China’s Two Tropical Architectures: Climatic Regimes, Socialist Reconstruction, and Global Maoism in Guangzhou and Dar es Salaam, 1955-76, by Sun Zhijian, National University of Singapore, supervised by Prof Jiat-Hwee Chang.

Abstract:

In the contexts of decolonization and the Cold War, the tropical world became a contested arena with fierce competition among various old and new donors in the name of development aid, of which the infrastructural construction constituted the backbone. In the past decade, a growing body of literature on postcolonial tropical architecture has challenged current accounts weighed towards the built environment produced by either the former metropolitan powers or the Soviet-bloc, by shedding new light on the role of a third category of emerging aid donors, especially socialist China. Following the Sino-Soviet Split (1960), the Chinese attempted to promote an alternative socialist development path in newly-independent African states to that proposed by their Soviet-allied rivals. However, despite the allegedly age-old Sino-African solidarity, as latecomers in the unfamiliar tropics, the Chinese struggled against many challenges, among which the most crucial was the hot-and-humid climate as well as building problems it caused. This process almost coincided with their domestic socialist reconstruction through coping with the scorching heat and humidity in subtropical Guangdong under the Great Leap Forward (1958-62) and subsequent revolutions.

Based on archival materials from China, Tanzania and the UK, this thesis is a transnational history of China’s two tropical architectures in relation to both domestic politics and global geo-politics in the mid-to-late 20th century, i.e. China’s overseas architectural aid in decolonizing Dar es Salaam, Tanzania under Nyerere’s Ujamaa socialism, which was the largest sub-Saharan African recipient of China’s assistance in the Cold War, and China’s domestic subtropical modern architecture in Maoist Guangzhou, which has long been the stronghold of China’s subtropical knowledge production. Through case studies of sample projects of industrial and agricultural infrastructures in Guangzhou and Dar es Salaam, it answers two overarching questions: Since China’s two tropical architectures took place concurrently, were there any transnational interactions between their knowledge production and practice? (If so, how did they happen?) How did the Chinese socio-cultural construction of the tropics give rise to a distinctively “anti-imperialist” mechanism of tropical architecture from that of the West and socialist North? 

Moving beyond traditional architectural historiography relying primarily on stylistic analysis, it draws on theories of “techno-political regimes” and “critical temperature studies” to develop the notion of “climatic regimes” to capture the interdependence between tropical architecture’s climatic management and the exercise of socio-political power. As the socio-technical arrangements of an interlinked body of climatic knowledge, thermal comfort norms, sanitary discourses, urban typologies and architectural expertise transcending Cold-War rivalries, climatic regimes render intelligible a certain set of climatic parameters, trigger remedial strategies dealing with environmental concerns and normalize people’s thermal sensation for certain political goals. It argues that China’s two tropical architectures were not only concurrent, but more importantly, were co-constitutive with each other through a highly-centralized bureaucratic network of socialist state-run institutions rather than the genius of certain individuals, in which not only architects and planners, but also building physicists, meteorologists, physiologists, ventilating engineers and technocratic Party cadres were all active mediators of global flows of resources and expertise. Divergent from the Soviet-bloc’s climatic regimes paying particular attention to former colonial thermal segregations of mass housing in Africa, the Chinese endeavors driven by the Sino-Tanzanian common appetite for rapid industrialization and self-reliance under the principle of “Production First, Livelihood Second” resulted in the uneven distribution of climatic considerations between industrial and non-industrial spaces in the work-unit typologies both within and beyond China. By revealing how the Chinese tropicality worked from within and vice versa, it contributes to existing literature on the histories of both modern Chinese architecture’s transnational influence and global tropical architecture, as well as recent scholarly attention to thermal comfort in the built environment against the Anthropogenic climate change.