Improvised City by Cole Roskam

Author:Cole Roskam [Roskam, Cole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Art & Architecture, Architecture, Planning, History, Asian, China
ISBN: 9780295744803
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2019-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

THE CHINESE CITY AND ITS WALL

The perceived loss of China’s “face” on the global stage proved a spark in mobilizing popular Chinese dissent over the course of the early twentieth century. The Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and Shanghai’s Mixed Court Riot of December 1905, among other protests, highlighted dissatisfaction with the Qing government and its perceived failure to protect China’s rights or its “national prestige” within the nebulous realm of transimperial diplomacy, even as Qing leaders were adopting the “modern technologies of governance” believed necessary to accommodate China’s geopolitical reality.103 In Shanghai, public anxiety fueled local gentry and guild-organized efforts to self-organize and establish public boards for the collection of taxes, postal and telephone services, the dredging of waterways, road and bridge construction, garbage and night soil removal, and manage a Chinese police force—the first embodiment of a municipal institution in the Chinese city.104

In December 1895, and with the support of Shanghai’s county magistrate Huang Chengxuan, a road privately built by Chinese gentry materialized along the Huangpu River to the south of the French Concession. The avenue heralded the establishment of the South City Roadworks Board (Nanshi Malu Gongcheng Ju), which also assumed responsibility for its physical maintenance. In 1905, local gentry formed the General Works Board (Zong Gongcheng Ju) with the support of Daotai Yuan. Members included well-known merchants such as Li Zhongjue (1853–1922); Zhu Baosan (1848–1926); Wang Yiting (1867–1938), a comprador and president of the southern city’s Chinese Chamber of Commerce; Cheng Ju, president of the general Chinese Chamber of Commerce and a leader of the 1905 anti–American goods boycott; and Zhu Yinjiang, Jardine Matheson’s lumber comprador. Foreign residents considered the board to be a “purely Chinese municipal representative government.”105 It was followed, in 1906, by the creation of two other boards in Zhabei and Pudong, two subdistricts of Shanghai.

Like their non-Chinese counterparts, Qing elite and officials understood that public works offered more than simple apparatuses designed for municipal management. They also represented discernible signs of progress and bureaucratic maintenance, and a visual “resistance” to foreign infringement in response to the contested legitimacy of the Qing government, and the growing demands of localized interest groups, particularly in China’s rapidly transforming urban areas.106 In 1909, the Qing court, under duress by national calls for political change, published a series of regulations for the local self-government of cities, towns, and rural communities (Cheng zhen xiang difang zizhi zhangcheng) calling for the institution of autonomous local government offices to be controlled by the Qing government. Following the fall of the Qing government, however, the Jiangsu provincial assembly announced plans to divide Chinese-controlled Shanghai into local self-governed municipalities. Each would have its own Urban Self-Government Bureau (Cheng Zizhi Gongsuo), later identified as a town hall, or shizhengting.107

Although there is documentation detailing the managerial structure and responsibilities of these offices, and the kind of public architecture they commissioned, very little is known about the architectural qualities of the government buildings themselves.108 It is unlikely permanent structures were ever completed; in 1914, Yuan Shikai

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