No abstract

No abstract

In the mid-1990s, close to a third of all the construction cranes operating in the world were at work in Shanghai, building the new Pudong business and industrial zone and remaking the older sections of China's largest city. 1 After fortyfive years of Maoist animosity and neglect, the shining star of China's first age of modern urban development, which reached its zenith in the 1930s, is once more on the rise. Accompanying it are a great many other Chinese cities. Nourished by domestic and foreign investment, cities across the country are remaking their downtown cores, dusting off and building new tourist attractions, sprouting department stores and fancy hotels, and struggling to deal with vastly increased numbers of automobiles, "floating populations" of migrant laborers, and crowds of disgruntled residents pushed out of their apartment blocks ahead of the wrecking ball. 2 With the increased prominence of cities and the opening of archives in China in the post-Mao era, there has been a growing interest in China's urban past, both in China and abroad. Much of this interest has centered on the last years of the Qing dynasty and the republican period , when Chinese administrators and entrepreneurs attempted to come to terms with and/or take advantage of the new urban culture developing in the foreignrun areas of the treaty ports. 3 The study of the introduction of Western institutions, practices, and ideas into Chinese cities was by no means the beginning and end of urban history in China, however. Scholarship on urban change in modern China has also been marked by a reexamination of China's urban heritage. Recent studies of modern Chinese cities have emphasized the cultural dynamics of modernity, the reconstruction of traditions in the making of modernity, and the intimate connections between the new discipline of modernity and the conserving power of culture in Chinese urban society. All three 50

No abstract

No abstract