Materializing a form of urban governance: when street building intersected with city building in Republican Canton (Guangzhou), China

Abstract

In the early twentieth-century China, the imperial court collapsed and modern cities emerged. How did a new form of governance become materialized, conceivable, and understandable? This article presents a case study of street building Canton (present-day Guangzhou) in the 1920s and 1930s. Drawing on discussions of material power, infrastructures, and governmentality, it attends to the role of material artifacts in creating the modern Chinese city. In particular, it illustrates the entangled emergence and development of modern streets and urban governance, a new form of governance essential to fashioning the Chinese nation-state and Chinese modernity. The unstable, evolving process of creating a new built environment provided specific, material reference points for various stakeholders to imagine and think about the modern city as governable space. This case analysis suggests an alternative perspective to urban history in China, and contributes to the broader discussion on the symbiotic relationship between urban politics and infrastructure.

Keywords:

• Infrastructure
• governance
• urbanization
• street
• materiality
• China

Acknowledgements

This article was originally presented at the workshop ‘Infrastructures: Provocations towards an Inter-disciplinary Dialogue,’ at the National University of Singapore in 2015. I thank Dr. Itty Abraham and other workshop participants for their valuable comments. I am grateful to Drs. Oscar Sanchez, Gonçalo Santos and Elizabeth Sinn for discussions on technologies, politics and merchant culture, and to the evaluable comments from the reviewers. Thanks to Dr. Martin Collins for his careful editing.

Notes

1. Barry, Osborne, and Rose, Foucault and Political Reason; Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitic; and Lemke, “The Birth of Bio-Politics”.

2. Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure; Naquin, Peking; Rowe, Hankow (1984) and Hankow (1989); Shiba, Zhongguo Dushishi; and Skinner, The City in Late Imperial China.

3. Rowe, “Urban Agency in Early Modern and Modern China,” 125.

4. Bennett and Joyce, Material Powers; Latham and McCormack, “Moving Cities”; and Lees, “Rematerializing Geography”.

5. Bennett and Joyce, Material Powers; Lewis, “Comments on Urban Agency”; and Santos, “Technological Choices and Modern Civilizing Processes”.

6. Hodder, Entangled; and Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind.

7. Anand, “Pressure”.

8. See, for example, Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism; Graham and McFarlane, Infrastructural Lives; Joyce, The Rule of Freedom; Mitchell, Rule of Experts and Carbon Democracy; and von Schnizler, “Travelling Technologies”.

9. Spence, The Search for Modern China.

10. Blussé, Visible Cities; and Van Dyke, The Canton Trade.

11. See, for instance, Shao-Hsing-Fu in Watt, “The Yamen and Urban Administration”. In cases when the walled city belonged to one county, the county court’s jurisdiction usually went beyond the walls. See Rowe, “Urban Agency in Early Modern and Modern China”.

12. This does not mean the physical form had never changed over time. Historians have found that variations from the ideal type existed, but the strengthening of orthodox official ideology and the anxiety of re-articulating Han culture and identity had led to more similarities between the actual form of the capital city and the ideal in classic books. See Chang, “The Morphology of Walled Capitals”; Steinhardt, “Why Were Chang’an and Beijing So Different?” and “Mapping the Chinese City”.

13. Commerce existed within the city walls. There were commercial streets in the walled areas of capitals and trading centers such as Kaifeng and Yangzhou since Song dynasty. See Kiang, “Kaifeng and Yangzhou”. But official culture and representation downplayed the commerce and highlighted imperial agencies within the city wall.

14. Lewis, The Construction of Space in Early China; Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City Planning; and Wright, “The Cosmology of a Chinese City”.

15. Dikötter, Exotic Commodities.

16. Cheng, Cheng Tiangu Huiyilu.

17. Chen, “Cao Ruying Chaicheng”; Han, Kuang, and Huang, “Jiu Guangzhou Chaicheng Zhulu Fengbo”.

18. Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan are not taken into consideration, because these places were under British, Portuguese and Japanese control during that period.

19. The names of historical figures mentioned in this article follow the Chinese format with the surname first and the given name last.

20. Zhang, “The Rise and Fall of Qilou”.

21. Turner, The Forest of Symbol.

22. Cheng, Cheng Tiangu Huiyilu.

23. Farris, “Thirteen Factories of Canton”; and Liang, Guangdong Shisan Hang Kao.

24. Ni, “Guangzhou Chengshi Daolu”.

25. Norton, Fighting Traffic.

26. Zhang, “The Rise and Fall of Qilou”.

27. GSG, 1923, 176–81.

28. GSG, 1926, no. 239, 48.

29. Rowe, Hankow (1984) and Hankow (1989); Shiba, Zhongguo Dushishi; and Tsin, Nation, Governance, and Modernity in China.

30. Qiu, WanQing Minguo Chunian Guangdong de Shishen yu Shangren.

31. GSG, 1927, no. 266, 30–1.

32. GSG, 1925, no. 206, 800.

33. GSG, 1925, no. 197, 482.

34. GSG, 1925, no. 203, 689.

35. GSG, 1926, no. 210, 1064.

36. Carroll, “Huangliang Jingxiang”.

37. Cheng, “Guangzhoushi Malu Xiaoshi”; and Yu, “Guangzhoushi Malu Gailiang Jingguo ji Baoyang Qingxing”.

38. Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong; and Horracks, “The Guangzhou-Hongkong Strike, 1925–1926”.

39. GSG, 1926, no. 222, 33–5; no. 216, 41–3, 48–9; no. 218, 28–9; no. 223–5, 67.

40. GSG, 1926, no. 222, 33.

41. GSG, 1926, no. 244, 56.

42. GSG, 1926, no. 215,7, 55–6; no. 223–5, 16–17; 1927, no. 256, 35; no. 262–4, 53; 1928, no. 296, 64–5.

43. GSG, 1926, no. 226, 9; no. 228, 47.

44. Lee, “The Singapore Shophouse”.

45. Zhang, “The Rise and Fall of Qilou”.

46. Lee, “Public Construction in Canton”.

47. See, for example, the comments by Dong Xiujia, the head of Public Works in the city of Wuhan, GSG, 1927, no. 259–61, 1–5.

48. Tsin, Canton, 1900–1927.

49. GSG, 1926, no. 210, 1072.

50. Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State”.

51. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom; and Otter, The Victorian Eye.

52. Rowe, “Urban Agency in Early Modern and Modern China”.

53. For example, Musgrove, China’s Contested Capital.

54. Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation.

55. Kooy and Bakker, “Technologies of Government”; and McFarlane, “Governing the Contaminated City”.

56. Anand, Hydraulic City.

57. Giglioli and Swyngedouw, “Let’s Drink to the Great Thirst!”

58. Mains, “Blackout and Progress”.

59. Schwenkel, “Spectacular Infrastructure and its Breakdown”.