From Liberating Production to Unleashing Consumption: Mapping Landscapes of Power in Beijing

Political Geography xxx (2010) 1e9

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Political Geography

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From liberating production to unleashing consumption: Mapping landscapes of power in Beijing

Patricia M. Thornton*

Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Merton College, Merton Street, Oxford OX1 4JD, United Kingdom

abstract

Keywords: This article offers an analysis of two locales in downtown Beijing nominally set aside for public use, Landscape of power Tiananmen Square and The Place, as successively linked landscapes of power that deﬁne the shifting and Public square relations between market and place negotiated by the Chinese Communist Party-state over time. Shopping mall However, whereas Zukin (1993) argues that such landscapes lack coherent values because of their Beijing ’ “ ” ’ Consumerism subordination to capitalism s haphazard process of creative destruction, a salient feature of Beijing s Public space shifting landscapes of power is the authoritarian Party-state’s persistent mediation of market relations, and its subordination of the contradictions between market and place to the changing needs of the regime under market reform. Despite their apparent differences in intent and design, the shopping mall has eclipsed the public square as a key urban site through which the Party-state seeks to build a self- conscious and cohesive socioeconomic class of subjects over which and for which it seeks to rule. Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

In the summer of 2006, two years before the opening ceremony service operations in the capital including The Place, spending an of the Olympics, Beijing city planners christened a brand new retail average of 700 yuan per person (Guoji Shangbao,2008). development just a few blocks from Tiananmen Square. Bordered As the evident success of The Place demonstrates, the regime’s by two high-rise office buildings and two luxury shopping and increasingly enthusiastic embrace of market reform has substan- entertainment malls, The Placedas it is known in Englishdwas tially reshaped the political geography of the capital, including that designed to provide customers with a one-stop shopping experi- of its symbolic center, Tiananmen Square. In consolidating its claim ence that includes expensive boutiques, posh eateries, several to rising power status, the post-Mao generation of Chinese movie theaters, and an upscale health club. The sweeping canti- Communist Party (hereafter, CCP) and state leaders has committed levered plaza at the center of the installation serves both as a stage itself to the distinctly entrepreneurial rebuilding of the nation’s for public performances, and an open public square. The largest cities to attract private investment and stimulate consumption- outdoor LED screen in the world looms six stories above it, beaming based development. According to David Harvey (2001), this new fantastic images to designed to delight shoppers, including four entrepreneurialism centers on expanding the role of pub- repeating video loops produced by state-owned Central China liceprivate partnerships in support of speculative projects, and Television (CCTV) of dancing dragons, fireworks, and Chairman a concomitant shift away from collective consumption in favor of Mao Zedong atop Tiananmen six decades before, triumphantly a new political economy of place (Hall, 1998; Zukin, 1995). Culti- declaring the founding of the People’s Republic of China (Railton, vating new urban landscapes as cultural resources and engines of 2007: 53). Thanks in no small part to the SkyScreen’s appeal, the symbolic capital, China’s city planners and real estate developers popularity of the new attraction can hardly be in doubt: several are quickly refashioning urban landscapes for visual consumption, publication outlets both in- and outside the country ranked the investing in spectacular and iconic building projects to attract massive Coca-Cola-themed display beneath the SkyScreen together domestic and international tourists (Broudehoux, 2004; Mattern, with the opening ceremonies at Tiananmen Square as “top Olympic 2008; Smith, 2008) and cultural infrastructural development moments” of 2008 (Li, 2008; Madden, 2008: 22; Marketing Event, projects aimed at securing global city status for its teeming met- 2008). Indeed, the Beijing Bureau of Commerce estimates that ropolises (Broudehoux, 2007; Kong, 2007; Wu, 2000). during the Olympics, 200,000 foreign guests visited new retail and At the same time, the (re)construction of landscapes is an ideological project that acquires particular salience in nation- building as elites seek to unify broader support for specific agendas * Tel.: þ44 (0) 1865 276 324. (Helmer, 1985; Holston, 1989; Johnson, 2008; Kong & Yeoh, 1997, E-mail address: [email protected] 2003; Mace, 1976; Musgrove, 2002). Like the Mao-era corps of

Please cite this article in press as: Thornton, P. M., From liberating production to unleashing consumption: Mapping landscapes of power in Beijing, Political Geography (2010), doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2010.06.001 2 P.M. Thornton / Political Geography xxx (2010) 1e9 cadres that reshaped the Chinese capital after the 1949 revolution, Square that ultimately resulted in the brutal 1989 crackdown. Wu the current generation of global and urban imagineers working (2005: 241e243) argues that since that time, a new generation of from within and alongside the Party-state (Hsing, 2006a) aspires to Chinese leaders have attempted to depoliticize the Square by use such projects to galvanize popular support for the regime’s restricting public access to the site, softening its edges with wider agenda (Hubbard, 1996: 1445; Paul, 2004). Such efforts are flowerbeds and larger expanses of green; and by constructing an particularly evident in Beijing’s new Central Business District (CBD), adjacent corridor of intentionally apolitical cultural installations, where, as Zhang and Jiang (2009: 80e81) remind us that due to its like the new egg-shaped National Centre for the Performing Arts, in proximity to central Party and state offices, the still “frequently hopes of drawing attention to the regime’s growing “soft power” visible hand of government planning” has taken the place of the and “peaceful rise” (see also Kahn, 2007; Marvin, 2008). more unruly and unpredictable “invisible hand” played by market The new landscapes of power that have sprouted up in Chinese forces elsewhere in the world, effectively guaranteeing that “the cities since the deepening of market reform in the 1990s represent overall shape of property development trends and the concentra- the latest iteration in the regime’s attempt to mediate the conflicts tion of human resources mutually interact, and together reinforce between place and market, and manifest in architectonic form the the state of development.” Despite waves of market reform, the regime’s drift from state socialism to market socialism to what is new urban entrepreneurialism in the Chinese capital is, as Wu arguably an emergent form of state capitalism (Lee, He, & Huang, (2003: 1694) underscores, fundamentally still a “state project in 2006; Yang, 1996; Zhao, 2000). The orchestration of this process the post-socialist transition.” by central and local agents of the Party-state has been documented This article offers an analysis of two locales in downtown Beijing in recent works by Broudehoux (2004, 2007), Wu (2003), and Li nominally set aside for public use, Tiananmen Square and The and Ong (2009). I seek to build upon this literature in two ways. Place, as successively linked “landscapes of power” that represent First, in comparing Tiananmen Square and The Place as metonymic the “fragile compromise between market and place” (Zukin, 1993) representations of socialist state-directed public space and state negotiated by Party and state elites over time. Yet whereas Zukin capitalist-directed consumption space respectively, I aim to ties the rise and fall of such landscapes to the contradictions of demonstrate that that the contemporary regime’s engineering of capitalism and the impersonal working of the forces of “creative urban environments to shape socio-political outcomes is a project destruction,” one striking feature of the rise and fall of Beijing’s with clear historic roots in the Maoist era, when urban and rural post-revolutionary “landscapes of power” is the authoritarian places were systematically claimed by the Party-state and rede- Party-state’s mediation of this process since 1949, and its persistent signed to serve revolutionary ends. The Party’s transformation from attempts to subordinate the contradictions between market and a revolutionary to a ruling party may have altered its agenda, but place to the needs of the center. In Zukin’s (1993: 269) reading of has not yet diminished its reliance on the use of space as a tool for how “circuits of capital are formed in real spaces,”“liminality”da attaining its goals. Second, as I will show, such efforts both past and state in which the stable hierarchical order of society breaks present are linked to the Party’s broader project of class formation downdtriggers “the process by which a landscape of power as a means to effect social change and economic development, most gradually displaces the vernacular.” Indeed, as Lee (2009: 33) recently under the auspices of Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents” rightly notes, during the final years of the ailing late imperial and Hu Jintao’s “Harmonious Society,” successive programs that state, Tiananmen Square was seen as an “empty space” between the seek to recalibrate the Party’s relationship with the new middle vernacular landscape of the common people and the outer reaches class alongside the deepening of market reform. Socio-spatial of the Forbidden City that was taken over and transformed “into engineering has long comprised a seldom recognized and little- a public space of political action . struggled over and earned by understood part of the CCP’s program of historical revolutionary the concerted efforts of people.” praxis, and while it has by no means been uniformly successful or Dramatically enlarged, reconstructed, and monumentalized in universally well-received, it remains a significant force in the the first decade of Communist rule as the symbolic and sacred shaping of the political geography of post-revolutionary China. political center of the new Party-state, Tiananmen Square served as the locus of triumphant social mobilization and collective cele- Constructing the square bration during Mao’s reign, a spatial representation of the dialec- tical relationship between Party and revolutionary masses it sought As Wu (2005: 87) and others have documented, imperial Beijing to create and inspire in architectonic form. Emblazoned with Mao’s was a city largely constructed during the Ming Dynasty on the ruins likeness and two enormous revolutionary slogans wishing “ten of the Yuan capital founded by Khubilai Khan in 1267 and designed thousand years” to the Chinese Communist Party and to the great as a concentric set of three walled cities, each enclosing the other: unity of the peoples of the world, the Square manifested the Party- the Outer City surrounded the Imperial City, which itself contained state’s power to organize the forces of production, and mediate the the Forbidden City. The outer city wall contained a bustling effects of global capitalism for the greater good of the laboring vernacular landscape that housed a restricted area reserved for the masses. When pressed into active service on National Day and use of the imperial family, and an inner sacred center for the International Workers Day, the two chief political holidays in the emperor himself (see also Li, Dray-Novey, & Kong, 2007; Zhu, People’s Republic, it served as a key site upon which the Mao-era 2004). Tiananmen, literally the Gate of Heavenly Peace, served as Party not only mobilized, but also constituted, the revolutionary the front gate to the Imperial City, and marked the axial passageway public on whose behalf it claimed to rule. through which the emperor exited to make his annual ceremonial Yet as the Maoist agenda and the practices that supported it observances, and from which edicts were issued in late imperial came under increasing pressure, particularly during the critical times (Meyer, 1991: 47). The site of a “dignified and peaceful Cultural Revolution, the Square likewise became a lightening rod protest” by patriotic students and scholars on May 4, 1919 that for contention by the very laboring masses it was designed to ended in tragedy, the open area before the gate was thereafter represent. During the liminal early stages of market reform, the marked as a political public space sanctified by their act of self- repeated and tragic attempts at the “appropriation and trans- sacrifice, and, therefore, the site of a “defining moment in the formation [of the Square] by groups who refused to accept their development of modern China” (Mitter, 2004: 131). ‘displacement’” (Herskovitz, 1993: 417) at the hands of the post- When Communist troops took Beijing in February 1949, the new Mao Party-state culminated in the series of demonstrations in the regime claimed Tiananmen Square as the site of its own symbolic

Please cite this article in press as: Thornton, P. M., From liberating production to unleashing consumption: Mapping landscapes of power in Beijing, Political Geography (2010), doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2010.06.001 P.M. Thornton / Political Geography xxx (2010) 1e9 3 origination, and consecrated it as not only public, but also civic, But during the May Day and National Day celebrations, the masses space on the brink of a new era. Accordingly, shortly after the 1949 and the Party elite alike abandoned these smaller collective work and inaugural ceremony of the founding of the People’s Republic, Mao residence units for the vast open reaches of Tiananmen Square, ordered that a new square be built before the gate “big enough to where they faced one other directly: the leaders assembled on the hold an assembly of one million” people (Wu, 2005: 8), replacing rostrum atop the gate to receive the revolutionary masses; and the the old imperial architecture with a vast, dynamic, and open public revolutionary masses performed orchestrated spectacles and display plaza modeled on Moscow’s Red Square (Yu, 2008: 576, 578). the products of their labor, as evidence of the revolutionary enthu- The Square’s expansion, which began in November of 1958 and siasm that inspired them, and their collective triumph over the forces was completed ten months later, was portrayed in the state-run press of global capitalism. As Wu (2005: 99, 23) argues, Tiananmen Square as a spontaneous mass movement (qunzhong yundong) of engineers itself served as a social-revolutionary catalyst in architectonic form: and construction workers directed by the vanguard Party leadership. the masses that gathered there to participate in the vast state spec- However, in fact, the Party’s decision to expand the Square and tacles were revolutionary because they responded to the Party in construct the Ten Great Buildings was remanded to Beijing municipal power and performed at its direction, “no longer scattered individ- authorities on September 5, 1958, who, within three days, convened uals but.part of an immense body of ‘friends and comrades’;” the a “mass mobilization meeting” of over a thousand architects and Party rightfully claimed the rostrum because it was capable of engineers to inform them of their decision. Experts from around the mobilizing and harnessing the power of the masses, particularly for country were flown to the capital and informed that they had five the attainment of collective and revolutionary ends. Class enemies, days to draw up a set of blueprints (Wu, 2005:112e114) to, in the counter-revolutionaries, and other “non-people” were excluded from words of the People’sDaily, “expand the vast carnival realm created by such assemblies, except when they were forced to participate as the people” (wei guangda renmin liaokuo de kuanghuan tiandi)intime “struggle objects.” The celebrations held in the Square, therefore, did for the tenth anniversary celebration of the founding of the People’s not merely mobilize the massesdit convened a particular type of Republic (Renmin Ribao, 1959). public, largely of the Party’s own making, and a revolutionary mass Official discourse notwithstanding, the observances held in the for which and on whose behalf it claimed to rule. Square after 1949 bore little resemblance to carnivalesque revelry: as Hong, Luo, and Ma (2009: 61e62) have documented, Mao-era Contesting the square state spectacles were meticulously organized and well-orchestrated events that not only relied upon, but also demonstrated, the As Zukin (1993: 16) points out, while “powerful institutions ability of the regime to mobilize the revolutionary masses. As early have a preeminent capacity to impose their view on the land- as 1951, the Beijing municipal government established two scapedweakening, reshaping, and displacing the view from the committees to coordinate the cycle of national holidays and cele- vernacular,” a landscape of power is also a “contentious, compro- brations to be staged in Tiananmen Square. Parading rituals were mised product of society.” Over time, the extraordinary political rehearsed three months or more in advance. Whereas National Day power invested in the Square invited contestation from the very parades in October featured military components, including revolutionary masses for which it was ostensibly designed, various People’s Liberation Army detachments and a display of a process that arguably began in the Cultural Revolution. In August military weaponry, May Day celebrations involved a civilian 1966, Mao added a new twist to the official events held in Tia- demonstration, “the people’s parade” of hundreds of thousands of nanmen by welcoming no fewer than eight assemblies of young Young Pioneers, workers, peasants, civil servants, urban residents, Red Guards from across the country into the nation’s sacred polit- representatives from industrial and commercial enterprises. These ical center. At the first of these rallies, held shortly after sunrise on civilian contingents were frequently preceded by an honor guard August 19, 1966, Chairman Mao broke with both tradition and bearing enormous portraits of revolutionary leaders, and were official protocol by descending the rostrum to mingle with the accompanied by grand floats featuring replicas of industrial crowds, signaling that the formal barriers between the leaders and machinery, agricultural equipment or symbols of a bountiful the led should begin to dissolve. As a result, soon thereafter, the harvest. The May Day parade generally concluded with the release balance of sovereignty over Tiananmen Square began to tilt of festive balloons or white doves, whereupon the assembled precariously in favor of the masses. At the conclusion of the crowd of workers and Young Pioneers rushed Tiananmen Gate to National Day celebrations in 1966, when Mao insisted upon hail the leaders assembled on the rostrum in an expression of mass mingling with the crowds in a motorcade, the masses surged affection and enthusiasm. forward, trapping the motorcade. Ten people were trampled to However, such fleeting moments of orchestrated unity were the death and nearly a hundred were injured. That same year, rebel- exception to the rule. Spatially, on a day-to-day basis, the urban lious Red Guards demanded that the name of Tiananmen Square be population was sequestered in thousands of walled “work unit” changed to reflect their distinctly proletarian and revolutionary (danwei) compounds that generally contained factories, canteens, aspirations instead of the imperial past, a move that Chairman Mao and a bathhouse; larger “work units” might encompass the fuller ultimately opposed (MacFarquhar & Schoenhals, 2006:108e109). range of “relevant welfare facilities” for their workers, including As political order in the capital steadily degenerated over the a staff club and schools for educating the children of affiliated staff. next three years, Premier Zhou Enlai issued an “Emergency Noti- As Bray (2005: 92e93) has demonstrated, these urban collectives fication” in January of 1967, closing Beijing’s stores and banks, aimed to not only increase labor productivity, but were also rationing daily necessities, and forbidding the sale of nonessential designed “as the foundation for revolutionary social and cultural consumer goods; the State Council quickly followed with a ban of transformation . [and] as playing a major role in the forging of Spring Festival celebrations in an attempt to spare the already new proletariat subjects,” serving as “social condensers” engi- fragile urban networks of the city. By October 1972, security had neered to instill collective practices that reinforced the revolu- become so lax that one morning an unknown number of Beijing tionary agenda, and inspired loyalty to the agenda of the Party-state residents spontaneously dug up and carted away more than twenty (see also Ho, 2004, 2008). The aim of these spaces was to create not thousand chrysanthemums that had been planted in the center of only new individual socialist revolutionary subjects, but also new the Square beneath the gaze of a nearby People’s Police substation, self-aware socioeconomic classes that responded readily to the despite the efforts of twenty officers to halt the destruction direction of the vanguard Party. (Mu, 2008:66e68).

When Premier Zhou Enlai passed away three years later in introduction to the space of a seasonal round of “soft mon- January of 1976, liminality shifted into overt challenge. Despite an uments”d“temporary installations constructed to celebrate the official order banning public displays of mourning, between one founding of the country and other important occasions.often and two million Beijing residents silently lined the main thor- designed as a group to transform the Square into a theme park.” oughfare used to transport the remains of Zhou Enlai in a defiant Others likewise rued the Square’s commercialization during the gesture of grief and respect for the fallen premier. Others gathered 1990s through “the relentless incursion of snack bars, newsstands, in the Square, laying white paper wreaths at the base of the book kiosks, commercial photo and historical costume booths and Monument to the Peoples’ Heroes beneath Zhou’s inscription on its other such businesses advancing onto this treasured site” south face, which were promptly removed by police. Several weeks (Liu, 1999: 34) as the model of centralized state power it represents later, on the eve of the annual observance for the sweeping and appeared to erode beneath the pounding rush of market forces. As repair of family tombs, a new mountain of white paper wreaths Dutton (2005: 165) wryly notes of the success of post-Mao depo- appeared at the monument to honor Zhou, which were also liticization: “One can challenge a claim to truth, but how does one promptly removed and destroyed. On April 5, defiant residents challenge a theme park?” placed an immense portrait of the late premier on the monument’s Needless to say, market reform has radically transformed urban north face directly opposite Mao’s own, deliberately obscuring the public space in China (Gaubatz, 2008), with Mao-era public squares inscription written there in Mao’s hand. That evening, authorities being rapidly replaced in an epidemic of “mall-building fever” (jian forcibly cleared the square of mourners and the thousands of shangchang re)(Kong, 2000). As Dai Jinhua (2002: 213e216, 220) impromptu memorials left behind, and subsequently charged that noted, beginning in 1995 and 1996, the names reserved for the incident had been cooked up by followers of accused counter- China’s new privately-owned and operated commercial installa- revolutionary Deng Xiaoping (Renmin Ribao, 1976a, 1976b). Unde- tionsd“mansion” (dasha), or “center” (zhongxin)dbegan to be terred by the brutal suppression, the mass gathering was reenacted superceded by “square” (guangchang), a term not traditionally used a year later, with some of the mourners swearing oaths of loyalty to to describe buildings, but instead “closely linked to the remem- Zhou Enlai only yards from the construction site of Mao’sown brance of modernity and revolution.” In Dai’s view, the appropri- mausoleum. During the tomb-sweeping observances in 1978, ation of Mao-era language to describe these new landscapes of demonstrators again gathered before the newly completed power constitutes “a political transgression, signifying to the nation Memorial Hall housing Mao’s remains to demand a similar the gradual metamorphosis from socialism to a capitalist market monument to commemorate Zhou Enlai (Cheater, 1991:72e77). economy,” and an attempt “at the very least to mask the signifi- By November 1981, the frequency of small disturbances in the cance of political mass movements with a happy shopper’s Square prompted officials to post a new notice forbidding heaven.” No longer a public site set aside for direct engagement demonstrations, rallies, public speeches, leafleting and the display between the leaders and the led over issues concerning the any propaganda materials in Tiananmen Square (The Globe & Mail, production, reproduction, and redistribution of capital, these new 1981). Nonetheless, in 1985, a crowd of two thousand students plazas represent depoliticized spaces devoted to a celebration of marched around the perimeter to protest Japan’s “second invasion” the newly stratified relations of consumption. As one local public of the Chinese mainland (Burns, 1985: A4; Gittings, 1985). The planning expert recently observed of this change, “At the time of following year in December, wall posters calling for reform the PRC’s founding, owing to economic backwardness, the majority appeared on Beijing campuses, triggering street demonstrations of [public] squares were used for mass assemblies, celebrations and and rallies in the Square. Although the rallies ended without inci- similar activities.” However, following the adoption of market dent, Beijing municipal authorities formally banned all unautho- reforms, and “the Party and the state’s emphasis on constructing rized public gatherings, particularly those taking place in the a spiritual civilization,” now “the content of ‘square culture’ Square (Burns, 1987: 56). (guangchang wenhua) is rich and varied,” characterized by frequent This ban was ignored by the students who began gathering in karaoke gatherings, folk dancing, and displays organized by local Tiananmen Square to mourn of the April 5,1989 death of Hu Yaobang, philatelists, so as to appeal to “the broad strata of urbanites, and a reform-minded leader purged for failing to suppress the protests of their various cultural lifestyle needs” (Zhang, 2008:16e17). two years before. This time, the student movement earned broad- It would be a mistake to assume, however, that this trans- based popular support and international sympathy, and even erected formation was the byproduct of an impersonal processes of its own monumentdthe Goddess of Democracyddirectly facing Mao’s portrait on the Square before army troops trucked in from the remote northwest finally succeeded in clearing the area in the early morning hours of June 4th, with heavy loss of life.

Diffusing the square

In the wake of the tragic events of 1989, Wu (2005), Marvin (2008) and others have argued that the regime made concerted attempts to defuse what Perry (2001: 176) refers to as “the magic, mimetic connection” Tiananmen Square holds for would-be chal- lengers to CCP rule. In the months after the crackdown, the Dengist regime commissioned a new statue depicting a worker, farmer, soldier and intellectual, each carrying the tools of their respective trades, to represent the unity of the Chinese people on the spot where the Goddess of Democracy brieﬂy stood. Additionally, in the replacement of some of the vast paved areas of the Square with lawns to “soften” its hard edges, Wu (2005: 241e243) reads a broader attempt to displace the Mao-era politics of collective Fig.1. Author’s image of Mao declaring the founding of the People’s Republic of China, engagement with a post-Mao politics of distraction, pointing to the broadcast on the SkyScreen at The Place.

Please cite this article in press as: Thornton, P. M., From liberating production to unleashing consumption: Mapping landscapes of power in Beijing, Political Geography (2010), doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2010.06.001 P.M. Thornton / Political Geography xxx (2010) 1e9 5 gentrification and “creative destruction:” the term “square culture” ministry, to design the layout of the complex. One of the installa- was coined in 1994 by a Deputy Vice Minister of Culture and chair tion’stwooffice towers houses the Trends Group (Shishang jituan), of the Chinese Mass Culture Study Association, who called upon a high profile joint venture involving China’s Ministry of Tourism, state cultural offices at all levels to seize the opportunity presented Hearst Communications, and the International Data Group (Fowler by market reform to vigorously promote “square arts” (guangchang & Qin, 2006). A powerful, profit-generating multinational yishu) of all types (Gao, 1994:374e378). “Square culture,” defined conglomerate fusing state power with commercial media enter- as “the construction and use of a city’s open public space for the prises to promote domestic travel, leisure, and consumption, the carrying out of political, economic, and cultural exchange activities Trends Group originally grew out of the Ministry’s modest reform- so as to thereby create an enriched and characteristic cultural era publication, China Tourism News (Zhongguo luyou bao). By ambiance,” quickly emerged as a buzzword in Chinese urban August 1993, the newsletter division of the Ministry decided to planning discourse, arguably as a method for “building a city’s expand this effort into a bi-monthly fashion magazine for China’s distinctive brand,” while at the same time “stimulating domestic nascent consumer market (Chen, 2009: A12); within five years, the demand and cultivating mass desires for cultural products” division partnered with Hearst Communications and the Interna- (Liu, 2004: 131, 133). Quickly shedding the class-based and tional Data Group to produce the Chinese versions of Cosmopolitan, production-focused managerialism of the Mao era for the less Good Housekeeping, and National Geographic, among other well- divisive language of cultural developmentalism, municipal known publications. Notwithstanding its cooperation with well- authorities in the 1990s threw themselves into a flurry of activity known international partners, the Trends Group continues to signal Wang (2001) describes as “culture fever” (wenhua re). In Beijing, for in its domestic operations an orientation congenial to Ministry example, the Municipal Party Committee Propaganda Department concerns, for example, reporting favorably on trends to develop “red and Bureau of Culture united with numerous other state, Party, and tourism” (hongse luyou) to historic sites associated with China’s mass organizations to declare 2001 “Beijing Square Culture Year,” revolutionary past in 2005, designated by the Ministry as the “year scheduling six thousand open-air film showings, and 28,000 art of red tourism” (Vanity Fair,2005); publishing a photo layout and exhibitions and performances in both public parks and privately- description of rare gold Rolex watches once owned by Chairman owned public spaces, and enlisting the participation of local hotels, Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai (Trends.com.cn, 2008); and promi- catering companies, and local merchants in a collective effort to nently featuring extensive interviews with celebrities who discuss “advance the progressive forces of culture in line with effective their membership in and evolving relationship with the Communist methods for practicing the key idea of Jiang Zemin’s ‘Three Party (Esquire,2007). The CEO of Trends Magazine, a graduate of Represents’” throughout the capital (Lu, 2001: 1, 4). Harvard Business School, once boasted that it is known “within What is perhaps most striking about the magnitude of such China as the Whampoa Military Academy of domestic fashion state-led activity is the degree of coordination that continues to publishing professionals,” after the famed training ground that once obtain, despite the proliferation of decision-makers engaged in served as the cradle of the Chinese revolution (Xiong, 2003: 50). urban development projects over the course of the reform era. With the Trends Group secured as an anchoring tenant, devel- Countering dominant interpretations of this process as a simply opers designed the retail and entertainment functions of The Place “state-led urbanization,” Hsing (2009, 2006b: 576e577) sees around it as a “social condenser” of a distinctly post-revolutionary China’s new urban entrepreneurialism as the result of an “intrastate type. At the news conference announcing the opening of the struggle” waged between “two sets of statist players:” municipal installation, the general manager of Aozhong Xingye Real Estate government actors, who seek to expand their control over the land gratefully acknowledged the close support and direction he within their jurisdiction, and the old “socialist land masters”d received from municipal and local district government officials, as “central-level government, party and military units, and state- well as the Beijing Municipal CBD management board, in shaping owned enterprises”dwho retain “exclusive use and management The Place as an enclave for the “corporate elite and high-paid white rights over the land that they occupy.” In addition to these state collar professionals” who live and work nearby, including the actors, Wang (2001: 91e92) points to the increasingly important employees of the Trends Group, and state-owned Central China role played by private capital, which frequently succeeds by fusing Television, headquartered only a few blocks away. The geographic its profit-making potential with the political and ideological clustering of this new rising class of urban professionals alongside agendas of Party-state branches at various levels, and relying upon a high concentration of foreign businessmen and consular officials, the capacities of its powerful partners to expand market reach. In he noted, “greatly expanded the latent capacity of the area as her research on new cultural venues in Beijing, Wang concludes a high-end consumer market” (Yang, 2006). Spurring such syner- that it is no longer possible to disaggregate the agendas of state and gies are district Party Committee officials and the local Chamber of capital: instead, she draws attention to mounting evidence of “the Commerce and Finance (jinrong shanghui), who facilitate sometimes complicitous coexistence, and sometimes conflicting networking opportunities by co-hosting and publicizing a regular relationship, of the state and the market, public and popular round of social events at which CBD-based professionals can culture, and state-owned and private enterprises in China.” mingle freely, participate in recreational sports activities, and stage However, as the case of The Place demonstrates, struggle and karaoke competitions (Chaoyangqu Zuzhibu, 2009a, 2009b). competition between various levels of the state and Party do not The Place thus serves as not only a geographic node around invariably obtain: complicity and cooperation between private and which members of these emerging urban classes frequently public, and Party and state, actors in contemporary urban politics congregate, but also as a sort of “ground zero” for the fashioning of can indeed succeed, particularly when development projects are new forms of individual and collective identities that subtly embed constructed to simultaneously serve multiple uses, and multiple transnational cosmopolitan consumerism within a nationalist and interests, over time. The Place, according to its Strategic Planning pro-Party agenda shaped by central elites. As Tomba (2004: 6e8) Director, “represents a new commercial form using its own style of recently noted, since the 16th Party Congress of November 2002, activist participation” to facilitate the realization of a broader state Chinese central leaders have committed themselves to the agenda (Guan, 2007: 47). Indeed, from the project’s inception, the “building of a well-off society in an all-around way” by stimulating private developers at Aozhong Xingye Real Estate partnered with domestic consumption to sustain economic growth, and by local Party and state officials at the municipal and district levels, and nurturing the new middle class to secure social and political aprofit-making enterprise owned by a central government stability. Literary and social critic Meng Fanhua (2004: 107e108)

Please cite this article in press as: Thornton, P. M., From liberating production to unleashing consumption: Mapping landscapes of power in Beijing, Political Geography (2010), doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2010.06.001 6 P.M. Thornton / Political Geography xxx (2010) 1e9 argues that Trends Magazine, the Group’s flagship publication, has The Party itself has likewise taken a particular interest in The from its inception marketed itself as the chief spokesman for this Place, and established a new branch committee in the complex. One new and rising social strata. The inaugural issue was relatively of the so-called “two new” types of grassroots Party organs founded “cautious and low-key” in putting forth the magazine’s luxury in recent years to build the Party’s constituency among new social consumerist orientation, but nonetheless clearly announced, and new economic organizations in the reform era, as of October 2009 The Place Party Committee boasted twenty-two Party Trends is not about blind consumption, and even less about members (Bejingshi Cishan Xiehui, 2009). According to Central debauchery; Trends is about realizing actual worth, cultivating Party directives, “two new” grassroots party branches focus on appearances, and taking comprehensive care to refract the “unifying and educating” employees where they are based, quality of one’s character (suzhi) in the domain of consumption. “actively leading their organizations to carry out a variety of mass As a tourism and consumer periodical, Trends will reflect the cultural activities, shaping and cultivating enterprise culture and latest domestic and international trends, and will serve as entrepreneurial spirit” through the implementation of the Party’s a practical guide advising on every kind of civilized consump- new “brand culture strategy” (pinpai wenhua zhanlüe)(Zhibu tion, from the six essential elements: counseling on what to eat, dongtai, 2008). In an April 2009 bulletin on the efforts of “two where to live, what to do, where to travel, what to buy, and how new” Party branches in Beijing’s CBD to “go deep into, study, and to amuse oneself (as cited in Meng, 2004: 108). practice scientific development,” The Place Party Committee Feature columns prominently included “A Look at White-Collar reported that, “as a Party branch in a large-scale private enterprise,” Beauties’ Lives” (Bailing liren de shenghuo guan), “Luxury Homes and it would use its position to carry out activities that would Furnishings” (Jingping changlang), and “Trends Shopping” (Shishang “strengthen the mechanisms of Party-building work over the long- gouwu). Moreover, as Zhou (2000: 144) observed, Trends and its sister term” throughout Beijing’s CBD (Zhonggong Beijingshi magazines effectively market a lifestyle to China’s new bourgeoisie Chaoyangquwei, 2009). Indeed, in response to an April 14, 2009 defined by its patronage of branded, locally-contextualized urban order issued by the Chaoyang District Party Secretary for all sites of consumption: not merely coffee bars and nightclubs, grassroots Party organizations to assist in relief efforts in the wake boutiques and luxury shopping malls in general, but, in addition to of the Wenchuan earthquake, The Place Party Committee collected The Place, Beijing’s Lufthansa and Xidan Shopping Centers, Shang- donations totaling 1300 RMB for earthquake relief (Chaoyangqu hai’s Paris in the Spring, and Guangzhou’s Daxin Department Store. Zuzhibu, 2009a, 2009b). Likewise, during the Bazaar Celebrity The persistent promotion of this type of recursive, place-bound Charity Night held at The Place in September, the editor-in-chief of consumer lifestyle is facilitated by the regulatory regime set by the the Trends Group publication reminded its online readership, Party-state. State Press Administration authorities limit the foreign On the sixtieth anniversary of our nation’s founding.public generated content of the Chinese version of Cosmopolitan to not charitable organizations have done important work according to more than 50%, allowing the Trends Group to tailor magazine the agenda laid out by the Party-state.We tell ourselves that content to suit local tastes, and therefore also to meet local we must persist in this to the end, because of not only the Party- commercial needs (Xiong, 2003: 51). Accordingly, in a letter to state and stars and celebrities, but also the ordinary people who potential retail tenants, the developers of The Place promised that follow and sustain Bazaar magazinedall of these are our the full range of powerful resources represented by the Trends staunch supporters (Tong, 2009). Group would provide a wealth of cross-advertising and joint promotional opportunities to the retailers leasing space in the two As the foregoing demonstrates, the fusion of the commercial vast malls (Zhi kehu han, n.d.). Trends Group publications routinely interests represented in The Place with the agendas of the “socialist publish information on the latest products available for purchase at land masters” of the Party-state and the urban developers at the retailers housed in The Place, and reviews of bars, discos and municipal and district levels has created an upscale profit-making eateries within the compound, and on celebrity sightings and lifestyle center that caters to Beijing’s new middle class while overtly promotional events staged in the mall’s vast plaza. These have signaling loyal support for the Party and its goals. In preparation for included so-called annual “pink ribbon” campaigns to raise breast the sixtieth National Day, for example, The Place ran an interlinked cancer awareness, the designation of The Place as an official series of promotions designed to appeal to its customer base: “Olympic culture square” in August 2008, and, most recently, consumers using state-owned Bank of China debit cards to make a winter celebration for which six snowblowers filled the stone purchase totaling various amounts during the National Day holiday plaza with manufactured snow on the last day of 2009 to entice were eligible to receive prizes ranging from Coca-Cola logo lock-tight residents to the mall for a New Year’s count down (Renmin Ribao food storage containers to courtesy tickets to view the new patriotic haiwai ban,2009). In language reminiscent of the Mao-era claim blockbuster film, “The Founding of the Republic” (Jianguo Daye)atone that the newly enlarged Tiananmen Square would act as a “vast of The Place’s movie theaters. Further whetting the appetite for carnival realm” for the masses, Municipal Bureau of Culture and patriotic and pro-Communist luxury consumption, in the run-up to Chaoyang District Government officials inaugurated the cantilev- the 2009 National Day, the vast SkyScreen debuted a newly expanded ered plaza as a new people’s “carnival ground” (kuanghuan 3D panorama version of the original historic footage of Chairman Mao changdi), although presumably one more congenial to Beijing’s declaring the founding of the PRC followed by scenes representing well-heeled revelers with shopping dollars to spend than to the more than 2000 years of Chinese history; the new version of revolutionary peasant and proletariat masses of yore. The Party and concludes with the same scene with which it began, but this time state luminaries on hand promised to attend and welcome the staged by the all-star cast of “The Founding of the Republic,” by way of masses, but to otherwise allow “every city resident to play offering a free preview of the film for mall-goers (TimeOut Beijing, protagonist” in the festivities, which included “arranged live 2009)(Fig. 1). improvised performances,” and a team of teachers and students Unlike the rather overt statement of centralized power repre- from Tsinghua University’s Academy of Fine Arts working to sented by nearby Tiananmen Square, The Place and other such urban produce a larger than life replica of the new Chinese urban ideal: “a sites exude an ambient power that works instead through somewhat family of three and their minivan” in snow, described by the deputy more subtle and indirect practices of seduction and invitation (Allen, director of the district Party committee as “a representation of 2006;cf.Kong & Law, 2002: 1505). Masquerading as free and open average people today” in the capital (Beijing Ribao,2009: 3). public spaces, such privately-owned public spaces practice an

Please cite this article in press as: Thornton, P. M., From liberating production to unleashing consumption: Mapping landscapes of power in Beijing, Political Geography (2010), doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2010.06.001 P.M. Thornton / Political Geography xxx (2010) 1e9 7 elaborate “politics of exclusion” that not only restricts public access, begun to “wither away” to make room for the market, the post-Mao but also ultimately “excludes politics” (Goss, 1993:26e27; cf. state has grown in both strength and capacity, facilitating pub- Crawford (2004 [1992])), and, in the eyes of some, represent the “end liceprivate partnerships, constructing science parks and conference of public space” (Mitchell, 1995;cf.Sennett, 1992). In promotional centers, drafting ambitious urban redevelopment schemes, and literature targeting potential investors and tenants, The Place is establishing a web of special enterprise zones. These interlinked described as an urban retail environment that “fulfills the five human strategies for the development of territorially fixed assets in the face senses: sight, sound, smell, taste and touch.an exciting place to sing, of competitive pressures from without have increased the structural dance, or do whatever you want to relax yourself from the stressful significance of the state as an institutionalized engine of capital day” (Market Positioning, n.d.). However, as was the case with the accumulation (Brenner, 1998:15e17), and, surprisingly, the signifi- supposedly spontaneous movement of engineers and architects that cance and influence of the Party as well, which has likewise embraced expanded the Square during the Mao era, the ruse is once again easily the power of the market as a tool for social transformation (Pieke, exposed: when a hundred young Beijing residents attempted to stage 2009). Furthermore, while as Hsing (2009) notes, marketization and an impromptu event at The Place on International Pillow Fight Day in increased access to capital have resulted in a proliferation of powerful 2008, they were instantly met by five vans, two police vehicles and agents shaping urban land development projects, as the foregoing a Ford Escalade. The more than sixty policemen that emerged from demonstrates, conflict and intrastate struggle are by no means the the vehicles put to an immediate end to the frivolity, and any notion only, or even the most likely, outcome of the urban development that The Place would tolerate even playfully spontaneous masses process: municipal and central, and state and Party, actors are indeed armed with bed pillows (Quinlan, 2008). capable of carving out spheres of mutual and sustained cooperation in the often contentious domain of Chinese urban politics. Conclusion: making space for class The foregoing analysis of the Chinese state’s persistent role in shaping successive landscapes of power despite waves of privatiza- Unlike the successive American landscapes of power mapped by tion and market reform may shed additional light on geographies of Zukin (1993), which are shaped by the fluctuations of the capitalist power and consumption elsewhere, hopefully stimulating a closer market and therefore appear to lack “coherent values,” what is most examination of state-capital cooperation in urban environments striking about the rise and fall of Beijing’s landscapes of power is the closer to home, where the “enchanting myth of consumer sover- enduring presence of the Party-state at their center, and its persistent eignty” (Korczynski & Ott, 2004) still reigns supreme. The spectacular efforts to shape the process in accordance with its shifting aims. fusion of state and corporate power behind the Mao show at The Place Although Tiananmen Square’s transformation from “empty space” to can be read as a noteworthy variation on a common theme in a “public space of political action” during the early years of the evidence, albeit in various guises and at disparate registers, at the Mall twentieth century occurred at the hands of patriotic students and of America (Goss, 1999), Dubailand (Davis, 2006), and so-called ordinary youths, it was the Party-state that subsequently succeeded in “festival marketplaces” (Crawford, 2004:131e132) that offer a heady redefining the Square not onlyas the symbolic center of the nation, but blend of historically-grounded narratives of national identity and also as the locus of revolutionary class unity. Weakened by popular consumerist escapism. The well-documented proliferation of challenges in the last decade of Maoist rule and temporarily reclaimed ambiguous social spaces in urban environments elsewhere, charac- by the masses at end of the first decade of reform, the post-Mao terized inpart by the extension of private methods of surveillance into regime regained control over the space largely by emptying it of the formerly open public areas, is more than suggestive of the perpetu- public. Since the 1990s, authorities have vastly increased surveillance ation of “a close connection between development capital, the state of the Square, encouraging the visual and virtual consumption of the and the planning apparatus” (Cuthbert & McKinnell, 1997:310;cf. site, and the use of other quasi-public venues, like The Place, to stage Cuthbert, 1995), in well-established market economies as well as key events. Most recently, in marked contrast to the large-scale mass those that were formerly centrally-planned. The insertion of images celebrations held in the Square in earlier decades, the 60th National of state power and national unity into privately-owned public spaces, Day parade was staged before a small invitation-only audience of in China as elsewhere, demonstrates that the “politics of exclusion” spectators; ordinary Beijing residents were enjoined to stay home to practiced by the owners and designers of such landscapes of power do view the pageantry on television. Those who did not heed the not, in fact, exclude all politics: rather, they actively serve to natu- instructions were held at bay by a formidable security presence that ralize, and to project into everyday life, a politics favorable to those in began closing down roads and subway stops in the center of the city positions of power, and apparently do so equally as well in overtly long before the parade began (Hutzler, 2009; Trouillaud, 2009). Barred authoritarian socialist regimes, as in democratic capitalist ones. from the Square and pedestrian overpasses spanning the city’s main thoroughfares, small groups of displaced patriotic residents lined the Acknowledgments street on both sides of The Place to watch the National Day celebrations broadcaston the giant SkyScreen at the mall several blocks away. This research, including site visits between 2002 and 2009, was When asked by a reporter if he felt proud, one middle-aged worker partially supported by the Fulbright Foundation. An earlier version craning his neck to watch the festivities broadcast on the SkyScreen of this paper was presented at a September 2009 conference at the replied: “Pride is pride, but I don’t have a permanent job. I’m just University of Oxford entitled “Consumer Revolution or Consuming watching the fun, having a look” (Ceng, 2009). Revolution: Making Sense of Marketization in China” sponsored by The apparent popularity and success of The Place at the mall the Leverhulme Trust. The author wishes to thank the workshop suggests that the processes of globalization and marketization have participants and especially Karl Gerth and Thomas F. Thornton of carved out new and expanding realms for the exercise of state power. the University of Oxford, and four anonymous reviewers, and the As Mann (1997) pointed out over a decade ago, the weakening of editor for their generous advice and suggestions. “hard geopolitics” in the post-nuclear age has served to strengthen the involvement of state actors in the “soft geopolitics” of commercial exchange, and global trade negotiations. Under such circumstances, References as Cerny (1995: 620) notes, “the state itself becomes an agent for the fi commodi cation of the collective, situated in a wider, market- Allen, J. (2006). 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