Abstract
The diversity of modern colonial expansions in the global context and the modernization of colonized states have been the focus of recent modern historical research. However, the historiography of modern China was mainly elaborated over a backdrop of imperialism and class struggles during the 1950s–1960s, and the main clues regarding the actual historicization of China’s modernization process only started to emerge during the Reform-and-Opening period. Simultaneously, although the research of modern architectural history has shifted with the times, the theoretical study of Chinese modern architectural history has been more or less neglected amidst the large amount of empirical studies focusing on architectural and urban development, constraining the potential directions that further research could adopt. Based on the experience of editing the five-volume work The History of Modern Chinese Architecture, this paper proposes a three-dimensional framework for modern architectural history that accommodates for internal and external factors (x-axis), traditional inheritances (y-axis), and multidisciplinary influences (z-axis), the roles of which need to be considered in tandem.
First, the paper interprets the x-axis as representing the ‘active receiving’ 主动受容 of ideas in a nationalistic context, and ‘passive receiving’ 被动受容 in a colonial context, thereby exploring the motivational mechanisms of modernization and the power relationships between nationalism and colonialism. Second, this framework explains traditional inheritances and innovation/creation on the y-axis which emphasizes the active research done on traditional architecture and the evolutionary process of the modernization of tradition. Finally, the paper claims that multidisciplinary interaction should constitute the present research focus, as opposed to the modern subdivision and splintering of disciplines. On the whole, the paper opposes the binary and linear history of modern Chinese architecture and emphasizes a three-dimensional, dynamic, and tense framework for understanding modern architectural history.
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Notes
- 1.
The “three high tides of revolution” are the Taiping Rebellion, the Hundred Days’ Reform and Boxer Rebellion, and the Xinhai Revolution.
- 2.
In 2001, the author listened to Mizoguchi’s comments on the framework of modern Chinese history at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, which promoted the author’s own reflection on the history of Chinese modern architecture.
- 3.
For more information, cf. the five volumes of History of Chinese Modern Architecture.
- 4.
The Tientsin Provisional Government had established a new managing system in Tianjin, which was later carried out by Yuan Shikai (Yoshizawa, 2002). In the same period, Yuan Shikai employed a Japanese consultant and engineer from the Japanese concession in Tianjin to work for a Chinese factory and school of technology (Xu and Aoki, 2007).
- 5.
Xu (1999).
- 6.
Perdue (2005).
- 7.
Professor Han Dong-soo of Hanyang University in Korea has studied the “Incheon Chinatown” in his work The Chinese Characteristics of Overseas Chinatown Architecture—Architectural Comparison of Incheon Concession in Qing Dynasty and San Francisco Chinatown (1880–1940).
- 8.
Xu (2015).
- 9.
In this paper, non-italicized words within block quotes are italicized in the original texts.
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Acknowledgments
This project was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51878438), the National Social Science Foundation for Major Projects (12&ZD230), and the Natural Science Foundation of Tianjin (18JCYBJC22400).
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Xu, S. (2021). Reflections on the Three-Dimensional Framework of Modern Chinese Architectural History. In: Xu, S., Aoki, N., Vieira Amaro, B. (eds) East Asian Architecture in Globalization. EAAC 2017. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75937-7_20
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