Historians of modem China have recently discovered the expansion of a public sphere in late imperial and early republican Chinese society. The works of Mary Rankin (1986) and William Rowe ( 1984, 1989, for example, focusing on late imperial Zhejiang and Hankou, respectively, point to community-centered, extra-bureaucratic elite activism as the major force behind China's modem political transformation. The work of David Strand (1989) on early republican Beijing further demonstrates how new organizations, such as the police, political parties, chambers of commerce, and labor unions, developed in parallel with old institutions, such as guilds, volunteer firefighting brigades and militias, charities, labor gangs, and elite mediation. Together, these works suggest that the public sphere expanded rapidly, taking advantage of the state's inability to extend itself aggressively into new areas of social life.' 1 This article joins the debate over the issues of the state-society relationship and the public sphere by examining the transformation of imperial, private, and restricted urban space into areas that were civilian, open, and available for public use in China's capital-Beijing-early in the twentieth century. The article deals with the public sphere in its spatial and physical form (i.e., public spaces). Instead of assuming that the transformation of public space sprang from local elite activism, it investigates the roles of both the state and society in the transforma-AUTHOR'S NOTE: I would like to thank

This paper studies the evolution of urban form in both physical and social manifestations through an examination of the transformation of the Chinese capital from a planned imperial city into a modern metropolis in the early twentieth century. The newly created municipal government sought to modernize Beijing through public works to improve the old urban infrastructure. Consequently, city walls and gates were reconfigured; streets were paved, widened and expanded; and new rules of urban planning and zoning were introduced. Reflecting changes in political power relations, the modernist transformation in the urban built environment was evidently brought about by a combined force of Western influences and Chinese indigenous developments, especially by a shift in ideological allegiance from imperial authority to people's rights, by the state's increasing intervention in urban affairs, and by new technologies transmitted from the West.

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

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