Defining Reform: Postmodernism in Post-Mao China

Abstract

The death of Chairman Mao Zedong in September 1976 ushered in an unprecedented series of far-reaching economic and political reforms in China—reforms actively conditioned by architectural form, theory, as well as practice. Of particular, if somewhat ambiguous, significance was the term “postmodernism,” which comprised an assemblage of aesthetic theories and physical forms introduced to China via the country’s architectural elite from abroad. This paper explores the term’s initial instrumentalization by the state in an effort to both explicate and rationalize China’s dramatic turn away from Maoist-era economic policy. Charles Jencks and Fredric Jameson were two key figures in the initial theorization of postmodernism in the United States, Europe, as well as China, and they warrant particular attention here. It was Jencks, for example, who introduced the term to a room of Party-affiliated architectural elite at Qinghua University as part of a 1979 tour to Beijing. Six years later, in 1985, Jameson spent a semester at Beijing University delivering his own theorizations of a uniquely postmodern cultural logic to audience halls of Chinese students Based on archival research and interviews with practitioners and academics, including both Jencks and Jameson, the paper attends specifically to the ways in which the historical and cultural disjunctions at work in postmodern theory were embraced by Chinese architects as well as officials eager to both reengage with a Chinese architectural past nearly erased by the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and shrink the profound developmental and discursive gap existing between China’s architectural community and the United States, Europe, and Japan at the time. This work looks specifically at the etymological sources for and subsequent iterations of multiple, distinctive “postmodernisms” by a Chinese architectural establishment still coming to terms with the profound failures of Maoist-era governance yet uncertain of its alternatives.