Xu, Yiming
(2024)
Japanese postcolonial urbanism: city, landscape and experience in Changchun, Manchuria, 1932-1957.
PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
Abstract
This thesis investigates the historical geography of Changchun during the colonial (1931-1945) and post-colonial (1945-1957) periods. The main research contents involve Changchun's urban development, changing political landscapes and urban life. As a regional centre within the Japanese Empire in the 20th century, Changchun has received limited attention in postcolonial geographies. The specificity of Japan as an Asian-led colonialism and the articulation of anti-Western discourses distinguished Changchun from colonial cities in western empires. Changchun's urban development in the postwar socialist period further expressed a successful transformation of a capitalist consumer city into a socialist productive city in a short period of time. Based on archives, official publications, historical maps, and interviews, I focus not only on how the city has changed physically and geographically, but also on the shaping of culture and identity by different governments, which affected residents' perceptions of the city.
The three empirical chapters discuss urban development (chapter four), urban political landscapes (chapter five), and urban life (chapter six). In chapter four, I introduced Changchun's development from a small frontier market town to a colonial capital, and to a socialist industrial centre. Among them, colonial urban planning was the main focus, which not only helped Changchun (then Hsinking) make a leap in city size and population, but also laid the foundation for later industrialisation. More importantly, colonial urban planning demonstrated the peculiarities and contradictions of the Japanese Empire. Hsinking’s planning was not an isolated case, especially in the wave of globalisation in the twentieth century; the urban experiences of Canberra, Paris, and Delhi were all applied to Hsinking. Japan used westernisation as an important means of articulating its anti-Western discourse, attempting to demonstrate its ability to build a city that resembled and transcended the Western world and aided the propaganda of its colonial rationalisation of 'Asian prosperity'.
I further emphasised Japan's expression of Asianism and anti-Western discourses in urban construction by categorising and detailing the architectural landscape in Chapter Five. Another important mission of political landscapes was to convey the political intentions of rulers and to shape culture and identities. Not only physical landscapes, I exemplify and analyse how textual and visual landscapes such as street naming, films and maps equally served the ruler's indoctrination of the inhabitants. For example, colonial films propagated false but rosy visions of coexistence and co-prosperity in Asia, while post-war socialist governments attempted to decolonise through street naming and encouraged residents to take up the cause of industrialisation and anti-capitalism through films.
Colonial urban planning shaped the physically and geographically grand and prosperous Hsinking, expressing the developmental and modern nature of colonialism. In Chapter six, I revealed the inequalities of colonialism through an investigation of urban life and the lived experiences of its residents. City residents showed clear class differences in housing, healthcare, income, and education divided by ethnicity. Through interviews with residents, this difference was further expressed as uncertainty about their urban identities. This further helped to explain why the egalitarian philosophy of the socialist government was widely recognised in the early post-war period. The combination of the government's shaping of residents' identities and residents' acceptance of the government's work led to the successful implementation of socialist transformation in the early post-war period.
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