Making a 'New Changsha': Reconstructing China's most Devastated City

In this chapter, I explore how the Nationalist and Communist governments made a ‘New Changsha’, after the end of WWII. The language CCP cadres used to describe the city in the first months after its takeover helped to consolidate the party’s grip on power, and as time went on the reconstruction of the urban built environment came to represent the process of creating revolutionary socialism. However, this language also dismissed KMT efforts at reconstruction. Scholars have discussed how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) denigrated KMT governance and saw Nationalist spies, real and imagined, everywhere, even within the party itself. They, along with criminals, beggars, prostitutes, and drug addicts were either parts of the old pre-liberation society that was responsible for all the ills of China, or their plight was created by the evils of that old society. Denise Ho describes how Fangua Lane in Shanghai, a street that was a slum before 1949, was transformed into a model district in the early 1960s. It was presented as an example of fanshen, standing up, in which Chinese people had transformed the old society. Indeed, it was a microcosm of New China, a promise of the socialist urban future that the party wanted to create for city dwellers across the country. Changsha was not a model city, but the narrative CCP cadres wove around urban reconstruction in the months after 1949 drew a similar distinction between the old pre-revolutionary society and the new one the party was trying to create. One of the effects of this discourse about the KMT’s failure to solve the problems in Changsha and other cities in China is that the impact of long years of war with the Japanese has remained largely unexamined. In short, the KMT has been unfairly maligned precisely because its reconstruction work has been ignored.

This is the Author’s Accepted Manuscript version of the chapter.