Abstract
SIMIlar to dISNEylaNd or the tourist attractions in Las Vegas, parts of contemporary China resemble a theme park, as copycat architecture and towns can be found throughout the country. From the “Sphinx” on the outskirts of Shijiazhuang in Hebei Province to the French aristocratic Chateau Laffitte Hotel (a reproduction of the seventeenth-century baroque Château de Maisons-Laffitte) in Beijing’s suburbs, from the “Eiffel Tower” in the Paris-styled town of Tianducheng in Hangzhou’s suburbs in Zhejiang Province to the “London Bridge” in Suzhou in Jiangsu Province, Chinese tourists can travel around the world without leaving their own country. The list can extend to replicas of European towns such as Hallstatt (an imitation of the Austrian village Hallstatt near the Alps) in Huizhou in Guangdong Province, Florence town in Tianjin, and Venice town in Dalian, among others. We can also discover several knock-off “White Houses” and “Capitol Hills” built by Chinese governmental officials and businessmen. Furthermore, it is said that a copycat version of Manhattan will be completed in Tianjin in 2019. It appears that China is coming to resemble a film set! In this essay, I introduce Thames Town, an English-themed town in the suburbs of Shanghai, and present how it has been received by English journalists, Chinese residents and tourists, and Chinese nationalists and their interlocutors. I also comment on their receptions. One of the most famous copycat towns in China is Thames Town, an English-styled town located in Songjiang, in the southwest of Shanghai’s suburbs.1 Alongside the German town (Anting), the Scandinavian town (Luodian), the Italian town (Pujiang), the Spanish town (Fengcheng), the Canadian town (Fengjing), and others, Thames Town is part of the “One City, Nine Towns” project that the Shanghai government initiated to
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