Remaking Beijing

Remaking Beijing PDF Author: Wu Hung
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Remaking Beijingtraces China’s modern and contemporary experience, focusing on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, still the most exalted space in China today. Wu Hung describes the square’s transformation from a proscribed imperial space to a public arena of political expression, and from a monumental Communist complex to a holy relic of the Maoist era. For over half a century, since the square became the symbolic centre of the new socialist capital, it has determined the city’s development; in examining the square, the author examines the city as a whole. Wu Hung also explores the importance of Tiananmen as a locus of visual production in China: as the site for Mao’s standard portrait on Tiananmen’s façade; as the location of museums and monuments showcasing masterpieces of socialist art; and as a parade ground for extravagant National Day celebrations. In recent years it has also inspired unofficial artists to create a large body of works – paintings, photographs, performances – which challenge its authority. Using a wide range of sources including government archives, newspapers, photography, architecture, literature, art exhibitions and advertisements, this book explores the history and complex meaning of Beijing’s public spaces. As a native of Beijing, Wu Hung witnessed the construction and transformation of the city; in this book he combines historical enquiry with his own personal experience, offering a case study of a particular type of modern metropolis whose construction is intertwined with the creation of a political nation-state.

Remaking Beijing

Remaking Beijing PDF Author: Wu Hung
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book

Book Description
Remaking Beijingtraces China’s modern and contemporary experience, focusing on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, still the most exalted space in China today. Wu Hung describes the square’s transformation from a proscribed imperial space to a public arena of political expression, and from a monumental Communist complex to a holy relic of the Maoist era. For over half a century, since the square became the symbolic centre of the new socialist capital, it has determined the city’s development; in examining the square, the author examines the city as a whole. Wu Hung also explores the importance of Tiananmen as a locus of visual production in China: as the site for Mao’s standard portrait on Tiananmen’s façade; as the location of museums and monuments showcasing masterpieces of socialist art; and as a parade ground for extravagant National Day celebrations. In recent years it has also inspired unofficial artists to create a large body of works – paintings, photographs, performances – which challenge its authority. Using a wide range of sources including government archives, newspapers, photography, architecture, literature, art exhibitions and advertisements, this book explores the history and complex meaning of Beijing’s public spaces. As a native of Beijing, Wu Hung witnessed the construction and transformation of the city; in this book he combines historical enquiry with his own personal experience, offering a case study of a particular type of modern metropolis whose construction is intertwined with the creation of a political nation-state.

Remaking the Chinese City

Remaking the Chinese City PDF Author: Joseph W. Esherick
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824825188
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
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.

China's Silent Army

China's Silent Army PDF Author: Juan Pablo Cardenal
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0385346581
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
The first book to examine the unprecedented growth of China's economic investment in the developing world, its impact at the local level, and a rare hands-on picture of the role of ordinary Chinese in the juggernaut that is China, Inc. Beijing-based journalists Juan Pablo Cardenal and Heriberto Araújo crisscrossed the globe from 2009-2011 to investigate how the Chinese are literally making the developing world in their own image. What they discovered is a human story, an economic story, and a political story, one that is changing the course of history and that has never been explored, or reported, in depth and on the ground. The “silent army” to which the authors refer is made up of the many ordinary Chinese citizens working around the world - in the oil industry in Kazakhstan, mining minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo, building dams in Ecuador, selling hijabs in Cairo - who are contributing to China's global dominance while also leaving their mark in less salutary ways. With original and fresh reporting as well as top-notch writing, China's Silent Army takes full advantage of the Spanish-speaking authors' outsider experience to reveal China's influence abroad in all its most vital implications - for foreign policy, trade, private business, and the environment.

Remaking the Chinese Leviathan

Remaking the Chinese Leviathan PDF Author: Dali L. Yang
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804754934
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
This book examines a wide range of governance reforms in the People's Republic of China, including administrative rationalization, divestiture of businesses operated by the military, and the building of anticorruption mechanisms, to analyze how China's leaders have reformed existing institutions and constructed new ones to cope with unruly markets, curb corrupt practices, and bring about a regulated economic order.

The Design of Protest

The Design of Protest PDF Author: Tali Hatuka
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477315764
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Public protests are a vital tool for asserting grievances and creating temporary, yet tangible, communities as the world becomes more democratic and urban in the twenty-first century. While the political and social aspects of protest have been extensively studied, little attention has been paid to the physical spaces in which protests happen. Yet place is a crucial aspect of protests, influencing the dynamics and engagement patterns among participants. In The Design of Protest, Tali Hatuka offers the first extensive discussion of the act of protest as a design: that is, a planned event in a space whose physical geometry and symbolic meaning are used and appropriated by its organizers, who aim to challenge socio-spatial distance between political institutions and the people they should serve. Presenting case studies from around the world, including Tiananmen Square in Beijing; the National Mall in Washington, DC; Rabin Square in Tel Aviv; and the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Hatuka identifies three major dimensions of public protests: the process of planning the protest in a particular place; the choice of spatial choreography of the event, including the value and meaning of specific tactics; and the challenges of performing contemporary protests in public space in a fragmented, complex, and conflicted world. Numerous photographs, detailed diagrams, and plans complement the case studies, which draw upon interviews with city officials, urban planners, and protesters themselves.

Remaking Chinese Urban Form

Remaking Chinese Urban Form PDF Author: Duanfang Lu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134326378
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
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.

Beijing Time

Beijing Time PDF Author: Michael Dutton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674047346
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
“Where is the market?” inquires the tourist one dark, chilly morning. “Follow the ghosts,” responds the taxi driver, indicating a shadowy parade of overloaded tricycles. “It’s not called the ghost market for nothing!” And indeed, Beijing is nothing if not haunted. Among the soaring skyscrapers, choking exhaust fumes, nonstop traffic jams, and towering monuments, one discovers old Beijing—newly styled, perhaps, but no less present and powerful than in its ancient incarnation. Beijing Time conducts us into this mysterious world, at once familiar and yet alien to the outsider. The ancient Chinese understood the world as enchanted, its shapes revealing the mythological order of the universe. In the structure and detail of Tian’anmen Square, the authors reveal the city as a whole. In Beijing no pyramids stand as proud remnants of the past; instead, the entire city symbolizes a vibrant civilization. From Tian’anmen Square, we proceed to the neighborhoods for a glimpse of local color—from the granny and the young police officer to the rag picker and the flower vendor. Wandering from the avant-garde art market to the clock towers, from the Monumental Axis to Mao’s Mausoleum, the book allows us to peer into the lives of Beijingers, the rules and rituals that govern their reality, and the mythologies that furnish their dreams. Deeply immersed in the culture, everyday and otherworldly, this anthropological tour, from ancient cosmology to Communist kitsch, allows us to see as never before how the people of Beijing—and China—work and live.

Behind the Gate

Behind the Gate PDF Author: Fabio Lanza
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231526288
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
On May 4, 1919, thousands of students protested the Versailles treaty in Beijing. Seventy years later, another generation demonstrated in Tiananmen Square. Climbing the Monument of the People's Heroes, these protestors stood against a relief of their predecessors, merging with their own mythology while consciously deploying their activism. Through an investigation of twentieth-century Chinese student protest, Fabio Lanza considers the marriage of the cultural and the political, the intellectual and the quotidian, that occurred during the May Fourth movement, along with its rearticulation in subsequent protest. He ultimately explores the political category of the "student" and its making in the twentieth century. Lanza returns to the May Fourth period (1917-1923) and the rise of student activism in and around Beijing University. He revisits reform in pedagogical and learning routines, changes in daily campus life, the fluid relationship between the city and its residents, and the actions of allegedly cultural student organizations. Through a careful analysis of everyday life and urban space, Lanza radically reconceptualizes the emergence of political subjectivities (categories such as "worker," "activist," and "student") and how they anchor and inform political action. He accounts for the elements that drew students to Tiananmen and the formation of the student as an enduring political category. His research underscores how, during a time of crisis, the lived realities of university and student became unsettled in Beijing, and how political militancy in China arose only when the boundaries of identification were challenged.

Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts

Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts PDF Author: Jeffrey W. Cody
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824834569
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
In the early twentieth century, Chinese traditional architecture and the French-derived methods of the École des Beaux-Arts converged in the United States when Chinese students were given scholarships to train as architects at American universities whose design curricula were dominated by Beaux-Arts methods. Upon their return home in the 1920s and 1930s, these graduates began to practice architecture and create China’s first architectural schools, often transferring a version of what they had learned in the U.S. to Chinese situations. The resulting complex series of design-related transplantations had major implications for China between 1911 and 1949, as it simultaneously underwent cataclysmic social, economic, and political changes. After 1949 and the founding of the People’s Republic, China experienced a radically different wave of influence from the Beaux-Arts through advisors from the Soviet Union who, first under Stalin and later Khrushchev, brought Beaux-Arts ideals in the guise of socialist progress. In the early twenty-first century, China is still feeling the effects of these events. Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts examines the coalescing of the two major architectural systems, placing significant shifts in architectural theory and practice in China within relevant, contemporary, cultural, and educational contexts. Fifteen major scholars from around the world analyze and synthesize these crucial events to shed light on the dramatic architectural and urban changes occurring in China today—many of which have global ramifications. This stimulating and generously illustrated work is divided into three sections, framed by an introduction and a postscript. The first focuses on the convergence of Chinese architecture and the École des Beaux-Arts, outlining the salient aspects of each and suggesting how and why the two "met" in the U.S. The second section centers on the question of how Chinese architects were influenced by the Beaux-Arts and how Chinese architecture was changed as a result. The third takes an even closer look at the Beaux-Arts influence, addressing how innovative practices, new schools of architecture, and buildings whose designs were linked to Beaux-Arts assumptions led to distinctive new paradigms that were rooted in a changing China. By virtue of its scope, scale, and scholarship, this volume promises to become a classic in the fields of Chinese and Western architectural history. Contributors: Tony Atkin, Peter J. Carroll, Yung Ho Chang,Jeffrey W. Cody, Kerry Sizheng Fan, Fu Chao-Ching, Gu Daqing, Seng Kuan,Delin Lai, Xing Ruan, Joseph Rykwert, Nancy S. Steinhardt, David VanZanten, Rudolf Wagner, Zhang Jie, Zhao Chen.

Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture

Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture PDF Author: Sheldon Lu
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350234192
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Honourable Mention, Best Monograph Award, BAFTSS Publication Awards 2022 Sheldon Lu's wide-ranging new book investigates how filmmakers and visual artists from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan have envisioned China as it transitions from a socialist to a globalized capitalist state. It examines how the modern nation has been refashioned and re-imagined in order to keep pace with globalization and transnationalism. At the heart of Lu's analysis is a double movement in the relationship between nation and transnationalism in the Chinese post-socialist state. He considers the complexity of how the Chinese economy is integrated in the global capitalist system while also remaining a repressive body politic with mechanisms of control and surveillance. He explores the interrelations of the local, the national, the subnational, and the global as China repositions itself in the world. Lu considers examples from feature and documentary film, mainstream and marginal cinema, and a variety of visual arts: photography, painting, digital video, architecture, and installation. His close case studies include representations of class, masculinity and sexuality in contemporary Taiwanese and Chinese cinema; the figure of the sex worker as a symbol of modernity and mobility; and artists' representations of Beijing at the time of the 2008 Olympics.