Book Review: The Landscape of Historical Memory: The Politics of Museums and Memorial Culture in Post-Martial Law Taiwan by Kirk A. Denton

Abstract

‘villages-in-the-city’ or they become villages-in-the-city engulfed by urban development. Either way, they are developed as ‘villages-as-the-city’ and are functionally unified with the city. In the absence of democratic and moral accountability, it is market incentives, patronage politics, and corruption that prevail to assert ‘the end of the village’, where societal responsibilities for the underprivileged, the displaced, and the deceased are discarded. The analysis pertaining to the state and market impetuses for village development is convincing. Smith could however have further contextualized the production of disjuncture in China’s administrative division system – a hierarchical and nested structure that runs from the centre to the province (or municipality) to the prefecture and to the county. Though Chinese cities were historically bounded by walls and, in contemporary China, by the urban construction boundary of the city proper, their administrative territories overbound large, outlying rural and urban areas that are not functionally connected to the central core. As provincial, prefectural, and county-level administrative seats, cities and towns do not suffer from the jurisdictional fragmentation or contentious political relations of urban and rural areas because the hierarchical ordering of administrative jurisdictions intrinsically transcends the categories of urban and rural. The urban–rural divisions were unambiguously defined under the communist regime to impose new land institutions and a Soviet-style ‘household registration’ (hukou) system. In both the pre-reform and reform eras, however, the disjunctures between urban categories and transformational processes serve the developmental goals of the party-state by leveraging greater jurisdictional power to realize economic rationalization and state modernization. Since the 1990s, the disjunctures have enabled the party-state to relentlessly extract labour, land, and other resources from the rural areas to feed the voracious urban growth. They also facilitate the transfer of an area to a higher jurisdiction, which deepens the power asymmetry between the local party-state and the public, further eliminating the opportunity for the latter to contest urban development processes. In this context, urban–rural coordination, new-type urbanization, and the like, would not only ‘expose this mismatch between [urban] categories and [urban] processes as a feature of urbanization’ (p. 32) but would also be harnessed by the party-state, as an artifice of political imperative, to reconcile or rather obfuscate the tension between scientific rationality and political decisionism. I highly recommend this informative and riveting book to scholars of China studies and urban studies. The book might also be equally appealing to other academics and students who are interested in the inner workings of China’s state-led urbanization (especially how power over land development is negotiated and wielded by actors at different levels of the party-state) and its inherent inequities. It documents a living history of China’s urban transition and leaves the reader pondering the nation’s urban– rural relations and integration.