Building Big, with No Regret: From Beijing's 'Ten Great Buildings' in the 1950s to China' Megaprojects Today

Abstract

China has long been obsessed with constructing enormous, monumental buildings, often at a huge human and social cost. Beijing’s ‘Ten Great Buildings’ project, built between 1958 and 1959, marked a new milestone in the nation’s recent history and its legacy still exerts a powerful influence over China’s architectural, urban, and social development. This essay examines how Beijing’s ‘Ten Great Buildings’ project was envisioned as part of an architectural and urban initiative of the Great Leap Forward and investigate how the architects who worked on the project became embroiled in an ongoing struggle to devise a style that would be suitable for its new socialist regime. It also studies how the project, which consumed enormous resources and labor, was built in ten to twelve months to meet the government’s deadline to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the ‘New China’ at the same moment that China was experiencing one of its most dire socioeconomic crises. Based on a study of the project in relation to China’s politics, economy, social organization and lives of its people in the late 1950s, this essay also considers how the legacy of ‘Building Big’ still persists on many levels of governance in today’s China, and how this legacy is often transformed into a new hybrid when China’s revolutionary sediments become mixed with the currents of globalization.