This is the second time that this journal has devoted a special issue to topics related to the study of urban history in China. There are several reasons for this. One, of course, is that over the past four decades, urbanization has taken on an exponential pace of development throughout the country. As I write this introduction, the country is witnessing a massive human migration: some 700 million people are on the move, rushing home to reunite with their families for the Lunar New Year. Needless to say, the need for so many people to be on the road arises from and reflects the extent of China’s urbanization – travelers have left the places where they were born and raised and worked in urban areas for most of the year. New Year is the most important holiday for them to visit their parents, grandparents, and relatives for the season. Although urbanization only began in the early 1980s, it is estimated that the country’s urban population now accounts for about 66.2% of the total population. This figure is bound to rise in the foreseeable future.
The effort to urbanize China has created both benefits and problems – the fact that nearly half of the population is on the move at this time of year, putting tremendous pressure on the country’s transportation system, is one of the latter. This is the other reason we are editing this issue, because urban historians in China have produced many noteworthy studies that have contributed to the field of urban history as a whole. As the subtitle of this issue suggests, their works have covered a wide range of topics that tend to go beyond the traditional scope of urban history studies. In particular, there seems to be a new interest in studying and analyzing the transformation of space, whether cultural, political, or social and architectural, in urban construction and reconstruction, as well as the role and impact of the perception of space in shaping people’s minds and sentiments. Indeed, using space theory in the study of urban history is a relatively recent phenomenon. When Xiong Yuezhi 熊月之 and Zhang Sheng 張生 surveyed the field of urban history in China in 2008, few attempts had been made to study the change and growth of urban areas from the perspective of space—incidentally Xiong was one of the first to have pioneered the study.Footnote1 This situation has changed dramatically in the past decade and a half. In fact, according to Fan Ying, a contributor to this issue, 60 research articles on “spatial studies” (空間研究 kongjian yanjiu) have been published since 2022 alone. So the six articles selected here, therefore, are just a few samples that reflect the growing interest, which has gone beyond the study of history per se, among the Chinese academics today.
With respect to the development of space theory, Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) has made a notable contribution. His key writings have long appeared in Chinese, not just because he was also a Marxist. All the same, Lefebvre’s belief in Marxism has left an ineluctable print in his theory of space. In writing his seminal Production of Space, for example, he stressed that space is not only a concept of geometry, geography, and/or architecture, but also an arena in which production takes place. That is, space is both physical and social, economic, and political, because production results in a social relation. In his study of the urban history of Venice, he remarks that “social space is produced and reproduced in connection with the forces of production (and with the relations of production).” As a Marxist, Lefebvre also analyzes space in a dialectical approach—in his new preface to The Production of Space, he reminds his readers that “As a product, interactively or retroactively, space intervenes in production itself: organization of productive work, transport, flow of raw materials and energy, product distribution networks. In its productive role, and as a producer, space (well or badly organized) becomes part of the relations of production and the forces of production.”Footnote2 In other words, while space is shaped by production, it also becomes a force that plays its own role in the production by influencing the social, cultural, and political relations that are formed within it.
Informative and inspiring, Lefebvre’s theory of space has offered a new perspective on the study of the changing interactions between human actions and their natural as well as man-made environment. Indeed, it seems that Chinese scholars have paid the most attention to Lefebvre’s study of space than to his other works, including his important writings on Marxism. Of course, Lefebvre’s theory of space is by no means the only theory in which Chinese researchers have taken an interest. Various and valuable works on landscape by several human geographers, such as Yi-fu Tuan (1930–2022), a Chinese-American professor who spent most of his teaching career at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, as well as by historians such as Simon Schama, a British-American scholar, have also influenced Chinese writings on spatial concepts and changes, both physical and mental, in the past and present. Taken together, it can be argued that the field of urban history in China has undergone a “spatial turn” in the past decade, characterized by many new works that begin by exploring a change in space induced either by a natural force or by human effort, and turn to analyzing how this change interacts with other socio-political factors. I call this a “turn” because this new research trend differs markedly from the earlier focus on the force of modernization in transforming China’s landscape that once animated urban history research in its formative years. Indeed, as I said at the outset, the boom of urban history as a new school of historiography coincided with the country’s economic expansion from the last quarter of the last century. Port cities such as Shanghai, Tianjin, and Wuhan were once the “darlings” of the field for scholars young and old when they began their research. Their studies also echoed the similar interest of China scholars in Western academies.Footnote3 But thanks to the “spatial turn,” the study of urban history has become increasingly diversified, covering a much longer time span and a wider range of topics, as the articles in this issue attest. Indeed, some of the topics addressed by our contributors are not about the “urban” at all. But they still help to enrich our understanding of the complex and changing issue of spatiality in Chinese history.
Let me now turn to our selections. Our first two articles are about the construction and destruction of capitals and palaces under the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). Pan Qing, a long-time editor of a noted academic journal, contributes her study on the establishment of Xanadu as the northern capital during the early dynasty. Her argument is that Kublai (1215–1294), or Emperor Shizu of the Yuan dynasty, chose Kaiping, located in the Jinlianchuan Prairie, as his northern capital because it was “Kublai’s political strategy, as well as a symbol of his shift toward Han culture.” In fact, according to her research, the emperor’s decision was made only after consulting with several of his Han Chinese officials who were later appointed as the Jinlianchuan Prairie Secretariat. Her research reveals details of how the decision was made and discusses the strategic importance of the Jinlianchuan Prairie, in linking the Mongolian steppe with the Central Plains inhabited by the Han Chinese. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space, Pan analyzes how this spatial reorganization constituted a turning point in Kublai’s rule of the dynasty—it suggested the emperor’s political maturity in using space to reinforce the legitimacy of his rulership over China. For overall, the building of Kaiping into Xanadu, while a clearly political move, helped facilitate the “interactions between the Han Chinese occupied lands and the nomadic Mongols and other peoples” and brought “agrarian and pastoral cultures into contact with one another.”
Chen Caiyun’s article turns our attention to the other side of Kublai’s political use of space. A professor of history at Zhejiang Normal University, Chen has written extensively on the history of the Yuan. His work here shows that while the Mongol emperor ordered the construction of Kaiping as Xanadu, he also wanted to demote the importance of Hangzhou, or Lin’an as it was called, as the capital of the Southern Song dynasty, which fell to the Mongol only in 1279, 8 years after the founding of the Yuan dynasty. Out of his fear of potential insurrections in Jiangnan, the political and economic center of the Southern Song, Kublai took drastic and draconian measures against Hangzhou. Not only did he destroy the former palaces, imperial mausoleums, and ritual sites and turn them all into Buddhist temples, but he also ordered the seizure of “ceremonial robes, ritual jades and imperial seal, as well as the maps and census records, treasures and toys, chariots and carriages, imperial chariots and carriages, imperial cortege, banners and ceremonial weaponry.” This seizure was later extended to “ritual vessels, musical instruments, books and treasures, as well as the banners and ceremonial weaponry from the Song.” These actions were intended to erase the memory of the Song from the city’s population. However, according to Chen, his policies provoked violent reactions from the city residents at the time and left the Jiangnan people with a lasting memory of the “dark” rule of the Yuan in the later period. This historical memory, he argues, reveals “the grudge that the people of Jiangnan held toward the rulers of the Yuan Dynasty, recounting their failure to win popular approval and inevitable defeat.”
The next two articles analyze the issue of spatial reform in twentieth-century China. One, co-authored by Fu Haiyan and Zheng Shuang, both of the School of Modern History at Central China Normal University in Wuhan, focuses on the transformation of the Confucius Temple. The other, written by Fan Ying, a history professor at the Research Institute of Urban History at Sichuan University in Chengdu, examines the use of space in Qingyang Palace for organizing flower fairs. During the imperial era, especially in the later period, Confucianism gradually acquired its religiosity. Sacrifices to Confucius and the construction of Confucian temples were examples of this. After the end of Imperial China, the function of Confucian temples became increasingly diversified, reflecting the political changes and the transformation of the whole country. Through their detailed research, using a variety of sources, both official and private, Fu and Zheng portray the tortuous fate of Confucian temples in modern China. In fact, they argue, Confucian temples, once seen as closely associated with outdated cultural dregs, as in the New Culture movement, also underwent a remarkable transformation in the period that followed. In the 1930s, for example, when “the Chinese civil war was increasingly fraught. The Nanjing Republican government urgently wanted to use the normative power of Confucian temple spaces and ceremonies commemorating Confucius’s birthday to strengthen national identification and the legitimacy of its own rule.” In other words, although the general tendency of the government in the Republican era was to transform Confucian temples from “sacred” to “secular,” it did by no means mark a linear progression from “traditional” to “modern.”
The Qingyang Palace in Chengdu, which Fan Ying covers in her article, was never as “sacred” as the Confucian temple. But as a large Daoist complex in the city, it was similarly religious. In fact, throughout most of the Qing dynasty, if not earlier, religious ceremonies, referred to in the late Qing as 賽會 Saihui (religious processions), were held regularly at Qingyang Palace. Toward the twilight years of the dynasty, despite its botched attempt at the Self-Strengthening Movement, dynastic officials retained an interest in developing trade. As a result, under the auspices of the provincial government, the Qingyang Palace went through a metamorphosis. It was turned from the religious site for holding flower fairs to a place for commercial and industrial expositions. To this end, as Fan’s research reveals, a series of attempts to reorder the space took place, in which political and social forces interacted. She stresses that the political infiltration of both local and national forces in this spatial reordering became more intensified after the Qing’s fall and during the subsequent warlord era. It became even more complicated when the GMD nominally reunited the country during the 1930s. Chengdu, in the southwest, remained more or less controlled in the hands of the warlords. All in all, the case that the modern industrial exposition was reincarnated in the traditional flower fair at Qingyang Palace, Fan argues, suggests the advance of modernity with the “support of tradition, as well as clear evidence of modernity providing shelter for the continuation of tradition.”
The last two articles deal with the issue of spatiality in wartime from the early 1930s to the end of the 1940s. After the Mukden Incident on September 18, 1931, Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 (1887–1975) and Manchurian military leader Zhang Xueliang 張學良 (1901–2001) decided to adopt the “non-resistance policy” in response to Japan’s aggression. As a result, Manchuria fell to Japan. But the Chinese public and Chinese academics, as Liu Jie analyzed in her article, were deeply disheartened by the incident and the loss of Manchuria. Contrary to the government’s position, there was a concerted effort among them to espouse and expound Manchuria as the northeast region of China. Not only did prominent historians such as Fu Sinian 傅斯年 (1896–1950) and Jin Yufu 金毓黼 (1887–1962) write texts on the history of the border area, but writers and poets also composed emotional songs to augment the belief that the Northeast, or Manchuria, had long been an integral part of a common homeland. Liu, a Ph.D. candidate at Nankai University, provides an in-depth analysis of how the landscape symbols of Manchuria, its rivers and mountains, were used in the songs and poems to arouse nationalist sentiment among all Chinese. This musical practice, epitomized by the composition and circulation of the song “On the Songhua River” (松花江上 Songhua jiang shang) in the wake of the Mukden Incident, based on the characterization of the Northeast’s landscape, contends Liu, amounts to “a part of the national imagination and identification.”
If a natural landscape can become a national symbol, so can man-made architecture. In his article, Yan Hailiang, another young scholar who has just completed his Ph.D. in history, analyzes how the effort to construct the Capital Martyrs’ Shrine (首都忠烈祠 Shoudu zhonglieci) became a symbol for China’s war effort in the War of Resistance against Japan, or the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Focusing on the 1940s, when shrines were built at the local, provincial, and national levels, Yan offers many details about the designs and displays of the shrines. In particular, he notes that most of these shrines juxtaposed martyrs and well-known military heroes from the past in their display. Due to the challenges of wartime economics and politics, the construction of the Capital Martyrs’ Shrine was not completed on a national level. Nevertheless, Yan believes, it became an “intangible symbol” of national unity, as the juxtaposition of the veneration of past and present heroes at many similarly designed shrines helped to transcend time and space and form a collective memory for the nation in its war against Japan. Like Liu Jie’s article, Yan Hailiang’s study provides a good case study of how space, whether natural or constructed, can be at once cultural, social, and political in its symbolic use and perception. Their studies, along with the previous four, illustrate the new dimensions that Chinese scholars are exploring while extending the vibrant practice of urban history in contemporary China.
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank Fan Ying for providing the information used in this introduction and for her assistance in contacting the other contributors to this issue.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Xiong Yuezhi and Zhang Sheng, “Zhongguo chengshishi yanjiu zongshu, 1986-2006” [A Comprehensive Survey of the Study of Urban History, 1986–2006], Shilin [Historical Review], 1 (2008).
2 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 77; Stuart Elden, Elizabeth Lebas, and Eleonore Kofman, eds. Henri Lefebvre: Key Writings (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 208.
3 During approximately the same time, scholars working in the West such as William Rowe and Christian Henriot also produced their studies of the history of Wuhan and Shanghai, which received ample attention in the Chinese historical community.