Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories (Asia: Local Studies Global Themes, 8)

Old Beijing has become a subject of growing fascination in contemporary China since the 1980s. While physical remnants from the past are being bulldozed every day to make space for glass-walled skyscrapers and towering apartment buildings, nostalgia for the old city is booming. Madeleine Yue Dong offers the first comprehensive history of Republican Beijing, examining how the capital acquired its identity as a consummately "traditional" Chinese city. For residents of Beijing, the heart of the city lay in the labor-intensive activities of "recycling," a primary mode of material and cultural production and circulation that came to characterize Republican Beijing. An omnipresent process of recycling and re-use unified Beijing's fragmented and stratified markets into one circulation system. These material practices evoked an air of nostalgia that permeated daily life. Paradoxically, the "old Beijing" toward which this nostalgia was directed was not the imperial capital of the past, but the living Republican city. Such nostalgia toward the present, the author argues, was not an empty sentiment, but an essential characteristic of Chinese modernity. "Madeleine Yue Dong offers the first comprehensive history of Republican Beijing, examining how - through processes of modernization and the material and cultural practices of recycling - the capital acquired its identity as a consummately "traditional" Chinese city." "From 1911 to 1937, the old hierarchies and walls of the imperial capital were steadily dismantled and new axioms of urban planning and social organization were instituted. Yet the construction of infrastructure and development of public spaces to encourage modern citizenship had less of an effect than intended. Beijing's residents were socially stratified and painfully poor; many did not behave like model modern citizens." "For residents of Beijing, the heart of city life lay in the labor-intensive activities of "recycling", a primary mode of cultural and material production and circulation that came to characterize Republican Beijing. An omnipresent process of recycling and re-use unified Beijing's fragmented and stratified markets into one circulation system. These material practices of recycling evoked the air of nostalgia that permeated daily life and animated representations of the city. Paradoxically, the "old Beijing" toward which this nostalgia was directed was not the imperial capital of the past but the living Republican city. Such nostalgia for the present, the author argues, was not an empty sentiment but an essential characteristic of Chinese modernity."--Jacket "Old Beijing" (lao Beijing) has been a subject of growing fascination in contemporary China's capital since the 1980s.