International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)

Modern China has been rapidly transformed from a largely rural society to an increasingly urban one. Historically 90% rural, the nation is currently projected to become 50% rural and 50% urban by 2010, and the capitalist city—once denounced as “parasitical” by Mao and devalued by the norms of traditional Chinese ethics—now functions in China as a site for the production of individual and collective identity. Where once rural values were used to distinguish Chinese civilization from a degenerate West (viewed as more urban), increasingly today it is the urban that characterizes modern China. In CITIES SURROUND THE COUNTRYSIDE, Robin Visser shows how the aesthetics of the urban environment today shape the emotions and behavior of Chinese individuals and cultures, and conversely how individual and collective images of, and practices in, the city produce contemporary urban aesthetics.

Drawing on the interdisciplinary tools of urban studies, literary and cultural theory, and field observations and interviews, Visser situates postsocialist urban aesthetics within broad economic, historical, ideological, and material contexts. She first considers the question of urban image-making in relation to urban design, providing historical background on urban planning and architecture and analyzing salient aspects of cultural debates relevant to urbanization. Surveying three decades of urban planning practices and urban art, as well as collaborative art exhibitions that have fostered dialog between artists and architects on contemporary Asian urbanism, Visser demonstrates the impact of neoliberal globalization on building the new Chinese city, on inciting critiques of urban consumerism by literary and visual artists, and on enabling alternative intellectual discourses in the academy. She then examines how two great Chinese cities—Beijing and Shanghai—figure in the cultural imagination, especially how aesthetic depictions are often at odds with portrayals by sociologists or urban geographers. She studies the post-Mao dream of middle-class consumption and notes how the mid-1990s saw commercial advertising flaunting class differences as in the promotion of upscale housing and the commercial exploitation of the concept of “the successful man.” In the final section of the book, Visser draws on urban sociology, psychoanalytic theory, and philosophy to understand how urban subjectivities are produced by, and also produce, urban space. She traces the waning influence of the work unit (danwei) and the local street committee, which once governed most aspects of urban life, now replaced by more individualistic decisions about livelihood and lifestyle.