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Toward a Critical History of China’s Modern and Contemporary Architecture: 
Introduction and Chapter I: Party, Form, and the Monument: 1954 - 1961
 
George  J. Ge
First conceived at the Royal College of Art in 2017,
Refined across Riyadh, London, Beijing and many long nights between 2018–2025



Contents

 1. Introduction

2. Party, Form, and the Monument: 1954–1961
           2.1 Architecture as Ideological Apparatus
           2.2 Sovietisation and the Ten Great Buildings
           2.3 Ghosts in the Grid
           2.4 The City We Could Have Had: Beijing’s Lost Blueprint

3. Between Silence and Search: Architecture under the Shadow of Rupture 1962–1979
           3.1 Liang Sicheng adn the Grammar of Tradition
           3.2 I.M.Pei and the Third Way of Modernity
           3.3 Between Form and Spirit: From Liang to Pei - Two Grammar Books of Chinese Modernity
           3.4 Coda: Between Memory and Blueprint 

4. Simulacra and Schism: Modernisation without Memory, 1980–1992
           4.1 From Syntax to Schizophrenia
           4.2 From Design to Directive: The Rise of Developmentalism
           4.3 Borrowed Faces: Colonial Fantasies and the Patchworked City
           4.4 From Confusion to Consciousness: The Quiet Reawakening of Chinese Architecture

5. Hesitations in the Fog: Chinese Architects Before the Olympics 1993–2007
           5.1 Spectacles without Spectators: Imported Icons and Exiled Authors
           5.2 In Search of Sincerity: The First Return to Site, Scale, and Soul
           5.3 Waiting for the Microphone: A Discourage and A Mirror

6. Between Spectacle and Sincerity: The Reawakening of Chinese Architecture 2008–2016
           6.1 Mockery in Stone: The Logic and Critique of Spectacularism
           6.2 From Critique to Exploration: The Rise of Neo-Localism
           6.3 Amateur Poetics: The Rise of New Culturalism
           6.4 Calm in Concrete: Modified Modernists and Quiet Resistance
           6.5 Between Two Fires: Urbanism and the Return of the Public

7. Light and Shadow in the Middle Decade 2017–2025
           7.1 Between Festivals and Lockdowns: A Prelude
           7.2 Plurality and the Golden Years
           7.3 The Quiet Collapse: Pandemic and Real Estate Meltdown
           7.4 Against Forgetting: Liu Jiakun and the Return of Humanity

8. Echoes and Embers: Toward a Personal Horizon
           8.1 The Future of Architecture: What Kinds of Spaces Do We Still Need?
           8.2 An Architect’s Migration: From London to Riyadh, from Drawing to Dwelling
           8.3 Leave Blank: Gratitude and the Architecture of the Unsaid


1. Introduction

I was born three years after the People’s Republic turned forty. 

Before I left Beijing, I had lived my entire life within what architects once called the Chinese Dream — though I had always wondered whether it was ever truly ours to dream.

Since the launch of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, the sheer scale and velocity of construction in China have propelled the nation into global architectural consciousness. Yet this ascent came at the cost of eroded traditions, vanishing vernaculars, and a built environment increasingly shaped by performance metrics rather than cultural memory. The space for architectural reflection — ecological, historical, philosophical — has narrowed amidst the roaring machinery of development.

Architecture, once understood as the spatial expression of values and cosmologies, now often finds itself reduced to a service function: an instrument of GDP, branding, and urban tokenism. Within this paradigm, the architect risks becoming a silent technician rather than a critical agent. And yet, not all are silent. A new generation has begun to question not only whatwe build, but why—and for whom.

By the time I entered architecture school, China had already become a global construction powerhouse. I learned design through the lens of expansion: rapid urbanisation, spectacular form, digital simulation. But beneath the momentum, I often sensed something unspoken — an absence of language to articulate doubt, to slow down, to ask what had been lost. I wanted to trace the connection between space, memory, and people, and to ask whether architecture might still mean something beyond delivery and display.

In the margins of plans and the gaps between regulations, one sometimes glimpses the ghost of an alternative China — a China that might have built differently.

This article is an attempt to reclaim that space of questioning. It proposes a critical history of China’s architecture not as a stylistic chronology, but as a cultural and ideological cartography. From the ideological monumentality of the Mao era, through the technocratic urbanism of reform, to the spectacular hybridisation of global China, architecture has mirrored — and often manufactured — the shifting contours of national aspiration. Now, as China’s economic momentum slows, we are granted a rare pause—a moment to reflect, to listen, and to learn from what came before.

This piece began as my RCA thesis in 2017, but it has since evolved — revised with the weight of lived experience, fieldwork, and critical practice. What follows is neither exhaustive nor neutral. It is written in the belief that architecture is not merely about what stands, but about what endures — within memory, meaning, and time.




2   Party, Form, and the Monument: 1954–1961
2.1 Architecture as Ideological Apparatus

Cover of the Architectural Journal, First issue, 1954.



Contents of the Architectural Journal, First issue, 1954. Mainly consist of articials by Soviet Union architects and party architectural guideline.



In January 1954, Architectural Journal 《建筑学报》 was launched under the direct supervision of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee. It was not simply a professional periodical, but a doctrinal manual. Its editorial voice declared a dual allegiance: to “serve the party’s plan” and to “carry forward the traditions of Chinese architecture” in the building of a modern socialist state. The journal operated as both guideline and surveillance—charting not just what architects could design, but what they were permitted to imagine.

What emerged was a state-scripted architectural dogma. The first issues of Architectural Journal promoted Soviet precedents in urban planning, while selectively invoking Chinese tradition through essays such as Liang Sicheng’s on the “essence” of Chinese architecture. In hindsight, it’s a bitter irony: Liang, once denounced for resisting the erasure of Beijing’s urban fabric, had his scholarship re-appropriated to justify a style of nationalist-historicism in service of a political vision he never fully endorsed.

Architectural expression in 1950s China was not merely aesthetic—it was ideological apparatus. As Henri Lefebvre would later theorise, space is not neutral, but produced as an extension of political authority. In Maoist China, this meant that form was inherently read as political position. To design modernist buildings risked accusations of bourgeois individualism; to explore spatial abstraction hinted at dangerous Western formalism. Instead, the state promoted “socialist realism with national form,” a formula that rejected international modernism while demanding symbolic legibility aligned with the party’s cultural scripts.

Under these constraints, architectural discourse narrowed. Rather than philosophy, history, or tectonics, Chinese architectural education became dominated by Soviet technical manuals. The earliest codified norms—such as Design Standards for Civil Buildings (民用建筑设计规范) and Design Codes for Residential Blocks—were adapted directly from Soviet regulations, translating typologies and construction methods wholesale into the Chinese planning system. Even today, remnants of these translated standards remain embedded in the national building codes, evidence of a structural legacy difficult to erase.

Attempts to introduce alternative voices were quickly stifled. When Zhou Boyi published an article in 1958 on Walter Gropius, it marked the first time many Chinese readers had encountered the Bauhaus figurehead. Yet the article was swiftly criticised—not on technical grounds, but for its ideological deviance. To admire modernism was, implicitly, to question the legitimacy of socialist realism. In the wake of this criticism, a chilling consensus settled: architects ceased to express dissenting views, and the journals became monologues of compliance.

Looking back, I remember standing in Tiananmen Square as a child. The air was often dry, the sun unforgiving, and the vast expanse of stone tiles stretched endlessly under my feet. I was small. The buildings were enormous. The scale overwhelmed not only the body, but the spirit. I didn’t have the words for it then, but now I recognise that sensation: the architecture was not meant to speak to me, but over me—to inscribe power onto space, and space onto memory.

The profession entered what I can only describe as its dogmatic winter. Innovation was subdued by fear. Blueprints became instruments of orthodoxy. Architects were not merely compliant—they were co-authors of an aesthetic of obedience. And yet, not all were complicit. Beneath the uniform facades and symmetrical plans, some searched for quiet articulations—ways to mark time, to leave fingerprints in mortar lines, to design without betraying themselves. They worked with impossibly narrow margins, but they still worked.

If architecture is an ideological instrument, it is also a human practice. And the people who built under authoritarianism were not always true believers. Many were simply trying to survive.








2.2 Sovietisation and the Ten Great Buildings


Great Hall of People 人民大会堂

Chang'an Avenue during the 10th anniversary of the People's Republic of China March, behind is the Great Hall of People, built in 1959. 


The China Museum of Art, Project by Sicheng Liang, he used the signiture traditional big roof as symbol of Chinese traditional architecture.1959.


The Beijing Exhibition Center, dstablished in 1954 as a conprehensive exhibition venue in the Sino-Soviet architectural style.



If the 1950s began with the ideological disciplining of architectural language, then 1959 marked its monumental materialisation. That year, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, the state initiated an unprecedented building campaign: the so-called Ten Great Buildings (十大建筑) of New China. Located in Beijing, they were not merely structures—they were staged statements, spatial tableaux designed to visualise the power and ambition of the socialist state.

Each building was assigned a function: assembly, exhibition, diplomacy, sports, railway, culture. But the deeper function was symbolic. These projects formed the architectural constellation of the Maoist capital, a “Red Beijing” that would rival the imperial axis of the past and echo the grandeur of Moscow. They were designed largely by Chinese architects from the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design (BIAD), yet under heavy Soviet influence and often with direct consultation from Soviet specialists. In their planning and style, the echoes of Stalinist architecture—symmetry, massing, axiality, and ornamented hierarchy—were unmistakable. By 1958, the Architectural Design Institutes (ADIs), organised under various ministries and municipal governments, were tasked not only with design but ideological compliance. Architects became civil servants of the plan, not visionaries of space.

Take the Great Hall of People (人民大会堂) as the paradigm. Designed in less than two months and completed in under a year, the building stretches 356 metres along the western edge of Tiananmen Square. Its imposing colonnade features exactly ten freestanding columns, an architectural pun on the “ten years of New China.” The entire complex was aligned to produce a new ceremonial axis—parallel to the Forbidden City, yet ideologically antithetical. If the imperial axis culminated in the throne of the Son of Heaven, the new axis culminated in the People’s Assembly, a hall for the collective will—at least in theory.

The aesthetic was eclectic by necessity. Under the party’s directive of “national form, socialist content” (民族形式，社会主义内容), architects were expected to synthesise traditional Chinese motifs—bracket sets, roof ridges, symmetry—with modernist structural systems and Stalinist massing. The result was a hybrid style: part operatic spectacle, part bureaucratic ambition, neither fully traditional nor modern. Many buildings featured pseudo-classical porticos with Chinese tile roofs, a typology now referred to pejoratively as “big roof architecture” (大屋顶). It was a style designed not for critique, but for legibility—for the people, for the Party, for the photograph. In later decades, this style came under sharp criticism. Architect Wang Shu would call it “a formal costume detached from inner life,” suggesting that it represented not cultural continuity but aesthetic theatre. What masqueraded as heritage was, in his words, “a reenactment without belief.”

Seen from the perspective of critical theory, these projects also mark a paradoxical inversion of what Kenneth Frampton once called critical regionalism—where architecture resists universal modernism by re-engaging with local culture. In the Chinese case, however, the vernacular was not rediscovered but instrumentalised—reduced to a state-administered iconography, scripted to perform national unity. Instead of resisting homogenisation, the “national form” became part of the homogenising machine, its symbolic gestures replicated across cities with bureaucratic precision.

Yet even as this hybrid aesthetic gained dominance in China, its Soviet parent was beginning to disown it. In 1955, the Soviet Union issued the Decree on the Elimination of Excesses in Design and Construction, a formal repudiation of the decorative monumentalism that had defined Stalinist architecture. The decree criticised “architectural embellishments that serve no functional purpose” and called for a return to efficiency, rationality, and material clarity. Ironically, just as Moscow began retreating from ornamented grandeur, Beijing was embracing it—codifying excess as the symbol of national identity. This temporal dissonance revealed how “national form” in China was less a response to evolving design thinking, and more a political theatre of catch-up ideology. In a strange twist of fate, China was left dancing alone to a song its composer had already silenced.

Criticism, however, did emerge—even within official publications. Architectural Journal in 1959 hosted debates on whether Beijing should emulate the “imperial capitals” of the West. Some architects warned of the danger of monumentalism, cautioning that the nation faced far more pressing issues, such as a massive housing shortage. Their dissent, while carefully worded, hinted at the widening gap between symbolic construction and real social needs. The state’s architectural resources were channelled into civic iconography, while everyday residential design languished in typological stagnation.

As a student decades later, I often passed the Beijing Exhibition Centre (北京展览馆), one of the earliest Soviet-style complexes in the city. Its golden spire and central tower stood like a transplanted fragment of Moscow. I remember feeling confused—was this truly Chinese architecture? I now understand that the building embodied an imported fantasy, an aesthetic template for a utopian society that never arrived.

This period cemented not only a stylistic orthodoxy, but a psychological one. The heroic scale of these buildings served to obscure the instability beneath. The Ten Great Buildings were completed during the height of the Great Leap Forward—a time of famine, forced collectivisation, and industrial hallucination. Architecture became both mirror and mask: reflecting ambition, concealing trauma.

Today, these buildings remain. Tourists pose beneath their façades. Political pageantry still unfolds on the granite expanse of Tiananmen Square. But what we rarely confront is their origin as tools of soft domination—architecture as spectacle, as discipline, as myth. In them, we glimpse the first full realisation of what I call “Party-form” space —architecture deployed as soft domination, ritualised permanence, and ideological hygiene. 








2.3 Ghosts in the Grid


Map of Beijing by the Cartographic Department of the Royal Prussian Arms Society 1914


By the early 1960s, the monumental fervour of 1959 had begun to wane. The steel skeletons of the Ten Great Buildings had barely cooled before the country plunged into a darker chapter: the failure of the Great Leap Forward, widespread famine, and growing disillusionment with utopian promises. Architecture, which had been mobilised as spectacle, now stood eerily still—massive façades casting long shadows over empty granaries.

Amidst this disorientation, something subtle began to shift. A faint self-consciousness flickered within the architectural discourse. In the 1963 issues of Architectural Journal, keywords like “form,” “function,” “aesthetics,” and “economy” surfaced with greater frequency, hinting at a tentative return to architectural thinking beyond the strictly political. These were not radical acts—but they signalled a quiet search for disciplinary depth in a climate that had long suppressed ambiguity.

Still, the planning ethos remained largely technocratic. Urban schemes increasingly adopted Soviet-style zoning diagrams: block grids, mono-functional sectors, and centralised control. The city became a diagram, the diagram a plan, the plan a substitute for life. In this rigid syntax of streets and sectors, a kind of haunted spatiality emerged—places designed for ideals rather than for people. The ghosts in the grid were not spirits of the dead, but absences of the living: informal paths erased, courtyards flattened, vernacular rhythms overwritten by abstract order.

The haunting was not accidental. Mao’s rhetoric of tabula rasa transformation demanded precisely this erasure. Land was not a site of continuity, but a canvas for political inscription. In this logic, courtyard demolished, hutong paved over, was an act of ideological hygiene. Architecture became not only the medium of state power, but its sanitation device—cleansing history to erect a purified modernity.

And yet, cracks persisted.

In some university studios, students began revisiting traditional tectonics. In design competitions, the question of “Chinese form” was tentatively re-posed—not as propaganda, but as a spatial language worthy of reinterpretation. The terms of engagement were still fraught, but a question had been planted: Could architecture re-engage the past without serving the state?

Even as a child, I sensed the rhythm of Beijing not in its avenues, but in its cracks. I remember once wandering through the old alleys behind Xisi with my parents, long before their demolition. The bricks were uneven, the windows mismatched, but it smelled like memory—like stewed cabbage, wet earth, and old books. Years later, those alleys were replaced by an administrative compound in clean concrete. But even now, when I close my eyes, I can trace the rhythm of the lane by instinct. Memory resists erasure, even when the grid insists otherwise.

To walk through the hutongs was to write a minor language upon a major plan—what Michel de Certeau might call the 'tactics of the weak'. Architecture in the mid-60s hovered between repression and reawakening. The dominant forms still served ideological stability, but the ghosts in the grid whispered. They asked questions the official diagrams could not answer. Not “what shall we build,” but “what have we already lost?”



2.4 The City We Could Have Had: Beijing’s Lost Blueprint



The masterplan of Liang-Chen Proposal, Beijing’s lost blueprint

Chaoyang Gate 朝阳门 (Gate of the Rising Sun) of Beijing in 1950s


Yongding Gate 永定门 (Gate of Eternal Stability) in 1950s
In the 1950s, while the Ten Great Buildings were rising over Tiananmen Square, another architectural imagination was quietly extinguished. It bore no colonnades, no heroic rhetoric—only the clarity of continuity, and the delicate custodianship of a city patiently crafted over centuries.

Known today simply as the Liang-Chen Proposal, it was a vision co-authored by architect Liang Sicheng and planner Chen Zhanxiang: a plan to preserve the ancient capital by building a new administrative centre west of the city, allowing the historic urban fabric to remain intact.

Had it been adopted, Beijing might have become a city unlike any other in the world—a metropolis of modern governance orbiting a heart of living heritage. Its twists and turns of hutongs, lively courtyards, magnificent city walls and gate towers, and those elegant wooden paifangmight have remained not as relics, but as breathing urban life. It could have become what Kyoto is to Japan—or more: a living palimpsest where dynastic memory and contemporary citizenship cohabit the same laneway.


The southern section of the moat of the inner city of Beijing, with the Zhanyang Gate 正阳门 ( Gate of Upright Sunlight )  and the Arrow Tower in the distance

Instead, history took another path.

The Liang-Chen Proposal was dismissed. Mao famously rebuked it with the words: “How can we possibly govern from outside the walls, like an emperor afraid of his people?” The plan was labelled reactionary, elitist, and ideologically inappropriate. From that moment, the city was fated to be reshaped not by care, but by command.

The bulldozers came.

City walls were torn down. Gates were reduced to traffic islands. Whole neighbourhoods were replaced by government compounds, office slabs, and later, speculative towers. The “old city” survived only in fragments, and even those were later subject to sanitised restoration or touristification. The symbolic axis shifted: no longer from drum tower to palace, but from Party headquarters to spectacle square. A city once composed of courtyards, intimacy, and birdsong became a city composed of code, power, and spatialised politics.

I was born decades later, in a Beijing already crisscrossed by 环线 (ring roads), its spatial memory paved over by concrete and bureaucracy. But some traces remained.

We lived in a courtyard. I remember walking with my parents through the alleys of Dongsi and Xisi, falling asleep on my mother’s lap beneath the old willows, chasing cats barefoot with friends in the narrow hutongs, long before they became theme parks of “Old Beijing.” The sound of bicycle bells, the rustle of cotton coats, the smell drifting from small kitchens—it was not architecture in the classical sense, but it was place. And yet outside the second ring road, among the unpoetic Soviet blocks and endless construction sites, it was hard to believe the city’s image could split so completely.

One winter, I asked my grandfather why the corner watchtower near Qianmen looked so lonely. He sighed and said, “There used to be a wall.”

Even as a child, I sensed something absent—not just spatial, but historical. A severance between city and story.

In recent years, “revitalisation” projects have tried to recapture that loss: installing facades mimicking traditional shops, erecting fake gate towers, naming developments after forgotten lanes. But memory cannot be manufactured. The Beijing that might have been—a denser, quieter, wiser city—is now a ghost that haunts the one we have. A blueprint we could have followed, but lost.

And perhaps that is why I write: 
not to mourn, but to record.
To leave a footprint where the walls once stood.
To say: we knew.
There once was a blueprint—quiet, thoughtful, and brave—that might have rendered a different Beijing.
One that still breathes between the bricks.




The City Walls and Moat of Beijing in 1919, a Beijing that long gone.






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