This study was conducted as a part of the history of urban transformation, namely, how urban spaces have reflected and structured historic situations, focused on people living in cities and urban societies.
Among the open port cities under the treaty ...
This study was conducted as a part of the history of urban transformation, namely, how urban spaces have reflected and structured historic situations, focused on people living in cities and urban societies.
Among the open port cities under the treaty system, the centers (coastal areas) and the surroundings (inland areas) show very remarkable differences from each other. The opening of Chongqing was around 50 years later than Shanghai, and the coastal cities represented by Shanghai had already been substantially modernized. When Shanghai had gradually been positioned at the center of Chinese modernization, Chongqing in the deep inland was very slow in modernization and was merely a region remote from the center owning most of traditions. However, the influence of the centers on the surroundings was much stronger than the shock of ‘port opening.’
The prosperity and development of steamship transportation business on the Chuan River and the high enthusiasm of Chongqing city administrators, managers and supporters provided favorable conditions for the influence of the centers (coastal cities) to infiltrate into relatively closed environment. In particular, urban constructors (劉湘, 潘文華, 盧作孚, 劉航琛, 胡光麃, 胡仲實, 康心如, 周見三, 曾禹欽, 楊燦三, 吳受彤, 潘昌猷, etc.) who tried to connect Chongqing, an enclosed world in the inland, to the outside, the open world, and to cope with rapidly changing global trends had direct impacts on the process of urban development.
This meant that Chongqing was faced with the time to accept modern things. The modernization of Chongqing was a process that the influence of ‘the centers’ was continuously exerted on inland Chongqing full of obsolete and premodern things. However, in very ‘diverse’ modern changes (urbanization, the development of commerce and industry, people’s value system or cultural consciousness, change in the existence pattern of pubic areas), the urbanization of Chongqing basically concentrated on ‘construction’ imitating the material aspect of large cities such as Shanghai. In general, the urbanization process included education, police and organization services related to transportation, energy, telecommunication, water supply, education, health, public administration and other facilities. On the other hand, as revealed by the expression ‘downstream people (downstream culture),’ the historical and spatial distance was too large to achieve a cohesive force of unified Chinese culture and this meant the requirement of time and effort as that much.