Understanding the Chinese City
- Li Shiqiao - University of Virginia, USA
- Li Shiqiao, writing in the South China Morning Post
This book teaches us to read the contemporary Chinese city. Li Shiqiao deftly crafts a new theory of the Chinese city and the dynamics of urbanization by:
- examining how the Chinese city has been shaped by the figuration of the writing system
- analyzing the continuing importance of the family and its barriers of protection against real and imagined dangers
- exploring the meanings of labour, and the resultant numerical and financial hierarchies
- demonstrating how actual structures bring into visual being the conceptions of numerical distributions, safety networks, and aesthetic orders.
Asked what was the difference between Japanese space and ‘western' space, Maki declared emphatically: ‘Nothing!’ Tackling differences in spatial thinking from inside both ‘western’ and Chinese thinking, Li Shiqiao demonstrates how mental space, Chinese and 'western,' is determined by culture.
Li Shiqiao reveals continuities between ancient Chinese city formations and current urban organizations where others see only rupture and chaos. No other work on the staggering urban explosion in China so deftly displays the complexities of these current formulations. Bringing an impressive array of disciplines into conversation with each other, this book gestures toward what urban studies could and should be.
Li Shiqiao has written the only book on the Chinese city that captures at once the accelerated hypermodernity of the Shanghai stock exchange and 2500 years of Daoist and Confucian culture. It will be a classic.
If as Wittgenstein suggested, the limits of one’s language set the limits of one’s world, what difference does it make to conceptualise things in a different kind of word and to give an alternative significance to numbers? In this book Li Shiqiao argues that ideas taken for granted in the West and built into our scientific world-view are by no means universal, while concepts such as yin yang, four cardinal points, five phases, the ten heavenly stems and twelve heavenly branches, allowed the ancient Chinese to develop a different conception of space and time. This is reflected in their architecture and town-planning, and must be taken into account if we are to understand it.
The book not only provides a new framework and fresh thinking for research on the Chinese city but also contributes to contemporary urban studies by providing a model for cultural-based research on urbanisation. Understanding the Chinese City is an excellent book. It is suitable not only for academic researchers for research purposes but also for readers interested in Chinese culture.
