“Watching Fish at the Flower Harbor”: Landscape, Space, and the Propaganda State in Mao’s China

Abstract:This article explores the designing, construction, and uses of the public park known as Huagang guanyu, “Watching Fish at the Flower Harbor,” in Hangzhou, China, during the time of Mao (1949–1976). While the existing scholarship has documented the transformation of the city into a political space after 1949, the present study emphasizes the diverse uses of this public site. My study on the construction and different uses—as political, mnemonic, and experiential spaces—of this public park sheds light on the intersection of three such spaces, allowing individuals to variously subscribe to, negotiate with, and appropriate the official rhetoric and practices. Thus, I argue that the politicization of the urban space in mid-century China was merely one of numerous “spatial practices.” It was the interactions of differing spatial practices that constituted the very essence of the development and transformation of cities in Mao-era China.