A city of workers, a city for workers? Remaking beijing Urban space in the early PRC

In 1950s’ Beijing, planners conjured up a city that could fulfill three different but inseparable functions: it should be a productive city, with a sizable industrial proletariat; it should serve as the host of a vast bureaucracy; and it should be remade into a more perfect urban structure, in which the people’s needs could be satisfied and themselves remade into new socialist individuals. This chapter traces the increasing distance between the projects of the planners and practices at street level, where the needs of bureaucracy and production led to scattered urban development and to continuing forms of oppression. I argue that these contradictions-reflected in Beijing’s urban structure-were intrinsic to the very project of Maoist modernization.