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As I cycled to work on 20 May this year, the Yan’an Expressway – Shanghai’s crosstown artery, named after the utopian socialist city that was Mao Zedong’s 1940s stronghold – was eerily silent, cordoned off for a visit by Russian president Vladimir Putin.
I discovered the next day that the upshot of his visit was the signing of a $400bn (£240bn) contract with China for the export of gas and petroleum. As US president Barack Obama had once promised he would, Putin made a pivot to Asia, albeit on a slightly different axis. From Shanghai, the terms of the deal – which was immensely advantageous to China – made it seem as if Russia was voluntarily becoming a vassal-state of the People’s Republic, making a reality of both the predictions of Vladimir Sorokin’s dystopian fantasy novel Day of the Oprichnik and of Russian scare stories about Chinese immigrants flooding into Siberia.
The irony is that models of society imported from Russia during the Soviet period – as realised in popular culture, legal apparatuses and, of particular interest to the cyclist, in architecture and urban planning – are as influential as ever in China.
If, as Chinese philosopher Wang Hui observed in his book The End of Revolution, socialism was the door through which China passed on its voyage into modernity, then it was Russia that opened that door, by exporting models and expertise that laid the foundation for much of what constitutes modern China.
Perhaps the most tangible of these legacies is the look and feel of the contemporary Chinese city; and since China is a centrally planned economy, this look and feel is remarkably unified. The prime shaping factor for the modern Chinese city was Soviet urbanism – or more precisely, Stalinist urbanism. In 1949, when the Communist party came to power, Beijing was a city of half a million people: 95% or more of both the population and built structures in today’s 20 million-person agglomeration emerged from the revolution, and from the Soviet advice that the new government relied on.
In his book Beijing Record, Wang Jun makes clear the scale of this influence: “On 16 September [1949], a group of Soviet experts in municipal administration arrived in Beijing. They were supposed to help the new government in its work to plan the city’s development. In reality, however, they were to have absolute say in everything.”
These Soviet town planners and architects delivered a report, Proposals on Improving Beijing’s Municipal Administration, which was to largely shape the development of the city to come. They had come to China not only for geopolitical reasons, but, like the Japanese urban theorists who had come in the 1920s and 1930s, and like the western ‘starchitects’ who come today because of China’s ability to undertake vast projects, to offer planners speed and huge power.
The Soviet model city could be realised on Chinese soil, when it could not be in Russia, because there were fewer impediments; Mao was willing to tear down all old buildings, making the Chinese city a tabula rasa. Moreover, Mao combined in one person the radical revolutionary desires of a Lenin with the total power of a Stalin; he both desired to, and was capable of, completely remaking urban society. A “truer, purer” version of the Soviet urban ideology could be materialised in the Chinese urban desert – literally empty fields and illiterate peasants who were being “modernised” – in the historically complex, ideologically overdetermined spaces of Moscow or St Petersburg.
As the Beijing model was replicated all through the country, in rural and agricultural areas that had never known large cities, this vision became ubiquitous: Soviet architectural typologies and the models of Soviet urban planners constituted the first vision of cities ever glimpsed by Chinese peasants in a rapidly modernising society. To this day, migrant workers from the countryside are hustled into the sort of large suburban tower blocks that dominate the edges of Russian cities. The ring roads, the tower blocks, the black taxis, the dingy restaurants, the sidewalks lined with empty liquor bottles: the urban templates of contemporary China are identical to those of the Soviet Union, just multiplied. The similarities do not end there: a frequent traveller from Blagoveshchensk to Heihe, or indeed from Beijing to Moscow, can’t help but note the same asymmetrical haircuts of the billionaires, the same suburban replications of Versailles and the same endless buzzing in the city centre.
This Soviet model of urbanism – a centrally planned component within a national economic unity – is thriving. The clearest indication of its survival in today’s China is the concept of “tiered” cities, with Shanghai and Beijing being “first tier”, Hangzhou, Chengdu or Tianjin being “second tier” and so forth.
This is a long way from what Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas has termed “delirious” urbanism: the Chinese city is meticulously planned as part of a holistic national grid of transportation networks, communication networks, and commodity distribution networks – the vast bulk of which is either state-owned or state-controlled.
We should not forget that some of the world’s fastest growing cities in China – like Zhengzhou, Hefei, Shijiazhuang and Changsha – are in some way the mutated children of the Stalinist belle époque. The ultimate objective of Stalinism – to rapidly expand the economy in order to destroy western hegemony – is being realised as we speak, by people who have been members of a Communist party all of their lives.
The creation of generic architectural typologies which can be infinitely duplicated, the model of an economic system which puts everyone and everything into a collective aspiration to increased production – this “Chinese” model of urbanism, which has deep roots in the Soviet theorists’ work, is today growing everywhere that Chinese state-owned companies operate, and often in former Soviet states themselves. The Stalinist-Maoist model, which instrumentalises the relationship between people and their environment in order to generate industrial wealth, even at tremendous cost to those people and environments, is alive today and expanding fast.
A version of this article first appeared at the Calvert Journal
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