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20 2 THE FASCINATION WITH FAUX Philosophical and Theoretical Drivers of Architectural Reproduction in China Towers and terraces emerge from the piled-up flowers, The entire universe hides in a single seed.1 The “authentic” and the “fake” are categories that face off against each other in philosophically and culturally complex ways. Their definitions and distinctions vacillate, depending on the vantage point from which they are considered: idealist or empirical, psychological or anthropological, esthetic or ethical. Some societies lay great stock by these distinctions; the same societies, at different periods of their development, may be blind to their differences or find them irrelevant in various ways. As critic Lionel Trilling suggests in his cultural history of “authenticity,” the concept acquires an ontological status or comes to be equated with “the real” and “the real” with “the original” rather late in the history of the West, emerging at the transition from medieval to modern culture.2 Meanwhile, China has long had its own classification system for copyworks, one that handles different types of replication, from “tracings” to “imitations,” in distinct ways depending on the meaning, manner of execution, and value of each form.3 Articulating the distinctions between the “authentic,” in the sense of the “original,” and the “fake,” or the “copy” or “simulacrum,” is central to determining the motivations that drive the conception and execution of China’s themed residential landscapes. With a preliminary understanding of the premiums and cachet that are potentially embodied in “counterfeited” environments, it is possible to fully appreciate the benefits and collateral power that champions of these contemporary Chinese “theme cities” might have anticipated from their venture into architectural duplication. Deciphering China’s contemporary architectural laboratory, with its focus on replicating the alien, requires that we first define the terms and lexicon that will be used to analyze this phenomenon. What should we appropriately call these structures and communities? What is their aesthetic status and value? Should they be stigmatized as fakes? Celebrated as careful copies? As Wen Fong, professor emeritus at Princeton 21 THE FASCINATION WITH FAUX University, notes in his essay “The Problem of Forgeries in Chinese Painting,” the Chinese distinguish among several different forms of “forgeries,” employing discrete terms to describe each one. The Chinese copywork system, Fong writes, differentiates among “mu, to trace; lin, to copy; fang, to imitate; tsao, to invent.”4 Tracing aims to “produce an exact replica of the original.”5 A copy is looser, and, as Fong notes, a Sung critic likens it to “a wild goose which flies along with its companion.”6 An imitation is more of an “adaptation.” An “invention,” likened to a pastiche, has the impression of “creative inspiration and wild abandon” but, upon further reflection, appears “confused and exaggerated,” “devoid of any true emotion,” and plagued by a “strange feeling of contradiction.”7 In the Chinese framework, forms of “forgeries” lie along a spectrum, with each “category of copy” produced, received, and valued in its own way. To be certain, China’s architects are not alone in duplicating forms: Chinese filmmakers, artists, and writers are also engaged in repurposing ideas and models, “adapting” earlier works to suit their purpose. Yet what sets apart China’s “imitation” communities is, to a large extent, a matter of degree: they are not “freehand copies” (lin) but more developed “forgeries.” Bearing these distinctions among mu, lin, fang, and tsao in mind, this study adopts the term “simulacrum” to designate the residential communities in China that model themselves on historical Occidental prototypes. The term, to be sure, comes with its own baggage of associations but will be found to be most amenable for the phenomena under consideration, not only because it defines the Chinese communities relationally in a way that always implies the prior existence of a phenomenon to which the Chinese residential unit relates, but also because it suggests a competition between two autonomous systems, each claiming superiority by virtue of its own standards of excellence. The term, which has its origins in the late Middle Ages, was initially used to describe religious icons believed to embody great functional potency. Since the late 1980s, Western postmodern theory has engaged the concept of simulated space as a novel phenomenon. Such topics as the “hyperreal” and “simulacrum” have been in vogue among Western postmodernists, who claim we have entered a “borderless age” in which meaning, identity, and reality hover on the verge of extinction.8 The arguments of these theorists have informed central concepts, such as the “simulacrum...

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