What Is Critical about Chinese Architectural History?

Abstract

This special issue on critical directions in Chinese architectural history is prompted by the opportunities for scholarly engagement that have opened up in postreform China. The opening is a result, not merely of China’s emergence as a geopolitical power, but also of the forms of knowledge production and exchange that the reformist desire for economic growth has spawned. After a hiatus of several decades, scholars in China are again engaging with Western scholarship. Architects and planners from the West are handling major commissions in China, and Chinese architectural firms are returning the favor. Thousands of students, practitioners, and researchers are crossing political, cultural, and linguistic boundaries to learn and to share expertise. The expansion of architectural criticism in China beyond the aegis of the state bodes well for the future. Although only a small fraction of architectural research and criticism published in Chinese has been translated into English, the surge in English-language publications on Chinese architecture and urbanism signals the potential for scholarly debate in this field. The subfield of Chinese architectural history has come a long way from being characterized as static and marginal, “dangling precariously” from the lowest branch of Banister Fletcher’s Tree of Architecture.1 Now it is “change” that preoccupies scholars of Chinese architecture and urbanism. The favorable conditions of communication take on an urgency as the pace of economic growth in China assumes sublime physical proportions, creating a gap between modes of conducting research in architectural history and the issues that have appeared critical in the midst of this landscape overhaul.2 The physical transformation of Chinese cities and rural landscapes—the destruction of historic fabric, the appropriation of agricultural land for urban expansion, the construction of massive infrastructural networks—has created a problem of description and historical caesura. China shares this phenomenon of transformation with many …