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PAINTING THE CITY RED
Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract
By Yomi Braester DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4723-1
Chapter One
New China, New Beijing Staging the Socialist City of the Future
AMONG THE EVENTS that have come to stand for liberated Beijing is the drying up of Longxugou, or Dragon Whisker Creek. The engineering feat was made famous in Lao She's play Dragon Whisker Creek, performed in 1951 by the Beijing People's Art Theater (Beijing Renmin Yishu Jutuan, henceforth BPAT) and filmed the following year by Beijing Film Studio, in collaboration with BPAT and the Beijing Youth Art Theater. In fact, the popular movie has come to stand as a reference for urban restructuring in the early years of the PRC, quoted in histories of urban planning and integrated into documentary films, as if it were historical footage.
In this chapter I explore the facts behind the public works at Longxugou and analyze the stage and screen productions to inquire into what made possible the interdependence between urban development and fictional accounts. I ask how Dragon Whisker Creek bridged the material city and its allegorical visualization, and argue that the stage play and film went beyond serving planners and decision makers: they retooled the audiences' vision. Dragon Whisker Creek draws much of its power from striking a balance between faithful representation and turning the city into a parable.
It is no coincidence that Longxugou was the site of one of the first public works projects in liberated Beijing, and that Dragon Whisker Creek was the first original play staged by the newly established BPAT. The convergence of city planning, drama, and film to make one of their earliest contributions to the New China is emblematic of their symbiosis. The engineering project, the play, and the movie supported a shift to a socialist conception of the city. Moreover, finding a visual vocabulary for presenting the city entailed novel staging and filming aesthetics, as well as challenging the hierarchy that privileges built environment over its visual representation. Stage plays and films not only recorded and propagated the new urban vision but also reified the new planning concepts and redirected the citizens' gaze. The theater and cinema became necessary for imagining and imaging the city.
Dragon Whisker Creek turned to the city in an evort to envision Maoist ideology not only through rural production and international strife but also through urban identity. Other productions of the same period emphasized military themes, preeminently in the context of the contemporary campaign to "resist America and support North Korea" (kang Mei yuan Chao), or addressed industrial and agricultural reform. Dragon Whisker Creek offered yet another site of building socialism by focusing on Beijing's poor and the slums in which they lived. Revolutionary ideology and collective identity were expressed by city life no less than through struggles at the national level. "New China, new Beijing," a key phrase in the film version, draws an analogy between the city and the nation. The Communist Party's hold over China relied on the claim not only that it was reinvigorating the nation-state but also that it was making over the capital.
Dragon Whisker Creek set an important precedent in distilling a temporal and spatial form to represent the socialist city. The workers' city is constructed through the residential courtyard (the formal siheyuan'r or the less regular zayuan'r), viewed at eye level yet penetrable by the authorities' gaze. The play defines the revolutionary regime of vision in the new Chinese city through the dialectic between two forms of urban space: residential quarters, on the one hand, and open squares and wide roads, on the other. Dragon Whisker Creek signals the emergence of the courtyard as the central location of social drama and primary site of governance, only to trump the enclosed vernacular architecture of the courtyard in favor of new public squares. In another important contribution, the play depicts the new construction as if the plans have already materialized. The reference to the future socialist city as an accomplished fact is an extreme case of the modernist conceit that promises a radically new world built on ruins of the old one. The projection of the future onto the present-what may be called the prescriptive chronotope of Dragon Whisker Creek-as well as the focus on the courtyard as a microcosm of class struggle, would become key devices in later stagings of urban policy.
The prescient vision of Dragon Whisker Creek is part of a complex structure for conveying urban policy. The play's strong rhetoric may be read as crass propaganda, marking it as a lesser work by Lao She, whose Teahouse (1958) has been ushered into the canon of twentieth-century Chinese drama. I argue, however, that Dragon Whisker Creek (which inspired Teahouse) was pathbreaking in both theme and form. In establishing the relation between urban space and revolutionary time, the play laid the grounds for dramatic and filmic discourse on urban development and renewal in the PRC. Beijing's image in literature, film, and the collective imagination at large cannot be fully appreciated without understanding the role played by Dragon Whisker Creek.
I look at the material and ideological construction of Longxugou by examining the policymakers' considerations as well as by analyzing the theatrical and cinematic works based on Lao She's play. In the following discussion, I use the title Dragon Whisker Creek to refer to all versions of the play, staged dialogue, and film script. Yet I will also distinguish among the various scripts and stagings, since their evolution evidences shifting emphases. The texts, stage sets, and cinematic images refashioned and gave new meanings to urban spaces, and Beijing's in particular, in the formative first years of the PRC.
URBAN GEOPOLITICS: PUBLIC WORKS AT DRAGON WHISKER CREEK
Lao She describes how, on returning to Beijing at the end of 1949 after fourteen years' absence, he found the city changed. Sewers had been mended, streets cleaned, and fresh water and electricity supplied. He was especially impressed by the Longxugou project. The playwright explains that despite its picturesque name, the creek was no more than a stinking ditch. The municipal government built a covered sewer and filled the open canal. Lao She praises the authorities: "I know that after more than a decade of anti-Japanese resistance and civil war, at a time when countless flaws await mending, the government's financial situation is not easy. Yet the government has shouldered the heavy burden for the sake of people's welfare." Lao She explains that he wrote the play "to express ... gratitude and admiration for the government." The playwright's description evidences the high stakes involved in public works. As internal memos of the municipal council also show, the Longxugou project was a major endeavor, carried out by a government fully aware of its implications for the urban structure, national economy, and ideological representation of the New China.
The project should be viewed in the context of the economic retooling implemented in the early 1950s. The new government was eager to improve urban conditions, for practical and ideological reasons. Political stability depended on high productivity; Mao Zedong decreed that "the consumerist city should be turned into a productive city." In fact, the new authorities revived the efforts that had begun already in 1914, when comprehensive urban planning was introduced in an evort to turn the old capital into a modern metropolis. Madeleine Yue Dong argues that in the 1930s Beijing became a "city of planners," and the Municipal Council implemented "a new, more open spatial order conducive to increased mobility of people and goods." In addition, the Communist government implemented a Soviet-style central economic policy that stressed urban industry, further increasing the need for workers' housing and transportation. A long-term policy was eventually laid out in September 1952, when the Central Finance Committee held the first National Conference on Urban Construction, resulting in the creation of the Bureau of Urban Development in the Ministry of Construction. Until that point, the new government had focused on rebuilding the urban infrastructure, such as the sewage system at Longxugou.
The task of improving workers' quarters and facilitating mobility in and out of the working-class districts was compounded by hygiene hazards. One of the most urgent problems was that garbage was heaped along the roads, while rainwater and sewage drained through filthy open canals. Municipal governments mobilized the residents to repair pipes and clean up garbage. The situation in Beijing was especially severe, and by March 1951, more than sixty tons of garbage were hauled away from around the city walls and moats. The water system was improved by dredging Beihai and Zhongnanhai lakes, followed by mending pipes and ditches and building a new network. Once the conditions permitted, streets were widened and new roads constructed.
Longxugou was an important component in the urban development scheme. The creek, a remnant of the natural topography, became part of a scenic system of rivulets and ponds during the Ming dynasty. The ponds, deepened and used for fish and shrimp farming, drew many visitors, though the area was not as highly regarded as other scenic districts strewn with graceful temples and villas. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (the Qing period), the area lost its elegant allure but remained a popular place for strolling. Comporting with the typical plan for a Chinese capital, the center of which is the seat of the emperor, associated with the dragon, the corridor south of the imperial palace was imagined as a dragon's snout, and so the stream to the east and west of the meridian road was compared to the dragon's whiskers. The stream ran through a large portion of the southern walled city (known as waicheng, or Outer City), and districts were named after the aquatic landmarks along its path: spanning Dragon Whisker Creek west of the Altar of Heaven was the Heavenly Bridge (Tianqiao); north of the altar lay the Goldfish Ponds (Jinyuchi); on the Altar's northeastern corner the creek was crossed by the Red Bridge (Hongqiao). Even though the creek is now gone, these names are still useful landmarks for orienting oneself in modern Beijing. At the Red Bridge, the stream shifted from an eastbound course to the south, passing through the Sun Temple (Taiyanggong) area before flowing into the southern moat (map 1). Since Beijing slopes toward the southeast at a rate of 1.2-1.3 percent, a large part of the southern quarters' rainwater and sewage flowed into the creek. The population growth in the Outer City during the Qing strained the creek's capacity. Passing through the poorest areas of town, the waterway filled with garbage, clogged, and often overflowed, inundating neighboring residences and causing severe hygiene problems. Even though it was often dredged in late winter, when the water froze, the creek by the turn of the twentieth century had acquired the reputation of "a stinking ditch." As part of rehabilitating the districts essential for small urban industry, and before any construction could take place, the Communist government needed to deal with the creek's ecological system.
Soon after Beijing's liberation, the provisional council commissioned works at Longxugou "to improve the environmental hygiene of the workers residing in the area." A survey conducted starting in March 1950 confirmed the immense obstacles facing the project and the huge scope required. Along the creek, firm soil was covered by five meters of trash; dirty water flowed as close as two feet to the surface. The creek's low-lying, 1.35-square-mile basin had to drain 10,567 gallons of water per second. Any attempt to replace the creek with a single modern sewer system would be nearly impossible with current technology. A pipe eight to ten feet in diameter would have to be put in place, inside a trench sixteen to twenty feet wide. A corridor of the same width would have to be evacuated and the houses demolished. Moreover, the creek's course would have to be lowered, necessitating in turn the rebuilding of the railroad bridge and wall gates in its path. Finally, the southern city moat would have to be deepened by twenty to twenty-three meters. The impracticality of such measures led the government to seek a different solution.
By the end of April, the new plan was ready. The water flow would be divided between two parallel pipes on both sides of the original creek. To the north, a four-foot pipe would be laid down along Dongxiaoshi Avenue; to the south, a 2.6-foot pipe would stretch along Jinyuchi Avenue. East of the Dongxiaoshi Avenue section (that is, east of the Altar of Heaven), the creek passed through a sparsely populated area, and would therefore be dredged but not rebuilt. Later, additional conduits would drain the flow from the northern side of the creek basin. Despite the weather and hard terrain, the workers proceeded to execute the plan; by the end of July 1950, they finished constructing some four miles of pipeline, thereby doing away once and for all with the problem of flooding. The works continued until 1952, by which time running water and electricity were supplied and tramway tracks installed. The hygiene and transportation problems were finally resolved.
Although the completion of the intricate project could be declared a success, authorities were also worried that their efforts might be misconstrued. In an internal memo, Cao Yanxing, head of the Public Works Bureau, mentions the unsavory prospect of demolishing a swath six meters wide along the canal. He also details concerns about problems that were not made public. Some setbacks, such as the crumbling of a supporting wall and the theft of construction wood, resulted from lack of experience or oversight. Such waste of work and materials, he explained, made a negative impression on those who witnessed the incidents. Other issues revealed the inadequacy of the first stage of the project and, more worrisome, caused miscommunication with the working-class residents on whom the authorities were counting as a power base.
Cao's memo cites specifically the residential courtyards in Beitangen, along the northern side of the Altar of Heaven. Since they were located too low for the water to be drained, rainfall was still causing lasting inundations. A citizen asked an engineer about the contingency plans, only to be told, "Mending the ditch is for the benefit of the majority of the residents, and we cannot take care of each single household." Another person inquired, "When the water can't be drained and the house falls down, what then?" The engineer retorted, "These houses are going to collapse no matter what. The government will build new ones for you." The incidents exacerbated the unrest among the already-dissatisfied residents, or, in the memo's cautious parlance, it "had unfavorable influence" on them. Bureau Head Cao issued directives to fix the remaining problems. The internal document evidences the municipal government's touchiness about criticism. To balance the impression left by the insensitive engineers, to ensure that the hard work and self-sacrifice of those involved would be acknowledged, to avoid alienating the working class, and to gain credit for improving urban infrastructure and workers' living conditions, the government had to employ more savvy public relations tactics. In this context, Lao She's play would become instrumental.
NEW DRAMA FOR NEW BEIJING
To complement the engineering efforts and put them in the right light, the government propaganda apparatus availed itself of Lao She's play. The stage play, and especially the film, could reach a large audience and were enlisted for documenting and propagating the importance and success of the project. Li Bozhao, the director of BPAT, wrote: "Lao She's play presents a good lesson for those who had little opportunity to understand and gain intimate knowledge of Beijing's indigent working people."
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Excerpted from PAINTING THE CITY RED by Yomi Braester Copyright © 2010 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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