A City of Workers, A City for Workers? Beijing Urban Space in the 1950s

Thursday, February 18, 2016

4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Bunche Hall 10383

Talk by Fabio Lanza, University of Arizona

Immediately after Beijing’s “peaceful liberation” in 1949, Chinese planners and leaders conjured up the idea of a capital city that could fulfill three different but theoretically inseparable functions：it should be a productive city, with a sizeable modern industrial proletariat; it should host a vast centralized bureaucracy; and it should be remade into a more perfect structure, in which the needs of the people（the newly industrialized working masses）could be finally satisfied and the people themselves remade into new socialist individuals.

Fabio Lanza（Ph.D. Columbia University, 2004）is associate professor of modern Chinese history in the Departments of History and East Asian Studies of the University of Arizona. His main research interests are political movements and urban history of twentieth-century China.