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







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.