Chinese Stories About "Entering The City" In The Era Of Globalization

The social transformation in contemporary China has witnessed its strides forward into the modern urban civilization."Entering the city" not only means the spatial migration from rural to urban areas,but indicates more universal survival circumstances incurred by the constant changes of the modern urban civilization.Under the influence of the varied social transformation in different periods of globalization,Chinese stories about "entering the city"are featured by the distinctive stages.In the early 1950s,Chinese revolutionaries were committed to building the socialist cities and remolding the urban-rural structure so as to transcend the European and American predicaments of "entering the city" in the industrial era.Further influenced by the globalization,China's practice of "entering the city" since the inception of the 1990s can be seen as its efforts to overcome a series of predicaments caused by the first wave of "entering the city" in the 1950s.In a sense,the complexity and uniqueness of Chinese stories about "entering the city" have been determined by the relationship between the two waves of "entering the city".Abundant and complicated city imagination in contemporary Chinese literature has provided us with an effective way to probe into the vitality and predicaments of "entering the city" in China.Different from many researches focusing on the spatial migration and aiming to interpret the issues of "pcasant/country people/peasant workers entering the city",this dissertation,on the basis of examining rural and urban literature as a whole,starts with the presupposition that "entering the city" is the embodiment of the universal circumstances among the Chinese and probes into the varied city imagination from two perspectives.One is to analyze the conceptual foundation and the realistic context of the collision and conflicts among the varied city imagination and the other is to unveil the mental apparatus sculptured by the different city imagination and the corresponding predicaments.In a nutshell,this dissertation is aimed at offering a new insight into the issues related to "entering the city".Herein is the innovation and significance of the research.This dissertation is composed of three chapters.Chapter one focuses on "the myth of workers",discussing the issues about the cognition and identification in the era of planned economy.Despite the sacredness and transcendence,the revolutionaries' practice of "entering the city",the construction of socialist cities,and the imagination of the socialist urban-rural structure have all illustrated the insurmountable realistic predicaments.The profound influence of this city imagination on the public mental apparatus has been further unveiled by the stories of both "returning to the city" and "peasants' entering the city" in the 1980s.Taking " the faces of the city" as the core,Chapter two examines the cognition in the era of market economy.The city is symbolic of "the desire","the maze",and "the obscurity" Meanwhile,there are different tales of "two cities",such as "the big city" and "the small city" as well as "Beijing" and "New York".Characteristic of the modern urban civilization,the complexity of "the faces of the city"can be regarded as the dialogue between the waves of "entering the city" in two different periods.Chapter three,concentrating on "others' cities and my own city",discusses the identification implied by the varied city imagination in the era of market economy.Whether the modern city can provide people with a sense of belonging and identity is the paramount issue in Chinese stories about "entering the city".The inevitability of the identification predicaments is especially highlighted by the intensity of the urbanization,the complexity between the identification consciousness sculptured by "the myth of workers" and the marginalization of"peasant workers" and "laid-off workers",the deliberate neglect of the complicated city life in many works saying high praise for the cities,and the poetic imagination of "the distant place"and "the hometown".The cognition and identification involved in the city imagination is,in essence,related to the mobility of the modern urban civilization.It indicates that there is no sole imagination of the city and "entering the city" is bound to be an "unfinished" status and process of seeking after the sanctity and facing up to the predicaments,which is probably what Chinese stories about "entering the city" is trying to reveal in the era of globalization.