Memories of the present: The vicissitudes of transition in Republican Beijing, 1911-1937

This dissertation analyzes the construction of Beijing's urban identity during the republican era. By focusing on the uses and transformations of urban spaces, it balances the abstract issues of how the city was perceived (by urban planners, the government, and sociologists) with the more concrete issues of how the city was lived and experienced by Beijing's citizens.;In the Republic, the old hierarchies and walls of the imperial capital were steadily dismantled and new axioms of urban planning and social organization were in command. But often these new rules were more influential as form than as content, the government never having sufficient financial resources to realize a comprehensive city plan. The infrastructure construction projects, national products promotions, and development of public spaces to encourage activities of modern citizenship all had less effect than intended. Beijing's residents remained socially stratified and, in general, painfully poor. Moreover, many did not behave as model modern citizens. Even the sociologists, despite their more radical perspective on what constituted a moral community, could find few practical solutions to Beijing's social ills.;What we find is that none of these projects designed from above were effective at mobilizing a popular concept of modern citizenship in Beijing. They were not what Beijing's residents regarded as aspects of the city's unique essence. For them the heart of Beijing lay, instead, in Tianqiao, and in the labor intensive activities we have brought together under the rubric of "recycling." It is from the material practices of recycling and the sentiments it evoked that Beijing acquired a modern urban identity as a "traditional" city, permeated by an air of nostalgia.