history

26 The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing

underpinnings and socio-political implications of urban image construction in today’s city. The second part then investigates diverse city marketing and image construction strategies used by the Chinese national government to serve social, economic, and ideological purposes. It examines the recent efforts undertaken by the Beijing city government at both the national and international levels to transform the image of the Chinese national capital and its government, and identifi es some of the main mechanisms used to give shape to the ‘idea of Beijing’ as both a mental construct and as a built form.

Place, Identity, and the Politics of Urban Image Construction

The image of the city is a major asset in the selling of places, and its construction and transformation stand at the heart of city marketing practices. The image of the city can be conceptualized as a ‘fusion of the physical and imaginative structures that all inhabitants use in constructing and construing it’.3 This defi nition rests upon Henri Lefebvre’s categorization of space, which distinguishes between the representation of space (conceived space) and the spaces of representation (lived spaces).4 The image of the city therefore comprises two main components: the physical image of the city – the actual city itself, as it is produced, lived in and experienced by people on an everyday basis and represented in a series of visual symbols, physical places, and social characteristics – as well as the rhetorical image of the city – the ‘idea’ or conceptual image of the city as it is imagined and represented in collective consciousness. Urban images are both visual and mental constructs, constituted through discourse – as found in city marketing campaigns, promotional brochures and tourism advertising – and through more concrete transformations of the built environment including public works, preservation of historic sites, and urban redevelopment.

Urban image construction is a highly selective process that imposes single- stranded images onto urban diversity and reduces place identity to a constricted and easily packaged urban ‘product’. The image of the city that is constructed and promoted in the process of selling places is often based not on the local reality but on stereotyped notions and exaggerated representations, which seek to enhance the marketability of the locale. The ready-made identities assigned by city boosters and disseminated through the mass media often reduce several different visions of local culture into a single vision that refl ects the aspirations of a powerful elite and the values, lifestyles, and expectations of potential investors and tourists. These practices are thus highly elitist and exclusionary, and often signify to more disadvantaged segments of the population that they have no place in this revitalized and gentrifi ed urban spectacle.5

Image construction is also a highly sensitive issue because of the way it alters the meaning and identity of a place. Places play a central role in the formation

EC 89 C BB9 E 9 4 9 B B8 39 B C: 0C C 9 B .CB8CB 2C 98 9 9 98 E 0EC1 9 - CC ,9B E

,E9 98 :ECA CB

, C

LE M

2 C

98 9

E E9

9E 98

Selling the Chinese City: Theory and Practice of Urban Image Construction 27

of collective consciousness and self-perception and are intimately related to the social construction of meaning and thus of identity.6 People’s association with and consciousness of the places where they live and work have long constituted vital elements of their identity that help shape who they are by virtue of where they are. Similarly, people’s awareness of their position within both space and society is fundamental to their self-defi nition, and represents a point of departure from where they orient themselves in the world.7 In its packaging and showcasing of culture, history, and place-identity, image construction alters the collective memory embodied in the walls and streets of the city, thereby affecting representation and the social construction of meaning. However, because the city’s cultural capital can never be manipulated as consensually as place marketers would like, the exploitation and transformation of place-identity in the process of image construction often gives rise to tensions and potential confl icts. The politics produced by places in the process of being transformed or made anew is thus also a politics of identity.

Urban environments are particularly important in the constitution of self and collective identities. Long seen as the mirror of society, the city acts as both a privileged space of representation and the physical embodiment of the competing forces that make up the urban sphere. Major alterations to the urban environment, either through sudden and planned remodelling or through more rhetorical interventions, are arenas in which various groups express their sense of self and their attachment for the spaces they call home. They represent important expressions of identity politics, and are challenged, resisted and reworked.

Apart from the more obvious economic function, urban image construction and city marketing also serve ideological purposes. Urban image construction has long fulfi lled political ends, serving as a tool of social control, as a means of popular pacifi cation, and as an instrument of state legitimatization. Decision-makers use the built environment to manipulate consciousness, and disguise this manipulation in order to reproduce their political ideology and naturalize their power. Urban images must therefore be read as ideology and as historical products, behind whose unifi ed appearance lie struggles between various organized groups and contestation over use and design.8

Throughout history, city leaders have manipulated cultural forms and symbols to engineer consensus among city residents, foster local pride, and promote a shared sense of identity in order to secure social stability and unity, and boost confi dence in the ruling party. Urban beautifi cation also has a depoliticizing effect, and distracts attention from social and economic inequities by reducing the city to a surface assumed to be transparent and unproblematic. Through the conscious manipulation of the culture, history, and spatial confi gurations of local places, urban managers and local entrepreneurs recreate the semblance of a familiar image, thereby appeasing popular opposition by giving an accommodating face to large-

EC 89 C BB9 E 9 4 9 B B8 39 B C: 0C C 9 B .CB8CB 2C 98 9 9 98 E 0EC1 9 - CC ,9B E

,E9 98 :ECA CB

, C

LE M

2 C

98 9

E E9

9E 98

28 The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing

scale redevelopment schemes and convincing people that good things are done on their behalf.9

Imaging the Third World City

Current literature on the social and political dimensions of image making and city marketing refers predominantly to the experience of First World cities.10 However, the impact of such practices is being felt even more in cities of the developing world where scarce public funds must be stretched to respond to acute urban problems. In most Third World cities, recent global restructuring has contributed to a widening of income disparities and growing social confl icts. In desperate need of foreign investment, these developing economies strive to distinguish themselves by building an image that asserts their stability and glorifi es their cultural character, be it real or imagined. In addition, worldwide concerns for idealized visions of modernity and prosperity have brought a considerable burden on developing economies which are trying to ‘fi t’ in the world system. This often results in greater hardship for the local population, including social exclusion and repression.

In their attempt to boost their self-confi dence and secure global trust in their economic potential, local governments use their limited funds to improve urban infrastructure in areas most visible to outsiders, or where foreign investments are concentrated. As a result, modest budgets are often squandered to serve the needs and expectations of potential investors and visitors, rather than those of the more needy local population. In addition, recent studies have demonstrated that foreign investments in the tertiary sector, especially in the tourism industry, carry little economic benefi t for local Third World populations who rarely have access to upwardly mobile employment and are only offered menial service jobs.11

Tourism has played an important role in the development of this urban image construction process. Many historic cities around the developing world have turned to tourism as an attractive source of foreign exchange and employment. As one of the largest employers and fastest growing global industries in the world, tourism represents one of the most concrete and pervasive forms of globalization, reaching out to the most remote regions on earth and bringing people from distant places face to face on an everyday basis. Because it thrives upon the marketing of places and local culture, tourism acts as a powerful force infl uencing local identity formation and promoting the construction of a coherent and easily marketable representation through the revival or invention of traditional cultural practices.12

Urban Image Construction in China

In China, the economic reforms implemented since the late 1970s have had a major

EC 89 C BB9 E 9 4 9 B B8 39 B C: 0C C 9 B .CB8CB 2C 98 9 9 98 E 0EC1 9 - CC ,9B E

,E9 98 :ECA CB

, C

LE M

2 C

98 9

E E9

9E 98

Selling the Chinese City: Theory and Practice of Urban Image Construction 29

impact on urban economies as the large state industries merged or disappeared altogether. As elsewhere, deindustrialization and the rise of the service economy also required fundamental urban restructuring, while China’s recent entry into the world economy exacerbated an already precarious situation. Cities throughout China, including Beijing, have thus had to fi nd new raisons d’être and undergo major transformations to revitalize their economies. Thus, in common with other parts of the world, urban development in late twentieth-century China was characterized by a growing predilection for the production and dissemination of urban images. The following section examines some of the image construction practices inherited from the Chinese past and used to create a particular vision of the city in the collective consciousness.

Face and Image

As discussed in the introduction, since its humiliating encounter with Western imperialism in the nineteenth century, modern China has been very self- conscious about its position in the world and deeply preoccupied with its image. Contemporary image construction efforts in Beijing must be placed in the context of a long Chinese tradition of concern for public recognition and personal prestige – or for what Western anthropologists have called ‘face’. The concept of face provides fundamental insights into the widespread preoccupation with self-perception and deep concern for outside opinion which have long characterized Chinese society.

The term mianzi, which is generally used to communicate ideas about how one is perceived by others, actually connotes a much wider range of meanings than can possibly be indicated by the English word ‘face’. Mianzi can be translated as ‘reputation’ or ‘prestige’, and refers to a sort of public recognition ‘that is accumulated by means of personal effort or clever maneuvering’.13 According to anthropologists, to attain this kind of social appreciation the ego must heavily depend upon its external environment. Like most forms of social prestige, it is greatly defi ned by how one is judged by others.

Face continues to play a major part in contemporary Chinese society, and its signifi cance cannot be overestimated. ‘Keeping’ face is a perpetual concern which requires constant caution and diligence. While face can secure social approval by encouraging ‘correct’ conduct and personal dignity, face can also be easily ‘lost’ when rules of conduct are not observed and one is seen at a disadvantage. And if face represents an important social capital – fundamental to the constitution of the Chinese self – too much face is not necessarily a good thing. People who are overly concerned with promoting their own reputation are reproved for ‘loving face’.14

As noted by anthropologist Susan Brownell, the Chinese notion of face can be extended to apply to a group as well as to an individual, so that it is also possible to

EC 89 C BB9 E 9 4 9 B B8 39 B C: 0C C 9 B .CB8CB 2C 98 9 9 98 E 0EC1 9 - CC ,9B E

,E9 98 :ECA CB

, C

LE M

2 C

98 9

E E9

9E 98

30 The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing

talk about the face of China as a nation and of Beijing as a city.15 This interpretation of face is essential to explaining the importance given to collective representation, place image, and world recognition in contemporary China. Clifford Geertz rightfully noted that the quest for international recognition is inherent in national identity formation: ‘one aim is to be noticed,’ he wrote, as ‘being somebody in the world’.16 Global acceptance of Beijing as an important world player would therefore contribute a great amount of face and prestige to the Chinese nation as a whole, and this expectation remains a major ingredient in the redefi nition of Chinese identity in the early twenty-fi rst century.

Chinese Potemkinism

Contemporary Chinese practices of urban image construction were greatly infl uenced by the Maoist legacy, itself derived from practices inherited from the Soviets. These image construction strategies were shaped by the potemkinist mentality that was the trademark of Stalinist socialism, and became a fundamental aspect of socialist epistemology.17 It was under Stalin that the Soviet leadership developed and mastered the art of building ‘Potemkin Villages’, using both ideological and environmental tools to project the state’s idealized and distorted representation of reality. The expression ‘Potemkin Village’ originates from the Russian army offi cer who, in the late eighteenth century, used stage sets and other theatrical props to build imitation villages and deceive Catherine the Great about his colonization accomplishments in Crimea.18 The expression was later popularized and served both literally and fi guratively to describe things that appear elaborate and genuine on the surface but which actually lack substance.

The extent of the Potemkin phenomenon in Stalinist Russia went beyond the mere construction of false architectural façades and window dressing to impress foreign VIPs. It also represented the reconstruction of an entire reality, a whole Potemkin world, in which newspapers, movies, political speeches, and offi cial statistics conspired to create a radiant future, totally different from the miserable past and the chaotic present. It was a world born in the leaders’ imagination – a kind of ‘fake it till you make it’ approach to modernization – where shameless exaggeration and deception became a standard feature of offi cial rule. Leaders regularly used boasting and exaggeration to hide economic and cultural backwardness and claim that the nation was catching up with the West.19 However, the projects initiated by demagogic leaders often resulted in the misuse of public funds for self-aggrandizement and ideological propaganda. For the Russian public which was rarely fooled by such practices, potemkinism amounted to just another form of repression.20

In China, potemkinism also became a central part of communist rule. It was

EC 89 C BB9 E 9 4 9 B B8 39 B C: 0C C 9 B .CB8CB 2C 98 9 9 98 E 0EC1 9 - CC ,9B E

,E9 98 :ECA CB

, C

LE M

2 C

98 9

E E9

9E 98

Selling the Chinese City: Theory and Practice of Urban Image Construction 31

in part through a combination of coercive capabilities, an elaborate propaganda apparatus, political theatre combining force and persuasion, and manipulative patriotic appeals that the Party managed to remain China’s sole ruler for over half a century. During its fi fty years in power, the Chinese Communist Party developed its own approach to image construction, erecting potemkin façades both for self- aggrandizement and to advertise the success of the revolution abroad. Many image construction initiatives were directed at the international community to secure external support for the revolution and to help the spread of world communist, but also to gain approval and recognition for the regime abroad, which was essential to establishing its legitimacy within China.

Image construction programmes initiated in Beijing during the Mao years (1949– 1976) were meant to inspire respect, to show China and the world the worthiness of the leadership, and to demonstrate how this worthiness was refl ected in the spaces, life, and order of the capital city. A unique opportunity for the Chinese leadership’s display of show politics was on the occasion of the visits of foreign heads of state to China. The rare foreigners to visit communist China were greeted with elaborately planned and carefully orchestrated displays of the nation’s progress. Foreign visitors were kept busy with tight schedules of sporting demonstrations, artistic performances, and a string of visits to architectural monuments that demonstrated the majesty of Chinese civilization. Contacts with the population were carefully fi ltered and usually limited to exchanges with offi cially assigned guides. Foreign delegations were taken on closely monitored tours of ‘model’ socialist institutions, especially schools and factories, which had been scrupulously re-arranged for the visits as idealized representations of successful socialism.

U.S. President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China for what he later called ‘the week that changed the world’, marked the restoration of Sino-U.S. relations and heralded the return of foreign visitors to China in growing numbers after the isolation of the Cultural Revolution.21 But the landmark visit diverged little from the tightly controlled itineraries that had characterized visits by other foreign dignitaries and ordinary tourists. Henry Kissinger characterized each one of his ten visits to China as ‘a carefully rehearsed play in which nothing was accidental and yet everything appeared spontaneous’.22

Chinese novelist Liu Xinwu captures the irony of such ‘stage management’ in his short story entitled The Wish. In the following passage, Liu writes of the hypocritical metamorphosis of a local school on the occasion of the visit of a single foreign guest in the mid-1970s, and alludes to the kind of popular hardship that resulted from such theatrical set up.

The sofa, tea-table, carpet, drawn silk curtains, and other such props had all been brought over from the district office in order to create this reception room. What was more, the ‘flowers for political use’ – the palms, the asparagus bamboo, the red-clusters – had all been

EC 89 C BB9 E 9 4 9 B B8 39 B C: 0C C 9 B .CB8CB 2C 98 9 9 98 E 0EC1 9 - CC ,9B E

,E9 98 :ECA CB

, C

LE M

2 C

98 9

E E9

9E 98

32 The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing

borrowed for the occasion from the nearby park. The classroom to be visited had been newly whitewashed, the broken windows repaired, the wooden blackboard replaced by one of fibreglass, and the best chairs in the school gathered together there. Even the pupils in attendance had been selected from each form on the basis of a triple examination of their political suitability, appearance and aptitude displayed in an oral test. The girls, moreover, had to wear floral print dresses. This created considerable difficulty for the parents of those selected to take part in these ‘diplomatic activities’, as whatever dresses might originally have been owned had long ago been put to other uses following the destruction of the Four Olds, so material had to be bought and new ones run up.23

Of course, image construction under Mao was not solely directed at an international audience but also sought to infl uence public opinion at the national level. The Chinese leadership combined public works and propaganda to engineer consensus among city residents, ensure social stability and unity, and stimulate civic pride. City leaders and their allies manipulated cultural forms and symbols to boost confi dence in the Party, reinforce political allegiance, and foster national sentiment. In the national capital, urban beautifi cation was also motivated by the desires of ambitious leaders who sought to benefi t personally from the international prestige that a positive world image would bring, and thus hoped to advance their careers and strengthen their power and stature.

Urban Renewal and Modernist Urbanism: The Panoptic City

In China, one of the principal tools of urban image construction was urban renewal,

Figure 2.1. Idealized visions of the future. Propaganda billboards have long served as a primary instrument of image construction in socialist China. In the Mao years, posters generally contained socialist propaganda slogans which were gradually toned down in the reform era and replaced by patriotic messages and praise for China’s modernization. But they continue to portray an idealized image of China’s future, often represented by industrial complexes, skyscrapers, high speed trains, futuristic airplanes and space shuttles.

EC 89 C BB9 E 9 4 9 B B8 39 B C: 0C C 9 B .CB8CB 2C 98 9 9 98 E 0EC1 9 - CC ,9B E

,E9 98 :ECA CB

, C

LE M

2 C

98 9

E E9

9E 98

Selling the Chinese City: Theory and Practice of Urban Image Construction 33

which served both to modernize the city and initiate social reforms. Throughout modern history, city and government leaders have used urban renewal as an instrument of modernization, which they believed could help rationalize urban life and create an effi cient, productive, and functional social order. The techniques and methods developed by Baron Haussmann in his drastic reordering of late nineteenth-century Paris in the 1870s infl uenced the strategic beautifi cation and spectacular redesign of many world metropolises, and inspired generations of modern planners and reformers worldwide.24 Responding to the needs of commerce and social control, and to a desire to create a clean and easily policed city, Haussmann redesigned Paris to allow for the effi cient circulation of goods, people, money, and troops. He created the ultimate capitalist city, where commodity display became more grandiose and impossible to ignore. His programme also made the rich and poor more visible to one another and exacerbated the misery of the population displaced by his scheme.

Modernist architects and planners who would follow Haussmann similarly believed they could change society by transforming the urban environment. They viewed city life through a normative lens, and used architecture and urbanism to engineer social reforms and to impose their modernist values on a recalcitrant humanity. Like Haussmann, they dreamt of an ordered and transparent city, and used urban renewal as a strategy of indirect government, a way of inducing the population to follow modernist adjudication of civility, morality, decency, and cleanliness not through public discipline but through self-policing. As observed by Michel Foucault, this new, modern city was one of surveillance, so rigid and transparent that nothing could be hidden from public scrutiny. ‘We are neither in the amphitheater, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism.’25

Many colonial powers such as the French in North Africa similarly saw the city as a mechanism of social discipline, and viewed urban form as an ideological project that could be mobilized to act as a tool of social control.26 They hoped that by radically modernizing the urban environment, they could push native inhabitants to conform to norms of order and rationality. This modernist vision with its latent environmental determinism would rapidly take hold around the world. Later in the twentieth century, newly independent Third World nations such as Brazil and India turned to high modernism in their construction of new capitals at Brasilia and Chandigarh, convinced that the creation of a perfectly ordered and spatially disciplined city would produce a more ‘civilized’ and progressive society. For their government leaders, modern urban design and architecture also stood as visual markers of progress and yardsticks of modernity, essential for their recognition as advanced nations.27

Such blind faith in the power of architecture and urban design endures around

EC 89 C BB9 E 9 4 9 B B8 39 B C: 0C C 9 B .CB8CB 2C 98 9 9 98 E 0EC1 9 - CC ,9B E

,E9 98 :ECA CB

, C

LE M

2 C

98 9

E E9

9E 98

34 The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing

the world. In countries with rapidly developing economies like China, urban image construction remains guided by similar modernist notions of aesthetic formalism, which maintain that planned changes in the environment would be suffi cient to produce predictable changes in people’s perceptions, habits and conduct. Such discourses where the city is imagined by the state, planners, scientists, architects, and social engineers as an object of knowledge, transparent, legible, and controllable, rest upon a conceptualization of space as an abstraction – a ‘representation of space’, as Henri Lefebvre calls it – which can be mapped, measured, calculated and exploited.28 This abstract space encompasses the diversity, randomness and dynamism of urban life into a rational blueprint, a neat collection of statistics, and a clear set of social norms, and reduces the city to a governable space, easily surveyed and penetrated. For Michel De Certeau, this ‘concept city’ remains the fantasy of urban reformers, who aspire to create an ‘un espace propre’: a purifi ed, hygienic space purged of ‘all the physical, mental and political pollution that would compromise it’.29

Such idealized conceptualizations contrast with a more anthropological vision of the city as a socially constructed ‘space of representation’, which is shaped, experienced, and transformed through everyday practices.30 The panoptic representation of the city promoted by modernist planners and reformers everywhere ignores the ‘real’ world that is found on the streets and in the houses of the city, and which is made of the places that people inhabit and appropriate on a daily basis, and invest with meaning, memory and desire. These two confl icting visions of urban space are at the heart of most contemporary confl icts over urban image construction, including in China where top down attempts to modernize the city are increasingly contested by grassroots preservation movements.

Staging the City: The Architecture of Spectacle

Another way in which the material fabric of the city has been exploited for image construction purposes is through the use of architecture and urbanism in the elaboration of theatrical stage sets for spectacular events and rituals. The widespread use of metaphors borrowed from the world of theatre in city marketing and image construction literature is telling. After all, observes urban historian, Spiro Kostof, urban life is nothing if not theatrical. ‘In every age urban spaces – streets and squares – have served to stage spectacles in which the citizenry participated as players and audience.’31

Urban beautifi cation and the staging of fl amboyant urban spectacles have long played an important role in the aestheticization of politics to conceal and obscure ideological manipulation by using spectacular displays to divert popular attention from social inequities and other contradictions. Autocratic governments from

EC 89 C BB9 E 9 4 9 B B8 39 B C: 0C C 9 B .CB8CB 2C 98 9 9 98 E 0EC1 9 - CC ,9B E

,E9 98 :ECA CB

, C

LE M

2 C

98 9

E E9

9E 98

Selling the Chinese City: Theory and Practice of Urban Image Construction 35

Napoleon III to Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Saddam Hussein widely relied on monumental architecture, ceremonial urbanism, and the careful orchestration of urban spectacles to legitimize their political order.32 They employed architecture as a tool of propaganda, a sort of ‘word in stone’, that communicated the permanence and authority of the established order. They also used urban renewal and urban design to create ideologically loaded settings for grand demonstrations of power, thereby transforming their metropolises into theatres for spectacular rallies and mass performances.33

The object was to claim the old cities in the name of the regime by pruning out of them undesirable elements, carving into them theaters for programmed mass demonstrations and political events, and building on a scale and magnificence that would prove the comparative worth of the present against the stony testimonials of past glories, native and foreign.34

Such urban dramatization was greatly inspired by the Grand Manner urbanism of the baroque period, exploited in Haussmann’s transformation of Paris, and later embraced by several autocratic governments in the course of the twentieth century. In this urban vision, theatrical conventions – especially perspective – helped underscore ‘the order imposed upon space by the political master of that space, the centrality of that master’s vision, and the increasing signifi cance of objects as they were located at greater distance from the position of power’.35 Grand Manner urbanism also contributed to the aesthetization of absolute power, by helping build the utopian vision of a well-governed society while hiding all evidence of its pathologies.36

Grand Manner urbanism advocated the creation of planned spaces for secular displays of mass patriotism, especially in the form of ceremonial thoroughfares that centralized and controlled the urban experience of both residents and visitors. Wide, rectilinear processional avenues lined with imposing buildings were carved out of old cities for political display. For example, Mussolini exploited the drama of long, broad axes when he opened a wide processional avenue into the heart of historic Rome to stage celebrations of his rule. Hitler similarly projected a new centre for Berlin along an axis that would run from a colossal Arch of Triumph to his megalomaniac Great Hall, designed to be the largest building in the world. Even early Republican China was marked by Grand Manner ambitions. Chiang Kai-shek’s deep admiration for the great dictatorships of Europe is evident in the monumental design for his new capital at Nanjing in the late 1920s.37

The masters of socialism settled for a similarly spectacular approach to urbanism, with appropriate symbolic adaptations. Stalin’s 1935 ‘General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow’, which was to set the pattern for urban planning throughout the soviet republics and provide the model for socialist capitals worldwide, featured a 20 kilometre monumental axis for military parades.38 The

EC 89 C BB9 E 9 4 9 B B8 39 B C: 0C C 9 B .CB8CB 2C 98 9 9 98 E 0EC1 9 - CC ,9B E

,E9 98 :ECA CB

, C

LE M

2 C

98 9

E E9

9E 98

36 The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing

modernist urbanism that would subsequently be embraced by socialist regimes as a more fi tting model displayed similar ideals of social and ideological control and was shaped by an instrumental rationality that envisioned the city in a coherent and integrated manner. Driven by both socialist ideals and a desire to master and dominate city space, modernist planners such as Le Corbusier envisioned a futuristic city and imagined a new representative urban order, with an expansive, majestic, and visually unifi ed panorama. Their penchant for monumentality yielded a highly theatrical urban vision fi lled with Orwellian illusions, creating a city where the new norms and forms of socialist society were put on display.

When the Chinese Communist Party came to power in the 1950s, it inherited a planning tradition that was very much infl uenced by the Soviet practices of the Stalin era, but which also bore the mark of China’s imperial tradition. Chinese dynastic leaders had long exploited the symbolic power of architecture and urbanism to support their claims to the celestial mandate. When it was conceived eight hundred years ago, the city of Beijing was designed to inspire awe and respect from all subjects of the empire, and to convince them that only the true son of heaven could be the ruler of such a magnifi cent city. The city’s cardinal orientation, its perfect proportions, gigantic walls and gates, broad and straight avenues, and its concentric organization at the heart of which stood the Forbidden City, all worked to convince the Chinese people that theirs was a blessed nation, destined to stand at the centre of the universe. Beijing’s powerful image produced a similar impression beyond the boundaries of the empire, and infl uenced world perceptions of China as a mighty empire. Indeed, early Western travellers to China, such as Marco Polo, were struck by Beijing’s splendour and brought back extensive descriptions of the city as proof that China stood among the world’s great civilizations.

Beijing’s grandiose urbanism would be extensively exploited by successive generations of leaders, including the new regime which took over in the mid- twentieth century. One aspect of the new socialist government’s approach to urbanism was what Victor Sit branded ‘wide-boulevardism’, or the state’s predilection for the construction of wide, ceremonial roadways for military display.39 In 1955, Mao carved out the broad Chang An Avenue into the heart of old Beijing to mark the establishment of the new regime. Tiananmen Square was also enlarged to megalomaniac proportions – making it the largest urban square in the world – to serve as a stage for mass demonstrations. Despite claims to turn away from imperial traditions, this policy reproduced the feudal dictate that had long required the streets of the imperial capital to be wider than those of all other cities in the empire. Wide boulevards long remained an attractive option for political leaders with ambitions of turning Beijing into a monumental socialist capital. The practice prevailed until the end of the twentieth century, periodically falling under attack, especially during the Cultural Revolution when it and other extravagant

EC 89 C BB9 E 9 4 9 B B8 39 B C: 0C C 9 B .CB8CB 2C 98 9 9 98 E 0EC1 9 - CC ,9B E

,E9 98 :ECA CB

, C

LE M

2 C

98 9

E E9

9E 98

Selling the Chinese City: Theory and Practice of Urban Image Construction 37

urban design practices in the Grand Manner were denounced as expressions of capitalist revisionism.

Today, image construction practices in China still often rest on spectacular urbanism to manipulate world perceptions of the city. As the powerful embodiment of a city’s attributes, architecture has long been a commodity as well as a form of publicity, and in today’s capitalist culture of consumption, designer skyline, signature urban furniture and carefully packaged urban spaces have more than ever become essential tools enhancing the prestige and desirability of place. Marked by a growing predilection for the ‘aesthetization of the material world’ and the production and dissemination of urban images for international consumption, contemporary urban design practices focus on surface appearance and the construction of sets of images. Often referred to as urban ‘imagineering’ – the Disney expression for the engineering of imaginary places – these practices rest upon the wide use of post-modern architecture, an ephemeral architecture of display, festival, and spectacle that blurs the distinction between the imaginary and the real.40

The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing

In Beijing, recent efforts to transform the world perception of the city and to produce a favourable image of the nation were initiated after Mao’s death, as China re-entered the world stage following the initiation of Deng Xiaoping’s Opening and Reform policy in 1978. The reforms triggered a major redefi nition of Beijing’s role as China’s national capital.41 According to directives issued by the Chinese Communist Party in 1980 and 1983, Beijing would no longer be the modern industrial centre it had struggled to become during the Mao period, but it was to serve primarily as the political, educational, and cultural centre of the nation and as the locus of international relations.42 Beijing would thus become a showcase of China’s contemporary material and cultural achievements and represent the country’s window to the outside world.

As its economy was redirected towards the development of tourism and service industries, the city used its status as China’s national capital and cultural centre to attract the attention of large multinational corporations in search of a location for their corporate headquarters on the mainland, and to expand its share of international tourism revenues. It thus became imperative for the Beijing city government to rethink the image of the national capital, especially following the 1989 crackdown against pro-democracy students at Tiananmen Square which triggered a large drop in foreign investment and tourism. Image construction efforts have therefore concentrated on building international trust in China’s stability and prosperity as a sop to attract foreign investment and tourism, develop trade partnerships, and

EC 89 C BB9 E 9 4 9 B B8 39 B C: 0C C 9 B .CB8CB 2C 98 9 9 98 E 0EC1 9 - CC ,9B E

,E9 98 :ECA CB

, C

LE M

2 C

98 9

E E9

9E 98

38 The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing

facilitate international exchanges. Through the remodelling of Beijing’s material landscape, the state strove to communicate a very specifi c message to the world: China was moving forward, and China was open for business.

However, image construction endeavours also made more conspicuous the fundamental contradictions inherent in the offi cial state policy of a ‘socialist market economy’ which rests on seemingly opposed ideological and economic imperatives. As Beijing retained its role as the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party and continued to serve as a base for communist morality, its new image would also have to proclaim China’s confi dence in its new found prosperity and rising world status, while simultaneously promoting national pride and reinforcing state allegiance at home. The new Beijing of the reform era would thus have to work as a model for the development of a modern capitalist culture while serving as an example in implementing socialist ideology and fostering patriotic sentiments. In its efforts to transform the image of the national capital, the Chinese state similarly had to juggle with its desire to reconcile international demands for a market-friendly environment and internal pressures for a socially responsible leadership.

Starting in the mid-1980s, the Beijing government initiated a series of ambitious redevelopment projects which aimed at remaking the world image of the Chinese capital. Infl uenced by a global concern with the production of images for international consumption, and by the modernist notion that one gains respect as a nation and people only by being modern, post-Mao leaders turned to urban redevelopment and social reform to fulfi l their desire to attain modernity as a marker of world recognition. Through the modernization of urban infrastructure, the rationalization of existing neighbourhoods, and the construction of modern buildings, the state aspired to project the image of a modern, entrepreneurial metropolis, and hoped in the process to turn the citizenry into disciplined modern subjects.

The great prosperity of the 1990s triggered an unprecedented construction boom and prompted major spatial restructuring intended to accommodate the new cultural, economic, and ideological revolution. In its effort to restore undervalued areas of the city, the fund-starved Beijing government sought the collaboration of private developers and entrepreneurs, offering tax breaks and other incentives to those groups whose support was deemed necessary to economic development. This growing reliance upon the private sector made balancing public interest and the logic of profi t increasingly diffi cult. The reorientation of Beijing’s economy towards the tertiary sector also allowed a new class of educated, cosmopolitan and entrepreneurial elite with international aspirations to take control of urban space and its representation. In contrast to the Mao years, when the dynamic for urban renewal had been generated internally, post-Mao economic restructuring opened the door to external players including foreign investors, members of the Chinese

EC 89 C BB9 E 9 4 9 B B8 39 B C: 0C C 9 B .CB8CB 2C 98 9 9 98 E 0EC1 9 - CC ,9B E

,E9 98 :ECA CB

, C

LE M

2 C

98 9

E E9

9E 98

Selling the Chinese City: Theory and Practice of Urban Image Construction 39

diaspora, and international tourists to play a major part in the construction of the image of the capital of the new China.

The urban reordering of post-Mao Beijing was thus shaped by a trans-national politics of identity and place. Attempts to ascribe new meaning to urban space radically altered the socio-spatial landscape of the city and greatly affected the experience and meaning of places used, created, and inhabited by generations of Beijingers. The creation of a new spatial logic inspired by market imperatives led to the establishment of new class relations and new patterns of urban segregation to a degree unknown in pre-reform Beijing, thereby negating the efforts of forty years of socialist urbanization. The hegemonic new representation of urban space that emerged as a result was greatly resented by those excluded from this vision, giving rise to growing expressions of discontent and grassroots resistance movements. Urban redevelopment would ultimately instigate important debates about representation, right to the city, and the constitution of citizenship in contemporary China, thereby unwittingly leading the way to the development of an embryonic civil society.

The ongoing battle over the control and interpretation of urban space would also be a battle for legitimacy. Increasing exposure to global fl ows of information, and the rising consumption of Western commodities and popular culture have created new desires and expectations, making it increasingly diffi cult for the Chinese state to draw the line between the consumption of Western goods and the consumption of Western ideals of freedom and democracy. As communism falters, to be quickly replaced by conspicuous consumption as the dominant ideology, the population grows increasingly inclined to favour the satisfaction of individual rights over the common good. To regain its hold on the nation, the Party is now whipping up nationalist fervour and promoting patriotism as the new hegemonic discourse, inscribing it in the urban environment as part of recent image construction efforts. Contemporary image making thus seeks to raise patriotic sentiments among the Chinese population and to secure people’s allegiance to the Party by promising major social benefi ts. The following chapter explores this last dimension of urban image construction in contemporary Beijing by presenting a case study on the uses of the nation’s history in transforming perceptions of the city for patriotic purposes.

Notes 1. For a survey of the literature related to city marketing and image making, see Ashworth

and Voogd, 1990; Kotler et al., 1993; Kearns and Philo, 1993; Erickson and Roberts, 1995; Ward, 1998.

2. Kearns and Philo, 1993. 3. Upton, 1991.

EC 89 C BB9 E 9 4 9 B B8 39 B C: 0C C 9 B .CB8CB 2C 98 9 9 98 E 0EC1 9 - CC ,9B E

,E9 98 :ECA CB

, C

LE M

2 C

98 9

E E9

9E 98

40 The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing

4. Lefebvre, 1986. 5. Zukin, Sharon, 1995; Kearns and Philo, 1993. 6. The close link that exists between place and identity stems from the privileged relationship

that connects space and society. Henri Lefebvre has demonstrated how space and society are dialectically related, as people and places are reciprocally constitutive of one another. While human actions transform space into experienced places by inscribing meaning into the lived environment, places in turn structure human activities by constraining or enabling social, cultural, political, and economic relations and practices (Lefebvre, 1986).

7. For discussions of the role of the built environment in the formation of self- and collective identity, see Walmsley, 1988; King, 1996.

8. Zukin, 1991. 9. Kearns and Philo, 1993. 10. Ashworth and Voogd, 1990; Kotler et al., 1993; Kearns and Philo, 1993; Erickson and

Roberts, 1995; Ward, 1998. 11. Britton, 1991. 12. Since the 1980s, large cities have become one of the most important type of tourist

destination. See Judd and Fainstein, 1999; Page, 1995; Law, 1993. 13. Hu Xsien-chin, 1944; see also Ho, 1975. 14. Fairbank, 1983, p. 135. 15. This usage is generally limited to the colloquial language. Offi cial discourse is generally

more cautious about the use of the term ‘mianzi’ for which it usually substitutes the words ‘honour’ and ‘dignity’ (Brownell, 1995, pp. 296–302).

16. Cited in Esherick, 2000, pp. 1–16. 17. Sheila Fitzpatrick (1994, p. 16) defi nes potemkinism as a Stalinist world view in which the

defects and contradictions of the present are overlooked and where the world is described not as it is but as it is becoming.

18. In the 1780s, the Russian fi eld marshal Grigori Aleksandrovitch Potemkin (1739–1791) was charged with settling and developing territories in the newly conquered Crimea. On the occasion of the Empress Catherine II’s 1787 tour of the territory, accompanied by the Austrian Emperor Joseph II and the Polish King Stanislas Poniatowski, Potemkin put together a grand spectacle to simulate the success of his settlement programme. His use of theatrical décors to create what passed, from a distance, for real houses and villages, later gave rise to the expression ‘Potemkin Villages’ ( Riasanovsky, 1994, p. 292).

19. Fitzpatrick, 1999, pp. 67–85. 20. Of course, socialist regimes do not have the monopoly over potemkinism. Throughout

history, authoritarian regimes of either the Left or the Right have resorted to different forms of spectacular development and image construction to show the success of their regimes. While all forms of governments have been known to manipulate the urban environment to reinforce political allegiance, great dictators and autocratic governments have been particularly profi cient in this regard.

21. Nixon, 1978; p. 580. 22. Kissinger, 1979, p. 1056. 23. Liu Xinwu, 1990, p. 110. 24. Harvey, 1985. 25. Foucault, 1979, pp. 216–217. 26. Rabinow, 1989; Wright, 1991. 27. Holston, 1989; Evenson, 1966. 28. Lefebvre, 1986. 29. Certeau, 1984, pp. 93–95. 30. Lefebvre, 1986. 31. Kostof, 1991, p. 222 32. Leach, 1999. 33. Benton, 1995, pp. 36–42. 34. Kostof, 1985, p. 721. 35. Carlson, 1989, p. 22.

EC 89 C BB9 E 9 4 9 B B8 39 B C: 0C C 9 B .CB8CB 2C 98 9 9 98 E 0EC1 9 - CC ,9B E

,E9 98 :ECA CB

, C

LE M

2 C

98 9

E E9

9E 98

Selling the Chinese City: Theory and Practice of Urban Image Construction 41

36. Boyer, 1994. 37. Although the architect who designed the new capital at Nanjing was American (Henry

Killam Murphy), the selection of the design was nonetheless infl uenced by the leadership’s proclivities for urban models such as those developed by European dictatorships (Cody, 1996).

38. The idea of political promotion as urban performance was often taken very literally. On the occasion of Mussolini’s 1937 visit to Berlin, the German government hired a stage artist, designer Bruno von Arent, to decorate the famous Unter den Linden processional way (Becker, 1995, p. 281).

39. Sit, 1995, p. 271. 40. Sorkin, 1992; Urry, 1995; Zukin,1991. 41. In 1982, French architect Phillipe Jonathan had already predicted that by the year 2000,

Beijing’s most pressing problem would be the construction of a physical image for the old city of Beijing as one of the world’s leading national capitals and an essential link with the outside world. The construction of Beijing as a leading international capital would stand as the core principle of this image construction endeavour, with the slogan of a ‘clean, beautiful and modern city’ as its guiding principle (Jonathan, 1982, p. 6; see also Chen Kehan, 1980).

42. In May 1980, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party published a four point proposal for the future of Beijing laying out the directives which were to guide the future transformation of the city’s image. The proposal stated that 1. Beijing should rank at the top among world capital cities and serve as a national model of public security, social order, and morality. 2. The city’s natural environment and historical patrimony should be carefully preserved in order to build a beautiful, clean and modern capital. 3. Beijing should lead the nation in the areas of culture, technology, and education. 4. Beijing should also prosper economically to increase living standards and ensure social stability (Hsueh, Feng-hsuan, 1995).

EC 89 C BB9 E 9 4 9 B B8 39 B C: 0C C 9 B .CB8CB 2C 98 9 9 98 E 0EC1 9 - CC ,9B E

,E9 98 :ECA CB

, C

LE M

2 C

98 9

E E9

9E 98