Negotiating Urban Space: Urbanization and Late Ming Nanjing by Si-yen Fei (review)

Negotiating Urban Space, consisting of an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion, examines the characteristics of late Ming urbanization through four case studies. The introduction, “A New Approach to Chinese Urbanism,” reviews earlier influential studies of cities and urbanization in imperial China and contextualizes the approach and arguments of the book. Fei suggests that urbanization in late imperial China was not simply the byproduct of rapid commercialization, but also a process shaped by institutional and cultural practices particular to each dynasty. She terms her approach “dynasty-centered” (p. 26) and refers to urbanization in late imperial China as “dynastic urbanism” (p. 252).

The first two chapters of the book probe Ming urbanism from an institutional perspective. Chapter 1, “We Must Be Taxed,” relates a city-wide effort by Nanjing residents in 1609 demanding that the government of Nanjing, the auxiliary southern capital of the post-1420 Ming dynasty, institute a property tax to replace the irregular and oftentimes unbearable burden of labor service. The petition received favorable responses from members of the administration, especially from its censor-in-chief Ding Bin (1543–1633), who eventually implemented a corvée reform much welcomed by the local residents. The reform, Fei argues, provided an urban space for public participation, consultation, and negotiation with the government. Similarly, chapter 2, “ To Wall or Not to Wall,” also explores negotiation and contestation in urban spaces as it reconstructs a victorious elite-led crusade against building defensive walls in 1590s Gaochun and an equally successful government-initiated, pro-wall campaign in 1570s Jiangpu. Both were counties under the jurisdiction of the Yingtian prefecture where Nanjing was located. Fei believes that the cases presented in this chapter refute without equivocation the conventional wisdom that the Ming dynasty was the epitome of Chinese despotism. She argues they confirm her position that urban space was a site of negotiation and cooperation between state and society in late Ming times.

The last two chapters examine urban space in late Ming Nanjing from a cultural perspective. Chapter 3, “Imagining Nanjing: A Genealogy,” examines two atlases and two tour-related books that projected different images of Ming Nanjing. Fei argues that these four Ming publications represented two distinct conceptions of the city in the Ming: one reflected the centralizing vision of the founding emperor and the other the vision of Nanjing native elites. Chapter 4, “Nanjing through Contemporary Mouths and Ears,” focuses on discussing the approximately 550-character fengsu (social customs) treatise in Gu Qiyuan’s (1565–1628) Kezuo zhuiyu (Superfluous chats from the guests’ seats). According to Fei, Gu divided Nanjing into eastern, central, southern, western, and northern districts, and this division was different from the official demarcation of the city into five administrative boroughs. Fei elaborates on Gu’s description of the five districts in terms of social relations (renwen) and financial power (wuli) between the native residents (zhu) and sojourning nonlocals (ke) and concludes that the native-sojourner relationship was a key feature of late Ming society. In the concluding chapter, “Toward a New Perspective on Late Imperial Urbanism,” Fei reflects on urbanism and urbanization in late Ming China and concludes that urbanization not only created more and larger cities in China, but also prompted the Chinese state and society to reconsider and reformulate the place of city in a centralized rural empire.

In her studies of the four cases, Fei occasionally accepts Ming sources uncritically and elaborates on them excessively. An example can be found in her use of an account in Gu’s Kezuo zhuiyu, which states that “when Chengzu (the Yongle emperor, r. 1402–1424) moved the primary capital to Beijing, he ordered 27,000 civilian and artisan households to be moved (from Nanjing to Beijing). As a result, the population of Nanjing dropped by more than half, and corvée labor services were subsequently affected adversely” (juan 2, fangxiang shimo). Fei takes this source at...