Building Citiizens for Nationalist China: Municipal Parks and Parkways in Wuhan (Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang), 1927-1937

Abstract

This dissertation examines the conceptualization and materialization of municipal parks and parkways in Wuhan during 1927-1937, a great triple metropolis of central China, and articulates a spatial understanding of them against the background of a worldwide public park movement since late nineteenth century, a wider agenda of urban reform in the tri-cities of Wuhan, and broader efforts to remake Chinese cities in the wake of the foreign encroachment in early twentieth-century China. The research construes these parks and parkways as a kind of newly-established public open space, and explores their architectural expressions and the social relations which informed their production and use. It intends to articulate the role of these municipal parks and parkways as an explicit spatial manifestation of the body and the mind of the citizen, which was viewed to be essential for constructing a modern nation-state in Nationalist China.