Abstract
This article explores the recent experience of a once prosperous late imperial Chinese city from the Japanese occupation to the post-Mao reformist era. It focuses on the effect of the drastically changing political and social environments on the city’s identity, and how the city responded to the challenges. Over the last seven decades, Jining suffered, survived, restored and transformed like other places in China, whereas yet from its trajectory we can still see its distinctive individual characteristics. The article reveals the deterioration of its late imperial legacy and the destruction of its new “Westernizing” identity from the late 1930s to the late 1970s, while it also shows a seeming return of the city’s certain traditions in the following post-Mao New Era though not where all positive.
Highlights
The core conception of this article is “urban identity.” The term “urban” used here first takes a general “city versus countryside” angle, there are different urban types identified by various categories and personalities throughout world history
A locality’s course is dependent on natural forces and on social factors shaped by local cultural traditions, as human beings work to alter their circumstances for survival and development
Situated in the proverbially unmanageable and poverty-stricken southwest of Shandong province, Jining had otherwise enjoyed an ancient cultural reputation mostly as a county-level seat before the Ming dynasty (1368-1644)..With the Grand Canal becoming the lifeline of the empire, Jining emerged as an economic and cultural metropolis in much of the Ming and High Qing when it was a subprefecture in the imperial jurisdictional hierarch
Summary
The question of how to define Jining’s identity is first concerned with its path of urbanization as commerce and a market economy composed urban Jining’s infrastructural makeup. Like many cities and market towns in western Shandong and south Zhili (Hebei), Jining’s real rise was because of the massive use of the Grand Canal as tribute transportation in the early Ming, and its continuing prosperity was dependent on the canal’s normal operation This specific urbanization and city formation demonstrated the dynamics of transportation, communication and trade via the canal as decisive roles in making an economic center, where factors beyond the locality shaped local identity. From the mid-nineteenth century, Jining faced challenges beyond yet another dynastic cycle: the decline and withdrawal of canal transportation and unprecedented changes in the national economic network and mode of production brought about by the alien forces of global modernity, capitalism, and Christianity Under this overwhelming intrusion, Jining’s prosperity and identity was at stake as the whole nation was on the brink of losing its integrity. Native premodern urbanism and imported modern urbanization worked together to form a fledgling urban creature
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