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Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories (Volume 8) (Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes) First Edition

by Madeleine Yue Dong (Author), Thomas Bender (Foreword)

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ISBN-13: 978-0520230507

ISBN-10: 0520230507

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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.

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Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2013

As an average reader (as in the other review), I found this book quite inspiring. For example, living in Beijing during my college years, I never thought of the beauty of the city's design. This book piqued my curiosity, and for the first time, I studied the map of the old Beijing, its spatial layout, as well as the power and the harmony in the general design.

This book motivates me to read more about the Chinese culture, and I am grateful for Dr. Dong's diligent work to collect every details of the city, which otherwise might be lost in time.

Beijing: A Disappearing Imperial Capital

Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2005

Beijing: A Disappearing Imperial Capital

Madeleine Yue Dong. _Republican Beijing: The City and its Histories_. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. x + 400 pp. illustration, maps, note, bibliography, index. $50 (hardcover). ISBN: 0520230507

Reviewed By: Yuxin Ma, Department of History, Armstrong Atlantic State University

Madeleine Yue Dong's Republican Beijing captured the transformations of Beijing from China's imperial capital, to the capital of the Republic, to a city of itself which was integrated into the modern industrial world market in the 1910s-30s. A major contribution of this book is that Dong rejects the dichotomies of tradition / modernity, of past / present, and of East / West, arguing for the centrality of the past, of history, of memory, even of nostalgia in the modernizing and self-consciously modern city. In the three parts of the book, Dong studies the transformation of the city's spatial order, the material life of the city's inhabitants, and cultural representations of the city in the Republican period.

In Part I "The City of Planners," Dong focuses on how the change of political ideal from Qing state to the Republic affected the principles of urban planning. In studying the transformation of spatial order and hierarchy in Beijing, Dong analyzes how the construction of railway and streets destroyed the imperial spatial order, and created new spatial organization and mobility. She finds once Beijing lost its status as imperial capital, its administrative boundaries and fiscal budget changed; Republican Beijing gradually lost her control of caravan trade from Mongolia and other long distance trades to her neighboring city Tianjin, which had easy railway accesses and was a treaty port city. In addition, Beijing had to compete with nearby places given to importance by railway for resources.

Dong is sophisticated in balancing the state planning from above with societal efforts from below in defining the new spatial order in Beijing. She finds both the state and the people utilized new political concepts such as "the public interest," and "people's livelihood" to argue for their cases. In struggling and negotiating with the state, ordinary people tried to define the meaning of those political concepts and the historical identities of their local communities. Dong provides a vivid picture of how the Beijing municipal government, the commercial forces of the city, and ordinary urban residents struggled with each other in getting city-planning information, controlling land use, and regulating street construction.

Dong parallels the change of political orders in China to the different modernizing projects in Beijing. Beijing did not have a self-sufficient economy as the old imperial capital, and the political changes in Republican period further weakened the local economy. Dong argues that when Beijing was still the capital of the Republic in 1911-28, the Republican government destroyed its city wall, created new streets and parks, and built revolutionary monuments, to modernize the city. After Beijing lost its capital status to Nanjing in 1928, under the new mayor Yuan Liang in the mid 1930s, Beijing's imperial glory was emphasized, and her historical sites were preserved. Yuan Liang intended to make Beijing a city of traditional Chinese culture to attract tourism.

In Part II "The City of Experience," Dong brings up a challenging but well supported argument that Beijing was not lagging behind other coastal areas in terms of its integration into the new global economy, but its integration had detrimental effects on local economy. The global industrial economic network made the city a market without improving its industrial production-Beijing people relied on imported goods to live, and the city only exported luxury goods. Dong finds the modern banks in Beijing did not make significant contribution to local economy, meanwhile old style credit institutions were not integrated into the new system. Dong pays attention to different modes of consumptions among people of different classes in Republican Beijing. She finds at the newly developed commercial centers in the wealthy inner city, money could be transformed into social status-consumption at new commercial centers like Wangfujing was an expression of one's social status. But most poor people went to temple fairs and recycling places to get what they needed. She argues that the mechanism of recycling was developed in Republican Beijing as a strategy for survival.

Dong reconstructs the popular culture of Republican Beijing by studying the Tianqio district. Created by new forces-"those who were in the way of new Beijing," facilitated by modern transportation-the railway and trolley, Tianqiao was a popular destination for Beijing people in the Republican period. Initially designed as an elite leisure center, Tianqiao soon became a market for all, and was enlivened and held together by elements from the past. Dong studies the cultural dimensions of Tianqiao market and entertainment, and argued as a public space where everyone could go, Tianqiao did not represent an egalitarian order or equality.

In Part III "The Lettered City," Dong studies how Republican Beijing was explored by sociology, history and literature. She finds in the 1920s sociology as a discipline to examine urban ills provided Beijing scholars the opportunity to turn way from political enthusiasm toward practical study, and they found poverty, crime and prostitution in the city resulted from larger social problems, and proposed social control and reform in Republican Beijing. Turning to history, she finds recording the old Beijing as the imperial capital became popular in the mid 1920s; Ming and Qing gazetteers were reprinted, and the changes of the city were detailed in historical writings. Dong argues that representing Beijing was a serious struggle involved in creating a system of knowledge about the city. She studies the narrative strategies and finds in those historical representation, place was treated as history-spatial changes functioned as the organizing mechanism, and people's everyday practices were taken for knowledge.

Dong excels at studying how Republican Beijing was represented in Chinese literature in different periods. In the 1910s-20s, intellectuals who embraced the new urban order and public spaces of the city created by the Republic criticized the city's low level of efficiency in their writings. From 1924 to 1935, intellectuals became more attached to the city, and their writings frequently mentioned museums and city parks created by the Republic. The rise of study on local customs (minsuxue yundong) attracted many writers to write on the local customs, ballads and pilgrimages. Dong points out that some writers consciously chose Beijing as "hometown" in their writing, to reject what Shanghai represented. She seems to suggest that resistance was also a response to modernity. Dong's analysis on Lao She's writings after 1925 really catches the popular sentiment about Republican Beijing: Lao She used the city as the stage and setting to situate his characters-those typical Beijingren had a good knowledge of the city, but their world fell apart.

Readers who love the old Beijing will enjoy this book. Reading this book is like wandering in an enchanting world which was about to disappear.

7 people found this helpful

New Lights On An Old City

Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2004

This is a book about the history of Beijing, the capital of China, between 1911 to 1937. But it tells you more than just a conventional history of the city. You actually learn how people lived in that time at that place. It also tells you about how Chinese writers wrote about the city. All the scholarly work aside, this book is quite enjoyable for an average reader. Get a copy if you are going to visit or re-visit that city: you will see it in a different light!

5 people found this helpful

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