Tag Archives: identity

Shanghai new towns

Martin Minost, « Harry den Hartog (ed), Shanghai new towns: searching for community and identity in a sprawling metropolis, », China Perspectives [Online], URL : http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/6497 1.

Shanghai new towns, edited by the Dutch architect Harry den Hartog, is interesting on two counts. To begin with, the 2010 book is the first – apart from individual articles – in English (it is bilingual, with Chinese text) to analytically deal with the Western-imitating architecture proliferating on the Chinese mainland since the early 2000s. Second, the book brings together articles by academics and experts all drawn from the domain of architecture and town planning.

However, the issue tackled is not that of architectural imports in China. What interests the authors is that of new towns, especially those built within Shanghai municipality. Analysing this urban object, the authors have tried to give an account of China’s current urbanisation, highlighting characteristics such as the context of state control during their construction, legacies from the past and their present influence, the working style of Chinese town planners, economic and urban planning ideologies, as well as the intricacies of the decision-making and planning processes. The book has both a theoretical aspect as well as practical and pedagogic ambition: minutely observed new towns are elevated to the rank of case studies; and the information the authors draw from the construction process should help Western architects and town planners to learn how to work with their Chinese counterparts, on what basis, using which theories and ideologies, and thus how to cooperate with them.

The book contains 11 articles, four of them written by den Hartog, grouped in four parts separated by mostly photographic dossiers including two by professional photographers. This multiplicity of contributors and forms of analysis, both written and visual, lends to the study a rich source of information, crucial for anyone interested, within the field of urban studies, in the initial process of urbanisation, projects, plans, decisions, and the start of construction. The trans-disciplinary studies thus seek to bring exhaustive knowledge of the subject, but the final product is an uneven work due to the differences between contributions.

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  1. Martin Minost is a contractual doctoral candidate in social anthropology and ethnology at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences/EHESS, Paris, affiliated with the Research Centre for Modern and Contemporary China []

Jacqueline Nivard

Jacqueline Nivard, Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine

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The making of an exotic homeland

Chen, Huai-Hsuan, (2014), The making of an exotic homeland: Performing place, identity and belonging on china’s southwest borderland. (Order No. 3607146, The University of Wisconsin – Madison). ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, , 264. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1493012095?accountid=16266. (1493012095). (Restricted access) Preview format Pdf

This dissertation is an ethnographic account of the profound cultural and spatial effects of the creation of a modern borderland. It draws primarily on a total of fourteen months of fieldwork between 2007 and 2011. It is a tapestry of how the imagery of home is realized through different tourist performances that reconfigure spaces of encounter, ethnicity and lifestyle in post-socialist China. The dissertation uses Chinese cultural concepts to shed light on the identification and dis/location of travellers and residents on China’s southwest borderland, and their issues of belonging in a place intended for the consumption of leisure. By illustrating how different social groups perform and embody their sense of belonging in a frontier tourist town, I intend to illuminate how the multiple meanings of place and the heterogeneous senses of belonging result from the entangled relationship between state power, mobility, and consumption. I divide the main body of the dissertation into four chapters of argument with ethnographic analysis, each of which addresses one aspect of the home-making process in the context of China’s ongoing, rapid socio-economic changes. With particular interest in the heterogeneity and cultural flow of performance spaces and their relationship to tourism consumption in post-reform China, I will focus on different ideas of home embodied in performances by Han Chinese tourists, ethnic performers, nomadic musicians, and native Naxi residents in the Old Town of Lijiang. Rather than studying a specific ethnic or cultural group, the dissertation explores the fraught experiences of people as cultural performers on the borderland. Shaped by a hybrid form of a tourism economy, which combines the state’s cultural authority, market forces, and mobility, lives on the borderland are shown to be an ongoing process of identification, full of friction, appropriation, and reproduction, when one’s own sense of home is constructed.

Jacqueline Nivard

Jacqueline Nivard, Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine

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