SINOPOLIS

SINOPOLIS

[SHS:LITT] Humanities and Social Sciences/Literature

[SHS:MUSEO] Humanities and Social Sciences/Cultural heritage and museology

[SDE:ES] Environmental Sciences/Environmental and Society

city

space

architecture

Westernization

globalization

hybridity

simulacrum:Liang Qichao

Liang Sicheng

China

Beijing

urban landscape

homogenization

The story of the manangment of city space over the past 60 years is imbricated with the Chinese state apparatus's desire to erase the physical, spatial traces of a historical memory which lie beyond the control of official history-telling and thus pose a threat to the party-state's monolithic narrative which makes of the past a non-history.<br />The only strategy for dealing with the incongruities between the Western and the local seems to have been the literal demolition of the old. And yet at the same time hisory-less simulcra ("Culture Streets", new "ancient" Chinese houses) simultaneously abound. The schizophrenic dichotomy, modern=Western versus old=Chinese, with which China has battled for over a century and a half is still dominant. This fear of engaging the past, this anxiety over hybridity, the reluctance to experiment, is connected to two problems – the problem of national identity: What IS Chinese/Chineseness? And the problem of history – the reluctance to think and write hat history as anything other than a narrative facilitating the maintenance in power of the Communist party.

Lee, Gregory

SINOPOLIS: "Chineseness" and the Modern Chinese City<br />Plenary Lecture

2008-09-08

ENG

invited conference talk

http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00322907

http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/32/29/07/PDF/SINOPOLIS.pdf

http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/32/29/07/PDF/LEE_SINOPOLIS.pdf

Northampton

United Kingdom