1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910780244703321

Autore

Dong Madeleine Yue <1964->

Titolo

Republican Beijing [[electronic resource] ] : the city and its histories / / Madeleine Yue Dong ; with a foreword by Thomas Bender

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berkeley, : University of California Press, c2003

ISBN

0-520-92763-X

9786612356575

1-282-35657-7

9780585456321

1-59734-862-7

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (406 p.)

Collana

Asia--local studies/global themes ; ; 8

Disciplina

951/.15604

Soggetti

HISTORY / Asia / General

Beijing (China) History

China History Republic, 1912-1949

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 345-363) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Foreword -- Preface -- Introduction -- PART I. The City of Planners -- PART II. The City of Experience -- PART III. The Lettered City -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Old Beijing has become a subject of growing fascination in contemporary China since the 1980's. 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.