From the First Five-Year Plan to the Cultural Revolution: the pre-reform urban transformation of Hangzhou, China

Abstract

Pre-reform Chinese cities base their uniqueness in urban transformation on Mao's duality of utopian and revolutionary ideals and pragmatic and economized approaches in practice. Through the lens of urban economy, population management, and city planning, this paper examines China's pre-reform urban transformation. By the case study of Hangzhou, this research reveals that urban development was driven by a diverse set of forces devised by the communist state to configure the urban conditions and control people's daily lives in pursuit of radical socialist goals. The controls from the state and other pertinent forces led to the actual outcomes of political-economic ambitions and spatial policy rhetoric. It was an inherent feature of the society and economy to go outside of the state's controls, and the unintended consequences were unavoidable. The state had to revise their strategies, the outcomes of which were again to be tested by time. An iterative process determined the urban transformation of Chinese cities.