value for modern practices. The focus on the Tang-Song period is not only because China was the most advanced civilization of its time, but also because it underwent a similar process of 'urbanization', evident by tremendous economic growth, a dramatic rise of urban population, and an extended building boom. Through evaluating the streets, city layout, public places, urban communities, houses and gardens, and using interdisciplinary research in urban planning, urban design, architecture, history, and cultural studies, this book asserts that the past is quintessentially important. The past not only truthfully records the course of social and cultural formation of urban community and its associated physical fabric, but also regulates the directions we may take in the future.

This edited volume covers the multiple changes concerning urban governance in the course of the progressive transformation of the Pearl River Delta mega-urban region in China. Looking at the megacities Guangzhou and Shenzhen, it analyzes the maturing of socio-economic, political and spatial structures after the first waves of economic globalization, political transformation, and their rapid expansion and urbanization. The initial claim and starting point of the book is the existence of a profound multidimensional shift in the coastal mega-urban region with a major tendency towards urban upgrading, economic restructuring and a clearly observable consolidation of political institutions. For the first time since the beginning of the reform and opening up after 1978, this has led to a stronger bias toward urban regeneration, an adaptive re-use of the building stock and an establishment of post-industrial knowledge-based creative industries. The book investigates these changes as a set of mutually dependent developments that have to be understood and analyzed in connection with one another. Thus, the backgrounds and underlying forces that shape physical restructuring in the developed urban cores of the mega-urban region and the ways in which the relevant actors and institutions are trying to both cope with and to influence each other are introduced here.

As one of Okinawa's most insightful writers and social critics, Medoruma Shun has highlighted the problems and limits of conventional representation of the Battle of Okinawa, raised new questions and concerns about the nature of Okinawan war memory, and expanded the possibilities of representing war through his groundbreaking and prize-winning fiction, editorials, essays, and speaking engagements. Yet, his writing has not been analyzed in regard to how his experience and identity as the child of two survivors of the Battle of Okinawa have powerfully shaped his understanding of the war and his literary craft. This book examines Okinawan war memory through the lens of Medoruma’s war fiction, and pays particular attention to the issues of second-generation war survivorship and transgenerational trauma. It explores how his texts contribute to knowledge about the war and its ongoing effects — on survivors, their offspring, and the larger community — in different ways from that of other modes of representation, such as survivor testimony, historical narrative, and realistic fiction. These dominant means of memory making have played a major role in shaping the various discourses about the war and the Battle of Okinawa, yet these forms of public memory and knowledge often exclude or avoid more personal, emotional, and traumatic experiences. Indeed, Ikeda’s analysis sheds light on the nature of trauma on survivors and their children who continue to inhabit sites of the traumatic past, and in turn makes an important contribution to studies on trauma and second-generation survivor experiences. This book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Asian literature, Japanese literature, Japanese history, war memory and Okinawa.

In this pioneering study of contemporary Chinese urban form, Duanfang Lu provides an analysis of how Chinese society constructed itself through the making and remaking of its built environment. She shows that as China’s quest for modernity created a perpetual scarcity as both a social reality and a national imagination, the realization of planning ideals was postponed. The work unit – the socialist enterprise or institute – gradually developed from workplace to social institution which integrated work, housing and social services. The Chinese city achieved a unique geography made up in large part of self-contained work units. Remaking Chinese Urban Form provides an important reference for academics and students conducting research on China. It will be a key source for courses on Asia in architecture, urban planning, geography, sociology and anthropology, at both the graduate and undergraduate level. The insightful yet accessible introduction to urban China will also be of interest to architects, urban designers and planners – as well as general audience who wish to learn about contemporary Chinese society.

In September 1951, Japan signed a peace treaty with forty-eight countries in San Francisco; in April 1952, the treaty came into effect. The San Francisco Peace Treaty is an international agreement that in significant ways shaped the post–World War II international order in the Asia-Pacific. With its associated security arrangements, it laid the foundation for the regional structure of Cold War confrontation: the "San Francisco System" fully reflected the strategic interests and policy priorities of the peace conference’s host nation, the United States. The treaty fell far short of settling outstanding issues in the wake of the Pacific War or facilitating a clean start for the "post-war" period. Rather, critical aspects of the settlement were left equivocal, and continue to have significant and worrisome implications for regional international relations. This book examines the key developments of the contentious political and security issues in the Asia-Pacific that share a common foundation in the post-war disposition of Japan, particularly the San Francisco Peace Treaty. These include both tangible and intangible issues, such as disputes over territories and "history" problems. Taking the San Francisco System as its conceptual grounding, the authors examine how these issues developed and have remained contentious long after the San Francisco arrangements. To provide bases for producing solutions, the chapters offer comprehensive accounts that explain and deepen our understanding of these complex regional issues and the San Francisco System as a whole. By closely and systematically examining the legacy and various ramifications of the San Francisco System, this fascinating book adds to our understanding of current and growing tensions in the region. As such, it will be of great interest to students and scholars of Asian studies, history, international relations and politics.