Places of Conflict: Rediscovering Chinese Cityscape through Emerging Cultural Spaces

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

As critical social theories suggest, conflict is an influential force for socio-cultural changes in the human world. Taking conflict in a broad sense of implicit and explicit disputes, confrontations, and contestations, this panel focuses on the relationship between the dynamics of conflict and the emergence of cultural spaces in the history of Chinese cities. Mapping out various places of conflict, such as temples, mausoleum, hospital, nature reserve, and vernacular architecture, emerging on different historical contingencies, we investigate: how would conflictive forces struggle and negotiate in spatial forms? Could spatial forms play an active part in generating the hope for reconciliation? Furthermore, would there be any spatial tactics particularly continual or evolving in Chinese cities that could contain or alleviate conflicts? With interdisciplinary method and cross-era comparison, this panel traces cases of emerging Chinese cityscape reverse-chronologically to Tang. Li Yanfei examines organically regenerated alleyways and courtyard houses for reconciliation between urban development and heritage conservation in post-Mao Beijing. Ren Yi delineates the clashes between religion and secularism, modern medication and colonial course in the establishment of Shanghai Hôpital Sainte Marie in the first half of the 20th century. Li Kan reveals the contending discourses of modernity in Haihe River conservation, Tianjin, in the late imperial and Republican times. Jin Hui-Han analyzes the conflicts and transformation of the imperial funeral rituals embodied by the location of Ming mausoleum in Nanjing. Zhou Nengjun studies the emergence of Taoist temples in the competition between the popularization of Taoism and Buddhism in Tang.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Yanfei Li, University of Toronto

Individual Presentations

• Urban Heritage in Contested Regeneration: Beijing Alleyways and Courtyard Houses, 1980-2008 - Yanfei Li, University of Toronto

• Shanghai Saint Marie Hospital (1907-1951): A Game between Secularism and Religion - Yi Ren, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

• Contesting the Modern: River Conservancy in Tianjin, 1897-1937 - Kan Li, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

• Mausoleum as Part of the City: Redefining the Space of Living and Dead in Nanjing (1368-1398) - Hui-Han Jin, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

• Taoist Temples: The Taoist Belief of Grass-roots Society in the Tang Dynasty - Nengjun Zhou, Zhejiang Institute of Mechanical & Electrical Engineering

Discussant

• Yue Meng, University of Toronto