Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750–Present
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A major compromise between the two political powers involved an attempt to bring socialist transformation to the masses by redistributing Japanese housing in what amounted to a carefully orchestrated, urban version of rural land reform. This effort included both visual propaganda—parades and press coverage—as well as an important but under-examined performative and experiential aspect of CCP propaganda found in the public struggle sessions against colonial-era grievances and exploitation. In the rural arena, this performative aspect of CCP administration involved the public trials of landlords and other “class enemies.” How would this component of the CCP’s revolutionary strategy play itself out in the urban arena?
Thus, the key challenge the new powers faced was how to recast both urban society and the colonial urban environment into a socialist mold. In other words, what steps did they have to take to make a city that was once the very embodiment of Japanese colonial development, capitalism, and militarism look like a new socialist space? What would a socialist city look like? Was this to include the physical dismantling of the highly visible parts of the colonial built environment in an attempt to erase the colonial past? If not, how would they be incorporated into the “new” definition of the city?
Each of these three interrelated themes touches on an aspect of “the visual” in Dalian’s history; how the new CCP government depicted socialism in material terms, how that vision was brought to the masses through a unique version of urban land reform, and, ultimately, how memories of the colonial past persisted in the socialist future. The overarching theme of this chapter is that urban socialism was presented by various historical actors in Dalian during the late 1940s in very material terms. By using images drawn the built environment of the city itself, we can begin to understand how those terms were represented, how changing material standards may have been experience, and what socialist urbanity meant in China even prior to the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.
The Spectacle of “Moving Day”: Colonial Mansions for Chinese Workers
Colonial-Era Housing Conditions
Initially, Japanese urban planners had envisioned colonial Dalian as a segregated city. The city’s spatial grid, as it developed in the early twentieth century, called for separate residential zones for Japanese and Chinese, buffered by parks and wide boulevards.5 Wealthy Japanese lived in large homes south of downtown, near the sea, while bureaucrats, managers, engineers, researchers and their families lived in Western-style row houses throughout the city. Due to Dalian’s rapid increase in population in the 1920s and 1930s, housing became scarce. As a result, areas of the city like Xigang (Western Ridge) became increasingly mixed, and some Japanese merchants and their families moved into the neighborhood. Although Chinese and Japanese lived side by side in Xigang, there existed a drastic spatial inequality between Chinese and Japanese in terms of domestic space. Taking Dalian as whole, Japanese residents comprised one quarter of the city’s population yet controlled and occupied over 65% of its real estate. In Xigang, Chinese comprised 89% of the district, yet occupied only 58% of the housing space.6
There were also drastic differences in the quality of housing between Chinese and Japanese residents. The Xing family represents a typical case. Xing Guihua, a 15-year-old in 1946, arrived in Dalian with her family from Shandong in search of work in 1940.7 The Xings lived for a time in the brick workers’ dormitory complex, nicknamed “the Red House” (hongfangzi) by Chinese residents, built near the docks. This was an extremely crowded, walled enclosure, complete with its own opera stage, brothels, and opium dens. It was essentially a city within a city, with walls designed to keep the exploitative side of Japanese imperialism contained and hidden away from the city core. Located on the outskirts of town, it even featured its own orange-colored tramcars, set up by colonial authorities, to shuttle laborers to and from the docks, where the majority worked loading and unloading trains and ships. Other Chinese families who arrived in Dalian, particularly those without formal employment, lived in sprawling slums built on or against sewage canals and garbage dumps. They built homes from whatever materials they could (Figure 10.1). The poorest lived in covered holes dug into the soft ground, or in makeshift tent communities. Rain often made conditions miserable as streets turned to mud and became clogged with raw sewage.
The Xing family eventually moved out of the worker dormitories and into a flat in Xigang, a densely populated area of cramped brick homes. Their apartment was very small. Seven family members shared a six-square-meter room.8 Xigang, pictured in Figure 10.2, was the center of colonial Dalian’s Chinese business community—its “Chinatown.” The streets were narrow and packed with small shops and residences. Street-side restaurants and a bustling outdoor market, where crowds often gathered to watch street performers and acrobats, were key features of daily life in Xigang.
The contrast with Japanese neighborhoods was striking. There, Japanese planners built brick houses in Western styles, following the cutting edge of housing design popular in Japan.9 Homes in these neighborhoods were spacious, and contained all the amenities of modern housing, including gas for cooking and heating. Small, walled yards and gardens separated individual residences (Figure 10.3). Occasionally, the calls of a tofu peddler could be heard from the windows, but most shopping was done in central markets or department stores. The streets were broad and quiet, starkly devoid of the many activities of the streets of Xigang.
Figure 10.1 Siergou, a shantytown at the edge of Dalian. This was an area populated by migrant workers and their families, many of whom came to the city from Shandong in search of work on the docks, or in construction trades. This type of image might be used by colonial authorities to justify their own projects to build dormitories for Chinese workers, which offered cleaner living conditions along with more control. The CCP used such images as examples of colonial exploitation in which Chinese people are denied access to the city in which they work. Siergou was thus a focal point in the housing campaigns. From: Li Zhenrong, ed., Dalian mengzhong lai [Dalian comes from a dream]. People’s Fine Art Publishing House, 1996.
Just as the political order in Dalian shifted upon the arrival of Soviet military and CCP officials in August 1945, the spatial hierarchy of the colonial era also broke down. Large numbers of, but not all, Japanese civilians, one-quarter of the city’s population, were shipped back to Japan in a massive repatriation movement following the war’s end. This situation presented the CCP with a unique opportunity to end one of the most glaring vestiges of Dalian’s colonial history. By transferring ownership of vacant Japanese homes to Chinese workers and the urban poor, CCP cadres would not only begin the process of reinventing the city as a socialist paradise, but also target a key group for support within their urban political strategy. It was a revolutionary attempt to transfer the ownership of urban property on a vast scale. Yet how was this done, and what were the consequences?
Figure 10.2 Dalian’s Xigang district. This area represents a developed, densely populated district of the colonial city populated by long-term Chinese residents. The photo, likely taken in the 1920s, captures a typical street scene. Such photos serve to reinforce an image of the city comprised of strictly segregated districts, in which the narrower streets of this largely Chinese district are contrasted with the wider boulevards of “Japanese” Dalian. From: Li Zhenrong, ed., Dalian mengzhong lai [Dalian comes from a dream]. People’s Fine Art Publishing House, 1996.
Urban Land Reform: Mobilizing the Urban Poor
One of the most comprehensive efforts by CCP cadres to work closely with urban residents in Dalian was through the housing redistribution campaign. Ironically, although a major goal of the campaign was to legitimize CCP authority, it was only with the prolonged presence of yet another foreign military force that allowed it to exist. The Soviet military presence made Dalian a stable environment, particularly when compared to other cities in the region, like Shenyang and Harbin, which were highly contested throughout the civil war. This stability made it an idea
l place for CCP cadres to forge an agenda for urban governance, of which housing reforms were an integral part. However, military stability aside, the Soviet presence also severely limited CCP operations in terms of grassroots work among urban residents—including some of the key tactics for making revolution. Soviet gendarmes, for example, routinely curbed violent “settling of accounts” (qingsuan) movements in the city, a popular tactic used by the CCP in rural areas to take back Japanese property by force.10
Figure 10.3 A typical Japanese colonial residence with a walled garden. Houses like these often featured gas appliances and telephones. These are the type of properties that were left abandoned as the Japanese civilian population returned to Japan after 1945. This is a contemporary image. These homes are now under threat from developers, but continue to represent part of the city’s architectural heritage. From: Nishizawa Yasuhiko, Zusetsu Dairen toshi monogatari. Kawade shobo shinsha, 1999.
Working under these limitations, and with Soviet oversight, CCP officials designed the housing redistribution campaign to be a carefully controlled experiment. It was not to include violent seizures of property. Such a decision was made in response to the earlier actions of CCP cadres, some of whom in early 1946 stormed Japanese homes at random, forcibly removing Japanese families by gunpoint.11 Several months later, at the outset of the housing redistribution campaign, CCP officials took great care in clarifying which properties could be touched, and which could not. The houses of Japanese militarists, industrialists, diplomats, and high-level functionaries were fair game to recover and redistribute. Importantly, however, those of skilled Japanese workers, technicians, and poorer Japanese laborers and their families, by far the majority of the Japanese population after 1945, were strictly off-limits. Why was this the case? Essentially, their expertise was needed in keeping factories running. Without their knowledge and skills, the Japanese-manufactured machinery that powered these factories would quickly break down and production would cease. Throughout the late 1940s, Japanese technicians and skilled laborers enjoyed a privileged status in the new society, reflected by the fact that their houses were not confiscated, but rather protected.12
Although not violent, housing redistribution was “radical” in the sense that, like the more radical phase of land reform carried out by the CCP in Manchuria in 1946–1947, it aimed to redistribute property in an egalitarian way. Indeed, the campaign involved processes similar to that of land reform in rural areas.13 From the perspective of the Soviet military officials, however, the policy must have seemed extremely radical. In fact, compared to the dire conditions of urban housing throughout the Soviet Union, Dalian must have seemed like a housing paradise.14 The idea to redistribute colonial-era housing to workers and the urban poor is alleged to have come from Luo Ronghuan (1902–1963), a leading CCP military official. Like other top ranking CCP officials, Luo came to Dalian to recuperate from the stresses of war and revolution in a seaside villa, once the exclusive domain of Japanese and wealthy foreigners. After describing the benefits of land reform for mobilizing the masses in rural base areas, Luo urged local CCP leaders to follow a similar path and redistribute housing to urban residents. Several months later, in July 1946, the CCP issued the first official declaration on urban housing redistribution. The stated goal was to “provide the masses with real material benefits in the form of houses.”15
On July 15, 1946, leading CCP cadres called a citywide meeting with representatives from the Soviet military, and Japanese and Korean labor groups in order to launch the movement, and establish the agenda for the campaign. The campaign’s main purpose was to take advantage of Dalian’s massive housing surplus by moving urban laborers and their families into fine, Western-style homes to give them a sense that “they are now masters of society.” 16 There was also a very real fear that, if left to stand empty, these houses might either be occupied by the Soviet military, which controlled 28% of building and housing space in the city after 1945, or might be slowly stripped apart and looted.17 Looting was a great concern. Official sources note that, in the absence of a stable economy, women and children often spent their days stripping vacant homes in Japanese neighborhoods of valuables.18 In fact, in the year immediately following Soviet takeover, the sale of Japanese goods on the resurgent free markets throughout Dalian was often the sole economic activity for tens of thousands of jobless workers. Prohibitions on the export of such household items as stoves, furnaces, and metal piping, all of which were stripped from homes throughout the city, point to the CCP’s concern regarding the high volume of trade in these items.19 Regulations to protect these homes called for the construction of metal fencing around vacant neighborhoods. The main concern was that large numbers of jobless people were stripping apart homes, and if such behavior continued, those properties would be of little future use.
After the initial citywide meeting, CCP cadres from the district and ward level formed “housing readjustment work teams” (zhuzhai tiaozheng gongzuodui). These teams were the backbone of the campaign. They fanned out into poor neighborhoods, selecting activists among residents while carrying out detailed investigations of housing and living conditions. Like land reform in the countryside, investigations determined which neighborhoods were the poorest, and what the housing conditions and family sizes were like in such neighborhoods. For local neighborhood leaders, particularly the ward heads, their first task was to present their claim as a poor neighborhood.20 For example, the head of the number fourteen ward, a predominantly Chinese neighborhood, lobbied cadres that his ward was quite poor, with many families living on hillside shacks. Moreover, most residents there earned their living as rickshaw pullers, and had little money and food.21 Cadres spent up to several months in neighborhoods like this, carrying out investigations of social and economic conditions there, right down to the household level.22
From the CCP’s perspective, this was the most crucial activity of the campaign. It was largely through the housing redistribution campaign that the CCP had the most intimate contact with the local population, particularly those not participating in organized labor activities. Moreover, one of the main ways in which the CCP chose to “view” people it wanted to govern was through the lens of housing. The investigations resulted in the formulation and application of a system of ranks for families based on occupation, income, family size, and housing conditions in order to determine moving priority. Those whose existing homes had few problems, but were found to be too small and crowded were classified as “grade one.” Those families with damaged houses that could be rebuilt were “grade two,” while “grade three” included families and individuals with completely dilapidated homes or no homes at all.23 Priority for new housing was given to those families ranked grades three and one.
These rankings also established the terms of ownership for a family’s new home, a system that proved to be a source of confusion for both officials and city residents. Many of the poorest families, those from grade three, were granted full proprietary rights over their new dwellings, and could buy, sell, or even rent them accordingly.24 In Xigang, of the over 2,500 families relocated by the end of the campaign, 2,000 received full proprietary rights, another 350 families received five years of free rent, and 80 families were granted three years of free rent. However, in the early phases of the movement, some merchant families and small businesses also received free rents and proprietary rights. In May 1947, CCP cadres had to re-investigate the situation, eventually adjusting titles and rental agreements, ensuring that those with the means to pay for their new property would do so.25 By the early 1950s however, the state regained control of property, taking away full ownership rights.
Once street-level investigations were completed, mass meetings to explain to local residents the housing redistribution process followed. Poorer families were encouraged to vocalize their plight and speak their minds against those who had made them suffer in years past. An internal report on the movement from July 7, 1946, placed great emphasis on building support amon
g the masses. Cadres should lead the way in organizing the city’s poor to carry out much of the movement themselves; in this way, the report says, “the poor can be made to feel that they are the masters.”26 This feeling, it was thought, would bind the urban poor to the new regime. The heavily publicized drama of moving day was thus the final stage of a series of events that drew a large segment of a given neighborhood to participate in the process. Neighborhood members were elected by ward leaders to be in charge of moving teams and for organizing local security teams (banjia jiuchadui) that were responsible for overseeing up to 10 families.27
The actual moves were carried out in three waves from July 1946 through 1947. In the first two phases, from July through February 1947, cadres paid little attention to long-term urban planning, focusing instead on providing for the immediate needs of Dalian’s poorest families. The egalitarian qualities of the campaign were evident at this time, as houses were distributed to poor people with little concern for the size of the homes in relation to number of family members. As we shall see below, this created numerous complaints, as large families often received smaller homes than smaller families. Moreover, in the first phase, some unemployed workers were given land to till in the rural suburbs rather than houses within the city.28 Once factories came back online, officials realized it was far more efficient to find housing nearer to industrial enterprises. Thus in the second phase of housing reform, carried out from December 1946 through February 1947, such mistakes were avoided.
Moving day throughout various Chinese neighborhoods, captured in Figure 1.8 (see Introduction), was a heavily publicized visual spectacle, featuring music, dancing, songs, and, most importantly, a moving convoy that was more a parade than a column of trucks. With their possessions securely latched to moving trucks, families marched alongside union volunteers, who led them in songs and lofted banners that read: “The People’s Democratic Government has taken us from hell and delivered us to heaven!”29 As the parade wound its way through the city, thousands of curious onlookers stopped to watch the procession. The trucks finally pulled over on a spacious, tree-lined avenue featuring rows of large, Western-style homes with fenced yards. Xing Guihua, whom we met earlier, remembers that once the trucks stopped in what used to be a Japanese neighborhood, CCP officials told her family that they were free to select their new home from any on the street before them. The overjoyed Xing family sprinted from the truck to claim the nearest home.30 It featured three large rooms, separated by sturdy walls, and a spacious kitchen featuring gas appliances. Like many such houses, it was equipped with a stove, a fireplace, and a bathroom.