Building Socialist Shanghai: Workers’ New Villages and the Socialist Right to the City

Abstract

This dissertation uses changes in Shanghai’s urban geography as a lens to study the processes and meanings of urban revolution for the daily lives of workers in the 1950s. Using a large body of archival documents, I focus especially on the construction of so-called Workers’ New Villages, and particularly Caoyang New Village in Shanghai’s Putuo District, which in 1951 became the first such model socialist community constructed in China. These New Villages were ambitious plans to provide industrial workers and their families with comfortable, hygienic, and modern housing with easy access to services such as food markets, schools, and cultural centers, as well as transportation services to the factories where they worked. These projects were intended to use spatial reorganization as way of serving both the daily needs of workers and the new industrial goals of the People’s Republic of China—two projects which the political rhetoric of the time suggested were inextricable from each other. While by most accounts the construction of New Villages in Shanghai failed to solve Shanghai’s housing shortages in the 1950s, they represented a self-conscious effort to use a combination of material construction and ideological training to shape an idealized notion of the working class that would loyally contribute to national goals for industrial production. I demonstrate that during the Maoist period the Chinese revolution was constantly vacillating between models of building socialism that highlighted the importance of state planning and those that emphasized the bottom-up mobilization of the masses. Despite claims to the contrary, neither of these approaches ever truly encouraged the poor and working classes to organize their own communities.