톈진의 도시 정체성을 위한 서사적 재현과공간적 실천

Abstract

This paper attempts to confirm an aspect of how a treaty port city remodeled and restructured urban culture and space through a process of social transformation during the Late Qing and Early Republican Period. The study examines aspects of change and acculturation with regard to the urban space of Tianjin through a process of spatial practices. It then analyzes aspects of how the process of cultural conflict and fusion is reproduced as urban memory, imagination, and the resulting urban identity. The modernization of Tianjin, beginning in the Late Qing and Early Republican Period, was utterly different from that of other treaty port cities, such as Shanghai, in terms of geopolitical environment, the process of urban development, and the characteristics of civic culture. Spatial and cultural bifurcation and coexistence, along with relationships of mutual influence, made the characteristics of citizenization and secularization noticeable. The Tianjin-style novels of the 1980s attempted to recreate the urban identity of Tianjin while also ruminating over the Late Qing and Early Republican Period. Tianjin-style novels attempted to recreate the complex and stratified urban identity of the ‘Tianjin-style’ as something that convicted and overcame the anti-nationalist characteristics of corruption and comprador capital and embraced the positivity of concessions in China through the healthy everyday life of the old urban administration and the optimism of the petit bourgeois. The space highlighted by Tianjin-style novels was the old urban center, but it did not wholly denigrate the positivity of concessions either. Such an attitude on the part of Tianjin-style novels aligns with the trajectory of contemporary Tianjin’s spatial practices which builds an urban identity of diversity and stratification by embracing heterogeneous space and time with a focus on traditional, indigenous cultural assets.