Download or read book The Making of a Chinese City History and Historiography in Harbin written by Soren Clausen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Harbin, ruled by the Russians, by an international coalition of allied powers, by Chinese warlords, by the Soviet Union and finally by the Chinese Communists - all in the course of 100 years - is presented here as an example of Chinese local-history writing.
Download or read book The Chinese City written by Weiping Wu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text is anchored in the spatial sciences to offer a comprehensive survey of the evolving urban landscape in China. It is divided into four parts with 13 chapters that can be read together or as stand alone material.
Download or read book Remaking the Chinese City written by Joseph W. Esherick and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2001-10-31 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In China today skyscrapers tower over ancient temples, freeways deliver lines of cars and tour buses to imperial palaces, cinema houses compete with old theaters featuring Peking Opera. The disparity evidenced in the contemporary Chinese cityscape can be traced to the early decades of the twentieth century, when government elites sought to transform cities into a new world that would be at once modern and distinctly Chinese. Remaking the Chinese City aims to capture the full diversity of recent Chinese urbanism by examining the modernist transformations of China's cities in the first half of the twentieth century. Collecting in one place some of the most interesting and exciting new work on Chinese urban history, this volume presents thirteen essays discussing ten Chinese cities: the commercial and industrial center of Shanghai; the old capital, Beijing; the southern coastal city of Canton; the interior's Chengdu; the tourist city of Hangzhou; the utopian "New Capital" built in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation; the treaty port of Tianjin; the Nationalists' capital in Nanjing; and temporary wartime capitals of Wuhan and Chongqing. Unlike past treatments of early twentieth-century China, which characterize the period as one of failure and decay, the contributors to this volume describe an exciting world in constant and fundamental change. During this time, the Chinese city was remade to accommodate parks and police, paved roads and public spaces. Rickshaws, trolleys, and buses allowed the growth of new downtowns. Department stores, theaters, newspapers, and modern advertising nourished a new urban identity. Sanitary regulations and traffic laws were enforced, and modern media and transport permitted unprecedented freedoms. Yet despite their fondness for things Western and modern, early urban planners envisioned cities that would lead the Chinese nation and preserve Chinese tradition. The very desire for modernity led to the construction of a visible and accessible national past and the imagining of a distinctive national future. In their investigation of the national capitals of the period, the essays show how cities were reshaped to represent and serve the nation. To promote tourism, traditions were invented and recycled for the pleasure and edification of new middle-class and foreign consumers of culture. Abundantly illustrated with maps and photographs, Remaking the Chinese City presents the best and most current scholarship on modern Chinese cities. Its thoroughness and detailed scholarship will appeal to the specialist, while its clarity and scope will engage the general reader. Contributors: Michael Tsin on Canton, Ruth Rogaski and Brett Sheehan on Tianjin, David Buck on Changchun, Kristin Stapleton on Chengdu, Liping Wang on Hangzhou, Madeleine Dong on Beijing, Charles Musgrove on Nanjing, Stephen MacKinnon on Wuhan, Lee MacIsaac on Chongqing, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom and David Strand with concluding essays.
Download or read book Reinventing the Chinese City written by Richard Hu and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the late 1970s, China has undergone perhaps the most sweeping process of urbanization ever witnessed. This is typically understood as a story of growth, encompassing rapid development and economic dynamism alongside environmental degradation and social dislocation. However, over the past decade, China’s leaders have claimed that the country’s urbanization has entered a new stage that prioritizes “quality.” What does China’s new urban vision entail, and what does the future hold in store? Richard Hu unpacks recent trends in urban planning and development to explore the making and imagining of the contemporary Chinese city. He focuses on three key concepts—the “green revolution,” “smart city movement,” and “great innovation leap forward”—that have become increasingly influential. Through case studies of Beijing, Hangzhou, and Hefei, Hu analyzes how attempts to achieve greater sustainability, promote data-driven governance, and foster innovation have fared on the ground. He also considers the experimental city Xiong’an in terms of China’s idealized vision of the urban future and investigates how the recent experiences of Hong Kong relate to regional and national development projects. Reinventing the Chinese City provides a careful accounting of the ideas that have dominated urban policy in China since 2010, emphasizing key continuities underlying claims of novelty. Shedding light on the transformations of the Chinese city, this book offers a new perspective on the factors that will shape the trajectory of urbanization in the coming decades.
Download or read book Making Hong Kong China written by Michael Davis and published by . This book was released on 2020-10 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can one of the world's most free-wheeling cities transition from a vibrant global center of culture and finance into a subject of authoritarian control?As Beijing's anxious interference has grown, the "one country, two systems" model China promised Hong Kong has slowly drained away in the yearssince the 1997 handover. As "one country" seemed set to gobble up "two systems," the people of Hong Kong riveted the world's attention in 2019 by defiantly demanding the autonomy, rule of law and basic freedoms they were promised. In 2020, the new National Security Law imposed by Beijing aimed to snuff out such resistance. Will the Hong Kong so deeply held in the people's identity and the world's imagination be lost? Professor Michael Davis, who has taught human rights and constitutional law in this city for over three decades, and has been one of its closest observers, takes us on this constitutional journey.
Download or read book China s Urban Billion written by Tom Miller and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2012-11-22 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By 2030, China's cities will be home to 1 billion people - one in every eight people on earth. What kind of lives will China's urban billion lead? And what will China's cities be like? Over the past thirty years, China's urban population expanded by 500 million people, and is on track to swell by a further 300 million by 2030. Hundreds of millions of these new urban residents are rural migrants, who lead second-class lives without access to urban benefits. Even those lucky citizens who live in modern tower blocks must put up with clogged roads, polluted skies and cityscapes of unremitting ugliness. The rapid expansion of urban China is astonishing, but new policies are urgently needed to create healthier cities. Combining on-the-ground reportage and up-to-date research, this pivotal book explains why China has failed to reap many of the economic and social benefits of urbanization, and suggests how these problems can be resolved. If its leaders get urbanization right, China will surpass the United States and cement its position as the world's largest economy. But if they get it wrong, China could spend the next twenty years languishing in middle-income torpor, its cities pockmarked by giant slums.
Download or read book China s Emerging Cities written by Fulong Wu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-11-13 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With urbanism becoming the key driver of socio-economic change in China, this book provides much needed up-to-date material and covers key topics on Chinese urban development.
Download or read book Understanding the Chinese City written by Li Shiqiao and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book teaches us to read the contemporary Chinese city. Li Shiqiao deftly crafts a new theory of the Chinese city and the dynamics of urbanization by: exploring the rise of stories of labour, finance and their hierarchies examining how the Chinese city has been shaped by the figuration of the writing system analyzing the continuing importance of the family and its barriers of protection against real and imagined dangers demonstrating how actual structures bring into visual being the networks of safety in personal and family networks. Understanding the Chinese City elegantly traces a thread between ancient Chinese city formations and current urban organizations, revealing hidden continuities that show how instrumental the past has been in forming the present. Rather than becoming obstacles to change, ancient practices have become effective strategies of adaptation under radically new terms.
Download or read book The Chinese City Between Two Worlds written by Mark Elvin and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Introduction to the Urban History of China written by Chonglan Fu and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores China’s urban development, examining the history and culture of Chinese cities and providing a cultural background to the rapid urban development of contemporary China. It offers a new perspective on Chinese urban history, showcasing the traditional culture which underpins the emergence of the modern city and highlighting how traditional Chinese philosophical thought is reflected in the culture of urban planning and architecture in China, notably examining such issues as ‘the integration of man and nature’, yin and yang, bagua, and the Wu Xing.
Download or read book The Habitable City in China written by Toby Lincoln and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-21 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new perspective on Chinese urban history by exploring cities as habitable spaces. China, the world’s most populous nation, is now its newest urban society, and the pace of this unprecedented historical transformation has increased in recent decades. The contributors to this book conceptualise cities as first providing the necessities of life, and then becoming places in which the quality of life can be improved. They focus on how cities have been made secure during times of instability, how their inhabitants have consumed everything from the simplest of foods to the most expensive luxuries, and how they have been planned as ideal spaces. Drawing examples from across the country, this book offers comparisons between different cities, highlights continuities across time and space—and in doing so may provide solutions to some of the problems that continue to affect Chinese cities today.
Download or read book 1368 written by Ali Humayun Akhtar and published by . This book was released on 2024-02-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With the goal of understanding China's future in a changing international landscape, this book offers a new picture of China's rise since the Age of Exploration and its historical impact on the modern world. The establishment of the Great Ming dynasty in 1368 was a monumental event in world history. A century before Columbus, Beijing sent a series of diplomatic missions across the South China Sea and Indian Ocean that paved the way for China's first modern global era. In 1368, Ali Humayun Akhtar maps China's ascendance from the embassies of Admiral Zheng He to the arrival of European mariners and the shock of the Opium Wars. In Akhtar's new picture of world history, China's current rise evokes an earlier epoch, one that sheds light on where Beijing is heading today. Spectacular accounts in Persian and Ottoman Turkish describe palaces of silk and jade in Beijing's Forbidden City. Malay legends recount stories of Chinese princesses in Melaka with gifts of porcelain and gold. During Europe's Age of Exploration, Iberian mariners charted new passages to China that the Dutch and British East India Companies transformed into lucrative tea routes. Among the ships' passengers were Italian Jesuits, whose linguistic skills facilitated book projects with local mapmakers and botanists published in Amsterdam. But there was a shift during the British Industrial Revolution, one that pointed to Europe's high-tech future. Across the British Empire, the rise of steam engines and factories allowed the export of the very commodities once imported from China. By the end of the Opium Wars and the arrival of Commodore Perry in Japan, Chinese and Japanese reformers called for their own industrial revolutions, one that would accelerate in the twentieth century. What has the world learned from China since the Ming, and how did China reemerge in the 1970s as a manufacturing superpower? Akhtar's book provides much-needed context for understanding China's rise today and the future of its connections with the West and a resurgent Asia"--
Download or read book Chinese Cities written by Fengxuan Xue and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1985 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by scholars from the People's Republic of China, Chinese Cities presents a comprehensive review of the evolution, present land-use patterns, economic base, and urban problems and planning of five of the largest Chinese cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Xi'an and Guangzhou, as well as the Taiwanese city of Taibei and the editor's own Hong Kong.
Download or read book An Urban History of China written by Toby Lincoln and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this accessible new study, Toby Lincoln offers the first history of Chinese cities from their origins to the present. Despite being an agricultural society for thousands of years, China had an imperial urban civilization. Over the last century, this urban civilization has been transformed into the world's largest modern urban society. Throughout their long history, Chinese cities have been shaped by interactions with those around the world, and the story of urban China is a crucial part of the history of how the world has become an urban society. Exploring the global connections of Chinese cities, the urban system, urban governance, and daily life alongside introductions to major historical debates and extracts from primary sources, this is essential reading for all those interested in China and in urban history.
Download or read book Invisible China written by Scott Rozelle and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of how China’s changing economy may leave its rural communities in the dust and launch a political and economic disaster. As the glittering skyline in Shanghai seemingly attests, China has quickly transformed itself from a place of stark poverty into a modern, urban, technologically savvy economic powerhouse. But as Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell show in Invisible China, the truth is much more complicated and might be a serious cause for concern. China’s growth has relied heavily on unskilled labor. Most of the workers who have fueled the country’s rise come from rural villages and have never been to high school. While this national growth strategy has been effective for three decades, the unskilled wage rate is finally rising, inducing companies inside China to automate at an unprecedented rate and triggering an exodus of companies seeking cheaper labor in other countries. Ten years ago, almost every product for sale in an American Walmart was made in China. Today, that is no longer the case. With the changing demand for labor, China seems to have no good back-up plan. For all of its investment in physical infrastructure, for decades China failed to invest enough in its people. Recent progress may come too late. Drawing on extensive surveys on the ground in China, Rozelle and Hell reveal that while China may be the second-largest economy in the world, its labor force has one of the lowest levels of education of any comparable country. Over half of China’s population—as well as a vast majority of its children—are from rural areas. Their low levels of basic education may leave many unable to find work in the formal workplace as China’s economy changes and manufacturing jobs move elsewhere. In Invisible China, Rozelle and Hell speak not only to an urgent humanitarian concern but also a potential economic crisis that could upend economies and foreign relations around the globe. If too many are left structurally unemployable, the implications both inside and outside of China could be serious. Understanding the situation in China today is essential if we are to avoid a potential crisis of international proportions. This book is an urgent and timely call to action that should be read by economists, policymakers, the business community, and general readers alike. Praise for Invisible China “Stunningly researched.” —TheEconomist, Best Books of the Year (UK) “Invisible China sounds a wake-up call.” —The Strategist “Not to be missed.” —Times Literary Supplement (UK) “[Invisible China] provides an extensive coverage of problems for China in the sphere of human capital development . . . the book is rich in content and is not constrained only to China, but provides important parallels with past and present developments in other countries.” —Journal of Chinese Political Science
Download or read book The Coming Collapse of China written by Gordon G. Chang and published by Random House. This book was released on 2001-09-15 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China is hot. The world sees a glorious future for this sleeping giant, three times larger than the United States, predicting it will blossom into the world's biggest economy by 2010. According to Chang, however, a Chinese-American lawyer and China specialist, the People's Republic is a paper dragon. Peer beneath the veneer of modernization since Mao's death, and the symptoms of decay are everywhere: Deflation grips the economy, state-owned enterprises are failing, banks are hopelessly insolvent, foreign investment continues to decline, and Communist party corruption eats away at the fabric of society. Beijing's cautious reforms have left the country stuck midway between communism and capitalism, Chang writes. With its impending World Trade Organization membership, for the first time China will be forced to open itself to foreign competition, which will shake the country to its foundations. Economic failure will be followed by government collapse. Covering subjects from party politics to the Falun Gong to the government's insupportable position on Taiwan, Chang presents a thorough and very chilling overview of China's present and not-so-distant future.
Download or read book Building Globalization written by Xuefei Ren and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-05 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the years 2004 to 2008, Beijing and Shanghai witnessed the construction of an extraordinary number of new buildings, many of which were designed by architectural firms overseas. Combining ethnographic fieldwork, historical research, and network analysis, Building Globalization closely scrutinizes the growing phenomenon of transnational architecture and its profound effect on the development of urban space. Roaming from construction sites in Shanghai to architects’ offices in Paris, Xuefei Ren interviews hundreds of architects, developers, politicians, residents, and activists to explore this issue. She finds that in the rapidly transforming cities of modern China, iconic designs from prestigious international architects help private developers to distinguish their projects, government officials to advance their careers, and the Chinese state to announce the arrival of modern China on the world stage. China leads the way in the globalization of architecture, a process whose ramifications can be felt from Beijing to Dubai to Basel. Connecting the dots between real estate speculation, megaproject construction, residential displacement, historical preservation, housing rights, and urban activism, Building Globalization reveals the contradictions and consequences of this new, global urban frontier.
