Organizer: Chung Man Carmen Tsui, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong China first encountered the theory and practice of modern city planning in the early 20th century. Some scholars consider this a result of the influx of western ideas. Others believe that the raising consciousness on the aesthetic quality and hygienic standard of the modern city was benefited from the return of Chinese architects and planners educated abroad. Nevertheless, it wasn’t a coincidence that modern city planning was introduced to China at a time when the country was threatened by both internal strife and foreign aggression. What prompted political leaders, one after another, to produce urban plans to Chinese cities where their powers were based?
This panel aims to bring together insights that can open up to a boarder meaning of city planning in early 20th century China. The four papers in this panel all share a simultaneous emphasis on the issues of legitimization and governance. The first two papers discuss the beautification of two capitals: Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, and Changchun, the capital of the puppet Japanese state Manchukuo. They explore how the Chinese and the Japanese leaders remade their respective capital into national symbols. The other two papers look at city planning at the municipal level. The urban change in Beijing and Wuhan showcased how the spatial restructuring of the city had helped local authority to enforce law and order, create discipline and establish governance. In sum, this panel hopes to shed light on the larger political agendas behind the manipulation of the urban environment.
After seizing power in 1927 amid political strife, leaders of Guomindang believed that a modern capital could be a source of political legitimacy for the new republic. Nevertheless, the dilapidated urban environment of Nanjing did not match its capital status. Hence, the State imposed an ambitious planning project, the Capital plan, vowing to make Nanjing more prosperous than London, Paris and New York. A major hurdle of this state-led urban transformation process, however, has been the requisition of land for the development of the planning project. How did the State legitimize the relocation of common people’s homes for urban development?
This paper explores how the State used public interest as a reason to justify the development of the Capital Plan and the requisition of common people’s property. The Capital had not only provided the means for the State to acquire the regulatory power to control the development of the urban environment; they had also created class separation in the city. Ironically, the spatial restructuring of Nanjing, which was carried out in the name of public interest, had caused violent conflicts with local residents who lost their homes. To justify the requisition of private property, the State had stigmatized the opposing home owners as short-sighted, selfish, and obstructive to the modernization of the capital. Not only this, the State proclaimed that all Nanjing residents had an obligation to the urban development of the capital. The shift of emphasis from public interest to public obligation reflected the powerlessness of home owners.
The Japanese colonialism was continuously redefined and repackaged, and it was by 1930 when a shift of discourse from one that identified Japan with the West to one that formed an association with Asia. In imaging and building the puppet state of Manchukuo, state ideologues advocated an Asian civilizational ideology drawn from a variety of regionally circulated ideas and symbols, such as Confucianism and Shintoism. The accomplishments of Japanese civilizing mission in Manchuria was epitomized in the urban construction of Xinjing, a name Japanese gave to the small town of Changchun following the establishment of the colonial state of Machukuo in 1932. In exhibiting Xinjing’s “new modern,” the colonial government sponsored and staged a variety of cultural and political spectacles, periodically or particularly. The new capital thus served important propagandistic purpose aimed at the residents of Manchuria with an overbidding goal of exhibiting state power and authority.
I will focus on the entangled relationship between Japan’s colonial ideology and its crystallization in city planning, architecture, ceremonies and exhibitions. I argue that building and operating Xinjing were central part of the Japanese colonial policies to showcase “East Asian Modern,” and the city became the most magnificent exhibit to demonstrate Japanese colonial achievements. My concern is to comprehend how physical construction and cultural events related to each other and the way they displayed the East Asian modern and demonstrated the co-prosperity ideology in making the city and the state.
China underwent tremendous change in social systems during the Republican period. New social systems created new establishments, both in public and private sectors. Among these changes, a new legal system based upon western ideology was first introduced to the Chinese society. The new legal system brought into presence modern establishments including law firms, police stations, law courts and prisons. The physical locations of these institutions and establishments reflected not only the political intent behind government’s city-planning initiatives, but also the interaction between tradition and the western values.
This study examines how the modern legal culture developed in Beijing during its process of urbanization in the early 20th century, by observing the spatial relationship of its legal, economic and political establishments. The observation argues that in a city where tradition and other cultures remained strong such as Beijing, its city landscape revealed a manifestation of interplay between the forces of state building and continuing tradition. This interplay, when placed under a cultural context, enabled us to make more sense of how modern legal culture developed during the period.
(Co-authored with Dr Li Ze)
The decade of 1927-1937 saw a major effort to remake Hankou, inland China’s most modern city and “the Chicago of China” during the 1920s-30s. Drawing on Western models as well as established Chinese institutions, Hankou’s reformists carried out a citywide survey and investigation, and drew up a series of land-use zoning plans, so as to guide along lines of orderly development. The idea of zoning, the separation of social activity and building forms according to their function within the urban milieu, was actually a new tenet of “scientific” urban planning. It was said to be the most important innovation promoted by American planners during the prewar years, with its promise of stabilizing land use and property values.
The paper intends to examine these zoning experiments as an active culture-bearing medium in material and intellectual modernization of early 20th-century China. It articulates the conceptualization process, and further traces the connection via certain returned city planners to early 20th-century America, where zoning ordinances were initially promoted as a response to severe problems of sanitation and industrial-urban growth. The paper argues that the use of zones, in contrast to traditional cosmological concerns, represented a new conception of city order in Hankou, one that emphasized economic functions and efficiency over all else as an important part of the Guomindang’s ideals of national reconstruction.
(Co-authored with Dr Zhang Tianjie)
The decade of 1927-1937 saw a major effort to remake Hankou, inland China’s most modern city and “the Chicago of China” during the 1920s-30s. Drawing on Western models as well as established Chinese institutions, Hankou’s reformists carried out a citywide survey and investigation, and drew up a series of land-use zoning plans, so as to guide along lines of orderly development. The idea of zoning, the separation of social activity and building forms according to their function within the urban milieu, was actually a new tenet of “scientific” urban planning. It was said to be the most important innovation promoted by American planners during the prewar years, with its promise of stabilizing land use and property values.
The paper intends to examine these zoning experiments as an active culture-bearing medium in material and intellectual modernization of early 20th-century China. It articulates the conceptualization process, and further traces the connection via certain returned city planners to early 20th-century America, where zoning ordinances were initially promoted as a response to severe problems of sanitation and industrial-urban growth. The paper argues that the use of zones, in contrast to traditional cosmological concerns, represented a new conception of city order in Hankou, one that emphasized economic functions and efficiency over all else as an important part of the Guomindang’s ideals of national reconstruction.
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