The Culture of Urbanization in (Post)Socialist China

By Joshua Neves

Yomi Braester. Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract. Duke University Press, 2010. 405 pp.

Robin Visser. Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China. Duke University Press, 2010. 362 pp.

Yomi Braester’s Painting the City Red and Robin Visser’s Cities Surround the Countryside offer complementary engagements with urban transformation in P.R. China—though Braester also has a single chapter on Taipei.[1] Each takes as their focus the cultural restructuring that has shaped and been shaped by (post)socialist urbanization and the shifting designs on the city. The works extend the robust conversation about bricks and mortar changes to Chinese cities by emphasizing the importance of cinema

Joshua Neves is Assistant Professor of Modern Culture & Media at Brown University. His work has appeared in Social Text, the Media Fields Journal, and Spectator. He is currently editing a collection (with Bhaskar Sarkar) examining Asian Video Cultures, and completing a book manuscript exploring the role of media technologies in shaping urbanism, development, and political society in Olympic era China.