Yannan Ding & Maurizio Marinelli 
China: A Historical Geography of the Urban 

This book offers a unique contribution to the burgeoning field of Chinese historical geography. Urban transformation in China constitutes both a domestic revolution and a world-historical event. Through the exploration of nine urban sites of momentous change, over an extended period of time, this book connects the past with the present, and provides much-needed literature on city growth and how they became complex laboratories of prosperity.






The first part of this book puts Chinese urban changes into historical perspective, and probes the relationship between nation and city, focusing on Shanghai, Beijing and Changchun. Part two deals with the relationship between history and modernity, concentrating on Tunxi, a traditional trade center of tea, New Villages in Shanghai and street names in Taipei and Shanghai. Part three showcases the complexities of urban regeneration vis-à-vis heritage preservation in cities such as Datong, Tianjin and Qingdao. 





This book offers an innovative interdisciplinary and international perspective, which will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese urban studies, as well Chinese politics and society.

Table of Content

Chapter 1. Introduction; Yannan Ding.- PART I. Nation and City.- Chapter 2. Shanghai Parks in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century – Architectural and Cultural Exchanges between the East and the West; Hsiu-Ling Kuo. Chapter 3. A City of Workers, a City for Workers? Remaking Beijing Urban Space in the Early PRC; Fabio Lanza.- Chapter 4. Changchun across 1949: Rebuilding a Colonial Capital City under Socialism in the Early 1950s; Yishi Liu.- PART II. Mediating History and Modernity.- Chapter 5. Tunxi: Urban Sectoral Agglomeration in a Regional Center of Tea Trade; Yi Zou, Xi Lin.- Chapter 6. What’s in a Name: The ‘New Village’ in Shanghai, 1930-1980; Duan Zheng, Xiaohong Zhang.- Chapter 7. The View of Comparison about Politics of Street Names between Taipei and Shanghai; Wenchuan Huang.- PART III. Contemporary City Building.- Chapter 8. Disneyfication or Self-referentiality: Recent Conservation Efforts and Modern Planning History in Datong; Shulan Fu, Jean Hillier.- Chapter 9. The Politics of Aesthetics in Tianjin between Past and Present; Maurizio Marinelli.- Chapter 10. Living in the “Past”: The Effects of a Growing Preservation Discourse in Contemporary Urban China; Philipp Demgenski.

About the author

Yannan Ding is a Swire – Cathay Pacific visiting academic at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, UK. 





Maurizio Marinelli is Associate Professor in East Asian History and Co-Director of the Asia Centre at the University of Sussex, UK. 





Xiaohong Zhang is a professor and the head of the Institute of Chinese Historical Geography at Fudan University, China.