Embodied ‘emancipation’: architects, technocrats, and the shaping of the Canton Fair in 1970s China

Abstract

The year 1971 was a turning point for modern Chinese politics. Several years after the initiation of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), repressed Party cadres and technocrats were gradually rehabilitated: politicians realigned with the capitalist West, public officials rationalised the government, administrators liberalised the economy, economists promoted foreign trade, technicians advanced science and technology, and architects and engineers engaged with creative practice. Perhaps nothing embodies what I describe as ‘the return of technocracy’ more strikingly than the Guangzhou Foreign Trade Project of the 1970s, an economic and architectural endeavour to expand exhibition venues, and build new hotels and department stores, in response to the growing number of international visitors attending the Canton Fair. This article examines how contention and cooperation between architects and technocrats noticeably shaped Lingnan Modernism as specifically embodied in the Foreign Trade Project. In doing so, I investigate the social, economic, and political background of the emergence and expansion of the Canton Fair, focusing on two representative buildings, the Exhibition Centre of the China Exported Commodity Fair at Liuhua Road and the West Wing of the Dongfang Hotel. Both projects demonstrate an extraordinary synthesis of Modernist vocabularies, climate-responsive design, and indigenous garden culture. I argue that the Guangzhou Foreign Trade Project embodied multiple forms of emancipation, both as a passive product of social, economic, political, and diplomatic liberation and as an active vehicle to further spatial, perceptual, and mental emancipation. This embodied emancipation reveals a productive, mutually respectful collaboration between progressive architects and enlightened technocrats, demonstrating the sharp contrast of the rule of expertise with domination by politics.