A Utopian Garden City: Zhang Jingsheng’s ‘Beautiful Beijing’

Abstract

This chapter analyses a utopian city that was described in two texts from Republican China, An Aesthetic Outlook of Life (Mei de renshengguan, 1924) and The Method of Organisation of an Aesthetic Society (Mei de shehui zuzhifa, 1925), by the notorious intellectual Zhang Jingsheng (1888–1970). Zhang Jingsheng’s grand designs for his ‘Beautiful China’ and ‘Beautiful Beijing’ were inspired by his personal experiences as a university student in France in the late 1910s, and his two texts also demonstrated influences from Ebenezer Howard’s (1850–1928) Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), the seminal text of the British Garden Cities Movement. Unlike Ebenezer Howard, however, Zhang Jingsheng never developed relationships with urban planners, academic sociologists, or government bureaucrats, and never successfully mounted a coherent movement that gathered political interest, let alone financial support, to turn his vision of an ideal city into reality. Nevertheless, Zhang’s utopian dreams, following Fredric Jameson, were a ‘laboratory of ideas’ that functioned as the registering apparatus for the social problems and political turmoil that Chinese intellectuals confronted in the early twentieth century, and to which Zhang Jingsheng prescribed the ‘cure’ of aestheticisation. In other words, rebuilding, refashioning, and rearranging urban spaces in China via the principle of ‘beauty,’ which would foster new ‘sentimental subjects’ and bring the Chinese nation into ‘modernity.’ Zhang’s texts were part of the important story of the Chinese reception of the Garden Cities discourse, which continued to dominate debates on urban development and civic administration in contemporary China.