Modernity And The Construction Of A Socialist City

Urban research has long focused on Shanghai in China, intentionally or unintentionally obscuring the complex conation of Chinese modernity issue Compared to Shanghai, Beijing, a city with long history,can obviously better showing the realistic dilemma and the possibility of breaking out it when Chinese traditional urban civilization collide with western modernity. Especially after1949, when Beijing become the capital city of PRC. Under the action of socialism modernity, the city experienced more profound space transformation and significance rewrite, constructed its unique position,and revealed how socialist culture leave its mark on a typical city in material and cultural aspects. Therefore, this paper takes Beijing since1949as the research object, researches how literary works image Beijing after the founding of PRC, and also wishes to exploit a new kind of possibility to research Chinese cities in the vision of socialist modernity.Political lyrics and lyrical prose of Beijing theme shaped Beijing as a super literary image full of political significance after1949,constructing a discourse structure of’Beijing-China-People-Regime’. Taking Lao She’s classic drama " Dragon Beard Ditch " as a represent, narrative literature not only narrate city renewal stories, but also interrelate individual to the discourse structure of New China more intensively,.So that the " Beijing " symbol finalized, and become the basis of imaging a new modern nation-state. Whereas for Chinese Communist which away form city for a long time, city is still seen as a dangerous space.This danger arises from the contradiction naturally existed between the city’s expendability and socialist ideals. The criticism of’Between a couple’makes city daily writing become a restricted area in the new China context. Because of this writing predicament, it is necessary to construct closed production space, which can accommodate dual demands of socialist ideals and modern industrialization. And then What comes further is transformation of urban space significance. Meanwhile, Compound communities, which is constructed for settle down government offices, military branches or culture units, redistricted Beijing city map, and formed faint confrontation and barrier between national space and urban space. Cultural fragmentation on city practical aspect actually means internal split of Beijing-China-People-Regime’discourse structure. After a long time,’Compound Literature’ originated from Wangshuo uncovered the internal split. we can also find that socialist modernity have a long-tern effect on Beijing city space and culture. In fact, even though later flourished’Beijing style literature’always work at imaging a culture Beijing, we can not really understand its internal appeal only until we place it in socialist modernity vision.