Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China

1. Into “the Land of Courtly Enjoyments”: An Introduction to China’s Architectural Mimicry

1 1 INTO “THE LAND OF COURTLY ENJOYMENTS” An Introduction to China’s Architectural Mimicry Within an astonishingly compressed term of two decades, China has catapulted its architectural universe years into a future in which the laws of physics no longer seem to hold: skyscrapers fold in half, buildings hover over water, and steel twists like silly putty. Architects have been breaking world records constructing mega-metropolises with the “greenest,” biggest, fastest-built, tallest, and most daring structures on the planet. But while the centers of Chinese cities now flaunt cutting-edge style, engineering, and technology, the suburbs and satellite townships are giving way to an entirely different breed of architecture: not innovative but imitative and backward-looking. Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, has constructed a residential complex for nearly two hundred thousand that is the twin of Dorchester, England, from its Poole Promenade down to the cobblestone paving on the streets. In the Yangtze River Delta, a 108-meter replica of the Eiffel Tower graces Champs Elysées Square in what has been branded the “Oriental Paris,” a faithful reconstruction of Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s City of Light. Shanghai officials devised a plan for “One City, Nine Towns” that calls for ringing the metropolis with ten satellite communities, each housing up to three hundred thousand and each built as a full-scale replica of a foreign city. On the peripheries of its first-, second-, and third-tier cities, China appears to be inverting the paradigm of the “Middle Kingdom.” While it once considered itself to be the center of the world, now China is making itself into the center that actually contains the world. The suburbs of China’s megalopolises, larger cities, and even smaller towns in provinces throughout the country—such as Beijing-Tianjin-Tangshan, GuangzhouHangzhou -Shenzhen, Anhui, and Sichuan (among many others)—are a surprising quilt of European and American Grand Tour destination sites. Tracts recently occupied by collective farms now boast sparkling versions of Paris, Venice, Amsterdam, London, Madrid, and New York. In homes, civic buildings, and government offices cast in historical revival styles from Europe and the United States, upwardly mobile Chinese go through the familiar paces of life in unfamiliar settings. Their alien homes are part of a 2 INTO “THE LAND OF COURTLY ENJOYMENTS” mammoth trend of “duplitecture” that is striking both in the minuteness of its attention to detail and the ambitious scope of the replication. Western-style structures are found not in isolation, scattered throughout the existing urban fabric, but in dense and extensive themed communities that replicate identifiable Western prototypes. Entire townships and villages appear to have been airlifted from their historical and geographical foundations in England, France, Greece, the United States, and Canada and spot-welded to the margins of Chinese cities. The target of the replication program goes beyond architecture and construction techniques. In fact, the agenda is all-encompassing: to re-create not only the superficial appearance of Western historical cities, but also the “feel”—the atmospheric and experiential local color—of the originals through such devices as foreign names, signage, and lifestyle amenities. In such communities, millions of China’s new economic elite shop in markets selling Western foods, dine in Western restaurants, navigate streets bearing Western names, congregate in parks and squares with monuments to heroes of Western Overlooking the “Fountain of the Chariot of Apollo,” a copy of a fountain at the Palace of Versailles at the Tianducheng development in Hangzhou. Beyond it, a replica of the Eiffel Tower punctuates the center of one of several housing areas in the development. Photograph by author. 3 INTO “THE LAND OF COURTLY ENJOYMENTS” culture, and celebrate festivals and holidays lifted from alien traditions. Hundreds of “theme park” suburbs—meticulously reconstructed versions of the most iconic cities of the West—now constitute an archipelago of the alien “other” within the geographically and historically integrated, coherently “Chinese” urban habitat. The Chinese housing industry has rewritten the capitalist real estate mantra “location, location, location” into the motto “replication, replication, replication.” The comprehensiveness of these copies has elicited criticism and derision on the part of Western and Chinese intellectuals alike, whose instinct is frequently to reject these themed communities as “kitsch,” “fake,” “temporary,” or “unimaginative and cliché.”1 But as this book will probe through analyses of these simulacra-spaces and the people within them, these themed landscapes should not be so easily dismissed. Far more...