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Subject: H-ASIA: REVIEW H-Net Review Publication: 'Uneven Urban Aesthetics
in Contemporary China'
> H-ASIA
> January 30, 2011
>
> Book Review (orig pub. H-Urban) by Alexander F. Day on Robin Visser.
> _Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China_
>
> (x-post H-Review)
> ************************************************************************
> From: H-Net Staff <revhelp@mail.h-net.msu.edu>
>
> Robin Visser. Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in
> Postsocialist China. Durham Duke University Press, 2010.
> Illustrations. x + 362 pp. $89.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8223-4709-5;
> $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8223-4728-6.
>
> Reviewed by Alexander F. Day (Department of History, Wayne State
> University)
> Published on H-Urban (January, 2011)
> Commissioned by Alexander Vari
>
> Uneven Urban Aesthetics in Contemporary China
>
> In _Cities Surround the Countryside_, Robin Visser investigates the
> transformation of Chinese urban aesthetics in the postsocialist
> period, a time in which, she contends, urbanization has become
> dominant. Tracking the manifestations of urbanization in fiction,
> cinema, visual art, architecture, and urban design, this study argues
> that the built environment has important political, social, and
> cultural implications. In part 1, Visser looks at urban design,
> architecture, and urban planning, theorizing the dynamics of a
> "place-space tension" (p. 20). Part 2 reads urban film, art, and
> literature to develop a comparison of Shanghai and Beijing, arguing
> that the Chinese urbanization is bringing about unevenness, not
> homogeneity. Part 3 looks at the relationship between space, urban
> aesthetics, and the production of subjectivity; in other words, it
> investigates the internalization of urban aesthetics within the
> consciousness of the individual. A plethora of well-reproduced images
> benefit the text.
>
> In terms of periodization, Visser contrasts the new urban aesthetic
> that she finds with an earlier imperial urban-rural continuum, the
> May Fourth metaphors of the nation-state, and the rural aesthetic of
> the 1980s. Frederick W. Mote's urban-rural-continuum thesis, which
> Visser reiterates, has been met with less consensus than is implied,
> however.[1] Visser, likewise, poses 1990s urban aesthetics as a break
> from the 1980s, when national allegories and a rural aesthetic in
> film and literature dominated. In the 1990s, by contrast, "the city
> had become a subject in its own right" (p. 9). Yet here we could note
> that the peasant question returned along with national allegories
> since the new millennium, and discussions of urbanization are again
> linked to questions of rural values and the persistence of the
> peasant mode of life. One wonders if what Visser's work registers,
> therefore, is a particular moment--the 1990s--or a more long-term
> trend. Visser cites figures suggesting that China will be 70 percent
> urban by 2030 (p. 28)--a figure that seems somewhat high. Like recent
> media remarks on the enormous "urban" population of Chongqing, what
> counts as urban is not an easy question to answer, and Visser notes
> that the definition of the urban in China is somewhat ambiguous (p.
> 33).
>
> Chapter 1 maps the relationship between urban planning, China's
> changing political economy, and urban art. Visser makes good use of
> ethnographic anecdote to attend to how the urban is lived and to the
> class dynamics of urban space, theorizing the rapidly changing urban
> landscape of destruction and creation with the help of Ackbar Abbas's
> concept "aesthetics of disappearance," in which the past is erased
> (p. 38). She notes the developing critique of the urban planning
> processes in China by professionals, citizens, and artists, the
> latter of which is the most detailed and theoretically elaborated in
> Visser's account. Yet, tellingly, Visser notes that "by the
> twenty-first century Chinese experimental artists had moved from
> their highly marginalized position in Chinese society to center
> stage, largely due to their prominence in the international art
> market" (p. 76). As a form of critique, therefore, the artists, too,
> are shaped by capitalist forces--the same could be said of the
> filmmakers described in the book. Visser argues that this has meant
> that they are "increasingly being seen in the city," but how this
> process shapes the production of art, especially the critical art
> that is focused on, is less than clear from the discussion (p. 76).
>
> Visser contextualizes Chinese urban planning and urban aesthetics
> within the context of twentieth-century Chinese history as well as
> the dynamics of capitalist restructuring--primarily the latter. While
> China is certainly integrated into global capitalism, the extent that
> the Chinese city is "neoliberal," as Visser argues, is open to
> debate, even for the period of the 1990s, and she spends more time
> discussing the meaning of neoliberalism globally than she does for
> China (see chapter 2, for example) (pp. 32, 92). More work needs to
> be done on this difficult question. She also calls the economy
> "hybrid," but goes into little detail as to how this actually
> operates in practice (pp. 5, 9). One wonders, for example, how a
> major development project with an "unlimited budget"--unlimited by
> the constraints of the profit motive--fits into the neoliberal model
> (p. 62). The actual urban decision-making process--opaque as it is in
> China--is likewise less discussed than seems necessary.
>
> Focusing on Chinese critical inquiry, chapter 2 traces debates on
> neoliberalism and the "loss of humanistic spirit" in the 1990s,
> attributing the birth of urban cultural studies "to a Leftist
> rejection of Weberian specialization and depoliticization of the
> intellectual in an urban market economy" (p. 21). This is a nuanced
> account of the position of the intellectual in contemporary
> China--strongest in its discussion of Shanghai University's Wang
> Xiaoming, whose influence marks the whole book--although at times the
> focus on the urban sphere seems to drop out. Also problematic is the
> naming of Chinese liberals "neoliberal," eliding important
> differences in political position.
>
> Chapter 3 looks at Beijing artists and writers, discussing Wang Shuo,
> Wang Xiaobo, and the "New Beijing flavor"; Qiu Huadong's novel _City
> Tank _(1996) and Wang Xiaoshuai's film _Frozen _(1997); together with
> conceptual and performance artists. All are placed alongside a
> discussion of the transformation of Beijing's urban fabric. For
> Beijing artists, Visser argues, the city is a space to perform hybrid
> identities. Chapter 4 follows a similar format in its focus on
> Shanghai artists, writers, and filmmakers: Shi Yong's _Shanghai
> Visual Identity Project _(1997-2007), filmmaker Lou Ye's _Suzhou
> River _(2001), and novelist Wang Anyi's _Song of Everlasting Sorrow
> _(1996). Shanghai, unlike Beijing to which it is compared, is a
> cosmopolitan space to be consumed, producing an aesthetics of
> simulacra in which the city and the Shanghainese must constantly
> remake themselves as an international commodity. Visser's Shanghai
> discussion shows the potential of her analysis as the subjects of
> that chapter better reveal the importance of the urban moment in
> their art, in part because Shanghai artists seem to focus more
> directly on the city as a city. It is her strongest chapter, and her
> discussion of Shi Yong is particularly enlightening.
>
> Analyzing four novels set in Beijing, Shanghai, and to a lesser
> extent Shenzhen--Liu Heng's _Black Snow _(1988), Sun Ganlu's
> _Breathless _(1993), Chen Ran's _Private Life _(1996), and Mian
> Mian's _Candy _(2000)--chapter 5 examines the relationship between
> urban space, notions of privacy, and the construction of subjectivity
> and gender. Visser argues that postsocialist urban space produces
> feelings of alienation; that "characters regularly construct their
> own private utopias in order to offset the exterior chaos of the
> metropolis"; and that "this self-imposed isolation often results in
> psychopathic symptoms of melancholy, paranoia, and narcissism" (p.
> 227).
>
> Also analyzing a set of postsocialist novels, chapter 6 looks at the
> intersection of narrative and ethics in the urban commercial context,
> arguing that "the intensely commodified post-Mao popular culture has
> challenged literary culture's ability to suggest a distinct moral
> mission" (pp. 260-261). This chapter discusses the
> humanism-postmodernism debates of the 1990s, retreading some of the
> ground already covered in chapter 2, before it turns to analyze the
> novels of three writers: Qiu Huadong's _Fly Eyes _(1998); Zhu Wen's
> _What's Trash, What's Love _(1998); and He Dun's _Hello, Younger
> Brother _(1993), _Life __I__s __N__ot a Crime _(1993), and _I Don't
> Care _(1993). The sharp contrast between Beijing and Shanghai of
> chapters 3 and 4 seems to washout in the last two chapters even
> though most of the novels discussed are set in those two cities.
>
> Yet the Beijing-Shanghai comparison forms the backbone of the book,
> as important to chapter 2 on critical inquiry as it is to chapters 3
> and 4. This highlights one of the limits of this work: the tight
> focus on Shanghai and Beijing as urban China obscures other forms of
> urban aesthetics that might be equally dominant within China. We
> could ask, for example, how would Visser integrate the cinematic work
> of Jia Zhangke into her argument? Most of Jia's films take place away
> from the urban centers of Beijing and Shanghai, in county-level
> towns, where, as Xudong Zhang notes, "socialist underdevelopment
> meets the onslaught of marketization."[2] This calls into question
> the metaphor of Visser's title, "cities surround the countryside." In
> China, actual urbanization is taking place within county towns and
> even villages within the countryside. What are the aesthetics of that
> urbanizing China? The title metaphor also implies that it is only in
> the postsocialist period that the urban begins to dominate the rural,
> and Visser states that the pre-reform period was "organized around
> ... collectivist, agrarian values which ... dominated its urban
> socialist work units" (p. 33). While this did become a hegemonic view
> during the postsocialist period among urban intellectuals, it is not
> substantiated in the actual political and economic practices of the
> socialist period. This could open a new line of questioning for this
> project. That said, Visser's study develops a new perspective on
> critical inquiry and urban culture in the postsocialist period by
> situating them within the tension between place and space in a
> rapidly changing urban environment.
>
> Notes
>
> [1]. Mote argued that there was no strong division between urban and
> rural civilization during much of imperial Chinese history. See
> Frederick W. Mote, "The Transformation of Nanking, 1350-1400," in
> _The City in Late Imperial China_, ed. G. William Skinner (Stanford:
> Stanford University Press, 1977), 101-154.
>
> [2]. Xudong Zhang, "Poetics of Vanishing: The Films of Jia Zhangke,"
> _New Left Review _63 (May-June 2010): 73.
>
> Citation: Alexander F. Day. Review of Visser, Robin, _Cities Surround
> the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China_. H-Urban,
> H-Net Reviews. January, 2011.
> URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30835
>
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
> Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
> License.
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