how the Stalinist model of urbanism – a centrally planned component within a national economic unity – is thriving in modern China

In his book Beijing Record, Wang Jun makes clear the scale of this influence: “On 16 September [1949], a group of Soviet experts in municipal administration arrived in Beijing. They were supposed to help the new government in its work to plan the city’s development. In reality, however, they were to have absolute say in everything.”

These Soviet town planners and architects delivered a report, Proposals on Improving Beijing’s Municipal Administration, which was to largely shape the development of the city to come. They had come to China not only for geopolitical reasons, but, like the Japanese urban theorists who had come in the 1920s and 1930s, and like the western ‘starchitects’ who come today because of China’s ability to undertake vast projects, to offer planners speed and huge power. 

The Soviet model city could be realised on Chinese soil, when it could not be in Russia, because there were fewer impediments; Mao was willing to tear down all old buildings, making the Chinese city a tabula rasa. Moreover, Mao combined in one person the radical revolutionary desires of a Lenin with the total power of a Stalin; he both desired to, and was capable of, completely remaking urban society. A “truer, purer” version of the Soviet urban ideology could be materialised in the Chinese urban desert – literally empty fields and illiterate peasants who were being “modernised” – in the historically complex, ideologically overdetermined spaces of Moscow or St Petersburg.

As the Beijing model was replicated all through the country, in rural and agricultural areas that had never known large cities, this vision became ubiquitous: Soviet architectural typologies and the models of Soviet urban planners constituted the first vision of cities ever glimpsed by Chinese peasants in a rapidly modernising society. To this day, migrant workers from the countryside are hustled into the sort of large suburban tower blocks that dominate the edges of Russian cities. The ring roads, the tower blocks, the black taxis, the dingy restaurants, the sidewalks lined with empty liquor bottles: the urban templates of contemporary China are identical to those of the Soviet Union, just multiplied. The similarities do not end there: a frequent traveller from Blagoveshchensk to Heihe, or indeed from Beijing to Moscow, can’t help but note the same asymmetrical haircuts of the billionaires, the same suburban replications of Versailles and the same endless buzzing in the city centre.