Postwar Urban Reconstruction in China, 1938 – 1958

Conférence de Toby Lincoln (Université de Leicester, Grande-Bretagne) au séminaire La Chine républicaine (1912-1949) : nouvelles approches historiques (Xavier Paulès, David Serfass, Delphine Spicq).

Date

• Mardi 10 avril 2018, 13h-15h

Lieu

• EHESS – Salle 4
  105 boulevard Raspail – 75006 Paris

Résumé

Postwar Urban Reconstruction in China, 1938 – 1958

This paper outlines my next major research project. It explains how urban reconstruction in China during and after World War II (WWII) laid the foundation for the country to become the world’s largest urban society. In focusing on the war as a transformative period in the development of China’s cities, instead of the Communist Revolution, it writes the country into the global history of urban change throughout the 20th century. I will review the extent of wartime urban destruction in different parts of China, before focusing on how the Nationalist Government was able to establish institutions to direct urban planning and reconstruction during and after the war. Throughout this period, officials at central and local government attempted to put into practice some of the latest global ideas on urban change, which were then circulating around China. Despite the difficulties of WWII and the civil war that followed it, urban reconstruction in the 1940s formed the foundation for the development of socialist cities after 1949.

Toby Lincoln enseigne l’histoire urbaine de la Chine à l’Université de Leicester (Grande-Bretagne). Il est notamment l’auteur de l’ouvrage Urbanizing China in War and Peace: the Case of Wuxi County (Honolulu : University of Hawai’i Press, 2015) et a co-dirigé, avec Xu Tao, The Habitable City in China: Urban History in the Twentieth Century (Londres : Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Page personnelle de Toby Lincoln

Monique Abud

Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine, EHESS, Paris, France

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