C
ities are viewed as a reflection of a society’s economic and cultural progress and are a fundamental agent of change. Modernity, on the other hand, is the process of thorough social, economic and polit-
ical transformation of a society. Thus, the city has been essential for Chinese political leaders, intellectuals and businessmen to establish a modernised China. Leaders of the various regimes that ruled China during the twentieth century focused on modernising their major cities in order to establish China’s power and dominance in the modern era. This paper will argue that during the Qing Dynasty Chinese cities were perceived as backward, before Republican rule modernised Nanjing to reflect their modernisation. Finally, under Mao, the Communists focused on modernising both the city and the countryside. However, the city remained the symbol of the regime’s modernity. Among historians there are conflicting conceptions of the Chinese city during the Qing period. Throughout Chinese history, cities have occupied the “commanding heights of political economic authority” . German sociologist Max Weber perceived the oriental cities of China to lack the modern urban civic communities and infrastructure of European counterparts. Chinese capitals, he claimed, were predominantly focused on administrative matters. They were purely the “capital of the mandarins” . Chinese cities were centres of intellectual and political affairs and did not have significant merchant cultures. In contrast, European cities actively fostered “scientific… capitalist enterprise in industry” . Modern Chinese history scholar John Friendmann argues that ancient Chinese cities developed and maintained a distinctive urban tradition during the Qing Dynasty, clearly not recognised by colonial scholarship. Jonathan Fenby points out that the rural economy was still primitive, inefficient and struggling to modernise. Nevertheless, during the twilight years of the Qing Dynasty, Chinese cities failed to match the modernisation occurring in the colonial quarters of the treaty ports and Western concession cities. New Chinese intellectuals influenced by Western colonial industrialisation, architecture and culture during early Chinese modern history, led cities to become the crucible of modernity. The Treaty of Nanjing (1842) prompted the establishment of treaty ports and concession cities by European colonial powers along the coast of China. This led to the development of Hong Kong, Canton, Ningpo and Shanghai, which all developed rapidly at the forefront of urban modernisation in China. By the 1920s, Shanghai had become China’s most economically advantaged and populace city, with a population of three million. The International Settlement of Shanghai “boasted a skyline graced with classical Greek columns that still look more like Oxford Street than the Orient” . This emphasises Shanghai’s comparative advancement to other Chinese traditional cities and the countryside. The Western-style architecture of contractually defined concession areas in Chinese cities largely influenced architecture outside these areas. The concessions of international settlements enabled a new urban consciousness to develop amongst the Chinese that had previously not occurred in traditional Chinese cities. Moreover, a “vernacular literature emerged in the pages of many new journals” in Shanghai, a city home to many modern writers including Lu Xun. Jianfei Zhu notes that “Chinese industrialists, intellectuals, students and revolutionary activists lived amongst the foreign concessions” and created a XXX Ormond Papers
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