by Cook, James A. ,Goldstein, Joshua,Johnson, Matthew D. ,Schmalzer, Sigrid
By mobilizing the city’s sizable print and broadcast media, themselves inheritances from the Japanese regime, the CCP announced that there would be material gains in the new order for loyal urban residents. Once neighborhoods had successfully moved, CCP officials organized massive assemblies to hand out deeds to their new homes. Xing Guihua recalls that over 1,000 families, including her own, attended such an assembly, where they received a deed along with a portrait of Mao Zedong to hang in their homes.31
News of the moves made the front pages of local newspapers, which carried the details of the campaign, including speeches from neighborhood activist meetings right through the events of moving day. From the start of the movement, the local, CCP-controlled press used strong patriotic and racial overtones to characterize the campaign, creating a sense that the comfortable life once denied Chinese was finally at hand. Efforts to generate class consciousness were no doubt part of the housing campaign, but its most powerful propaganda involved images of poor Chinese. Newspaper articles carefully and clearly explained the inequalities of the colonial-era housing situation. One article wrote, “Under Japanese imperialism, Chinese children wouldn’t dare play in Japanese neighborhoods; if they did they’d be beaten and cursed. Chinese couldn’t just freely build a house, rather they lived in wooden shacks built on sewage canals, and even then had to bribe Japanese police.” 32 In an effort to contrast the situation in Dalian with cities in Nationalist-held areas, articles described how the Nationalists were demolishing poor neighborhoods throughout Nanjing without relocating or providing for the residents. “The democratic government cares about city people and their housing situation. Now poor live in good homes. In Nationalist-held areas there are lots of good houses, but they don’t give them out to the poor.”33 This was a particularly effective way of driving home the point that the Soviet-backed government would take better care of them than the Nationalist government.
The final wave of the housing campaign, carried out in the spring of 1947, was the most controlled, and reflected the CCP’s growing emphasis on industrial recovery and other policies aimed at jumpstarting Dalian’s economy. Officials established clearer guidelines for decisions about rents and property rights, and paid more attention to integrating economic development with the movement of people. For example, the newly established Finance Bureau (Caizheng ju) coordinated the distribution of shops and retail properties to merchant families.34 By the summer of 1947, as the movement wound down, newspaper articles lauded the achievements of the housing campaigns, boasting that over 20 percent Dalian’s residents received new homes.35
The Concrete Colonial Foundations of Socialist Dalian
We have seen one attempt by the new regime to redistribute the spoils of the Dalian’s colonial-era built environment. The redistribution of property in Dalian was impressive; it compared favorably with similar attempts undertaken by the CCP in the country’s rural areas. Of course, the departure of the majority of China’s former “colonial oppressors” made the task of identifying land and property to redistribute much easier for local cadres. Nonetheless the fact that a fifth of city residents suddenly found themselves in new homes was trumpeted by the CCP as emblematic of the city’s new socialist economy. The new leaders of Dalian envisioned a city owned, populated, and administered by Chinese workers. Yet, just how socialist was postcolonial Dalian? What had happened to city’s seductive, rich colonial past?
As a total colonial space under Japanese control from 1905 through 1945, Dalian’s physical environment was designed to showcase Japanese development of the region. The striking port facilities, the headquarters of the Southern Manchurian Railway (SMR), and the European architecture of the downtown district (see Figure 10.4) were captured on postcards representing the physical face of the city. The main roundabout in the downtown core featured a large plaza, and a circular ring road on which one would find monumental architecture featuring banks, hotels, a post office and government buildings. An elaborate tramcar system crisscrossed the city, stretching from the industrial district on the west side of Dalian, including the large SMR railroad factory complex, through the downtown core and the massive port facilities, which, along with the SMR corporate headquarters, served as the lifeblood of the colonial city.
The new Sino-Soviet regime did little to alter the built environment of the city. There was little need or desire to dismantle its key features. Soviet military authorities and CCP cadres used these buildings as their headquarters: what is now the headquarters of the Dalian municipal government was once the seat of the administrative apparatus under the Japanese in the late-1930s. Other physical structures of the colonial past—its housing, public spaces, transportation, parks, and streets—remained, and thus so too did the potential to remember that past at a time when new authorities were attempting to redefine Dalian as a model production city in a socialist mold.
Figure 10.4 Downtown Dalian at the peak of Japanese rule. Streetcars arrive from every direction under the watchful eyes of an elevated police box. Here, the celebrated colonial infrastructure of the city is clearly on display, as is the reality of colonial power here. Note there are a number of military and police personnel visible in the photograph. From: Li Zhenrong, ed., Dalian mengzhong lai [Dalian comes from a dream]. People’s Fine Art Publishing House, 1996.
In 1949, following several years of redevelopment in the hands of Soviet and CCP officials, Dalian hosted a major industrial exhibition. This event served to highlight Dalian’s industrial recovery under the Soviets and the CCP, cementing the city’s new definition as a vanguard model production metropolis of new China. Newspaper reporters, travel writers, and thousands of other visitors, including overseas Chinese industrialists, flocked to Dalian to see the exhibition, which was carefully organized following months of researching similar events held in New York, San Francisco, and even those held by the Japanese regime in Manchuria in the 1930s. In the three months that it lasted, the exhibition attracted over 300,000 visitors.36
Walking through the display halls, visitors saw industrial products made in Dalian’s recently recovered industries, including items ranging from machine tools and chemical products, to buses and tramcars. One observer noted that Dalian was capable of producing things that Shanghai and Beijing had never been able to produce, and people visiting from Beijing felt that many products were the same quality as those found in the United States.37 The final hall of the exhibition was a heavily propagandized homage to Sino-Soviet relations, featuring pictures and displays driving home the point that Soviet aid, and Dalian’s full embrace of the Soviet model, made the futuristic world of production they were witnessing possible.
Products and exhibits, however, were not the only things to see. The city itself was on display. Numerous journalists and writers who came to report on the exhibition also took in the sights of Dalian and reported what they saw. “Dalian,” one visitor wrote, “has been made into a true production metropolis. City people’s productivity and labor, this is the new character of Dalian.”38 Another visitor wrote, “Riding the streetcars, it is easy for us to feel that we are already living in a society led by workers. Everyone on the trams is a worker, wearing dark uniforms in blue and gray. Even the women wear these; we saw no gaudy clothing.”39
According to these observers, the city’s culture, not its built environment, seemed transformed by the new regime. Yet, despite the effort to publicize these new features of the city, many of the journalists who visited Dalian in 1949 wrote glowingly of the city’s past. Walking out of the train station, one writer was moved by the vista of “such a modern city” (jindaihua de chengshi). “The Japanese, as far as city planning is concerned, had great skill—the streets are very wide and lined with trees.” Praise for aspects of Dalian’s colonial modernity did not stop there. The author continued, “The Japanese have very hygienic practices, and as a result the buildings here are quite spacious and ordered.” In direct comparisons with Shanghai and Beijing, Dalian was favored for its highl
y developed public transportation, particularly the colonial-era streetcar system, which “reaches nearly every corner of the city.” Likewise, the author noted that Beijing “has too many bicycles,” and, like many cities of the interior, “not enough public transportation,” while Dalian, he judged, “among all of China’s cities, has the best public transportation; the price is cheap, you don’t have to wait, and you can get anywhere.”40 Spacious apartment buildings, once the residences of Japanese, were now home to workers and their families, who “abandoned their old huts and now live in these Western-style buildings.”41 In these brief examples, one can see the ways in which the colonial-era built environment, although little changed, remained an essential feature of what made Dalian. Try as they might to shift the emphasis onto what was “new” about the city, visitors in 1949 were awed as much by features of the city’s colonial past as they the more mundane displays of its socialist present.
Conclusion
Regime change, the replacement of one form of political control with another, is a major theme in the study of history. History textbooks are filled with pages devoted to the demise of older forms of empire and the rise of new nations, including the revolutionary movements that led to the foundation of socialist states in Russia and China. Even today, the idea that founding a new political regime will bring major change to people’s lives is embraced by countries like the United States and the United Kingdom The current state of affairs in Iraq, for example, was premised on the idea that toppling the Saddam Hussein regime would somehow lead the Iraqi people in an entirely new direction, down the road to democracy.
Statues might be toppled, but physical, concrete legacies of the past remain: Saddam’s palaces are still used as fortresses for a military regime, and his prisons still hold Iraqi people captive. Dalian during the years from 1945 to 1950 provides us another historical window through which to view how a new regime grappled with the question of what to do with an urban built environment that had been bequeathed by an entirely different administration. The CCP hoped to transform the city from a colonial stronghold into a socialist paradise by transferring ownership of property and land into the hands of the urban poor. Under Japan’s colonial order, all of the factories and fine residences were owned by Japanese residents. Now, the owners of all property and, of course, the means of production would be the people of Dalian. The CCP’s vision of Dalian’s future was one predicated on socialist construction led, of course, by the party.
The parades of 1946 were essentially a visualization of the movement of ownership and capital from one regime to another. The CCP had transferred the property and former assets of Japan’s colonial regime, and, in the case of housing, literally into the hands of the people of Dalian. The crowds of people moving from Xigang with their belongings accompanied by posters of Mao Zedong and banners proclaiming the virtue of the CCP were, in many ways, a staged spectacle designed to perform on the street what was taking place in the city’s economic and political circles.
In the end, however, both regimes were predicated on production. In the case of Japan’s colonialist regime, management of the city’s resources was organized around profiting the Japanese imperial state and there was little concern for Dalian’s Chinese residents. The new regime’s publically stated principals of socialism meant that, in theory, industry within the city was now controlled for the benefit of the Chinese people. Yet both sets of leadership, organized around seemingly diametrically opposed principals, were primarily concerned with maximizing industrial production. While the new CCP leadership may have wanted to banish the city’s colonial past, the city’s main function as a transportation, manufacturing, and distribution center remained unchanged. Much of Dalian’s colonial past was part of the socialist future.
notes
1. These statistics are available at the Dalian Municipal Archive website: http://www.da.dl.gov.cn/xhsb/messageinfo.asp?id=343
2. Xin sheng shibao, September 1, 1946.
3. Chen Qiying, “Dalian—xin Zhongguo de mofan dushi” (Dalian—new China’s model metropolis), Luxing zazhi vol.23 no.11 (November 1949).
4. Li Zongying, Liu Shiwei, and Liao Bingxion ed., Dongbei xing (Travels through the Northeast) (Hongkong: Da gong bao chubanshe, 1950), 50.
5. Koshizawa Akira, Shokumin chi Mansh no toshi keikaku (Urban planning in Manchuria) (Tokyo: Ajia keizai kenkyu jo, 1978), 49–50.
6. Xigang qu weidangshi bangongshi, ed., “Xigang qu ‘Qiongren da banjia’” (Poor people’s big move in Xigang district) in Xigang wenshiziliao 4 (July 1997): 71–72.
7. Lao Xigang huigu dangnian “pinmin banjia yundong” qiaoluo dagu zhu jin Riben fang (Looking back at the poor peoples moving campaign in old Xigang, ringing in moving into Japanese homes with gongs and drums) in Dalian wanbao, March 19, 2006.
8. Ibid.
9. Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930. Harvard University Press, 2003, p.263–287.
10. Tan Songping, “Jieguan Daguanchang jingchashu yu jianli zhongshanqu wei” (Recovering the colonial Daguangchang district police office and establishing the Zhongshan district police) in Zhonggong Dalian shi Zhongshan qu wei dangshi bangongshi, ed. Zhongshan chunxiao (Zhongshan’s dawn of spring) (Dalian: Dalian haiyun xueyuan chubanshe, 1992), 1–6.
11. Dalian difang dangshi bian, ed. Zhonggong Dalian difang dangshi ziliaohuiji (Compilation of historical materials of the Chinese Communist Party, Dalian branch) (Dalian: (no publication data), 1983), 377.
12. “Zhonggong Lüda diwei guanyu kaizhan Dalian zhuzhai tiaozheng yundong de jueding” (The CCP Lüda committee’s decisions regarding the spread of the housing redistribution movement), July 7, 1946, in CJSG, 515–520.
13. Pepper, Suzanne. Civil War in China: the Political Struggle, 1945–1949. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999 [1978], 277–289.
14. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 46–54.
15. Cong Xuanyou, “San qu zhuzhai tiaozheng yundong” (The housing redistribution movement in three districts) in Zhonggong Dalian shi Zhongshan qu wei dangshi bangongshi, ed., Zhongshan chunxiao (Zhongshan’s dawn of spring) (Dalian: Dalian haiyun xueyuan chubanshe, 1992), 42.
16. Dalian shi fangdichan guanliju bianzhi bangong shi, ed. Dalian chengshi fangdichan da shiji (A chronology of real estate in the city of Dalian). (neibu, no publication data: 1989), 3–4.
17. Ibid.,19.
18. Ibid., 7–8.
19. Ibid., 11.
20. In February 1946, the city was broken down administratively into five districts (qu). Each district was composed of between 20–40 wards (fang), with each ward containing twenty-five neighborhoods (lu). Many of the ward heads and even neighborhood heads were essentially the same people that had been in charge during the Japanese regime. See Lüda gaishu bianji weiyuan hui, ed. Lüda gaishu (A brief account of Lüda), Lüda: Lüda gaishu bianji weiyuan hui yinxing, 1949.
21. Xin sheng shibao, September 7, 1946.
22. Xin sheng shibao, August 28, 1946.
23. Cong Xuanyou, “San qu zhuzhai tiaozheng yundong” (The housing redistribution movement in three districts) in Zhonggong Dalian shi Zhongshan qu wei dangshi bangongshi, ed., Zhongshan chunxiao (Zhongshan’s dawn of spring) (Dalian: Dalian haiyun xueyuan chubanshe, 1992), 43–44.
24. Cong Xuanyou, “San qu zhuzhai tiaozheng yundong” (The housing redistribution movement in three districts) in Zhonggong Dalian shi Zhongshan qu wei dangshi bangongshi, ed., Zhongshan chunxiao (Zhongshan’s dawn of spring) (Dalian: Dalian haiyun xueyuan chubanshe, 1992), 47–48.
25. Ibid., 48.
26. “Zhonggong Lüda diwei guanyu kaizhan Dalian zhuzhai tiaozheng yundong de jueding” (The CCP Lüda committee’s decisions regarding the spread of the housing redistribution movement), July 7, 1946, in CJSG, 515–520.
27. Cong Xuanyou, “San qu zhuzhai tiaozheng yundong” (The ho
using redistribution movement in three districts) in Zhonggong Dalian shi Zhongshan qu wei dangshi bangongshi, ed., Zhongshan chunxiao (Zhongshan’s dawn of spring) (Dalian: Dalian haiyun xueyuan chubanshe, 1992), 44.
28. Relocating the urban poor and those deemed “unproductive” into rural areas was a tactic carried out in other cities throughout Northeast China (Manchuria). See Steven I. Levine, Anvil of Victory: The Communist Revolution in Manchuria 194–1948. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 188–190. For such resettlement in Lüda, see Zhang Pei, Dalian fangwen jiyao (Summary of a visit to Dalian) (Herafter DFW) (Shenyang: Dongbei Xinhua shudian, 1949), 2–3.
29. Xin sheng shibao, August 27, 1946.
30. Dalian wanbao, March 19, 2006.
31. Lao Xigang huigu dangnian “pinmin banjia yundong” qiaoluo dagu zhu jin Riben fang (Looking back at the poor peoples moving campaign in old Xigang, ringing in moving into Japanese homes with gongs and drums) in Dalian wanbao, March 19, 2006.
32. Dalian ribao, August 27, 1946.
33. Ibid.
34. LDGS, 275.
35. Guandong ribao, June 5, 1947.
