Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories (Volume 8)

Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes

by Madeleine Yue Dong, Madeleine Yue Dong

Old Beijing has become a subject of growing fascination in contemporary China since the 1980s. While physical remnants from the past are being bulldozed every day to make space for glass-walled skyscrapers and towering apartment buildings, nostalgia for the old city is booming. Madeleine Yue Dong offers the first comprehensive history of Republican Beijing, examining how the capital acquired its identity as a consummately "traditional" Chinese city.

For residents of Beijing, the heart of the city lay in the labor-intensive activities of "recycling," a primary mode of material and cultural production and circulation that came to characterize Republican Beijing. An omnipresent process of recycling and re-use unified Beijing's fragmented and stratified markets into one circulation system. These material practices evoked an air of nostalgia that permeated daily life. Paradoxically, the "old Beijing" toward which this nostalgia was directed was not the imperial capital of the past, but the living Republican city. Such nostalgia toward the present, the author argues, was not an empty sentiment, but an essential characteristic of Chinese modernity.

Genres: China, History, Nonfiction

403 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Professor
Joint Appointment: Jackson School of International Studies
Ph.D. University of California, San Diego, 1996

(from http://depts.washington.edu/history/p...)

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a phenomenal history of Beijing from the 1910s to the 1930s. The book describes the changes in Beijing’s urban order in this era, intended to transform an imperial city into a city of “modern” republican citizens. The author describes how these changes failed to create the new citizens the state wanted, even as local people creatively used the new concepts of citizenship and the public interest to advocate for their interests. After 1928, when the new Nationalist government moved the capital to Nanjing, Beijing was now presented as a center of Chinese culture and civilization, with its imperial history highlighted (often for the purposes of tourism) in an example of an invented tradition. The book also discusses Beijing’s economy, which was thoroughly integrated into the global economy, although this brought the city few benefits. Beijing became a market for foreign goods, but was unable to develop its own industry, instead relying on handicraft production and a system of recycling second-hand goods. This recycling of old objects touched all facets of Beijing in some way, providing a sort of unifying experience in a deeply divided city. The author uses the concept of recycling more broadly as well, to explore how the people of Beijing saw their past and present. The discussion of Beijing’s representation in literature leads to what I found to be the book’s most interesting point. While nostalgia for the “old Beijing” seems to be a common theme of much of this writing, the “old” Beijing that was the object of this nostalgia was the Republican Beijing of the present. These writers fixated on the transition from “traditional” to “modern”, expressing a sort of nostalgia for elements of the past in the present, a present that was seen to be in immanent danger of disappearing. But this nostalgia was more than empty yearning for a lost past; rather, the people of Beijing used the past as a resource, “recycling” elements of it to shape the present. Republican Beijing was a modern city, and yet a sense of nostalgia for the present was an “essential characteristic” of this modernity. Overall, this is a fascinating book (this review can’t do it justice) that I would highly recommend to anyone interested in China, Beijing, and urban history more generally.

[Eoz Ud · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The past is a foreign country.”